Ubuntu Institute

The African Great Lakes Region has experienced cyclical violence since countries began gaining independence in the 1960s. The repeated emergence of leaders formed in contexts of rebellion and violence has yielded continuing authoritarian rule rather than democratic societies aimed at the common good. Three key continuing problems today are a regional development deficit, a distrust of institutions and erosion of social capital, and the instrumentalization of religion by authoritarian political regimes. In taking into account this long history of multidimensional vulnerability and instability, a few leaders of national/international state institutions, as well as leaders of religious denominations, are looking for innovative perspectives that could generate new approaches for the strengthening of social capital and the resilience of populations. One such initiative mobilized the energies of religious leaders in the region during 2019 and 2020. It is an interfaith platform called Dignity and Peace in the Great Lakes (PIDP-GL) which brings together representatives of the Catholic Church, traditional Protestant churches, Revivalist churches, and the Islamic community from platforms already operational in the various countries.

This chapter will focus on the built environment dynamics of spatial design practitioners and the related discipline’s involvement in addressing spatial inequality. It draws from a series of recorded conversations between three South African socio-technical spatial design practitioners during the 2020 Covid19 Lockdown. These conversations were titled ‘Gripe Sessions’ and were held every 2 weeks between three socio-technical practitioners as a means of support, reflection, and knowledge sharing through a peer-led ‘venting’ model. The co-author’s intent lies in making tangible a series of interpersonal dynamics that are present within working from the grass-roots neighbourhood scale of socially engaged built environment work in the contemporary neo-apartheid city condition. The chapter draws from Feminist scholarly principles on concepts of positionality and offers an additional ‘partial perspective’ to this topic, in doing so it does not offer to empirical findings, rather it uses qualitive social studies technique to introduce and ground the concerns identified by the co-authors to the larger discourse around city-making practice towards spatial justice in South Africa’s built environment.