If it is undeniable that the Braamfontein Regeneration Project has been able to bring back people to a previously semi-abandoned area. It is important to analyse who and which kind of changes are attracted and dismissed as a result of this project The study examines neighbourhood regeneration in Braamfontein in order to test the extent to which it is an example of similar regeneration developments across global cities, and especially in emerging economies. One part of current global literature suggests that such neighbourhood regeneration has been dominated in recent decades by an inversion of interests from public to private. In the Braamfontein case – situated here through detailed documentary, mapping and image research – the study finds that the border between private and public is very ambiguous. Public agencies, private businesses and developers pursue similar and different goals with varying methods. A ‘profitable vision of the city’ which is clear for public authorities and private developers is not necessarily perceived or shared by most of the users (residents, business owners, consumers from other zones). The overall conclusion is that Braamfontein is a contradictory example of urban neighbourhood change which partly fits with and partly contradicts the global model, but which seems to reinforce the creation of a segregated consumption space in Johannesburg.

Work on urban renewal internationally focuses on a vast range of topics, including gentrification, increased criminalization of poverty, rent-seeking behaviour, and neoliberal urbanism. These arguments tend to centre the interests and actions of certain actors, prioritize certain forces (such as economic ones), and thus tend to predict a particular set of outcomes. In adopting a southern urbanist epistemology, and Jennifer Robinson’s reimagined comparativism through a reconceptualized 'case’, this research shows how predominant assumptions regarding the drivers and outcomes (both social and physical) of urban renewal do not necessarily apply in the case of Braamfontein, an instance of urban renewal in Johannesburg, a post-apartheid city in the south. The findings examined here include policy narratives and empirical referents to culture-led strategies of urban renewal and ways in which they speak less to market-orientated objectives, and more to socio-political ones; how the findings in Braamfontein speak to literature on gentrification, studentification, and youthification, showing that urban renewal and gentrification are not the same processes, and that studentification does not necessarily lead to youthification or gentrification; how attempts to suppress informal trade have led to the proliferation of iterant strategies on the part of hawkers, and have in turn led to enhanced relationships between informal traders and the formal economy; and, finally, how the presence of communities self-identifying as foreign or gay are shown to be driven by forces other than those that the literature typically predicts.

M.Tech. (Architectural Technology) / This dissertation explores the opportunity and necessity of a connection between Braamfontein and Newtown Johannesburg's landscape developed as a result of decades of socio-economic and geographic fragmentation where planning policies etched permanent boundaries of exclusion. The focus is to form a more integrated city fabric in the area to allow for a cross-pollination of people and activities between Braamfontein and Newtown At the same time the proposal aims to create a more socially Inclusive space that connects the urban users to each other and to the city as a whole...