Developed during the first lock-down in 2020, this initiative was conceived as a means of translating the ‘back-of-house’ research and training work that was being done through 1to1 – Agency of Engagement and my doctoral research. We named this initiative Jus’t Spatial Design ZA and worked to make it accessible to as many people who could use it in their work.
The platform was developed from an early digital resource that I developed while teaching at the University of Johannesburg and was seen as a way to support practitioners (research, design and socio-technical) in their work towards Spatial Justice in South African cities. Each of these terms are carefully unpacked and include quick links, academic references and a local/global comparison for each part:
The website offers a series of Practice Framings that aims to assist those working across this sector a way to describe their work through local and global terms.
The platform has been further enhanced with the support of Adheema Davis to include a Contribution Section that is busy collecting a multitude of different voices on this topic, with a regular publication schedule. Contributors are invited to submit a short writing, visual or other media idea in exchange for editing, development support and a cohort of similar writers that we have been facilitating.
The platform also houses a growing set of resources that I add as my own doctoral work covers these fields. This is imagined to grow and adapted in the future to be more thorough and relevant.
Jus’t Spatial Design ZA is still largely in development, but is seen as a collaborative project. If you are interested in join or get involved in way – please contact the team!
Project Background (developed by BUDD Tutors & shared from project website)
Projects Aims (developed by BUDD Tutors & shared from project website)
Project Focus (developed by BUDD Tutors & shared from project website)
The week was supplmented by a series of public events that brought together a host of different local actors, practitioners and people from across Sheffield.
Public Events (developed by BUDD Tutors & shared from project website)
The week was packed with engagements, and had the students staying and working on site each day and each evening.
Project Background (developed by BUDD Tutors & shared from project website)
The workshops was carefully documented in both a Daily Blog, as well as a live Instagram account, allowing the project partners involved to share and connect through the week’s activities.
With a final project report that shared and covers all of the student research and design proposal work which was shared and made available to all involved in the project, and publicly accessible here.
This initiative was started a few years ago by previous PhD students (acknowledged below) with the amazing graphic design by our fellow PhD candidate Ecem Egrin.
“WIP+ (Work in Progress Plus) is a student-led initiative set up by PhD students at The Bartlett School of Architecture to connect and support the doctoral cohort across all streams of the programme.
WIP+ is intended to be a supplementary student-led support space to The Bartlett PhD Programme that works alongside existing training resources. The initiative is seen as a means to foster a platform for new and current PhD scholars to connect and share their knowledge, skills, and experience. The WIP+ has been developed through the volunteer efforts of previous PhD students who have launched and maintained this initiative since 2019.
WIP+ is currently structured through seasons that will see different student groups convening and overseeing curated sets of themes, topics or focuses. The Season 1 program has been developed from a survey undertaken in 2021 and will act as a pilot for WIP+ initiative. The 2022 programme has been supported by funding from both The Bartlett School of Architecture PhD Programme and The Bartlett Faculty Doctoral Initiative Fund Award.
All events are recorded and available on the Teams Group along with all documented resources and links. Join the Teams Group to be involved. There have already been several sessions this year to catch up on the teams site. The remaining sessions are detailed below.
While many amazing individuals have emerged over the years and offered their guidance and support through these obstacles: it really should not be this difficult to undertake a PhD in and around architecture from the African continent.
In response, I have gathered some of these great individuals alongside my own collected resources to lead on the development of a publicly accessible platform to share these assets, as well as bringing together those on this journey.
The website is part of a larger and ever-growing resource that seeks to support South(ern) Africans looking to undertake a PhD in architecture or the related spatial practice fields associated with the built environment – both on the continent as well as abroad.
This platform is by no means exhaustive & has been built more as a platform than a comprehensive source. At present the resource carries certain biases to South & South(ern) Africa and their adjacent cross-national links.
These resources are put together, shared by volunteers and will be updated as regularly as possible. Please feel free to join the contributors to expand and change this, as well as message us with any additional contributions, resources or to suggest points to add/edit/re-consider.
