The urban scripting ways: shifting the frame to the ‘Other’
Funding period: 1 February 2026 – 31 October 2026
Type of funding:
International Fellowship
Solam Mkhabela is an urban designer based in Johannesburg at the School of Architecture and Planning (SoAP), University of the Witwatersrand (WITS). As a senior lecturer, he convenes the Master of Urban Design and teaches in the architecture programme. He holds a Bachelor of Architectural Studies (BAS) and a Master of City Planning and Urban Design (MCPUD) from UCT Cape Town and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) from WITS.
Storytelling has been fundamental in shaping his Nguni identity and academic approach that aims to improve Johannesburg’s spatial performance through a dynamic urban site assessment process. Solam’s work promotes transdisciplinary methods that use audio-visual storytelling to read complex urban situations. It positions the urban designer in African cities as a producer of physical space in conjunction with social content from, for, and with society’s margins, thereby restructuring spatial practice for more equitable life.
In addition to numerous papers and book chapters in academic publications, including the Routledge Companion to Architectural Pedagogies in the Global South (2023), Solam is the author of the graphic novel, Alexandra: A Backstory, released by Jacana Media in 2024. This hybrid work, which merges traditional academic writing with the graphic novel format, has garnered considerable attention in South African media, underscoring the importance of the discourse it engages with.
As a USF International Fellow, Dr Mkhabela will spend nine months at Edinburgh University and will work under the mentorship of Dr Aidan Mosselson (Global Challenges Chancellor’s Fellow at Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA)). During the Fellowship, he will work on the transformation of his doctoral thesis, Urban Scripting: Audio-visual Forms of Storytelling in Urban Design and Planning: The Case of Two Activity Streets in Johannesburg (2023), into a manuscript for publication titled The Urban Scripting Ways: Shifting the Frame to the ‘Other.’
The book explores the social life of two specific streets in an Empire-conceived and apartheid African city, Johannesburg. Employing film, animation, and graphic novel, the work captures multiple temporalities of urban change and argues for the integration of oral histories as a means of unsettling dominant planning narratives in favour of African knowledge construction.
Profile at WITS | Profile at Researchgate | solam.mkhabela@wits.ac.za