Image: Public Acts: What does Mai Mai mean?

I am a South African architectural practitioner, urban researcher, and educator working across design practice, research, and pedagogy. My work centres on repairative architectures, spatial justice, and Southern urbanism—asking how architecture might participate in repairing the spatial, social, and ecological harms that continue to shape cities in the Global South and beyond.

I am a Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics at the University of Cape Town, where my teaching and research focus on reparative design practices, ethics-in-action, and inclusive approaches to architectural and urban pedagogy. Alongside this, I am a Research Associate 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 completed my PhD at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, in 2024. My thesis, Locating Southern Architectures: Situating a Reparative Practice through a Post-Post City, developed a theoretical and methodological framework for practising architecture from a Southern urbanist position. Grounded in more than a decade of engagement in Johannesburg, the research explored how architectural knowledge emerges through situated practice, relational ethics, and forms of repair, rather than through universal or Northern-centric models. This work continues to inform a practice-led, design-based approach that is reflective, critically speculative, and attentive to questions of positionality, responsibility, and power in spatial practice.

These threads now come together through Repairative Architectures, a platform I am developing to bring my academic, practice, and personal work into dialogue across South Africa and the UK. The platform connects work at UCT, UCL, and 1to1 – Agency of Engagement, and brings together initiatives including Repairative Architectures ZA, the Southern Urbanist Maintenance Corner, and UG2.repair, using Southern urbanist principles as a shared ground for teaching, research, and making.

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 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 advise the organisation and its ongoing projects.

Teaching has been a central form of praxis throughout my career. Over the past decade, I have held teaching and research positions in South Africa and the UK, including as Unit Tutor for Unit 2: Systems of Exchange at the Bartlett, with further contributions to programmes at the University of Cambridge, Central Saint Martins, the University of Johannesburg’s Graduate School of Architecture, and the TACK (Communities of Tacit Knowledge) doctoral 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 from the University of Pretoria in 2012. I was named an Ashoka Fellow in 2015, and in 2016 I completed the Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders, undertaking a programme in leadership and social impact at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. A formative moment in my trajectory was the Slovo Park Project in 2010—a student- and community-led co-design initiative—which shaped my enduring commitment to architecture as a relational, ethical, and reparative practice within South Africa’s continuously re-forming urban conditions.

For a collection of my written and published work, please visit my ResearchGate profile. For my CV, please contact me directly or see my LinkedIn profile.