WELTSTADT

The sixth issue of the Weltstadt newspaper deals with the Weltstadt project (In)formal Studio: Marlboro South and the (In)formal City Project from Johannesburg. The newspaper's theme (In)formal Cities summarizes projects exploring practice and research through modes of engagement with the (in)formal realities of housing and living in Johannesburg.
The project Informal Studio: Marlboro South (developed by 26’10 south Architects at the University of Johannesburg with Alex Opper, Director of the Master’s Program, and supported by the Goethe-Institut)
represents an extreme zoom-in into one condition of informality. It seeks to impact on existing university curricula by exposing architecture students to real world challenges and the role-players involved.
The studio provided a platform for students, lecturers, residents; non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and community-based organizations (CBOs) to collectively act in support of people-centered development.

Who makes the city, who are the actors and decision makers? What do cities in the global North and global South share? The (In)formal City Exchange Project between Berlin and Johannesburg,
presents a sampling of informal situations across Johannesburg and Berlin (p.18). Here informal development processes and practices related to city-making stood at the center of research conducted over a
period of six months by multidisciplinary teams. The project investigated informally organized initiatives which offer both a flexible and user-orientated way of citymaking.
While both cities are undergoing large-scale restructuring processesrelated to their past, their different social, environmental, economic and management challenges were revealed in the samples studied.


Both the Marlboro South and the Johannesburg / Berlin project argue that adequate responses to city-making cannot be generated by one discipline or theoretical framework alone, but require professionals to immerse themselves from different scales and viewpoints, applying a variety of methods towards learning and acting simultaneously.


The newspaper is available in English.


Download the file here:

JOHANNESBURG.pdf