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Wits School of Architecture & Planning. Wits University, Johannesburg, South Africa.

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SoAP Events to diarise in 2026. Follow our social media and website for updates.
www.wits.ac.za/soap/events/ by @witssoap

41

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6 months ago

Please join us for next week's FoTC:

Abstract:

To spur more conversations on financialisation and the built environment from southern perspectives, this session hosts two scholars at the forefront of a recent of wave of Brazilian financialisation research whose work engages themes of urban restructuring, infrastructure privatization and differentiated local investment actors. In "From Production to property: Housing Financialization in Brazil and its impacts on the urban renewal of the São Paulo metropolis", Beatriz Rufino highlights shifts to developers' investment structures and their impact on urban renewal in parts of São Paulo. In "Rent extraction and the making of urban frontiers: a firm-centred", Daniel Sanfelici analyses the publicly listed firm Multiplan in Porto Alegre to show how firm-specific strategies for rent extraction shape the urban environment and property markets.

Bio:

Beatriz Rufino is Associate Professor at the School of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo (FAU/USP), and was a Visiting Fellow at King's College London through the Urban Studies Foundation's International Fellowship Programme (2021–2022). She coordinates LABHAB, is a researcher at the National Institute of Science and Technology for Housing and City Production, and leads the CNPq research group "Space, Production and Urban Politics.” Daniel Sanfelici is a professor of economic geography at Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), Brazil, and holds a PhD in Human Geography from the University of São Paulo. He currently leads a FAPERJ-funded project on the consolidation of Brazil's asset management industry.

Online Details

Please join us at 16:00 - 17:30 online
MS Teams link in bio
Meeting ID: 366 800 230 869 999
Passcode: YG954vo6 by @witssoap

12

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5 days ago

STRELITZIA: Acts of Repair
A first year design exhibition exploring resilience, repair and the beauty of growth through gardens of repair.

Join us as we share the work, ideas and spaces developed throughout our first year.

📍John Moffat Extension
🗓️1 October 2026
⏰17:00-20:00
#Strelitzia #ActsOfRepair #WitsArchitecture #FirstYearExhibition #DesignExhibition taken in John Moffat Building, Wits by @witssoap

3

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8 days ago

Please join us for next week's FoTC:

Abstract:

Informal settlements are often portrayed as marginal spaces, excluded from formal economies and property regimes — a framing that obscures the social differentiation within them. This article examines how the landlord–tenant hierarchy structures inequality in Zandspruit, an informal settlement on the periphery of Johannesburg. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research, it shows how land and housing operate as income-generating assets, producing a divide between landlords — typically long-standing residents who lease backyard rooms or subdivided plots — and tenants — often newer arrivals or migrants reliant on insecure wage work and rental housing. Situated within South Africa's history of racialized dispossession and post-apartheid labour-market precarity, the article brings theories of rentier capitalism into dialogue with anthropological work on distribution. It shows how grassroots rentierism, grounded in popular notions of ownership and legitimacy rather than formal title, involve intra-local distribution and extraction that intensify inequalities within marginalized urban communities. The article demonstrates how class differentiation is reproduced through rent extraction within local distributional circuits, rather than solely through employment.

Bio:

Hannah Dawson is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Johannesburg. Her research grapples with the social, economic, and political shifts stemming from mass unemployment, and the ways in which the future of work and welfare is being imagined – and transformed – in South(ern) Africa. This work culminated in her monograph, Making a Life: Young Men on Johannesburg’s Urban Margins (Wits University Press, 2025), which was recently longlisted for the 2026 Sunday Times Non-fiction Award.

Online Details
Please join us at 16:00 - 17:30 online
MS Teams link in bio
Meeting ID: 366 800 230 869 999
Passcode: YG954vo6 by @witssoap

10

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12 days ago

STRELITZIA: Acts of Repair
A first year design exhibition exploring resilience, repair and the beauty of growth through gardens of repair.

Join us as we share the work, ideas and spaces developed throughout our first year.

