Current Projects and Initiatives

CUBES partners with the University of Cardiff and Ardhi University in a multi-sited research project that looks at the relationship between identity, temporality and walking in three cities: Dar es Salaam, Tshwane and Cardiff. Using a walking interview method and focus groups, this project has engaged with over 30 participants across the sites.

An e-book compiling text, photos, mapping and video from each participant’s experience of walking in their city, and telling some stories of how people negotiate their spaces, was launched at Wits University School of Architecture and Planning and School of Arts on 3 October, 2025.

CUBES provides technical advice to on an ongoing basis to two shack settlements in pursuit of incremental, in situ upgrading or development. One is Harry Gwala, located within Wattville near Benoni in the Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality. The other is Slovo Park to the south of Eldorado Park in Soweto, within the City of Johannesburg. This ongoing engagement provides insight into the limits of the statutory tools and instruments for ‘upgrading of informal settlements’, the shortcomings in institutional and intergovernmental arrangements, and the outsourcing arrangements. On a yearly basis, a ‘student-stakeholder engagement on informal settlement upgrading has brought community leadership, NGOs and officials from key departments and agencies together to update, reflect and debate on progress on and obstacles to participatory, incremental informal settlement upgrading as indented by policy.

Marie Huchzermeyer reflects on this work in both Harry Gwala and Slovo Park in an open access paper: Critical planning advocacy in solidarity in the pursuit of informal settlement upgrading in Harry Gwala and Slovo Park, Greater Johannesburg in a 2025 special issue of Environment and Urbanization themed on socio-technical practices for just cities.

Marie Huchzermeyer and Kristen Kornienko reflect on the Harry Gwala trajectory in a chapter titled ‘Unsettling the formal-informal binary: The right to development and self-determination in the Harry Gwala settlement trajectory in Ekurhuleni’ (2025) in the open access book Everyday Urban Practices in Africa: Disrupting Global Norms

Neil Klug reflects on the implementation of the Upgrading of Informal Settlement Programme in Slovo Park in his 2023 Thesis titled ‘Why do equity oriented, “progressive” planning policies fail to redress the apartheid city? An examination of planning instrumentality in South Africa’.

In 2020, two webinars reflected on the situation in Slovo Park:

• SERI held a webinar reflecting on the Slovo Park informal settlement upgrading process. Neil Klug and Marie Huchzermeyer participated alongside Nomzamo Zondo from SERI, Lerato Marole from the community forum, and Jacquie Culyer from 1to1.
• Marie Huchzermeyer presented a reflection on ‘understanding the state from below’ about Harry Gwala and Slovo Park in the CPR-CHS Seminar Series of the Centre for Policy Research in India.

Through a sandwich postdoc fellowship sponsored by Wits University’s Centennial funds and co-hosted by the School of Architecture and Planning and CUBES (Prof Sarah Charlton), and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield (Dr. Paula Meth), Priscila Izar is furthering her research work around the everyday practices and long-term strategies that women adopt towards improving urban and living conditions in their territories. Furthermore, she is look at the ways in which ambiguous and fragmented state approaches intersect with women’s action(s), and the outcomes of these relationships on the built environment and in women’s lived experiences of activism and struggle. The investigation is based on a case study in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and in Tshwane, South Africa, taking as a point of departure women’s action in water and sanitation. This work builds from research at the intersection of gender and urbanization at the periphery that Priscila coordinated at the Dar es Salaam City Lab (Ardhi University, Tanzania), and which also received support by an Urban Studies Foundation International Fellowship and Knowledge Mobilization Award.

In parallel to the postdoc research, Priscila Izar is co-leading a series of seminars with support from the Urban Studies Foundation Seminar Series Award, to strengthen debate and dialogue about the multiple ways in which contradictory outcomes of urban transformation at the periphery affect marginalized women, through gender and intersectional lenses and south-south comparison.  Titled Feminising urban struggle: bodies, territories and politics in women’s production and reproduction of peripheral spaces, it also involves the School of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo in Brazil and the Institute of Human Settlements Studies at Ardhi University in Tanzania.

This project began in 2016 through collaboration between the School of Architecture and Planning at Wits and the Habitat Unit at TU Berlin funded by the German Academic Exchange Service DAAD. In its second 5-year phase starting in 2021, the project incorporated a third partner, the Centre for Housing and Sustainable Development at the University of Lagos. As a Postgraduate SDG School, the first phase supported PhD students, the restructuring of the School’s interdisciplinary masters degrees into one Master of Urban Studies with different fields, the introduction of a new field in Urban Management, and bursaries for numerous masters students. The second phase of the project includes fewer bursaries, but incorporates postdocs, the development of young career researchers, and collaboration on a book project that critically engages global urban policy norms. The research components of the project are located within CUBES. For more on the project, see /wits-tub-urban-lab/ and https://www.urban-sdg-school.org