In this blog, Jhono Bennett reflects on his IJURR Foundation Funded Workshop Series.
Published: 24.04.26
There is a particular kind of work that begins not with building something new, but with recognising what has always already been there.
This project—Co-Writing Southern Architectural Repair & Maintenance: Expanding Urban Spatial Knowledges Beyond the Global North—emerges from that recognition. It begins from the understanding that cities across the African continent and its diasporas are not sites of lack – waiting to be understood – but of ongoing labour: of repair, of maintenance, of improvisation, of care. And yet, much of this largely remains unrecognised within dominant architectural and urban research discourse.
What does it mean, then, to write from these practices—not as case studies, not as marginal examples, but as foundational forms of knowledge?
This question sits at the heart of a broader, evolving platform: the Southern Urban Practice Maintenance Corner. From this, the project unfolds as both method and infrastructure—connecting dispersed knowledge centres through collaborative, reparative engagements that resist the fragmentation so often produced by academic and institutional boundaries.
It was within this context that the IJURR-funded Co-Writing Southern Architectural Repair & Maintenance initiative took shape—led by Dr. Jhono Bennett (UCT), Professor Guy Trangos (UJ), and Associate Professor Philippa Tumubweinee (UCT)—as both a continuation and deepening of this work. Moving across Johannesburg, Cape Town, and a final hybrid gathering, the project brought together predoctoral and doctoral researchers into a shared process of writing, reflection, and co-production. Through practice-based tools such as storytelling, mapping, co-design theories, and collective writing, it foregrounded the knowledge embedded in everyday acts of repair and maintenance, while supporting participants in navigating publication, funding, and research development.
In doing so, it not only sought to equip the emerging generation of Southern Urban and Architectural scholars, but also began to reframe how urban knowledge is authored, circulated, and valued. This article traces that unfolding—situating the workshops not as isolated events, but as part of a broader effort to build a sustained, Southern-led infrastructure for thinking, writing, and practicing urbanism otherwise.
Co-Writing as Collective Practice
The workshops that formed this project—moving between Johannesburg, Cape Town, and hybrid global spaces—were not conceived as discrete events, but as an ongoing, design-led process of working together. Grounded in spatial and visual methods, they created environments where thinking could happen collectively, across both physical and digital platforms, allowing ideas to be drawn, mapped, shared, and reworked in real time.
At their core, these gatherings brought into conversation doctoral researchers, recent graduates, established scholars, and practice-based researchers from across Southern Africa, alongside invited voices from Egypt and Colombia engaging through the Southern Urban Practice platform. What emerged was not a conventional academic setting, but a space of encounter—where different experiences, positions, and forms of knowledge could meet without being flattened into a single framework.
Visual tools became central to this process. Mapping, diagramming, storytelling, and other spatial practices were used not simply as representational techniques, but as ways of making ideas visible, relational, and open to exchange. Through these methods, participants were able to work across difference—connecting their research to lived realities, and to one another—while building a shared language that moved between disciplines and contexts.
These interactions extended beyond the workshop room. Digital platforms enabled ongoing dialogue, allowing connections to continue to evolve across distance, while in-person sessions grounded these exchanges in embodied, situated encounters. Hearing from those at different stages—recent graduates navigating early research, established scholars reflecting on longer trajectories, and practice-based doctoral researchers working from within the field—created a layered and dynamic learning environment.
In this context, co-writing emerged not simply as a technique, but as a way of building relationships through knowledge. The emphasis was less on producing individual outputs, and more on reshaping the conditions through which those outputs could emerge—foregrounding collaboration, iteration, and shared authorship as central to the work itself.
A Cohort, A Network, A Platform
At the centre of this process is a carefully assembled cohort of participants drawn from across the continent and its diasporas. Their work spans different stages of doctoral research, different institutional contexts, and different relationships to practice.
What binds them is not disciplinary alignment, but a shared commitment to working through questions of repair, spatial justice, and Southern urbanism.
Around this cohort, a wider network continues to form—one that extends beyond the workshops themselves. Through shared documents, open calls, and evolving digital platforms, the project remains accessible and porous. Materials circulate through working documents and open participation channels, allowing others to engage with, respond to, and build upon the work as it develops.
In this sense, the project is not contained within its participants. It is part of a broader effort to build a transnational community of practice.
Writing Against Extraction: Repair as a Way of Knowing
To speak of repair here is not to speak of fixing what is broken.
It is to speak of reweaving—of reconnecting fragmented urban knowledges, of re-engaging spatial actors who have long been excluded from formal recognition, and of building forms of knowledge that sustain rather than extract.
