YEOVILLE STUDIO
Yeoville Studio was a two-year community-oriented research and teaching initiative, driven by a collaboration between Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½ School of Architecture and Planning, and civil society organisations in Yeoville between 2010 and 2012.
It aimed to:
- Train students to engage with communities in understanding and producing the city;
- Produce innovative research through a multidicisplinary approach grounded in, and focused on, a specific neighborhood; and
- Produce applied research that is of relevance and use to partnering local communities or stakeholders.
The Studio was supported by Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½ University, the School of Architecture and Planning and its research center, the Center for Urbanism and the Built Environment, and the French Institute of South Africa-Research (IFAS-Recherche).
This website, constructed by Alexandra Appelbaum and Claire Bénit-Gbaffou in 2019, sponsored by IFAS-Research, has the following objectives:
- It constitutes an organised archive for a vast amount of knowlegde produced on Yeoville by Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½ students & staff as well as Yeoville communities, during the Studio;
- It complements the book, published by Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½ Press in 2019 and focused on academic reflections on the Studio, by adding more detailed stories, more diverse voices and images to the book's stories;
- It reflects on the making of the Studio, its pedagogic and political architecture, its process and the variety of its productions, thereby sharing experiences with academics and activists interested in community-engaged research initiatives.
Greater Yeoville (hereafter Yeoville), encompassing the suburbs of Yeoville, Bellevue and Bellevue East, is a peri-central area, located north east to Johannesburg CBD. Bounded to the South by a non-urbanised ridge, to the North by Louis Botha avenue, it is organised around a high street, Rockey-Raleigh street, where public amenities (the recreation center, swimming pool, library) and shops and market are concentrated. The neighborhood consists of small-scale buildings and densified bungalows, and this contrasts with the neighborhing areas - high-rise Hillbrow and Berea to the west, or suburban Observatory to the east. A popular neighborhood, it has a long story of mobility and migration, currently attracting migrants from South Africa, and international migrants from the continent - francophone Africa, but also Zimbabwe and Ethiopia.
