Laura Nkula-Wenz
Biographic Data
| ID | 1283661 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Laura Nkula-Wenz |
| GIVEN NAMES | Laura |
| FAMILY NAME | Nkula-Wenz |
| SIGNATURE | NKULA-WENZ L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cape Town |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8298-7544 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 7 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 17 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 7 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Dwellers as designers’ – untangling the politics and practices of co-design ‘from below’ through a Cape Town housing occupation
Design has emerged as a powerful framework for governing emergent and resilient urban futures, attracting sustained attention from both scholars and practitioners. However, this ‘will to design’ often defaults to top-down, expert-led processes, overlooking the agentive design practices of marginalised urban inhabitants. This article contributes to a critical conversation between design studies and urban scholarship by untangling the politics and …
Design emergencies
This special issue affirms that design, as a socio-material practice of problem-solving, has gained currency among a variety of actors – from governments and international organisations to civil society forums and community activists – to address increasingly complex and interwoven emergencies. As design historians have shown, involving designers and leveraging semi-codified design protocols like ‘design thinking’ to find ostensibly innovative so…
The (im)possibilities of critical urban scholarship in plausibly genocidal times
Challenges and opportunities of curbing urban corruption and building professional integrity
Beyond the success/failure of travelling urban models
In this paper, we highlight the importance for policy mobility research to engage with the ‘multiple temporalities’ of globally prevalent urban policy ideas to understand how these eventually come to shape localities incrementally, and as we show, in sometimes unexpected manners. Through the study of over 10 years of (failed) redevelopment policies in Cape Town’s East City, we formulate two distinct contributions to existing urban policy mobility…
Effecting cultural change from below? A comparison of Cape Town and Bandung's pathways to urban cultural governance
This article compares the cultural governance pathways of two UNESCO “Design Cities” – Bandung and Cape Town – methodologically framing them as “repeated instances” [Robinson, J. (2018). Policy mobilities as comparison: Urbanization processes, repeated instances, topologies. Revista de Administração Pública, 52(2), 221–243] of a globalized drive towards more creative cities. While the value of mobilizing culture for local urban change in rapidly …
Worlding Cape Town by design
Considering the ongoing global proliferation of the urban 'creativity fix' and its inclination to further push local governments towards entrepreneurial governance logics and market-led development imperatives, there is a sustained need to understand how the creative city paradigm is being grounded, renegotiated and put into practice in so-called 'Southern' cities. To analyse Cape Town's creative city trajectory and its eventual emergence as the …
Worlding Cape Town by design
Considering the ongoing global proliferation of the urban 'creativity fix' and its inclination to further push local governments towards entrepreneurial governance logics and market-led development imperatives, there is a sustained need to understand how the creative city paradigm is being grounded, renegotiated and put into practice in so-called 'Southern' cities. To analyse Cape Town's creative city trajectory and its eventual emergence as the …
The (im)possibilities of critical urban scholarship in plausibly genocidal times
Effecting cultural change from below? A comparison of Cape Town and Bandung's pathways to urban cultural governance
This article compares the cultural governance pathways of two UNESCO “Design Cities” – Bandung and Cape Town – methodologically framing them as “repeated instances” [Robinson, J. (2018). Policy mobilities as comparison: Urbanization processes, repeated instances, topologies. Revista de Administração Pública, 52(2), 221–243] of a globalized drive towards more creative cities. While the value of mobilizing culture for local urban change in rapidly …
Challenges and opportunities of curbing urban corruption and building professional integrity
Beyond the success/failure of travelling urban models
In this paper, we highlight the importance for policy mobility research to engage with the ‘multiple temporalities’ of globally prevalent urban policy ideas to understand how these eventually come to shape localities incrementally, and as we show, in sometimes unexpected manners. Through the study of over 10 years of (failed) redevelopment policies in Cape Town’s East City, we formulate two distinct contributions to existing urban policy mobility…
Dwellers as designers’ – untangling the politics and practices of co-design ‘from below’ through a Cape Town housing occupation
Design has emerged as a powerful framework for governing emergent and resilient urban futures, attracting sustained attention from both scholars and practitioners. However, this ‘will to design’ often defaults to top-down, expert-led processes, overlooking the agentive design practices of marginalised urban inhabitants. This article contributes to a critical conversation between design studies and urban scholarship by untangling the politics and …
Effecting cultural change from below? A comparison of Cape Town and Bandung's pathways to urban cultural governance
This article compares the cultural governance pathways of two UNESCO “Design Cities” – Bandung and Cape Town – methodologically framing them as “repeated instances” [Robinson, J. (2018). Policy mobilities as comparison: Urbanization processes, repeated instances, topologies. Revista de Administração Pública, 52(2), 221–243] of a globalized drive towards more creative cities. While the value of mobilizing culture for local urban change in rapidly …
Worlding Cape Town by design
Considering the ongoing global proliferation of the urban 'creativity fix' and its inclination to further push local governments towards entrepreneurial governance logics and market-led development imperatives, there is a sustained need to understand how the creative city paradigm is being grounded, renegotiated and put into practice in so-called 'Southern' cities. To analyse Cape Town's creative city trajectory and its eventual emergence as the …
Beyond the success/failure of travelling urban models
In this paper, we highlight the importance for policy mobility research to engage with the ‘multiple temporalities’ of globally prevalent urban policy ideas to understand how these eventually come to shape localities incrementally, and as we show, in sometimes unexpected manners. Through the study of over 10 years of (failed) redevelopment policies in Cape Town’s East City, we formulate two distinct contributions to existing urban policy mobility…
Challenges and opportunities of curbing urban corruption and building professional integrity
The (im)possibilities of critical urban scholarship in plausibly genocidal times
Dwellers as designers’ – untangling the politics and practices of co-design ‘from below’ through a Cape Town housing occupation
Design has emerged as a powerful framework for governing emergent and resilient urban futures, attracting sustained attention from both scholars and practitioners. However, this ‘will to design’ often defaults to top-down, expert-led processes, overlooking the agentive design practices of marginalised urban inhabitants. This article contributes to a critical conversation between design studies and urban scholarship by untangling the politics and …
Design emergencies
This special issue affirms that design, as a socio-material practice of problem-solving, has gained currency among a variety of actors – from governments and international organisations to civil society forums and community activists – to address increasingly complex and interwoven emergencies. As design historians have shown, involving designers and leveraging semi-codified design protocols like ‘design thinking’ to find ostensibly innovative so…
Political science (5 works) · Geography (4 works) · Sociology (4 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (4 works) · Economic geography (3 works) · Economic growth (3 works) · Economics (3 works) · Politics (3 works) · Cape (2 works) · Colonialism (2 works)