Maintenance, in this sense, is not secondary labour. It is an ongoing practice of attention. A way of staying with the city. A refusal to abandon what is already in place.
Across Southern urban contexts, particularly in communities navigating systemic inequality and environmental precarity, these practices are not exceptional—they are everyday. They are how cities continue to function.
And yet, they are rarely written into the centre of architectural knowledge.
This project begins from the insistence that they must be.
The urgency of this work is sharpened by the conditions in which it takes place.
At a time when the climate crisis is intensifying, the uneven geographies of its impact are becoming impossible to ignore. Africa contributes only a fraction of global emissions, yet faces some of the most severe consequences—flooding, drought, food insecurity, displacement. And still, dominant frameworks of sustainability continue to be shaped elsewhere, often imposed rather than co-developed.
Within this context, the extraction of knowledge mirrors the extraction of resources.
Southern urban practices—particularly those held by grassroots practitioners—are frequently documented, circulated, and theorised without acknowledgment or return. They are rendered visible, but not valued.
This project takes a different position.
It argues that sustainability, resilience, and urban futures cannot be designed from above. They must emerge from the existing practices of repair and maintenance that have long sustained urban life under conditions of neglect.
To write from these practices, then, is to engage in a form of epistemic resistance.
Toward a Collective Voice: Staying With the Work
The project moves toward a final moment of coming together through a hybrid symposium later in 2026—where participants will share their work alongside contributors from a parallel initiative, Writing Southern Urbanism, supported by the British Academy and focused on postdoctoral researchers. Bringing these two trajectories into conversation creates a space not only for presentation, but for exchange across different stages of academic and practice-based work—linking emerging doctoral voices with more established scholarly engagements in Southern urbanism.
Yet this is not simply an endpoint.
Rather, it marks a point of articulation—an opportunity to make visible something that has been gradually forming across workshops, conversations, and shared encounters: a collective voice. Not a singular or unified position, but a set of relations. A way of thinking, writing, and working that remains open, contested, and in motion.
What has emerged across Johannesburg, Cape Town, and the hybrid engagements is not simply a body of research, but a commitment—to co-production, to repair, to maintenance—not only as subjects of inquiry, but as methods through which knowledge itself is produced. This has meant holding space for uncertainty, allowing ideas to develop through iteration, and recognising that knowledge is always shaped through encounter—across disciplines, geographies, and lived experience.
In this sense, the project does not offer a finished framework. Instead, it foregrounds an ongoing practice—one that understands the city, like knowledge, as something continuously made and remade. Something that requires attention, negotiation, and care.
To write from the South, then, is not to arrive at clarity once and for all. It is to remain in relation—to place, to others, to the conditions that shape both. And to continue building from within those relations, collectively.
This work has been shaped by a remarkable group of participants, including Buhle Mathole, Dagnachew Amberbir Ketema, Leigh Maurtin, Lelentle Ramphele, Mathewos W. Gebreyesus, Megan Ho-Tong, Mohau Moidi, Ngillan Faal, Nikheel Joshi, Paul Devonish, Phadi, Priscilla Namwanje, Sailas Hussein Matamanda, Selalelo Ramohlale, Sisipho Nqadala, Siyabulela Keith Ntuntwana, Tapiwa Maruza, Thabisani Nzimande, and Zakiyyah H, whose engagements, questions, and practices have grounded and carried the project forward.
It has been equally shaped by the generosity of speakers and contributors including Dr. Afua Wilcox, Dr. Amina Kaskar, Dr. Brigitta Stone-Johnson, Prof. Catalina Ortiz, Prof. Emmanuel Nkambule, Dr. Heather Dodd, Dr. Sandra Felix, Dr. Omar Abolnaga, Tom Chapman, Dr. Katie Ewing, Dr. Alicia Fortuin, Daanyaal Loofer, Leigh Maurtin, Dr. Nobukhosi Ngwenya, Professor Nancy Odendaal, Dr. Christine Price, and Dr. Anna Selmeczi, who opened up critical spaces for dialogue, reflection, and exchange.
This collective effort has been made possible through the support and collaboration of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Foundation (IJURRF), the British Academy, the African Centre for Cities, the University of Cape Town, the University of Johannesburg Graduate School of Architecture, UCL Urban Lab, and 1to1 – Agency of Engagement through the Asivikalane Campaign, alongside a wider network of partners and practitioners committed to more just and reparative urban futures.
Together, these contributions do not resolve the questions the project raises.
They extend them.
And in doing so, they point toward a practice of Southern urbanism that is not fixed, but continually unfolding—held
Jhono Bennett, UCT Lecturer in Architecture, 1to1 Co-Founder.
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