The Centre for Urbanisation and Peripheralization (CUSP) is a research platform at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). It was established by Prof. Lindsay Blair Howe after her appointment as Professor of Urban Development and Spatial Planning at TUM in 2025. Lindsay trained as an architect and completed her doctorate at ETH Zurich. Her research has long been rooted in Southern Africa, particularly Johannesburg, where she has combined everyday, lived-experience research with digital and mixed-method tools to understand how people move through and make urban regions. CUSP grew out of that body of work and gave it an institutional home. It officially launched in November 2025 and works across the Global North and South with partners including the Gauteng City-Region Observatory and the University of Johannesburg’s Graduate School of Architecture.
CUSP starts from the idea that the periphery is not a place but a process. Urbanisation unfolds unevenly. Some parts of a city are planned for, invested in, and protected, while others are shaped by neglect, extraction, and exclusion. These conditions are produced through planning, policy, infrastructure, finance, and governance. CUSP studies how that happens, focusing on gender, environment, infrastructure, and inequality in extended urban regions such as Johannesburg and Lagos. The aim is to build urban knowledge from the margins inward. That means taking peripheral regions seriously as places of knowledge, creativity, and future-making, and challenging the Eurocentric concepts that still shape much of urban studies.
The centre combines theory, fieldwork, and practice-based research. It uses spatial and visual methods and collaborative practices grounded in an ethics of credit, consent, and care. Its work is shared through exhibitions, toolkits, visual outputs, policy work, and public conversations as well as academic writing, connecting critical Southern theory to real-world planning and design.
As an Associate Researcher, I bring an architectural and reparative design perspective to this work. I explore how questions of inequality and uneven development can be investigated, represented, and acted on through design. I also co-tutor CUSP’s urban development design project at TUM, bringing Southern urban realities into the Munich studio. The role builds on my long engagement with Johannesburg through 1to1 – Agency of Engagement. It also links CUSP’s research to the Repairative Architectures platform at the University of Cape Town, strengthening a network of collaboration between Munich, Johannesburg, and Cape Town around spatial justice and repair.
Links
CUSP on Instagram: @cusp_research
CUSP resources: linktr.ee/cusptum
TUM Professorship of Urban and Spatial Development: arc.ed.tum.de/en/udsp