In addition, there is now a fully active Twitter Platform on @SouthernArchPhD and a Communal Slack Channel for more detailed discussion with a growing peer group.
Please feel free to join the contributors to expand and change this, as well as message uswith any additional contributions, resources or to suggest points to add/edit/re-consider.
“Curated by The Bartlett School of Architecture’s Director of History and Theory, Tania Sengupta, along with Megha Chand Inglis and Jhono Bennett, the History and Theory Forum is being revived this year after a hiatus, particularly as part of collective action on urgent issues.
This year’s theme is ‘Race and the Architectural Humanities: How we (can) research, teach and learn’, understood broadly, and including the interactions of these themes with design and technologies. Reflecting on how these relationships shape or might shape research, design or other forms of practice and pedagogy through inclusive, anti-racist, socially equitable, environmentally just and culturally nuanced approaches.
This online event – consisting of roundtables, show-and-tell presentations and conversations – is open to all Bartlett School of Architecture staff and students. The presenters include the school’s staff and students as well as key external researchers, designers, creative artists and activists. The forum will enable the school to gather as a community and share the varied efforts taken that address such questions and consider how we might transform our practices in fundamental and meaningful ways.
There is limited capacity to join the event in 6.04 at 22 Gordon Street.
This event has been oranised by Tania Sengupta, Megha Chand Inglis and Jhono Bennett. The digital facilitator will be Maxwell Mutanda. Visual Design by Ecem Ergin. “
The excellent graphic design work was undertaken by Ecem Egrin, while Maxwell Mutanda and I facilitated both a digital and physical summary space for the session and captured the day’s discussion live via a Miro Board.
In addition I presented my own doctoral work through the specific focus on positionality and my research titled: Navigating the What-What: A situated Southern urban design inquiry around how
In all, the day was highly successful, and has placed a solid foundation to continue this work outwards into other areas of focus and dissemination across the school and wider faculty.
“While diaspora speaks to ideas of dispersion or forced relocation, the resultant geographic displacement of any group of people invokes spatial practices that create intimate relationships to place, enhance social connectedness and produce unique ideas of home. Diasporic living practices typically empower and support actions of solidarity and interconnectedness as well as the assertions of cultural self and collectivism that tend to travel with people through global manifestations of community. Very often, these practices create friction within existing socio-spatial systems and can result in strong collective actions around identity, politics, and agency in relation to belonging.
This session will host an immersive and interactive city-walk-talk format that will be led by local voices and actors in spatial making from London’s South(s). Through walking, talking, and engaging with the people and places of this dynamic urban center, we will be exposed to a unique juxtaposition of temporality and permanence, of preservation and innovation and understanding as well as response that are present in the South(s) of London’s diasporic geographies.
In this session we will join a small local selection of spatial actors from Elephant and Castle as well as Brixton.”
The final exercise in the Site Writing Module I undertook in 2020 with Dr. Polly Gould, Dr David Roberts and Dr. Jane Rendell called for an ‘Artist Book’ to accompany by a body of text to support the work.
This was my first public creative piece of design research and arts-practice orientated work. For this exercise I combined the writing exercise with the animations to produce a curated web installation that aimed to frame the ‘demographic dilemma’ /the ‘what-what’ that had been present throughout the module.
The web page lands on the 4 animations produced in the earlier iteration as the reflective writing/drawings (along with court documents) move on a continuous loop in the background. As one scrolls down the page the text moves between a descriptive narrative of the events that took place in the project.
These are contrasted with a different voice that speaks to my personal experience of this work across my practice. As the conversation continues, it turns back to the work and incorporates the website into the discussion – breaking a digital 4th Wall.
The footnotes supplement the narrative, and offer a mixture of anecdotal historical information in conjunction with insight into the writing’s intent and aim. These are intended to speak to specific audiences.
