Acts on Decent and Insurgent Architectures
Presenter: Thireshen Govender
Discussants: Paulo Moreira and Bongani Xezwi
Thursday 8 May 2025, 1-3pm, PARI offices and online
RSVP to attend in-person here and online here
Abstract
We are in a state of urban free fall—an accelerating poly-crisis shaped by deep bureaucratic, social, and political entanglements that hinder meaningful change. Despite our expertise and resources, we continue to fail in imagining and building inclusive, prosperous African cities. The urban landscape is increasingly defined by unchecked informal networks, broad systemic failures and privatised growth that fortifies inequality. In this moment, we must move beyond naive optimism and instead engage with the urgency and complexity of our condition. As an architect and urbanist, I am interested in the role of design to materially and imaginatively provide for stabilisation and prosperity in volatile, resource-scarce contexts.South Africa’s townships, with their raw, unregulated, and entrepreneurial dynamics, offer critical insight into how collapse and emergence coexist. These spaces present opportunities to rethink urbanity—not through distant ideals, but by confronting present realities and mobilising our creative, intellectual, and economic capacities for immediate, grounded transformation. There’s a hunch, that the emergent languages and practices from the townships, critically framed, may provide a tangible and imaginative approach to thinking about the future of Johannesburg’s urban spaces.
About the series
The Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI), Society, Work and Politics Institute (SWOP), Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO) and the Johannesburg Crisis: Concerned Academics, continue this seminar series to offer scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students an opportunity to share their ongoing work, either by discussing work in progress or presenting upcoming and new publications on the City of Johannesburg.
In 2025, the series provides a collaborative space and dialogue to scholars, researchers, activists and policy makers, to share their ongoing work on the City of Johannesburg.
This is an itinerant series and the details of each seminar will be published one week prior.
