In this guest post, Dr Min Tang, Anuj Daga, and Dr Ying Cheng describe the results of their research and actions, which examine how young people’s moving and waiting practices indicate their space-making, time-making, and meaning-making performance across radically changing urban spaces in Africa and Asia. This initiative was supported by a USF Knowledge Mobilisation Award grant.
Between 21 and 24 July 2025, the Youth on the Move team joined forces with the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship (University of Pretoria) and, in partnership with Pretoria-based community partner Yeast City Housing and Tshwane Leadership Foundation, to host a four-day workshop: Cartographies of Care: Mapping Women’s Everyday Journeys and Stories across Pretoria CBD.
The workshop sought to reimagine mapping as storytelling through the lens of women’s everyday practices of care. Public spaces in South African cities, particularly in downtown Pretoria, continue to be marked by the legacies of apartheid and persistent inequalities. Yet these same spaces are animated by practices of resilience, adaptation, and solidarity. Women’s movements across the city—whether walking, waiting, or making detours—are not only acts of necessity and survival but also crucial forms of care, for themselves and for others.
By focusing on women’s routes, routines and embodied experiences, the workshop asked how mapping might reveal latent hierarchies and open possibilities for designing cities that are safer, more inclusive, and more attuned to belonging. It featured lectures by Professor Stephan de Beer, a leading scholar of urban planning and public space, and Wilna de Beer, a long-standing community practitioner working with women in Pretoria. Their contributions provided crucial insights into the histories of South African cities and the dynamics of downtown Pretoria. The workshop also welcomed African artists—Senzeni Marasela, Kawthar Jeewa, and Nsika Mhlongo—whose practices in visual and performance art expanded the methodological boundaries of mapping. Most importantly, however, the workshop centred the voices of women living and working in Pretoria’s CBD. Their stories and everyday practices of care are what truly sustain and reimagine the city. Through participatory exercises, participants transformed these everyday narratives into collective spatial critique, rethinking maps not as fixed coordinates and street names, but as songs, paintings, performances, or collages.
The workshop opened at Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship (University of Pretoria), with a lecture by Professor Stephan de Beer, who spoke about making women’s presence visible in urban space. Participants—working women from Pretoria’s CBD, members of the Tswane Leadership Foundation and Yeast City Housing, together with invited artists and architects—then set out on group walks through the city. Returning to the office of Yeast City Housing, they traced their routes onto maps, initiating a layered cartography of care that would be expanded in the days to follow.
The following morning began with a collective reflection on the experiences of walking and being in the city. Wilna de Beer shared insights from her longstanding work with women in the region and with the Tswane Leadership Foundation. Participants then divided into smaller groups to map everyday routes, identifying associations, challenges, and places of respite across the inner city. These walks raised questions about food, safety, and belonging and led to a process of documenting and preparing for deeper exploration.
As the workshop unfolded, participants embarked on city walks that uncovered the historical layers of Pretoria’s landmarks, streets, and buildings. Stories and anecdotes shared during these walks sparked conversations about memory, erasure, and imagination. These encounters laid the groundwork for collaborative projects, as participants began to develop creative responses to their experiences of moving through the city.
The final day was devoted to creation and collective reflection. Through painting, collage, and performance, participants narrated their experiences into shared cartographies of care. In an atmosphere of support and camaraderie, individual memories and emotions were woven into collective representations of the city—projects that embodied both its histories and its possibilities, and reimagined the urban map through the lens of care. In doing so, the workshop foregrounded care as both a method and a vision for more inclusive urban futures.
- Outputs: Three Collective Projects
Pretoria Finders produced a Passbook Map, collaging found materials onto drawings of pedestrian impressions of the CBD. By referencing the apartheid-era passbook system, this project subverted a tool of exclusion into a form of reclamation, documenting everyday spaces of movement and survival, and maybe a link to the video for the performance. - Transformations challenged the stigmatised image of Pretoria’s inner city by mapping homemaking practices across multiple urban spaces. Through storytelling and shared walking, participants reflected on vulnerability, violence, and the care that emerges from building connections. Their cartographies combined personal journeys, mobile homemaking practices, and collective reflections on belonging.
- The Care Walkers created a performance titled Walk of Care. Connected by a red thread, participants followed the paths of local women through downtown, moving between spaces of solidarity and official heritage sites. Encounters in places like Marabastad, Burgers Park, and Melrose House opened moments of recognition and disruption. Their project culminated in an art installation: on a cloth traditionally used by sangomas, each participant hand-stitched objects symbolising care, from tissues and bottle caps to drawings and recycled materials.
Cartographies of Care: Reimagining the City Otherwise
Cartographies of Care demonstrated how participatory mapping can illuminate hidden dimensions of urban life, offering both empirical insights and methodological innovation. By centring women’s embodied experiences, the workshop foregrounded forms of knowledge often overlooked in conventional urban design and planning, highlighting how everyday practices of care constitute vital urban expertise. The creative outputs—maps, performances, and installations—were not merely documentation, but deliberate interventions that reimagine, reclaim, and produce knowledge about the city.
Beyond mapping coordinates or landmarks, the project illustrated how participatory approaches can mobilise local knowledge, translating situated, embodied practices into forms of collective understanding that can guide more inclusive, attentive, and responsive urban futures, while connecting lived experience with scholarly inquiry and informing future urban research.