Image: Public Acts: What does Mai Mai mean?

I am a South African architect, urban researcher, and educator working across design practice, research, and pedagogy, with a focus on reparative architectures, spatial justice, and Southern urbanism.

I am currently a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Cape Town, where my teaching and research centre on reparative design practices, ethics-in-action, and inclusive approaches to architectural and urban pedagogy. Alongside this, I am an Associate Researcher with the Centre for Urbanisation and Peripheralization (CUSP) at TU Munich and a Research Fellow at UCL Urban Lab, contributing to transnational research on urban inequality, repair, and climate justice.

I am the co-founder of 1to1 – Agency of Engagement, a non-profit design-based social enterprise established in 2010 that works with and alongside spatially marginalised communities in South Africa. Through 1to1, I have led and supported long-term, collaborative projects positioned between grassroots organisations, professional practice, academia, and government, using participatory and design-led methods to address systemic urban inequality. While I have stepped back from day-to-day leadership, I continue to act as an advisor to the organisation and its ongoing projects.

My research is practice-led and design-based, grounded in long-term engagement within South African cities, particularly Johannesburg. Through my doctoral work, I developed a theoretical and methodological framework around Southern Urbanism, exploring how architectural knowledge emerges through situated practice, relational ethics, and forms of repair rather than through universal or Northern-centric models. My work is reflective, critically speculative, and attentive to questions of positionality, responsibility, and power in spatial practice.

Teaching has been a central form of praxis in my work. Over the past decade, I have held teaching and research positions across South Africa and the UK, including roles at the Bartlett School of Architecture, where I was a Unit Tutor for Unit 2: Systems of Exchange, as well as contributions to programmes at Cambridge, Central Saint Martins, and through the TACK / Communities of Tacit Knowledge network. I use teaching as a space to test ideas emerging from practice, to foster critical reflection, and to support alternative modes of architectural education grounded in social and environmental justice.

I was professionally trained in Durban, Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Pretoria, and was awarded a Master’s degree in Architecture with distinction in 2012. In 2016, I completed the Mandela Washington Fellowship as part of the Young African Leadership Initiative, undertaking a summer programme in leadership and social impact at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School for Public Policy. A formative moment in my trajectory was my involvement in the Slovo Park Project in 2010—a student- and community-led co-design initiative—which shaped my critical commitment to architecture as a relational, ethical, and reparative practice within South Africa’s continuously re-forming urban conditions.

To see my collection of written/published work, please access my Research Gate profile. For my C.V please contact me directly or see my LinkedIn