The writing style and structure borrows liberally from a tradition of South African authors who have merged anecdotal reflection, historical critique with elements of satire or intimate positioning of their story within that of South Africa.
Situating the Research The work began as a way to re-enter the site of Marlboro South, due to both the physical and emotional distances that have been created between myself and Johannesburg. The early investigations began through an evaluation of my own practice-photo-archive and visited the images that I covered this period of my involvement.
I struggled with the positional aspects of ‘extracting’ from this context tied to the above-mentioned personal challenges in my own relationship to this work, the people involved and my recent move to the UK. This positional paralysis felt crippling and had me trapped in cyclic patterns of reflection, guilt, anger and shame. At a particular low point in this pattern, with the guidance of my supervisors, I pushed ‘to make’ in an effort to break from the ethical rut.
This began with simple tracings, creative writings, role-playing that initiated the first re-visitations. I then began working through physical prints and used illustration alongside handwriting as a means of re-telling the stories of my time on-site. As I wrote, traced, and re-drew the events of that time; the emotions of those moments were made almost tangible while other actions and events made sense with my more updated understanding of South Africa’s socio-spatial landscape.
These exercises were highly cathartic, and almost meditative as I worked freely and intuitively through the tacit act of writing on the site of my practice photo-archive. This form of writing, drawing and working through not only reflection, but towards a larger practice actions and future potentialities is drawn from scholarly work on creative practice as a disciplinary field.
During an iteration of this process that focused specifically on the images that captured aspects of materiality and individuals through digital illustration software that employed a layering structure, I noticed how the drawings created a very simplistic stop-frame. I leaned into this animative aspect of quick simple linework that facilitated a rapid form and intent with slower, more intentional layering and curating of the image. This rhythm of reflection and making resonated with my own natural pace of work and opened a line of experimental inquiry into animation as both a form of reflection-on-practice as well as analysis.
I re-visited my practice photo archive and searched for more accidental stop frame sequences that engaged people, material and action. From these I developed the final series of explorations that captured these sequences. The challenge lay in the limited resource to deeply draw from.
Questions of audience have guided much of the creative process and been at the core of my internal concerns of my Johannesburg/London work geographies. For this reason, I moved away from producing a simple video or interactive pdf and towards a website as the base from which to curate the work. The positioning of the content online felt more appropriate as this allows for a multi-locational access while allowing me to curate the work for a targeted audience of this, the final artefact in this series. The text structure of digital exhibition site borrows liberally from a tradition of South African authors who have merged anecdotal reflection, historical critique with elements of satire or intimate positioning of their story within that of South Africa. The Footnote and Endnote functions were carefully designed to convey both an academic rigor of referencing and linking the concepts and authors to existing cannons of knowledge while speaking to a dual audience of South African and United Kingdom based spatial design practitioners and researchers.
Due to both the spatial and temporal limits of access to my chosen site for the first full online iteration of the Site-Writing module, I used my own practice-photo archive to re-engage the context. As a result, I found myself working closely with these images and through iterative and repetitive actions of both drawing and writing through a blend of digital and physical formats, I re-visited and worked through the site of Marlboro South , 2021. These deeply situated and reflexive explorations through the images of the practice photo-archive eventually led me to new readings of my experience and a form of reflective animation that was both analytical as well as symbolic of other gestures of action in regard to material actions
Within the solitary and barren empty ocean of the doctoral voyage, one of the few milestones available beyond starting and finishing a PhD at UCL is the ‘upgrade’. This is an upgrade from an MPhil student to Candidate Doctoral Student and involves the submission and presentation of a package of written work that includes a Case for Upgrade, a draft chapter, an outline of the proposed study and thesis. At the Bartlett School of Architecture this includes a public presentation of the Case for Upgrade and is open for feedback from staff and peers.
