South X Initiative Event: Lesego Bantsheng, "The Material Costs of Performing Urbanisation"
Event details
| Date | 12.10.2026 |
| Hour | 18:30 › 20:00 |
| Speaker | Lesego Bantsheng is a South African researcher, urban designer and landscape architect whose work explores the material and spatial complexities of rural life across Southern Africa. She is the founder and co-director of Rural Futurisms NPC, a research and design platform that investigates how rural communities negotiate change through making, adaptation and collective knowledge. Bantsheng’s work examines how everyday materials, infrastructures and spatial practices shape contemporary rural life. Bantsheng holds a Master of Urban Design from The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Cape Town. |
| Location |
Foyer SG
|
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
| Event Language | English |
Lesego Bantsheng (Rural Futurisms): "The Material Costs of Performing Urbanisation"
Monday, 12 October 2026; 18:30
SG Foyer, EPFL
Across rural South Africa, materials such as red soil, clay, cement, corrugated metal, plastic and glass are assembled into spatial forms that exceed neat distinctions between traditional and modern, vernacular and industrial, rural and urban. These landscapes are frequently interpreted as incomplete urbanization or degraded vernacularism but may be better understood as material responses to conflicting aspirations and uneven development.
The lecture builds on the proposition that urbanization is not simply a material process but a demand to adopt particular aspirations. In many rural territories, inhabitants are compelled to perform urbanity through suburban house typologies, private mobility, certain material accumulation, enclosure and individual property imaginaries, while remaining excluded from promised infrastructures. Drawing on the work of Rural Futurisms in the Ngaka Modiri Molema region, the lecture proposes that craft should not be understood as the preservation of tradition, but as a technology of approximation: the material labour through which rural communities pursue, perform, negotiate and sometimes abandon the aspirations of urbanizing.
By examining the uneasy coexistence of red soil and cement, communal land and enclosure, livestock and private mobility, organic and inorganic making materials, the lecture explores how aspiration becomes material, and how material practices reveal the contradictions, compromises and negotiations through which urbanity is performed.
About the 2026 "South X Craft: Matters of Making" Lecture Series:
Craft is often used to evoke nostalgia and has been employed in the language of othering and fetishizing ‘Global Southern’ communities. At the same time craft holds the potential to re-ground design in ecological and social specificities and attend closely to materiality. We thus seek to use it as a critical lens towards the built environment. We ask how craft can be engaged rigorously and ethically: attentive to the political economies of who makes, whose knowledge is valorized, and how traditional practices are being reshaped by contemporary conditions.
Monday, 12 October 2026; 18:30
SG Foyer, EPFL
Across rural South Africa, materials such as red soil, clay, cement, corrugated metal, plastic and glass are assembled into spatial forms that exceed neat distinctions between traditional and modern, vernacular and industrial, rural and urban. These landscapes are frequently interpreted as incomplete urbanization or degraded vernacularism but may be better understood as material responses to conflicting aspirations and uneven development.
The lecture builds on the proposition that urbanization is not simply a material process but a demand to adopt particular aspirations. In many rural territories, inhabitants are compelled to perform urbanity through suburban house typologies, private mobility, certain material accumulation, enclosure and individual property imaginaries, while remaining excluded from promised infrastructures. Drawing on the work of Rural Futurisms in the Ngaka Modiri Molema region, the lecture proposes that craft should not be understood as the preservation of tradition, but as a technology of approximation: the material labour through which rural communities pursue, perform, negotiate and sometimes abandon the aspirations of urbanizing.
By examining the uneasy coexistence of red soil and cement, communal land and enclosure, livestock and private mobility, organic and inorganic making materials, the lecture explores how aspiration becomes material, and how material practices reveal the contradictions, compromises and negotiations through which urbanity is performed.
About the 2026 "South X Craft: Matters of Making" Lecture Series:
Craft is often used to evoke nostalgia and has been employed in the language of othering and fetishizing ‘Global Southern’ communities. At the same time craft holds the potential to re-ground design in ecological and social specificities and attend closely to materiality. We thus seek to use it as a critical lens towards the built environment. We ask how craft can be engaged rigorously and ethically: attentive to the political economies of who makes, whose knowledge is valorized, and how traditional practices are being reshaped by contemporary conditions.
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Organizer
- The South X Initiative, housed within ENAC, aims to bring together voices from across the “Global South” to collectively think about our built environment. It reappropriates the phrase “Going South”—both an orientation and a colloquialism for worsening conditions—as a generative and creative exercise to understand how ecological systems, social inequalities, and histories of conquest have spatial manifestations at the building, urban, and territorial scales. Instead of taking the categorization of the Global North and South as given, the initiative puts it under pressure. In doing so it takes up Edouard Glissant’s call for “renewed perception”—to see, listen, discuss and understand otherwise—to think, fresh and different, about the place and their relationship to global questions of habitability: how climate justice, migration, resource use, housing, and labor are entangled in the making of the built environment.
Through semester-themed guest lectures, reading discussions, and workshops, the initiative offers a platform for exploring alternative methods, processes, and narratives of spatial praxes.
Contact
- South X Initiative [email protected]