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NAVITAGING THE WHAT-WHAT: STAYING WITH MY TROUBLE
Jhono Bennett

Johannesburg, South Africa







Navigating the What-What: Staying with my Trouble - PDF




‘South African cities remain among the most unequal urban areas in the world. Amidst the city-making forces that led to this condition, those implemented through the spatial form were not an impassive by-product of centuries of segregated development, but were conceptualised, drawn, designed and implemented by built environment practitioners - individual spatial designers who were politically, socially, technically and ethically situated in South Africa. The tacit logics of their designed built form continue to play a significant role in how these inequalities spatially persist decades after social and political reform.

This observation is framed to point out an important, and under-explored inter-scalar dimension of spatial practice and agency that exist between the individual practitioner, the discipline and the socio-spatial systems that require more situated and critical approach to city-orientated research. These inter-scalar and inter-generational legacies of the colonial and apartheid socio-spatial system remain firmly embedded in the spirit of the legal, professional, and disciplinary systems of city-making and depending on one’s own historical location, these aspects of self and other manifest very differently in both personal and practitioner engagements. As a result, there exists a demographical dilemma, an incommensurable dimension of paradoxicity, for those of us working at the practitioner scale through such inter-scalar and positional dynamics of spatial design in post-Apartheid South Africa that remains largely unspoken or documented.

This paper will attempt to frame a partial perspective on this paradoxical dilemma, while acknowledging important incommensurable contradictions through a discussion on research audience, positional moves and ethics-in-action. The paper will do so through a multi-voiced designerly structuring of the document format that will share the initial creative findings revealed from a practice-orientated critical reflection on my own work in Johannesburg through a Site Writing modality that has brought these dynamics, the what-what, to the surface.’

Jhono Bennett
 

 

Echoes and Intersections is a collection of site-writings produced as part of the module Critical Spatial Practice: Site-Writing across the MA Architectural History, MA Situated Practice, and MA Historic Urban Environments dgree and PhD programmes at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.

The featured works take the reader through fixed spatial locations and buildings, and on temporal journeys across ambiguous lands and waters. Written simultaneously across the globe, our situated writing offers diverse perspectives and narratives on plural geographies, landscapes and cities, through pieces interwoven with multiple, intersecting threads.

Many of the works occupy edgelands, peripheries or crossing points, writing the boundaries of buildings, states or bodies. They explore homelands, homes and selves that have been deconstructed, revealed and returned to. Echoing with memories, histories and absent others, the sites written carry the voices of place and voices displaced or fragmented, which resonate through the materials of the land - mud, sand, sky and rock.

These writings can be read in any order, allowing connections to emerge differently upon each reading.

Curatorial committee: Toby Blackman, Chia-Ying Chao, Kanza Leghari, Charlotte Morgan & Rasha Saffarini. 

With thanks to Polly Gould, Jane Rendell and David Roberts.


Bloomsbury Festival 2021

In October 2021, participants from the class read from their work on Bloomsbury Radio as part of Bloomsbury Festival 2021, alongside Polly Gould, Jane Rendell, David Roberts and participants from the class of 2020.

Find the recordings on Soundcloud here.