• Location: Johannesburg, South Africa
  • Date: January, 2025
  • Programme: Change by Design
  • Project Partners: 1to1 Agency of Engagement
  • Activities: Co- Design/ Community-Led Research/ Capacity Building

Building on previous Change by Design Johannesburg workshops, the 2025 programme focused on the final stage of ASF-UK’s methodology: developing. Over five and a half days, the priority was developing practical principles and strategies for upgrading informally occupied buildings, and pressure-testing how they’d hold up in different real-world contexts. ASF-UK and 1to1 worked alongside Inner City Federation (ICF) leadership, the Inner City Resource Centre (ICRC), the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI), and 1to1’s own Community Facilitators, together with residents, building management representatives, researchers, and architects.

The workshop combined site visits, interviews, mapping, and co-design activities to build scenarios and develop upgrading options for inner-city buildings, working across Fraser House, Argyle Court, Jean Law Court, Old Pem, and Walpert Motors — grounding the discussion in the specific, often messy detail of how inner-city housing actually works.

The final session brought together a set of principles and options for change across different scales, closing with a discussion on what an ideal inner-city building might look like and how it could function. Community-based, community-led governance came up repeatedly as central to any of this working. Participants pointed to the need for new ways of transferring tenure and management responsibilities to residents and their supporting organisations, and for financial models — potentially including cross-subsidy mechanisms involving the private sector — that could actually fund such governance. Methodological reflections flagged that the resulting Portfolio of Options needed consolidating into a more succinct, testable format — the task the subsequent Evidence into Action phase took up. The overall consensus was that these ideas now need testing through experimentation and pilot projects, not further theorising.

Sites:

  • Fraser House
  • Argyle Court
  • Jean Law Court
  • Old Pem
  • Walpert Motors


Bertrams