URB_714 Global Urbanism – Core Studio Abroad: ‘Rand to Reef Rhizome’

The goal of the summer urban design studio is to afford students an opportunity to engage as designers in an array of urban conditions archetypical of 21st-century urbanization to which the urban design profession will be required to respond.

Johannesburg is one of the most divided cities in the world today, with the imprint of formal segregation policies, city planning and architecture, and the impact of globalization in the post-apartheid era. Its urban condition consists of a fluid and dynamic tension between the durability of the apartheid landscape and its buildings and an emerging subaltern anarchy with its urban architecture of resistance. Typical architectural, landscape, and urban projects provide spaces of exclusion or interface with the possibility of inclusion, not in the sense of integration but as a coexistence of shared and unequal—all in a city of fear. The challenge for a radical architecture is to provide a space in which a spontaneously new order—an urbanism of openness—can emerge.

Students investigated the complex urban forms, social juxtapositions, and spatial apartheid that exists within Johannesburg through the examination of the M1 Rand to Reef corridor, which encompasses the Fordsburg, Ferreiras Dorp, and Newtown neighborhoods. The program was supported by guest academics and practicing professional lecturers. Students visited the offices of renowned architectural and urban design firms and took field trips to contemporary and relevant cities, architectural features, and landscapes within South Africa.