In August last year we were delighted to work with the fledgling Now Now Competition that used the Cape Town stadium as a focal point for its inaugural design contest. In it's second iteration the Now Now contest has shifted focus within Cape Town from Green Point to Khayelitsha's Spine Road. In this latest episode of the Talking Transformation Podcast, Sebestian Hitchcock - principal coordinator of the NowNow architecture competition - and I talk to two of the local entrepreneurs within Khayelitsha, Brian Bango a friend of the podcast and, for the first time Buntu Matole. Spine Road is a crit ..read more

For our first recording of the year the Talking Transformation Podcast we are blending innovation, international and entrepreneurial flavours with our guest, Marlene Lerch co-founder of the "Dooiy" – Hack your Schack NGO. Dooiy is a fledgling non-profit organisation from Germany that operates between Berlin and South Africa. I first met Marlene whilst working with the Ranyaka NGO team operating out of Stellenbosch last year. As you’ll hear, collaboration and partnership with other NGOs and agencies with similar values and perspectives is an essential part of their operations and key to the gro ..read more

I was first made aware of the unique building typologies in the Blue Downs area in the early 2020s. Central Blue eState and eHousing units certainly didn’t look like a conventional affordable housing project or subscribe to many of the unit design concepts I’m familiar with. I’ve been intrigued by the thinking behind the units and the design ever since. When I met the Managing Director and Co-founder of Citra South Africa, Joel Bauer on site a couple of months ago and he confessed to being a listener to the podcast, I invited him and members of the team to reflect on the Citra journey and deve ..read more

In this episode of the Talking Transformation Podcast we change our geography considerably, from a South African context, to the Arabinan Peninsula and Persian Gulf region. Our guest is Mahmood Al-Wahaibi an urban planner, ethnographer and academic who heads up OTU: the Oman Think Urban. The OTU is a Think Tank that blends urban ethnography and planning methodologies to support community engagement and research impacting on a number of the major planning initiatives in Oman. It comes at a time when Oman is looking to transition its economy away from a heavy emphasis on oil and commodities to a ..read more

Welcome to the latest episode of the Talking Transformation Podcast released on World Town Planning Day, the 8th of November 2023. It's a great way to celebrate this initiative with this latest episode, as we pick up on a familiar TTPod theme: the issue of state-owned land - in this instance, properties owned by Transnet - and the opportunity to build and renew our existing cities. My guest is the distinguished academic, Professor Ivan Turok who last week published an Op-Ed titled: "Transnet should sell its surplus land to unlock housing and jobs." It was an article widely circulated on social ..read more

In this second of the Talking Transformation Podcasts recorded at the ESRI Southern Africa User Conference, we are joined by three highly innovative and motivated individuals: Vhuyo Nevari, from ESRI South Africa Nsovo Pearl Maluleke, Planning Masters Student at the University of Johannesburg and, Tshidi Morabi , representing the STEAM4kids initiative. Vhuyo describes his journey from rural South Africa to urban professional and GIS practitioner: a truly inspiring conversation and one that celebrates both the individual and the benefits of an internship programme growing future GIS practitio ..read more

In TTPod 1.4 “A Tour of Duty and of Service” - we highlighted the issue of healing in communities and peacemaking with the World Bank Group’s Dr Jana el Horr. Several years on from that podcast we revisit the theme, specifically the multicultural dimensions of building trust, understanding and collaboration within and between communities. Our guests are Reverends Andrew Esterhuizen and Bossie Muller. The two of them have taken their own extensive personal expertise in working with communities into Culture Connect, a cultural diversity project falling under the Unit for Reconciliation and Justi ..read more

In this episode of the Talking Transformation Podcast, we engage with four of the collaborators behind the inaugural NowNow architecture competition - https://www.nownowcompetition.com/. It's a unique and new take on the opportunities afforded by a new sporting event in the Cape Town calendar - Formula E racing - and a brief to design a sustainable and functional pavilion for the event. How could such a piece of infrastructure, the pavilion, work to foster integration and connection between different parties whilst responding to the obvious functional requirements of spectator seating and othe ..read more

We conclude the Talking Transformation Podcast mini-series recorded at the City of Cape Town’s Civic Centre discussing the scales of planning on show during the EXPO. We talk to the metro spatial planning team - setting the broad citywide spatial framework including the policy and strategy components. We discuss foundations of that scale of planning including the city’s land use model and spatial costing tools and trends reporting.  The district level planning interprets that citywide message via defined city districts. The Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act requires a greater e ..read more

We are straight into our second of three Talking Transformation Podcast conversations recorded at the City of Cape Town’s Spatial Planning and Urban Design exhibition that took place between July 27th and August the 2nd. In our first episode we heard from the management and organisation teams from the City’s Planning and Urban Design department. In this second episode we shift our focus to the voices of the tertiary school participants, the lecturers and students who took part and exhibited in the programme. The expo platform allowed the students to test some of their practical observations an ..read more