City Studio

Since 2010 CUBES and the School of Architecture & Planning have been driving geographically focused, multidisciplinary, community-oriented research, learning and service initiatives in the form of a City Studio.

Through a three-year commitment to a specific area, the City Studio deploys a multi-pronged strategy to fulfil both the research and pedagogic objectives of the School. The City Studio provides an opportunity for Wits students who will become future architects and planners to build people-oriented cities, in local contexts with in-depth understandings and in real life situations, with the guidance and support of lecturers and community members. 

The City Studio approach embeds pedagogy in socially complex neighbourhoods in a way that seeks to make a contribution through research, mapping, thematic analyses, community/stakeholder engagement, problem-solving and small-scale design interventions. 

As research and results are periodically discussed and reviewed with partnering civil society organisations (CSOs), the City Studio produces socially relevant research, and locally adapted design and policy solutions. Through engagement with communities, key stakeholders and professionals around the real-life problems, the City Studio may enhance a professional and public discourse on this critical thematic and facilitate the transformative visioning for an alternative and just urban future.

Urban Lab+ Network

CUBES was the South African partner in the Urban Lab+ Network of research centres, funded by Erasmus Mundus, and driven by the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin). It focused on research and education on cities through city studios, and enriched the City Studio initiative within CUBES. The network involved numerous research centres on the city, including in Mumbai, Santiago de Chile and Hong Kong. The main activities of the Urban Lab+ network were symposia in Europe and the Global South on the urban laboratory approach and education, encourage staff and student international exchange and mobility, and contributing theoretically informed and applicable research and publications within the built environment disciplines.

The network offered CUBES the opportunity to strengthen relationships with partners in the global North and global South, and extend its understanding of complex international urban issues and strategies for education, research and participation. The network also provided the opportunity to establish international educational partnerships in the form of student exchange and joint master’s programmes. 

Within the network, CUBES was part of the cluster of research programmes that focussed on examining the use of city studios to engage universities and communities in teaching, research and service, and how planners, politicians and academics narrate and theorize urban practices in relation to urban change. This cluster included CUBES, the Urban Research and Design Laboratory at TU Berlin, University College London Urban Laboratory and the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies (KRVIA) in Mumbai.

Through Urban Lab+ CUBES researchers attended symposia in Berlin, Germany and Cosenza, Italy and hosted a conference in Johannesburg in November 2013. See Ulab Johannesburg Cluster Meeting Report for CUBES’s report on the stimulating Johannesburg event held in November 2013. The City Studios within CUBES were a key reference point for this workshop.