Within the global South, the public realm is often characterised as a territory of intense accessibility and spatial claims, equally enabling and constricting citizens to shape and reshape an inclusive place within the informal city. The contemporary African city has been central to the discourse around the rapidity of urban development and influx, producing a global narrative of the inability of a frail postcolonial metropolis to support this growth. What is emerging, however, is the resulting improvisation of the city’s inhabitants to reimagine their contrasting, everyday environments for the city’s negotiation and daily navigation. Often, the global discourse omits the finer, more nuanced informality of life that the African city’s marginalised users employ in the everyday to innovatively sustain their livelihood. Central to this imagination, is the Designer’s role to spatially represent all citizens within the urban arena; achieving this through the People’s City design approach. This participatory, incremental approach produces innovation outside the preconceived idea of a design product; rather, pursuing the process over the product. If more than half the city is marginal, the role facing practice should be framing solutions from the perspective and design of citizen/community majority. As Hamdi observes, the integrity of developing an inclusive approach in design, is through the collective voice and experience from within the community context itself; “practice, then, is about making the ordinary special and the special more widely accessible - expanding the boundaries of understanding and possibility with vision and common sense... It is about getting it right for now and at the same time being tactical and strategic about later” (Hamdi, 2004). Manenberg, Cape Town, provides insight into the negotiation of community spaces; where form-making operates outside of the regular and explores how previous areas of exclusion contribute to an emergence of a more flexible and adaptable city. Rather than the static public realm, Manenberg demonstrates “a temporal articulation and occupation of space which not only creates a richer sensibility of spatial occupation, but also suggests how spatial limits are expanded to include formally unimagined uses in dense urban conditions” (Mehrotra, 2010). These unimagined, informal spatial nuances become the co-construction of choice and improvisation that composes daily life. This collaboration and co-constructing of place formed the catalyst from which the research project pursues the process over the product, and was the key in developing an action research methodology to partnering and co-design with community members. The overarching thread that this research project attempts to explore in its approach, is: how can designers intervene in a manner which creatively alters the persistent dominance of exclusion in the public realm? And, in doing so, can the community be invited into the process? Throughout this iterative design, three principles emerged: People, power and place; through these the design process could be interrogated across multiple scales, with participants establishing outcomes, diagnosing spatial negotiations and dreaming proposed interventions. The co-design process in the research project required active engagement, where the participants explored values, issues, threats and opportunities relating to the principles through a series of three process stages: Diagnosis, Dreaming and Designing. The intention was to allow the question of what the community wanted to emerge from within the groups. This process framework provides an opportunity for the group members to revisit their visioning iteratively during each process stage, testing and negotiating decisions of how interventions can be achieved. It allows the participants a space to comprehend urban solutions and explore alternatives, responding to on-the-ground issues from local and nuanced experience. Answering questions communities are not asking: this subtitle becomes a commentary, or perhaps a statement, on how previous areas of exclusion, the marginalised and the informal city, often do not have a voice in the conversation of how their spaces are conceived and designed for them, without them. The research project concludes with strategies of intervention, with outcomes and solutions generated from the process of co-design. These strategies were then transposed into incremental interventions, testing the greatest impact to alter the accessibility of the public realm. The greatest tool to emerge from the community-led approach was the identification of potential partnerships which strengthened the dynamics in negotiating the public realm; illustrating that if communities are offered a seat at the table, the designs become all the richer, participating in the emergence of a more flexible, incremental and adaptable city.

Public open spaces are major environmental, social and economic resource, but, these spaces are depleting at an alarming rate and are often undervalued (Cilliers, 2015). Within a South Africa context there are many challenges that coincide with public open spaces especially in informal settlements and established townships where rapid urbanisation leads to increasing pressure to provide housing which often competes with these spaces (Cilliers et al., 2021). The challenges faced by public open spaces and the importance of protecting them will be explored. This research project lands within Gugulethu Township along the Lotus River canal and aims to explore how this public area along the river can be utilised as a sustainable public open space, designed for all role players within the Gugulethu community. The project seek to discover the role that an urban designer can play in highlighting the potential of such spaces and how urban design interventions can be used improve these open spaces.

Among the many problems that exist in the urban built environment today, uninviting pedestrian spaces is a prominent characteristic especially adjacent to inner-city shopping centres. Often, this is accompanied by a divorce of the building from the street, where the irony is that the street, which is a prominent public pedestrian space and connector of people, places and everyday lives, is often an underappreciated and unrealised pedestrian space. In the CBD of Claremont suburb, Cape Town, this is a reality and the resulting social ills such as dead zones, a lack of public surveillance, high crime rates, poor quality of space and lack of sense of place- all which can clearly be seen in this area. To realise the dual role that the street can play as both a public pedestrian space and a connector of people and place, professionals and role-players in the built environment should challenge the norms around street form, street-building interaction, people's perceptions that shaped the current day street and continue to influence its physical and perceived position within our cities and town. The literature component of this study seeks to unpack the qualities and functions of urban streets and their possible role as quality public space. The design component of this study seeks to explore and identify interventions at a local scale.

