Cohort 1
Adheema Davis
(co-editor)
Adheema is passionate about restorative spatial justice, and holds a Master of Architecture degree from the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
Her exposure has seen her hold the role of Vice-President at the KwaZulu-Natal Region of the South African Institute for Architects, and has supported a reflexive practice workspace that tinkers between practice and theory – currently manifesting through her research interests of Public Culture, Heritage, and Decoloniality. These themes led Adheema to being selected as a Mandela Washington Fellow in 2018, through which she completed a course in Civic Leadership and Engagement at the LeBow Business College at Drexel University, Philadelphia.
Suzett Vaan Der Walt
Suzette is a professional architect with 4 years of experience at 1to1 where she manages a project supporting community-driven development and relations of illegally occupied inner-city buildings.
She is also involved in the strategic planning of 1to1 projects and aims to support the development of the GIS/BIM for neighbourhoods initiative. She is an aspiring academic, beginning her career as a researcher, and also spearheads the teaching and training initiatives of 1to1.
Althea Peacock
Althea Peacock is founding partner, principal architect and director of Johannesburg based practice Lemon Pebble Architects and Urban Designers and an alumnus the School of Architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand.
She is a resident and professional architect practicing and continuously thinking through being a black women architect and its implications to discourses on identity, marginalized history and narrative, feminist practice and spatial politics, and how these manifests in their projects of making of homes, educational buildings, and other built infrastructures.
There is a global shift around thinking differently about architectural and other spatial practices. Althea’s interests converge around other means of engaging with the languages, spatialized ethnographies, fragments, intersections, conflicts, archives and alternate narratives which inform spatial practices Ms. Peacock has been an invited speaker to conferences, as well as guest critic and examiner at various universities for several years.
This experience feeds back into her practice which promotes and is at the confluence of critical spatial thinking, spatial justice, erased identities and landscapes, space making, learning, and mentoring as intrinsic components of spatial practice.
Thina Dube
Tinashe is a Zimbabwean born architect, who is currently researching informal living conditions within an Architectural context in the world’s largest cities, with the hope of generating principles and design policies that will allow for more adaptive and resilient cities.
Tinashe is busy completing her PhD in Architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
Christine Botha
Christine Botha is a recently graduated architect from Johannesburg, South Africa. Her research and socio-spatial interests are around design, building and urban processes related to South Africa’s dynamic cities.
Christine aspires to be an architect that contributes to the built environment as an agent for socio-spatial justice and development towards more inclusive city-making.
She is currently engaged in a fellowship with Play Africa that focuses on Children led public space initiatives.
Elao Martin
Elao earned his undergraduate degree in architecture at the Namibia University of Science and Technology NUST, and his Master’s in Architecture at the University of Johannesburgs’ Graduate School of Architecture in South Africa. Elao has received a certificate of excellence as an ‘Emerging Voice in African Architecture’ from the inaugural Africa Architecture Awards 2017 in Cape Town, the 2016 Des Baker Award, and the 2019 Corobrik Award at the University of Johannesburg. He rejoined NUST as a Staff Development Fellow under the University’s Graduate Talent Acceleration Programme and is also a PhD student at the Architecture department with a research focus on socio spatial practices at the nexus of urban and communal land in northern Namibia.
Sibonelo Gumede
Sibonelo Gumede is an urbanist who is interested in the intersections of urban sociology, people centered development, and policy application. He has been driving dialogue and innovation platform opportunities for sustainable community development projects. He uses participatory action research to unlock value and promote civic engagement about inclusive communities.
Roanne Olberholzer (Moodley)
Roanne studied architecture at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. During her studies, she founded and ran a mental health awareness campaign, co-chaired the transformation forum at her residence, and was a member of UPrising, one of the organizations that led the movement Fees Must Fall in Pretoria in 2015. In 2017 she interned at Asiye eTafuleni, an NPO that works alongside informal workers in Durban’s Warwick Junction. She is currently studying for a Masters in Architecture in Unit 12 at the Graduate School of Architecture, Johannesburg.
Jens Horber
Jens Horber is the Urban Land Project Officer at Isandla Institute. He has diplomas in Industrial Design and Business Management, and a Masters in City and Regional Planning, and experience in project management, design, and business management in the industrial design and public art fields. He is an experienced professional town planner, and is interested in urban policy (and how it addresses spatial transformation, urbanisation, housing, and governance), sustainable development, rural development, and heritage.
Milswa Ndziba
Miliswa Ndziba is a South African student currently in Unit 19 at the University of Johannesburg’s Graduate School of Architecture. For her thesis, she is designing a series of paper toys that make concepts of colonial and Apartheid spatial planning accessible to children. In the final year of her undergraduate studies at the University of Pretoria she interned at 1to1 – Agency of Engagement, an NPO that facilitates spatial design strategies through critical engagement with residents in poor unsafe areas of South Africa.
Amy Leibbrandt
Amy practises as a project architect as part of the Alexander Walt team in Johannesburg, South Africa. She has a keen
interest in the craft of architecture, housing and global south urbanism. Her dissertation titled Architecture without Land (UP 2017) investigated land rental as a development strategy in well located, low-income neighbourhoods such as Westbury, Johannesburg.