Subject
Locating Spatial Practice Within the Post-post City: a Situated Southern Urban Design Inquiry Around How
South African cities remain among the most unequal urban areas in the world; the tacit logics of their designed built forms play a significant role in how these inequalities continue to manifest decades after social and political reform. The socio-spatial city-making forces that led to these asymmetries were not an impassive by-product of centuries of segregated development, but were conceptualised, drawn, designed and implemented by built environment practitioners – individual spatial designers who were socially, historically, politically, technically and ethically situated in South Africa.
This observation is made to highlight an important, and under-explored, inter-scalar dimension of agency between the individual practitioner, the disciplines, and the socio-spatial systems that require more situated explorations of spatial practice in regards to city-making in contemporary South Africa, as well as in similar spatially unjust contexts. In response to this observation, the doctoral study will respond to the growing efforts of Southern scholars in developing more locational and theoretically contextualised forms of urban research and engagement and will employ Southern Urbanist principles from which to develop and explore the research questions.
The study is positioned at the disciplinary intersection of architecture, urban studies and arts-practice in developing a situated design-research methodology to creatively, ethically and iteratively guide the approach. In addition, the study will work with a community of contemporary local practitioners through a series of engagements around the nature of spatial design practice as well as a practice-orientated auto-interrogation of my own work over the last decade.
Ultimately this inquiry will attempt to locate and reveal the various tacit values embedded in the how of socio-spatially focused post-Apartheid South African spatial design practice, and seeks to contribute an additional partial perspective to the ongoing conversations around Southern urbanism through the development and documentation of a practice-orientated situated research-methodology that focuses on spatial design in Southern cities.
The work presented was made up from a series of selected design research exercises that I have been working on since early 2020:
Developmental Gestures
A self-critical and satirical reflection on the nature of socio-technical design work in South Africa that examined the various gestures, postures and actions that make up the field of ‘development’ work.
Spirit of the Order
Through Dr. Jane Rendell’s Site Writing Module I engaged with critical inquiry with my work with the Marlboro South evictions in 2012. This exercise led to my primary method of reflective animation that I will be using going forward.
Catalogue of Auto-Critique
Throughout the process I have been cataloguing reflections, observations and self-critique on the visual methods and techniques as a means of building a positionally iterative tool for navigating the demographic and locational dynamics of this work.
All this work is documented on an instagram account I have made for the doctoral design research explorations:
From this point, the next few steps will be to arrange the field work that will be taking place in Johannesburg in 2022 and work through the proposed design research structure.
My first solo book chapter has been published. This was my first attempt at reflecting on my experience as both a teacher as well as a practitioner in Johannesburg and attempting to frame this through theory as both research and resource for others working in similar conditions.
Abstract
There has been an intense discourse on the relationship between inter-stakeholder university engagements, or service learning, and the broader society that South African universities claim to serve over the past decade in both local and international academia. The inherent problem within these power structures, the challenges to achieving mutually beneficial project outcomes and the growing concern of vulnerable, unheard institutional and individual voices are critical factors. The recognition of these dynamics within the emerging field of design research and design-led teaching is less nuanced in these debates. Training institutions of architecture have a rich history of undertaking service-learning initiatives to create value and learning for both the students and the stakeholders of such projects. Still, in South Africa, they are only now seen through a post-rainbow nation lens. The FeesMustFall movement is primarily driving this change. Larger institutions are recognising previously marginalised voices that now find traction in learning and practice across South Africa. This chapter reflects the author’s experience with emergent views and concerns as a researcher, lecturer and spatial design practitioner in Johannesburg. This section centres on learning regarding city-making in Southern Africa, and it presents two case studies followed by a discussion of growth opportunities.
Bennett, J. (2021). Teaching Design in a Post-Rainbow Nation A South African Reflection on the Limits and Opportunities of Design Praxis. In F. Giuseppe, A. Fisher, & L. Moretto (Eds.), African Cities Through Local Eyes. Experiments in Place-Based Planning and Design (1st ed., pp. 151–172). Springer: The Urban Book Series. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84906-1_8
In July, two online roundtables will bring together staff and students from Witswatersrand University and UCL to share and discuss work-in-progress on transformational decolonial urbanism. Contributions will report on a variety of research, teaching and other initiatives for change in our institutions.