The legacy of apartheid spatial planning is still evident under South Africa's democratic government. Townships are segregated dormitories with residents who still face many inequities in their daily lives. Soweto is a township which a deep history of struggle for liberation. Vilakazi street is especially symbolic due to all the activists who used their voices as a tool to fight against a system of inequality. Today Soweto is in a transitional phase. It has developed from what was once a dormitory township to a diverse, resilient community of people who have reclaimed the spaces as their own. This research serves to gain a deeper understanding of Vilakazi Street (as a catalyst to transformation) - an emerging high street in a culturally rich neighbourhood of Orlando West. Furthermore to understand the missing links and gaps which can better improve the quality of life for the community. It is also important to gain a deeper understanding of the legislation and contributing factors that enable the development of the existing vibrant township culture. Furthermore to learn what role the youth of today contribute to. Orlando West The research is guided and grounded in a theoretical framework which highlights the importance of democratic planning processes and enabling resident's voices in the design processes. The methodology and methods speak on the approach to gain research on the ground and the interactions with the local residents and their everyday spaces. A contextual analysis is done on the metro scale to better understand the role of Orlando West in relation to the city and a neighbourhood scale analysis is done to better understand the role Vilakazi Street plays in it's neighbourhood. This is followed by a case study which is used as a precedent to address and create inclusive design for the youth of Soweto. The proposal aims to improve and amplifying the vulnerable voices of the youth.

South Africa is a country with many small towns, each rich in heritage and culture and with their own unique spatial character. Unfortunately, most small towns are in distress. The focus of investment to bring about spatial transformation has typically been in either cities, or villages; i.e. urban or rural. However, Arndt, Davies and Thurlow (2018) suggest that a 3rd way would be to invest in secondary cities and small towns. Small towns are embedded in the cultural landscape, and sit at the intersection of rapid urbanisation and industrial agricultural practicetwo of the most significant features of the Anthropocene. The broad aim of this research is to explore potential solutions to the regeneration of small towns in South Africa. This research applies urban design thinking and practice in a rural context; using evidence-based design research and a socio-ecological approach. Urban design is a critical spatial practice to ensure there is a focus on urban form and structure, and the creation of positive, enabling environments. An approach that balances the social order with the ecological order produces a spatial structure that heals and repairs the whole. This is urban design, giving form to life.

Kampala, like many cities in the global south, is experiencing urbanisation at an unprecedented rate. Eight out of ten people are taking up informal employment, many of whom set up and occupy sites within highly contested spaces in the urban realm. Modernist planning and developments across the city are unable to sustain the growing number of traders in the city. The Godown Zone in Namuwongo provides an entry point for a self-organised community of informal traders who have taken upon themselves to create spaces for trade and occupation in a restricted space a few kilometres away from the local market. The Godown Zone offers a range of opportunities for inclusive and sustainable development however it also highlights the urban disconnect between planners need to control functions of spaces and the actual functioning of such spaces. Research has shown a bottom-up design approach through engaging with traders allows for effective and multifunctional development of spaces. This project has therefore development an urban design framework to amplify voices of the trading community of Namuwongo while factoring in long term development plans through interviews, observations, research studies, and site data analysis. By incorporating the experiences of the users, this urban design framework hopes to contribute to the development of an inclusive and vibrant city

