M.Tech. (Architectural Technology) / This thesis is an attempt at changing the urban visions of the inner-city of Johannesburg, in particular Marshalltown. Through the generation of a new urban network/ transport orientated development (T.O.D) within the inner-city , the underlying aim of this thesis is to enhance the inner-city of Johannesburg and to promote a more sustainable way of life for it's current and future residents . Essentially, this thesis is an urban regeneration project which re-appropriates existing building stock within the inner city, in hope of promoting Marshalltown as a vibrant, safe , liveable, dynamic and sustainable environment . This thesis favours the compact city approach, which promotes high density , mixed use development, public transport and community living. The proposed architectural intervention for this thesis deals with the appropriation of an existing auto and general shop situated on Anderson street , Marshalltown, and converts it into a mixed-use building which aims to improve and enhance the quality of life with in the precinct .

Thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of Master of Urban Design to the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2015 / This research report demonstrates how an enabling framework can be applied as a means to address morphological issues in a manner that also fulfils certain existing urban policy objectives. The aim of the research is to assess the extent to which an enabling framework applied in this way can create environments that are in line with the core values of the urban design profession. The morphological issues in question are primarily due to the continued existence of the railway lines in the middle of the Johannesburg CBD. The policies in question, presented in the form of spatial development frameworks (SDFs), are those of the City of Johannesburg (COJ) and the Gauteng Provincial Government (GPG). The enabling framework is an approach to settlement making that is characterised by three aspects. The first is its end product, a movement-oriented spatial framework known as the organising concept. The second aspect is the enabling framework’s open ended approach, which holds that the city is an act of will: that a city can be shaped proactively by a single idea and that the idea need not be detailed in order for it to be applied. Lastly, the enabling framework is distinct in its understanding of participation, which is described as democratic feedback: an infinite number of responses to the organising concept that includes even the production of alternate plans. It is argued in this report that these three aspects of the enabling framework align well with the existing policy context in Johannesburg, where there is emphasis on spatial planning (with a strong transport component), on an open ended approach, and on participatory approaches to planning. The report assesses the extent to which the application of the enabling framework in this context can create an environment that espouses urban design principles. This is done in three steps: demonstrating how an enabling framework is constituted and how it may be applied; demonstrating possible responses to it; and then evaluating these responses on the basis of imageability (Lynch, 1975) and responsiveness (Bentley et al, 1985). In general, the findings from this assessment indicate that enabling frameworks may be more effective at addressing imageability than they are at creating responsiveness.

Thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree: Master of Architecture (Professional) to the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2016 / The heritage and history of a city is often based on urban legend. These stories pertain the cultural rooting of the society that had lived within the cities from their founding and until today. Johannesburg or Egoli appears to have skipped this cultural rooting and instead stems from the political and commercial soil of the gold mines. If we excavate into the gold mining history of the city – and even into the history preceding it - we can find the hidden sacred and cultural beginnings embedded in our society today. Our society has been formed on the continual evolution of the ideas of the sacred and profane through practices of incorporation, salvation and adaptation. As the gold mines in the city shut down, in 1940, the migrant labourers were left in hostels in an unfamiliar terrain and little means to make a living (Potenze, 2015). This means that today, we can still find evidence of the importance of sacred rituals similar to those in the mining compounds. Religions and cultures in Johannesburg, that have been gradually changed overtime, are a result of the incorporation of mining labour, urban customs and western ideas (including religion and technologies). Although the city has clearly harmed the rural traditions, we can still see glimpses of the endurance of the sacred within the profane landscape. The profane is adapted by the different communities in the inner city – as will be discussed with reference to the Mai Mai and Shembe (Nazareth Baptist Church) communities – to express their cultures of the sacred, traditional and religious and to accommodate for ritual practices associated with them. Today’s societies of the inner city are a mix of cultures, religions, God, the ancestors and ritual practices - both sacred and profane. By learning from the way in which these communities continually evolved to incorporate their environments into their traditions, the city too must now incorporate these communities and their beliefs into its structure. If this is achieved, it could ignite a healing process through integration as opposed to replacement or removal of elements of the city or of its society. This report explores ideas of the importance of religion and culture in Johannesburg’s context. As it is an architectural analysis, the response will be a proposal for religious infrastructure and space within the area of City and Suburban, alongside the Kwa Mai Mai market and the gathering spaces of the Shembe / Nazareth Baptist Church. This will promote and retain the cultures, traditions and religions that were brought to the city and used as a tool of survival. / MT2017

M.Tech. (Architecture) / This research interest stems from observing at close range (and researching historically) a seemingly impermeable cycle of occupation, violence and abandonment within the inner-city, whose roots stretch back over the past 130 years 1. The cycle has culminated in the 'writing off' of a number of inner-city buildings as 'bad buildings' not fit for habitation or study. This dissertation is both an architectural response and a research inquiry into how design, in its broadest sense, might contribute to an inner city 'vertical settlement' ...