She had the opportunity to present this research,
summarized as a paper, at the Open Building for Resilient Cities conference in Los Angeles, December 2018. In November 2019, Amy participated in a short course, Developing Social Housing Projects at the Institute of
Housing and Urban studies at the Erasmus University,
Rotterdam. As project architect, she has completed a 318 unit affordable housing project in Johannesburg cbd, South Africa.
For the fourth quarter in 2020 and 2021, she lectured
(online and in person) at University of Pretoria for the
Architecture Honours programme, consulting with 10
students weekly on refining their design projects. She was
an external examiner for the final year students for the BSc
Architecture programme at the University of Pretoria in
2021, for both the June and December exams.
Jhono Bennett
(co-editor)
Jhono Bennett is the co-founder of 1to1 – Agency of Engagement, a design-led social enterprise based in Johannesburg. 1to1 was initiated in 2010 in support of the multi-scalar work being done to re-develop post-Apartheid South African cities in the face of systemic spatial inequality.
Jhono is currently enrolled at the Bartlett School of Architecture as a doctoral candidate in the TACK / Communities of Tacit Knowledge: Architecture and its Ways of Knowing network. His practice-led research interests are driven by issues of inclusive design approaches, spatial justice, critical positionality, and urban planning in South African cities.
Nomonde Gwebu
Nomonde Gwebu is a candidate architect, having recently graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand. After obtaining some experience in the commercial property sector, Nomonde is passionate about finding innovative ways to support students to enter and advance in the field ofarchitecture.
Olasumbo Olaniyi
Olasumbo is a vibrant creative who sees life as a canvas and an institution. She believes in exploring and redefining the context of creativity. Currently, she works as a researcher and architect with AFI (African Futures Institute) and ACID (African Contemporary Institute of Design (ACID). She is an alumna of the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg. Having trained in Nigeria, South Africa and the Netherlands, she is passionate about interstitials and in-betweens of informality, social justice and surveillance. Olasumbo also volunteers as a Project Manager at Slum Art Foundation where she mentors children between ages 6-17 alongside other art enthusiasts.
Bonolo Masango
Bonolo Masango is a Candidate Architect who completed her masters at the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA) in The University of Johannesburg (UJ) in 2019.Her architectural ambitions seek to integrate multiple tales, memories, and meanings in the making of architecture. She did her candidacy at MMA Design Studio, a Johannesburg based architecture studio that engages in the African landscape through contemporary interpretation of indigenous knowledge and cultural practices. She is currently an asistant lecturer for ”Unit 15x”; a masters design studio at Graduate School of Architecture (GSA) which focuses on public space on the african continent inorder extend the post-colonial spatial discussions in architetcure, landscape and urban design.
Heather Dodd
Heather Dodd is a founding partner in Savage + Dodd Architects based in Johannesburg South Africa. As a practice, Savage + Dodd Architects believe in the power of design in restorative spatial justice and urban resilience within the context of architectural practice in a society with a deeply unjust past. This is reflected in the scope of projects undertaken in the Practice, which encompass buildings within the public realm such as universities and social housing which are reflective of building new building types for a new society. Working in the inner city of Johannesburg for the past 20 years has given her a unique insight into housing processes, urban living and the urban condition. Heather is an agile design strategist with skills in complex building adaptation and urban housing. In addition, Heather’s skills encompass heritage, sustainability and housing policy research.
Tebogo Ramatlo
Tebogo Ramatlo is an architect, maker, performing arts choreographer and lecturer at Tshwane University of Technology. He established himself as an architect and teacher who integrates thinking and making in his practice since his master’s dissertation, uses large scale model building and stop frame animation to narrate an urban future in which migrant women with children help build the city in which they seek shelter.
In 2018, he collaborated in the Time, Space Existence Exhibition at the Venice Biennale with Nadia Tromp of Ntsika Architects where they built an installation raising awareness about refugees from Africa and Europe as part of a global architectural discourse. He frequently collaborates with 26’10 south Architects on projects that focus on the transformation of South Africa’s built landscape. Since then he has travelled extensively to Berlin, Turkey, Peru, São Paulo and Los Angeles where he has given lectures and collaborative workshops on migration, informality, sustainability and homelessness in cities.
He is currently a Doctoral Candidate in architecture at TUT and his thesis focuses on defragmentation of colonial cities in Africa from the centre, the in-between and the periphery.
Lesego Bantsheng
Lesego Bantsheng is an urbanist, landscape architect, sculptor, film photographer and the director of the NPO Uhuru Heritage. For her dissertation at UCT in 2018, Lesego studied the cosmology of Barolong Boo Rratshidi of Makgobistad to devise a rural development framework responsive to land restitution and climate change in Arid South Africa. The project won a prestigious Corobrik award for innovation and continues to be an inspiration of how the south designs. Lesego is currently studying an MArch Urban Design at the Bartlett, UCL. She is involved in a group dissertation titled Decomposing Temporalities which investigates the underside of cities where concepts of wastedness reside. Lesego has learned to design, craft and test living prototypes and varying scale from architectural to urban frameworks in the public sector. She aims to work towards developing rural Southern African and learn from rural cosmologies, alternative speculations for urban futures
Cohort 2 coming soon….
Jus't Spatial Design ZA 