In the South African context, political and universal rights of citizens have been expanded since liberation but the basic services and livelihoods have eroded (Miraftab, 2009). Marginalized citizens have created their homes through auto construction, and self-making, in the post-apartheid city (Caldeira, 2017). This is evident in spaces like Philippi, where areas of Neoliberal planning practices remain as exclusionary imaginaries of city and citizenship that promote collective amnesia (Miraftab, 2009). Insurgent planning scholarship calls for collective memory and looks to liberating planning imaginaries and histories of marginalized people as strength in knowledge (Miraftab, 2009). Through ways of being and social spatial production practices, people are infrastructure (Simone, 2004). The social practices and community agencies inform a type of infrastructure. Amin (2014) speaks of the liveliness of infrastructure. The term infrastructure is used loosely. It indicates the bigger infrastructural elements like transport infrastructure, yet to come in Philippi, as well as other more basic infrastructure like water, sanitation, and electricity, which are often void in spaces in Philippi. Amin (2014) highlights the politics of community and institution, and visible and invisible infrastructure (Amin, 2014). Networks of social gathering spaces, such as economic trade and eating areas, and physical space, like places of water collection and sanitation, give a rendering of the urban poor experience. As part of the experience of these infrastructures, the sensory landscape of urban places holds collective memory and social outlook (Amin, 2014). Acknowledging and paying homage to this helps an understanding of the noteworthy social, cultural and spatial rituals of place and self-built placemaking in Philippi. Through investigating planned and self-built places and their everyday practices, this study has attempted to collect spatial practices, to inform a framework that considers this narrative and the interventions it suggests. The collection of information has been used to guide and inform design principles for interventions at various scales. The starting point of the inquiry is the pavement. A universal everyday place that all actors engage with. In Philippi, the pavement and walkways offer many everyday practices. The pavement is the most common public space of movement, social exchange, and public and private interface, and the investigation of the street in Philippi has informed other areas of design intervention.

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Creating a sense of place; a meaningful urban landscape has been one of the great challenges of the contemporary built world. Urban fabric once molded and sanctified by religion, myth, and subtle forces, is presently understood through formal and functional issues. This thesis contends that an important part of the experience of place is through understanding the landscape as a part of a greater narrative of spiritual or energetic significance. In a contemporary context, this can be engaged through the conception of the human body. The human body has held a special role with regards to the built world. We assess the world with the aid of our physical bodies and our relationship to space is shaped by the understanding of ourselves as psychological and spiritual creatures. Currently, North American culture is undergoing great change in the comprehension of the body. This includes a reality where the energetic or subtle body is recognized as a valid element of human existence and an inherent mind-body connection is being supported by advances in the world of science. There is also an increasing awareness that the divide between human beings and the natural environment is detrimental to both physical and mental health. The city of Toronto is in a period of redefinition and this new interest in the human condition can play a central role in the development of the city fabric. Its main civic avenue, University Avenue, becomes the site for an urban project guided by respect for the physical, energetic and cyclical nature of the human being. A network of public spaces is created that allows people to reconnect to the city as a part of a narrative of body, energy, and the cycles of the natural world.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The overall aim of this research was to examine aesthetic response to façade colour. Drawing on a range of theories and studies from environment-behaviour studies (EBS), Nasar’s (1994) probabilistic model of aesthetic response to building attributes provided a theoretical framework within which to examine patterns of response. Prompted by the Development Control Plan for Sydney Regional Environmental Plan: Sydney Harbour Catchment (NSWDOP, 2005), this research also linked its aims and methods to planning policy in Sydney. The main research questions focussed on whether changes in aesthetic response are associated with variations in façade colour; and whether changes in judgements about building size, congruity and preference are associated with differences in façade colour. A quasi-experimental research design was used to examine patterns of aesthetic response. The independent variable was represented by four façade colours in two classifications. An existing process, environmental colour mapping, was augmented with digital technology and used to isolate, identify and manipulate the independent variable and for preparation of visual stimuli (Foote, 1983; Iijima, 1995; Lenclos, 1977; Porter, 1997). Façade colour classifications were created from extant colour theories (including those of Albers, 1963; Hard & Sivik, 2001 and Itten, 1961). The façade colour classifications were further developed using F-sort and Q-sort methodology (Amin, 2000; Miller, Wiley & Wolfe, 1986; Stephenson, 1953). Ten dependent variables, linked to overall aesthetic response, were drawn from studies relating to environmental evaluation, building congruity and preference (Groat, 1992; Janssens, 2001; Russell, 1988; Russell, 2003; Russell, Ward & Pratt, 1981; Wohlwill & Harris, 1980). The dependent variables were presented in the form of a semantic differential rating scale and a sample group of 288 evaluated the visual stimuli. The Latin-square technique was used for the controlled presentation of visual stimuli. Factor analysis, correlation analysis and analysis of variance were applied to the data. The findings indicate that variations in aesthetic response are associated with differences in façade colour. Judgements about building size varied by up to 5% and buildings featuring contrasting façade colours were judged to be larger and more dominant. Judgements about a building’s congruity varied by up to 13% and buildings that featured harmonious colours were considered to be more congruous. Preference varied and harmonious façade colours were not necessarily preferred over contrasting façade colours. The outcomes from this research suggest that a new approach to façade colour within the context of planning policy may be appropriate. A model of façade colour evaluation is presented and, unlike current planning guidelines, the model allows for a participatory approach to façade colour evaluation and specification. The model allows for factors that may influence aesthetic response to façade colour (such as contextual, perceptual and idiographic factors) as well as variation in architectural expression with respect to façade colour.