My Fulbright project in South Africa investigated youth perspectives on the post-apartheid urban space of Johannesburg. I worked with black South African students at the Afrika Cultural Centre for 8 months through walkabouts, workshops, and discussions about the city.

During this time, I was interested in finding ways to understand their strategies for moving through the city and navigating the complex and chaotic urban environment of Johannesburg. By asking them questions about their neighborhoods, experiences, and mobility, we collaboratively constructed an in-depth representation of their Johannesburg.

At first, images and texts were produced that confronted the act of entering the city, and these were displayed as an exhibition called "Getting to Newtown". After delving deeper into the themes brought about by that exhibition, I began to see a relationship between the way some students drew maps of Johannesburg and images made throughout the project. This led to the thematic categorization of the project and final public exhibition, titled "All My Cities".

“All My Cities” organized the images and texts of the projects through six maps, which are broadly named: In the City, Road City, Rail City, Contrast City, Concept City, and Home City. These categories reflect the behaviors, obstacles, and perspectives of urban youth.

As an architect, I have taken the impetus of this research to generate strategies that respond to the behaviors, attitudes, and struggles that the students had towards the urban environment of Johannesburg. The 6 themes of the "All My Cities" exhibition resulted in 6 typologies of interventions, which occur in specific locations in my drawings but could occur any number of times all around Johannesburg. These typological strategies address a struggle to belong, make space, and be an individual, in a city with the history of apartheid.

A website documenting the public exhibition All My Cities.

Some work has been published in the African Cities Reader II: Mobilities and Fixtures.

The paper, The Verb Form of the City, was written during my Fulbright in South Africa. It was presented as part of City Seminars, put on by the School of Architecture and Planning and CUBES, Centre for Urbanism and Built Environment Studies, at the University of the Witwatersrand.