Speakers include: Jhono Bennett, Nnamdi Elleh, Hayley Gewer, Neil Klug, Nkosilenhle Mavuso, Clare Melhuish, Matimba Ngobeni, Kamna Patel, Makena Phaledi, David Roberts, Nathaniel Télémaque and Tsepang Leuta.
These discussions will lead into a public lecture by Professor Achille Mbembe (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) with responses by Dr Tsepang Leuta (Wits) and Dr Adam Elliott-Cooper (Queen Mary, University of London and Visiting Research Fellow, UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre, UCL); and a PhD workshop for UCL and Wits students.
Unfinished Symphonies is organised by Ben Campkin, Solam Mkhabela, Naigwe Kalema and Jennifer van den Bussche with support from the UCL-Wits Strategic Partnership fund.
Here I shared my early work on a project titled ‘ The Spirit of the Order’, where I have been critically reflecting on the role and nature of socio-technical spatial design practice from a deeply positional and iterative series of creative exercises that is currently guiding my doctoral studies.
The recordings of all the presentations are available here:
In the early stage of my doctoral research, I reflected on my practice work with 1to1 and developed my thoughts on the problematic operationalization of the term “community” in South Africa’s informal settlement upgrading.
This was an attempt at a form of satire with grounded reference, aiming at a practitioner/academic audience in my own sector.
The actionable questions from the process being:
Can we adopt and normalise a more complex idea of ‘community’ being multiple communities and individuals who share space?
When we say or think ‘community’, can we allow for people to question what we mean by that towards a better understanding of a context?
Can we be more specific to describe what we mean: a neighborhood, a group of men/women/children, the church goers, the football players e.t.c – this will allow your designs more variables to draw from?
Can we allow for dissent, non-agreement and conflict – these are as crucial for good participation that agreement, cohesion and consent are often based on reductive and simplistic ideas of people who are as a rule complex and nuanced and not perfect?
How can we meaningfully recognise and value the project beneficiaries and adjacent grass-roots actors in projects in ways that support financially, experientially and creatively?
‘TACK / Communities of Tacit Knowledge: Architecture and its Ways of Knowing’ is a newly funded Innovative Training Network, as part of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions within the European Framework Program Horizon 2020. It trains young researchers in understanding the specific knowledge that architects use when designing buildings and cities. TACK gathers ten major academic institutions, three leading cultural architectural institutions as well as nine distinguished architecture design offices. Collaboratively these partners offer an innovative PhD training program on the nature of tacit knowledge in architecture, resulting in ten parallel PhD projects.“
The research program consists of ten PhD projects, which are pursued by ten PhD candidates, hosted by ten academic partners. While the individual PhD projects constitute independent doctoral projects in their own right, nine of these can (in terms of content) be grouped in three clusters:
Approaching Tacit Knowledge: These PhD projects approach tacit knowledge from historical and theoretical perspectives
” The three PhD candidates working on this research cluster will develop new theoretical concepts and new heuristic approaches to examine how tacit knowledge is understood in architectural practice and how it can be made explicit and communicated. They will investigate how value-systems that are inherent to specific cultural contexts (for instance concerning the public role of the architect) affect the perception and reception of tacit knowledge in architecture, and examine how self-reflexivity can sharpen the understanding of the functioning of tacit knowledge.”
The 3 year programme is jam packed with conferences, symposia and meetings and actively encourages and support mobility across the network, including a practical secondment as well as secondment to cultural institute in the network.
It has been a long journey to reach this point, and I am grateful to the individuals and institutes who supported me in this difficult transition period as well as those (who have been personally acknowledged these last months) who played such an important role in shaping my research and practice through the opportunities offered. Thank you.
Jhono Bennett 