Urban Citizenship: CoDesign Studio

Studio leaders: Dr Carin Combrinck & Mr Jason Oberholster

Refugees and migrants across the globe are faced with the emotional trauma of displacement, temporality and marginalisation that result in severe socio-spatial injustice. Increasingly, there is a call for architecture to shift its focus to one of greater empathy and understanding the voice of those who find themselves without secure shelter. In this move towards more socially engaged architecture, the Urban Citizen CoDesign studio will engage with community partners in Plastic View and Melusi to investigate methods of design generation that consider the partnership between architect-expert and user-expert. Relationships that have been established through the Urban Citizen studios will serve as the platform for further engagement, which will take place in-situ as well as on-line. Through hybrid processes of CoDesign, spatial investigations and proposals will be developed to offer a critical contribution to the socio-spatial issues highlighted in the studio. Collaboration with various stakeholders will support the implementation of micro-scale interventions based on these proposals to be documented and reflected upon in order to understand their possible impact.