Project:

Change by Design Johannesburg: Housing Justice in the Inner City

project team: 

Jhono Bennett, Jacqui Cuyler and Beatrice De Carli (Coordinators) with Kathryn Ewing, Tahmineh Hooshyar Emami, Tamara Kahn, Rowan Mackay, Sifiso Mtimunye, Francesco Pasta, Valentina Riverso.

partners: 

Architecture Sans Frontières UK and 1to1 Agency of Engagement with Inner City Federation, Inner City Resource Centre, Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa and International Institute for Environment and Development. 

project summary & care approach

Change by Design Johannesburg is an action-learning programme dedicated to advancing the right to adequate housing in the city. This initiative is a collaboration between Architecture Sans Frontières UK (ASF-UK) and 1to1 Agency of Engagement, alongside grassroots and civil society stakeholders from South Africa and the UK.

The programme engages with residents of informally occupied buildings in inner-city Johannesburg, where these structures and their inhabitants often face significant stigma. Public discourse frequently labels these buildings as “hijacked,” “bad,” or “dark.” In this contested context, Change by Design documents both housing deprivations and residents' initiatives to improve their living conditions, aiming to amplify their housing claims.

Since 2023, the programme has collaborated with residents from approximately ten informally occupied buildings. Many of these residents are survivors of systemic violence and face intersectional discrimination related to their living conditions, citizenship, ethnicity, gender, age, and ability. This collaboration seeks to document both their challenges and their efforts to transform the physical spaces and sociopolitical environments in which they live.

methods used to think through care

Through a series of transect walks, drawing-elicited interviews, modelling workshops, and collaborative mapping exercises, Change by Design Johannesburg aims to capture the rich and diverse experiences of residents in these communities. The initiative places particular emphasis on the documentation of acts of care and maintenance carried out by residents at both household and building levels, highlighting their vital role in fostering a more inclusive and welcoming living environment in the inner city.

This process involves redrawing building and dwelling plans to accurately reflect actual living conditions, conducting focus groups to explore residents' priorities in organising their spaces, and visualising governance diagrams that illustrate the informal social systems enabling these buildings and their communities to function despite severe resource scarcity and a lack of state support. By focusing on these elements, the programme seeks to recognise residents and celebrate their contributions to improving life in inner-city Johannesburg.

entanglements of justice in care and design

The case of documenting lived experiences in Johannesburg’s inner-city buildings highlights the importance of attending to the experiences of others as significant and deserving of consideration—particularly in situations of deep-rooted epistemic injustice, where certain lives and viewpoints have long been neglected or silenced. By capturing these narratives, documentation fosters both agency and recognition.

This approach promotes agency by encouraging residents to develop self-awareness and a deeper understanding of their own circumstances, facilitating conversations about desirable and possible changes in their living spaces and socio-political settings. Simultaneously, as a foundation for ongoing knowledge sharing and dissemination, documenting enables marginalised voices to be seen and valued in contexts that would otherwise overlook them, for instance, placing them at the centre of policy debates.

references

• [the outputs are in progress]*