Johannesburg’s inner city today is densely populated and diverse—characterized by pockets of inclusion and exclusion, but shaped by transient migrant and immigrant communities attempting to claim a stake in sub-Saharan Africa’s rapidly growing economic hub. Development of the area has often been subject to contradictory approaches evident in the coexistence of highly secured, neatly manicured banking and office compounds, and the cluttered sidewalk exchanges of the vibrant—and often illicit—informal economy. This emergent urbanism, produced at the intersection of top-down planning and bottom-up improvisation, cannot be meaningfully addressed by traditional planning models and demands critical investigations into the future vision of inner city Johannesburg.

Students will travel to Johannesburg as an extension of the Urban-Think Tank Design Studio to investigate the architecture, urbanism, culture, and social exchange in Johannesburg with a specific focus on housing. City and architectural tours, museum visits, lectures and talks from local experts will constitute the majority of the trip. With students from the University of Johannesburg Graduate School of Architecture, we will take part in a series of on-site mapping workshops to collect urban ideas and input from residents, interdisciplinary experts, community groups, NGOs, and the private sector.

Notes
Enrollment in this seminar week is NOT required but is highly recommended for students in the Radical Jozi Design Studio.  The trip is open to max 15 students, but space is unlimited for students enrolled in the design studio. If enrollment is full online, please contact Danny Wills (wills@arch.ethz.ch) to sign up.


Visa
Each passenger traveling across any international boundary is solely responsible for obtaining all necessary travel documents, including any required visas, a valid passport and for complying with the laws of each country flown from (the departure country), through (any transit country) and into (the destination country). Neither the ETH Zurich nor the travel services provider nor the booking office can be charged for inconvenience and costs as a result of failure to obtain a visa.

This studio brought together the diverse worlds of academia, professional practice, government, and the private sector to analyze urban processes in order to generate new housing typologies for Johannesburg’s Eastern Gateway Area.

Johannesburg embodies the South African paradox at its most acute. A city shaped by the rise, fall, and reconstruction of legally sanctioned segregation, today it is one of the world’s most unequal and spatially polarized urban landscapes. By observing, reading, listening, and drawing, we confronted these challenges and opportunities while broadening our understanding of the economic, social, and spatial dynamics of the selected site.

Students designed housing projects that encompass both temporary and longer-term interventions at the scale of a city block, while generating an overall urban vision that challenges conventional approaches to issues related to public space, mobility, environment, and culture. With support from the Swiss Embassy in South Africa, the Johannesburg Housing Development Agency, and the University of Johannesburg, student projects have the strong potential to be built, continuing our four year initiative of applied teaching and research on South Africa.

Although crime has fallen, spurring increased occupancy rates, improved investor confidence, and privately led regeneration efforts, central Johannesburg is still plagued by an over-populated and poorly maintained building stock, pervasive vacancy and squatting, a continued housing shortage, and a commercial presence largely composed of small-scale vendors and informal service providers, rather than established businesses forming a foundation for wider economic development. At the same time, Johannesburg now finds itself at a catalytic moment of change. The most contested local government election since 1994 has ushered in a new political regime with the momentum to potentially reverse current inequalities and spark more sustainable area-based development in the city that does not result in gentrification and displacement. In particular, the diverse eastern sector represents a valuable microcosm of the larger city when it comes to use, building typologies, and demographic mix.

Located on the eastern fringe of the Central Business District (CBD), the Inner City Eastern Gateway (ICEG) is an interface between the CBD, the eastern suburbs, and the broader East Rand. Several areas within the ICEG are among the older suburbs in Johannesburg, and are coming under increasing pressure from contemporary urbanization processes to be recast as ‘zones of transition’. Former commercial and industrial precincts have also been redeveloped or repurposed for residential use. Taken together, the established infrastructure, dense urban grain, central location, and convenient public transport links present in the ICEG offer the potential for the area to perform a key role in the provision of innovative housing projects and mixed-use developments, which could in turn contribute to increased economic opportunities and improved social amenities in a severely depressed part of the city.

The development of this studio will lay the foundations for the longer-term research project, “The Joburg Lab,“ which will be a participatory research and design initiative directed by a unique collaboration between the Urban-Think Tank Chair, the University of Johannesburg Graduate School of Architecture, and the Museum of African Design (MOAD), as supported by the Embassy of Switzerland in South Africa. The initiative will be an inclusive platform to encourage productive civic engagement and collect urban design ideas from residents, interdisciplinary experts, community groups, NGOs, and the private sector.

Housing the Inner City

Radical Jozi

Teaching

This winter school will combine theoretical and empirical field research, engaging with local practitioners and stakeholders. It will function as an interdisciplinary think-tank, exploring the requirements to make cities more inclusive for all. The focus will be on opportunities and challenges provided by the two emerging cities of Cartagena and Santa Marta, Colombia.

This winter school will challenge you to work in an intensive, cross-cultural setting identifying new development potentials in complex, real-life contexts.

Mid-sized cities in Latin America are growing at unprecedented rates. Struggling between globalization, modernization, and local traditions, these emerging cities are characterized by great social and spatial disparity. The decisions made over the next decade will have lasting consequences on long-term demographics and economic growth. In this short time window we face the challenge to respond to these high demands on resources, such as land, infrastructure, and energy.

Are these boomtowns doomed to follow the pitfalls of rapid urban development? Can they be tackled by integrated and inclusive solutions, rather than generic and fragmented interventions which exclude the challenged local communities?

