Bennett, Jonathan (Jhono); (2025) Locating Southern Architectures: Situating a Reparative Practice through a post-post City. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

South Africa’s post-Apartheid, post-colonial – and now post-rainbow – urban state constitutes a set of ‘post-post’ societal framings, reflecting the ongoing, deeply embedded, and unequal spatial segregation in the country’s built environment. In many ways, these divisions remain largely intact, and in some cases even more pronounced than they were at the moment of democratic change in 1994. Current professional architectural models still fall short of meaningfully engaging with these endemic dynamics and, as a result, have largely been ineffective in fostering meaningful change over the last three decades of political freedom. This thesis articulates Southern framings of knowledge production, urbanity, and research methods, employing values that go beyond the dominant ‘northern’ knowledge centres. The approach transcends the binary ‘global north/south’ divide by embracing relational readings of ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’. The thesis unpacks these complexities by examining the author’s collaborative practice journey, which has sought to promote spatial justice through multi-scalar efforts. Through design-based iterative methods of locating, revisiting, engaging, discussing, and making, it situates the post-post city and examines the tacit complicity that shapes the biases and prejudices of those who experience the daily realities of spatial inequality in Johannesburg. It develops a practice-oriented means of navigating the ‘what-what’ of the interpersonal and often incommensurable nature of spatial justice in South African cities. Drawing on Jane Rendell’s ‘Site-Writing’ modality and Gautam Bhan’s concepts of ‘Southern Practice’, the work makes explicit the socio-spatial complexities of ‘post-post’ South Africa through the creation of digital design outputs through three distinct sections of the thesis. It proposes that relational reparative forms of design practice are better suited for engaging with ‘Southern Architectures’ rather than attempting to ‘fix urban informality’. As such, the thesis contributes a Southern Architectural practice-oriented approach to cross-locational research, offering a transferable and collaborative reparative methodology for architectural designers and communities to address the spatial injustices of cities in South Africa and similarly spatially unjust urban contexts.

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