Jhono Bennett was part of the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at the University of Johannesburg’s groundbreaking Graduate School of Architecture. He is the co-founder and co-director of 1to1 – Agency of Engagement, a non-profit that provides a design-based collaboration between grassroots organisations, professionals, academia, and government. He took part in the CPR-CSH workshop on ‘a Post-Post Apartheid Urban Praxis’.
Mukta Naik, a Fellow at CPR, is an architect and urban planner. Her research interests include housing and urban poverty, urban informality and internal migration, as well as urban transformations in small cities. At CPR, she focuses on understanding the links between internal migration and urbanisation in the Indian context.
Their conversation explores ideas of design-led practice and learning, practice-oriented design in South Africa, and parallels between the post-colonial contexts of India and South Africa. The conversation has been originally published on the Tacit Knowledge Urban Research Network (TURN), which collaboratively conducts research on urban informal processes and the tacit knowledge integral in them from multiple vantage points in the relational geographies of settlement, housing, and economies, with the eventual goal of incorporating that understanding into knowledge systems that support policy-making.
The conversation is excerpted here.