This program is part of an ambitious, three-year collaboration with the Inter American Development Bank’s Emerging and Sustainable Cities Initiative (ESCI) and the Swiss Ministry for Economic Cooperation (SECO). Building on the existing ESCI Action Plans, the winter school will lead to its own urban assessment and identify potential proposals for future project developments. The outcomes of the course will lead to a concrete project proposal, influence decision makers, and engage with real issues.

ETH will focus on the two emergent Colombian cities of Cartagena and Santa Marta, which are facing the specific challenges of coastal urban centers, such as mass tourism, social inequality and chronic flooding. We will examine, analyze, and compare the two case studies in order to produce meaningful urban strategies to influence urban policy. In teams, you will contribute with your expertise and unpack the realities of sustainable development within a tropical climate. How can knowledge from ETH be combined with Colombian research and translated into a Caribbean context? Through debate, community appraisals and collaboration, it is expected that you question the preconceptions of socio-spatial inclusion and sustainable urban development, to produce scenarios which integrate your different disciplines.

This immersive, three-week winter school will be structured in four interlocked modules:

In the first module you will investigate the city of Cartagena and gain a strong understanding of its social, environmental, mobility and built contexts. Through intensive fieldwork, you will employ analytical mapping and empirical methodologies to integrate and synthesize knowledge across different disciplines.

In the second module, you will develop a series of alternative solutions for an integrated and inclusive future of the city. You will build on the research from the first module, and explore the potential of your ideas with local stakeholders and professionals from your fields. You will document these scenarios using creative and varied representational methods.

In the third module, you will explore the neighboring city of Santa Marta, repeating the research and discussion steps of the first modules. From these case studies, you will develop a comparative analysis which should inform and correct your initial assessments.

In the final module you will pitch your recommendations to decision makers. During this event you will measure their preferences, debate the associated trade-offs, and provide a series of orientations for those planning the future of Cartagena and Santa Marta.

Back in Zurich, you will be asked to gather all your findings into a final report, which will be presented to SECO and delivered to the other ESCI partners.

We are looking for enthusiastic students currently enrolled in a PhDs or Masters program in ETH Zurich, Colombian Universities and other academic institutions around the world, particularly from developing countries. A group of 10 ETH students from the D-ARCH, ISTP and D-BAUG departments will be selected. Priority given to the ISTP PhD candidates of the Urban Research Incubator. D-ARCH students receive 4 ECTS.

Applicants should have a strong interest in sustainable urban development, urban poverty and socio-spatial exclusion, policy development and transdisciplinary collaborative research. They should be able to demonstrate their academic strengths, motivation, interest and expertise. Knowledge of Spanish is welcomed but not obligatory.

Applications can be submitted including curriculum vitae, portfolio where relevant and letter of motivation as portable document format (pdf) to Marie Grob at grob@arch.ethz.ch

Notification for admission: November 30th

The winter school includes accomodation, group transportation, on-site activities and guides.

Each student will be responsible for obtaining his flight ticket to and back from Cartagena, visa and travel insurance; meals and any other personal expenses.

ISTP students receive a 400 CHF contribution for their flight ticket.

Dates in Zurich: 25th of January and 20th to 24th of February 2017.

Dates in Colombia: 4th to 18th of February 2017.

Transdisciplinary Work-Lab for Architects, Engineers, Economic and Social Scientists

Winter School: Cities for All

How did cities develop into the cities we live in now? Which urban plans, instruments, visions, political decisions, economic reasonings, cultural inputs and social organization have been used to operate in urban settlements in specific moments of change? Which cities are exemplary in illustrating how these instruments have been implemented and how they have shaped urban environments? Can these instruments be transcribed into urban operational tools that we recognize within existing tested cases in contemporary cities across the globe?

Urban form cannot be reduced to the physical space. Cities are the result of social construction, under the influence of technologies, ecology, culture, the impact of experts and accidents. Urban unconcluded processes respond to political interests, economic pressure, cultural inclinations, along with the imagination of architects and planers and the informal powers at work in complex adaptive systems.

Current urban phenomena are the result of an urban evolution. The facts stored in urban environments include contributions from its entire lifecycle. That is true for physical environment, but also for non-physical aspects, the imaginary city that exists along with its potentials and problems and with the conflicts that have evolved over time. Knowledge and understanding along with a critical observation of the actions and policies are necessary to understand the diversity and instability present in the contemporary city and to understand how urban form evolved to its current state.

This lecture series will introduce urban knowledge and the way it has introduced urban models and operational modes within different concrete realities, therefore shaping cities. Urban knowledge will be translated into operational tools, extracted from cities where they have been tested and become exemplary samples, most relevant for providing the understanding of how urban landscape has taken shape.

Case studies will be identified to compile documents and an archive, that we use as templates to read the city and to critically reflect upon it.

The presented contents are meant to serve as inspiration for positioning in future professional life as well as to provide instruments for valuable contributions and interventions.

For wider information on the previous research teaching activities, please visit:
utt-toolbox.com

Kostenrahmen	E
Location	Johannesburg, South Africa
Urban-Think Tank Chair of Architecture and Urban Design	Prof. Alfredo Brillembourg & Prof. Hubert Klumpner, Danny Wills, Hans-Christian Rufer
Advisors	Bronwyn Kotzen, Rebecca Looringh-van Beeck
Research Partners	University of Johannesburg, Graduate School of Architecture Unit 16, 26'10 south Architects (Anne Graupner, Thorsten Deckler, Paul Devenish)

City of Gold