Department of Architecture | Chair of Sociology

Earth building is not only one of the oldest, but also one of the most modern construction methods of our time. It is no coincidence that Anna Heringer was invited to the TED Conference 2017 in Vancouver to give a talk on earthen architecture. The internationally active rammed earth construction specialist Martin Rauch, the architect Lindsay Howe and Anna Heringer, winner of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture and the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture, dedicate this book to a wide scope of built and unbuilt projects. They demonstrate the strategies that can be implemented to edify processes of building, adapting the use of earth to each unique culture and context.
Earth is the single most important building material in human history. Not only can it be found almost anywhere in the world, it is suited to each specific climate. It does not require any added substances that detract from its long-term sustainability and pose a danger to people and resources. It is fully recyclable without any material degradation. Earth provides unparalleled quality in both physical construction and architectonic expression.
The authors outline what environmental, economic, and social conditions are necessary for an upscaling of earth to occur. They explore groundbreaking technological innovations, highlighting the potential impact of elevating the material. From normative and architectural considerations to globally-oriented, economic perspectives, this book reveals the incredible potentials of earth for people and the planet.

Urban development in contemporary South Africa generates opportunities for the reproduction of inequality, as well as chances to increase the social justice of the urban landscape. This article juxtaposes two current developments in greater Johannesburg to illustrate the contrast between ‘insurgent’ bottom-up planning approaches and top-down ‘control’ policies characteristic of development in Africa today. While top-down megaprojects often promoted by governments can marginally reduce poverty, they fail to address the complex networks of human interaction necessary for underprivileged populations to negotiate their everyday lives. The narrative of control and insurgency explored in Johannesburg therefore highlights the diversity of approaches the underprivileged employ to ensure claims to space and opportunity. It also emphasises the need for innovative approaches attuned to this urban majority rather than ‘grand visions’ that effectively exclude them from the processes of city-making. The article concludes with analysis of several current initiatives that attempt to address this urban majority from the top and the bottom, reinforcing the need to incorporate insurgent tactics in redressing inequality.

Liverpool University Press International Development Planning Review (forthcoming October 2018).

In response to calls for formulating urban theories grounded in the everyday realities of space, this dissertation explores inequality and spatial structure in Johannesburg, South Africa. The research undertakes a multi-scalar analysis ranging from the urban region to the individual resident, in order to understand the reproduction of structural spatial inequality in greater Johannesburg. In doing so, it employs established tools from the social sciences and built environment analytical procedures, as well as an innovative smartphone application developed within the framework of the project to map mobility patterns of study participants. This method aims to gain insight into the specificity of their daily lives as they relate to the overall urban whole. This approach is therefore interdisciplinary in its range as well as transdisciplinary in its implementation. It builds on the theoretical base of postcolonialism, planetary urbanization, and the Lefebvrian understanding of the production of space. Furthermore, this broad palette of tools demonstrates the interstices between everyday processes and the urban outcomes of unequal territories.

Operating on the premise that global processes of capital accumulation are equally as important to the shaping of urban regions as the movement and interactions of their residents, the primary research question of the dissertation is twofold: How is structural spatial inequality reproduced across the territory of greater Johannesburg? And what approaches to urban development could begin to create alternative spaces amongst this deeply ingrained pattern? Decreasing in scale with each chapter, and simultaneously considering the past and present, it asks a further series of specific research questions: (1) What kinds of urbanization processes contributed to the territorial formation of greater Johannesburg from a historical perspective? (2) Which processes can be identified in the contemporary urban region and, in addition, in which terms can they be described and mapped? (3) How can underprivileged processes of urbanization be compared and contrasted in concrete spaces, especially when they have developed divergent trajectories? (4) How can the everyday lives of the underprivileged be related back to the structural spatial inequality of the urban region? After investigating these questions across four chapters, the final chapter seeks to evaluate this accumulated knowledge, asking: (5) Can moments of the urban commons potentially begin to shift the discourse on development in Johannesburg? Based on these findings, this dissertation contributes to the contemporary discourse on centrality and inequality in urban studies.

Providing an in-depth exploration of the complexities of densification policy and processes, this book brings the important experiences of densification in Johannesburg into conversation with a range of cities in Africa, the BRICS countries and the Global North. It moves beyond the divisive debate over whether densification is good or bad, adding nuance and complexity to the calls from multilateral organisations for densification as a key urban strategy.

The Gauteng City-Region (GCR) in South Africa is a paradigmatic example of extended urbanization, in which the legacy of mining and apartheid continue to impact spatial practices and the experience of everyday life. The dynamics between urban centralities such as Johannesburg and regional-scale peripheries established by this legacy characterize the "spatiality of poverty" that exists in the GCR today. Yet the relational urbanization processes occurring on these under-researched urban peripheries are also driven by the choices and strategies of people, or "popular agency," as they negotiate both local and regional-scale spaces in pursuit of opportunities. Utilizing the northern part of the GCR as a case study, the article presents ethnographic research including a purposive sampling of informal settlement residents, government officials, and planning experts to discuss how socio-technical strategies focused on capital expenditure for infrastructure and affordable housing often reinforce existing socio-spatial inequalities. At the same time, new "popular centralities" are emerging as individual people exercise their agency to move around the region and produce alternative forms of space. Considering the agency of people calls for a decentered and transdisciplinary approach to urban analysis and spatial planning, with significant implications for both the theory and practice of urban and regional studies today.

Despite the 'mobility turn' in urban studies, there is surprisingly little research into the role people's everyday movements play in driving urbanisation processes. As this paper discusses, one reason this has not occurred is because understanding this relationship requires both quantitative and qualitative knowledge, including geospatial locations and patterns as well as why people choose to move the way they do. Few studies employ mixed methods to this end; instead, many quantitative approaches focus on the use of big data and many qualitative approaches remain focused on sites themselves rather than the movements between them. This methodological gap can preclude operationalising findings and proves particularly detrimental when research is conducted into areas with high levels of poverty and inequality. In response, this paper presents a mixed-methods approach to studying urbanisation, using volunteered geographic information (VGI) to map regional-scale movements in the Gauteng City-Region (GCR). Exploiting the potential of smartphone technology, this methodology operates at the interstice of quantitative and qualitative research, describing both macro-scale mobility patterns and the micro-scale decisions behind them. Using the case study of the GCR, it highlights movement as a strategy for those living in poverty, who can utilise the entire region as a resource to subvert entrenched inequality. 'Thinking through people' suggests that a new ontology of categories describing urbanisation processes in terms of movement could connect empirical research into poverty and inequality to theory, and be used to create an epistemology of the urban from below. Thus, this paper contributes to advances in urban studies methods as well as to debates on urbanisation, relational poverty and socio-spatial inequality.