• Location: Johannesburg, South Africa and Online
  • Date: March/April, 2024
  • Programme: Change by Design
  • Project Partners: 1to1 Agency of Engagement
  • Activities: Co-design/ Capacity Building

As part of the wider Change by Design Johannesburg initiative, this workshop explored and documented what it takes to maintain and repair inner-city buildings that house low-income residents. Developed by ASF-UK with 1to1, the workshop moved the methodology into its middle stages — dreaming and developing — building on the diagnostic work carried out in Bertrams and Jumpers the year before.

Participants worked across micro (dwelling), meso (community), and macro (city/policy) scales, alongside grassroots partners linked to each building: the Inner City Federation (ICF), affiliated with Argyle Court, Jean Law Court, and Linatex House; and the Inner City Resource Centre (ICRC), affiliated with Bertrams. 1to1’s own network of Community Facilitators supported each scale group. Through interviews, walking tours, drawing, mapping, photography, and storytelling, residents and grassroots leaders shared how they maintain and adapt their homes and buildings — surfacing informal repair practices, fire safety concerns, shared infrastructure arrangements, and aspirations for future improvements. These conversations fed into a documented record of residents’ lived experience and an initial set of principles and options for community-led maintenance and repair, covering collective governance, resource mobilisation, skill-sharing, and partnerships.

The five-day workshop’s findings were written up as building-specific profiles and network diagrams and shown in an interactive exhibition at the University of the Witwatersrand, bringing stakeholders from across these scales together to reflect on future strategies for maintenance and repair in the inner city. It closed with a discussion of the key questions a future Inner-City Maintenance + Repair Guide would need to address to meaningfully support the upgrading of informally occupied buildings.

Buildings involved:

  • Argyle Court
  • Bertrams
  • Jean Law Court
  • Linatex House