M.Tech. (Architecture) / To heal- to make whole (Heal 2014: [sp]). The journey to good mental health is a multi-faceted one, and one which involves more than solely medical or institutionalised notions of treatment. This research proposal explores a phenomenological approach to understanding space, recognising that our embodied experiences of our environment can inspire, balance and heal the human spirit, to the same degree that can oppress and harm it ...

Thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of Master of the Built Environment (Housing), to the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2017 / Johannesburg like many rapidly urbanising cities around the world has the problem of a lack of affordable accommodation and inadequate access to basic services (Tissington, 2013). Residents in the inner city use spaces and buildings in a way that reclaims the promises of the city to a better life. As historian and cultural theorist Abdou Maliq Simone (2004) has noted people within African Cities have a probable tendency to improvise. In this research I use the concept of evolutionary resilience, which has been described to account for individuals and households ability adapt in constantly changing environments (Simmie & Martin, 2010) to explore the responses of residents to precarious living conditions and vulnerability that is created by conditions of insecure tenure and evictions. There is little comparative empirical research about how inner city residents talk about their lives and experiences. This research contributes to filling this gap by examining the experiences of residents and highlighting the ways in which as Cirugeda (2004) points to, residents often use empowerment strategies that encourage inhabitants to subvert laws and regulations, in order to maximise self-help by appropriating structures for better living conditions (Cirugeda 2004). This research utilises in depth interviews that were conducted within selected buildings in the inner city using a semi structured interview guide. The objective is to examine the strategies of coping with the exposure to risk and how individuals respond to these shocks. Şoitu (undated) states that vulnerability is a situation of social, economic and physiological need when individuals are marginalised and resilience is a personal resource that allows individuals to face stress and shocks and provides strength (Şoitu, undated). This research finds that there are many difficulties, threats and vulnerabilities that residents are exposed to and residents invoke various strategies and responses for coping. KEYWORDS ‘Bad buildings’, inner city, Johannesburg, vulnerability, evolutionary resilience, precarious living conditions, basic services, insecure tenure / XL2018

A dissertation submitted to the School of Language, Literature and Media, Faculty of Humanities for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, March 2017 / Although the burgeoning fields of linguistic and semiotic landscapes (LL and SL) studies provide extensive coverage of urban settings around the globe, it lacks a focus on urban development and the associated phenomenons such as gentrification, with the notable exception of Lou (2016). This dissertation looks at the neighbourhood of Marshalltown, located in the inner city of Johannesburg. Marshalltown is known as the mining district because of its proximity to the original goldmines that sparked the growth of the city. The neighbourhood’s SL has radically shifted from a place of urban decay to a trendy neighbourhood since the late 1990s, after urban development efforts financed by the private sector made the area stand out from the rest of the inner city. The developers working in Marshalltown have purposefully filled it with signs indexing the mining heritage its businesses which tend to cater to the middle-to-upper-classes, thus excluding poorer residents which make up most of the inner city’s population. Against this backdrop, the dissertation aims to answer the following three research questions: 1) How is Marshalltown constructed as a space of heritage, both in its materiality and in its representation in a corpus of media texts? 2) Considering that heritage entails a selection process from a more general historic field, which sections of history are curated in Marshalltown’s SL, which are silenced, and what are the implications for the narratives displayed in the context of post-apartheid South Africa? 3) How is Marshalltown’s urban environment experienced by social actors in a context of globalized trends in urban design which rely on heritage and authenticity to market formerly ignored city centres? The data for this study consists of a corpus of 25 media articles from various outlets, 255 photographs of Marshalltown and its vicinity, ethnographic field notes written between 2012 and 2016, as well as interviews with developers, heritage architect, a deputy director of immovable heritage at the City of Johannesburg, shop owners and people who work in the area. This dissertation aims to contribute to the young field of SL studies, while bringing forth Scollon and Scollon’s (2003) methodological toolkit of geosemiotic which allows for an analysis of signs in place and how people interact with them to draw a pertinent analysis of the construction of place. Geosemiotics is coupled with specific themes for each analytical chapter which brings forth a new way of analysing a SL. Those themes are 1) the language of urban development which drawing on Markus and Cameron (2002) helps analyse the representation of city neighbourhoods; 2) heritage, which brings a temporal perspective to SL studies that I call a chronoscape; 3) authenticity, which brings a visual analysis addition to the recent debate on the topic within sociolinguistics scholarship (Coupland 2003, Bucholtz 2003 and Eckert 2003) and its focus on the discursive construction of what counts as authentic. This study argues that Marshalltown’s post-apartheid SL is carefully designed by a majority of (white) developers wanting to give the area a heritage feel, borrowing from the mining history of the city; thus anchoring a European influenced heritage within their own interpretation of what an African city should look like. The heritage feel of Marshalltown is part of a broader plan to reclaim the city, which means changing the image it acquired previously during an era of urban decay as a dangerous no-go area, into an attractive tourism-friendly urban space. Those changes are achieved by inserting development efforts into the market for authentic urban lifestyle which Marshalltown can provide thanks to its preserved history. The neighbourhood stands out from the rest of the inner city by being privately controlled and maintained thus distancing itself from the popular discourse of inner city Johannesburg and instead developers redesign it as an ideal space for consumption. / XL2018