📍John Moffat Extension
🗓️1 October 2026
⏰17:00-20:00
#Strelitzia #ActsOfRepair #WitsArchitecture #FirstYearExhibition #DesignExhibition taken in John Moffat Building, Wits by @witssoap

3

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13 days ago

Please join us for next week's FoTC:

Abstract : Johannesburg was founded 140 years ago in September 1886, later receiving official city status in September 1928. Although the current mood is sombre and public enthusiasm for commemoration is low, marking this anniversary provides a vital opportunity to reflect on a remarkable history—one continuously defined by shifting narratives of progress and crisis. This presentation traces the urban trajectory of Johannesburg by examining the tension between narratives of chronic crisis and those of rapid progress. Born into a turbulent era that culminated in the South African War, the city has repeatedly navigated profound disruptions—from the strikes of the 1910s and the 1922 Rand Rebellion to the Great Depression, the apartheid-era States of Emergency, the 1976 Soweto Uprising, the volatile 1980s, the late-90s financial crunch, and the modern era of coalition instability. Conversely, triumphalist narratives of growth dominated during the gold-mining booms, the post-Depression expansions of the 1930s through the 1960s, the 1990s democratic transition, and the early decades of post-apartheid rule. By analysing key commemorative milestones—spanning from the 10th anniversary in 1896 to the 120th in 2006—this paper contrasts these historical flashpoints with the present day, ultimately reflecting on the city's prospects as it approaches its 150th jubilee.

Bio: Philip Harrison is a Professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at Wits, and Director of the newly established research unit, UrbanX@Wits.
Respondent: Professor Noor Nieftagodien, Head of the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Online Details

Please join us at 16:00 - 17:30 online:

MS Teams link in bio
Meeting ID: 366 800 230 869 999
Passcode: YG954vo6 by @witssoap

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19 days ago

Please join us for next week’s FoTC:

Abstract : South Africa needs more electricity, more reliable electricity and cheaper electricity. Many municipalities have failed to take sufficient note of the opportunity provided by small-scale embedded generation (SSEG) such as rooftop solar and battery systems installed by residents. In some cases, they actively work to erase that opportunity by taking a punitive approach towards SSEG installations. This approach is based on the erroneous assumption that the only impact of this infrastructure for the municipality is negative. The majority of these installations are residential, and most of them produce ‘excess’ electricity on average over a twelve-month period; electricity that could be produced by the system, but which is curtailed because it has no place to go. This excess electricity is potentially available to municipalities at a rate almost half that which is currently paid to Eskom. We have estimated that the value of that excess power (based on existing installations) could be just over R2.5bn per annum by 2035, to the Gauteng municipalities.

Bio: Tracy leads the Just Transition programme at PARI. She holds a Phd in Anthropology from the University of the Witwatersrand and an M Comm from Stellenbosch University. Her main research interest is the analysis of institutional failure in the public sector, and how that undermines the state’s ability to design and implement a just transition in electricity, water and food. She has 25 years of experience in the fields of local economic development, power sector reform and state capability.

Online Details

Please join us at 16:00 - 17:30 online:

MS Teams link in bio
Meeting ID: 366 800 230 869 999
Passcode: YG954vo6 by @witssoap

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24 days ago

Please join us for next week’s FoTC:

Abstract : Looking at two modes of densification in Gauteng, South Africa, we examine the attitudes, responses and agendas of the number of urban actors to “hard” and “soft” densification. Based on several years of field work, we demonstrate how the “quiet” densification of individual entrepreneurs who build rooms for rent on their properties often receive a variety and uneven set of state responses despite their market appeal and ability to provide decent accommodation. We contrast this form of densification against large scale public-private partnerships, which have numerous management and quality of life issues but remain the preferred mechanism of densification by the state. Our work reveals the urban imaginaries, politics and agendas that are at work behind the policy responses to densification. We show how densification is not just about meeting housing needs and the business of supply and demand but also how the state sees itself, its partners and the cities that it is trying to imagine into being.

Bio: Neil Klug is a Johannesburg-based urban planner and designer and senior lecturer at the Wits University’s School of Architecture and Planning. His areas of specialisation include housing policy and governance (particularly informal settlement upgrading) land use planning and land tenure arrangements. He has published several articles in local and international journals, book chapters and in 2023 jointly edited a book with colleagues, titled: Housing in African Cities: A lens on Urban Governance.

(Continued in comments) by @witssoap

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1

a month ago

Friday morning field trip in Fordsburg with @witssoap third year Architectural Histories & Theories class. 💫

#wits #witssoap taken in Fordsburg by @witssoap

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a month ago

DETAILED | Technical Research Exhibition

Join us for Detailed, an exhibition showcasing the technical research of the Master of Architecture class. Through drawings, details and investigations into construction, the exhibition explores how architecture is shaped through the process of making.

📍 The Atrium, Wits School of Architecture & Planning 🗓️ Friday, 28 August 2026
🗣️ Opening talk by Garret Gantner @ 13:00 🎓 Selected work by BAS Undergraduate & Honours students, presented by the Master of Architecture class.

🤝 Proudly sponsored by the Professional Provident Society (PPS) @pps_for_professionals

#OnTheHighestLevel #WitsMArch2026 #WitsUniversity #WitsArchitecture #TechnicalResearchExhibition taken in John Moffat Building, Wits by @witssoap

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3

a month ago

Please join us for next week’s FoTC:

Abstract : Set against a social and political urban landscape of segregation and forced removals, Postmodernism and Architecture at the End of Apartheid unpacks postmodernism in the 1970s and 80s as it unfolds in South Africa during the final brutal decade of apartheid. Architecture and apartheid are central subjects of the book – the ways they came to interact simultaneously to both buttress and undermine a country rapidly disintegrating. With battles waged in defence of white minority rule, architects’ turn to postmodernism reflected their disintegrating consciences and commitments in operating in uncertain times. They shared with architects globally a postmodernism steeped in anxiety and despondency summoning forth classical forms and colonial symbols detached from their surroundings. For some of these architects having studied abroad at the University of Pennsylvania, the route to postmodernism was through their mentor Louis Kahn’s bid to begin architecture anew in transforming ancient ruins as a modern concrete and brick order. For others, influenced by compatriot Denise Scott Brown who had moved to the USA, it was learning by way of her “African view of Las Vegas”. Postmodernism and Architecture at the End of Apartheid expands on contemporary discourse in postmodernism and architectural theory, public culture, and urban spatial politics. It examines critical voices of the period – Robert Venturi, PaoloPortoghesi, Colin Rowe, Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson, Kenneth Frampton – as well as questions of resistance in different forms and mediums, from the literature of Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee to grassroots struggle and community participation.

(Continued in comments) by @witssoap

89

4

2 months ago

Please join us for next week’s FoTC:

Abstract: In Predatory Welfare, Erin Torkelson explores how the direct cash transfer program instituted in South Africa revised and reworked post-apartheid racialized and gendered dispossession, despite its promise of ameliorating extreme poverty. Beginning in 2012, she focuses on how poor Black South African women asserted their entitlements to social assistance and responsibilities for familial care against the pressures of expropriation built into the grant payment system. Because the grants did not cover monthly bills, recipients were pushed into predatory loans collateralized by welfare payments. Torkelson finds that the state-sponsored but privately-run program was fundamentally undermined by its reliance on digital financial technologies which encoded wider forces of colonial rule, nationalist politics, and global development. Even when the government assumed control of grant payment in 2018, the neoliberal bent of fiscal policy continued to drive recipients into debt in new ways. Drawing on seven years of ethnographic fieldwork and organization in grant payment queues, loan offices, grocery stores, Parliament, and the Constitutional Court. Torkelson demonstrates how cash transfers can offer a means to making racial capitalism more acceptable and how recipients can push back to demand reparation.

Online Details
Please join us at 16:00 - 17:30 online:
MS Teams link in bio
Meeting ID: 366 800 230 869 999
Passcode: YG954vo6 by @witssoap

12

1

2 months ago