Our goal is to contribute to shaping the cities of tomorrow. We can do this not by imposing ideas from above, but by creating room for genuine collective imagination.

Over the past 15 years, we’ve evolved from a periodic publication—Cityscapes Magazine—into a lean, multi-disciplinary studio focused on advancing ideas that help cities work better for the people who live in them.

It all started in 2009, when AbdouMaliq Simone and Edgar Pieterse decided to bring together urbanists from across Africa—architects, cultural producers, designers, curators, social scientists. The initial idea wasn’t just conversation for its own sake. They wanted to actually spark collaborative projects among this diverse group and get things moving.

The early gatherings in Cape Town and Cairo were genuinely energising. But pretty quickly, it became clear that collaboration across different professional languages and frameworks would be harder than anyone had anticipated. Rather than advancing the original vision, the group pivoted. They produced a book where each participant contributed a chapter on their own practice and work: Rogue Urbanism. Putting that volume together took several more years.

At the same time, the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town was running CityLabs, a research program focused on Cape Town as it underwent a vast transformation ahead of hosting the 2010 FIFA World Cup. One highlight was a series of weekly lunchtime sessions that invited practitioners from outside the academy to present their work and receive feedback from the centre’s growing team of experts and researchers. The sessions were often exciting—practitioners could reflect on their work from different perspectives, researchers could examine their own work through a practitioner’s lens, and there were many heady, insightful exchanges.

But the sessions also exposed a challenging reality. Practitioners would shift their language and reposition themselves in academic terms just to be taken seriously. To speak to the academy as an equal meant becoming one. It revealed something fundamental: academic language and institutions can feel welcoming while simultaneously closing doors. And when you’re chasing institutional acceptance, you can end up compromising authenticity if the rules of engagement are being written by only one party.

There was another pattern, too. The references structuring discussion were frequently Western: Brooklyn for gentrification, Shoreditch for creative districts, Barcelona for urban regeneration, Northern subway systems as the “ideal” for public transit. The scholarly references disproportionately cited academics from that part of the world. It sometimes seemed as if the rest of the African continent—let alone the rest of the Global South—had no valuable lessons or knowledge to offer. Where was the infrastructure to confront this imbalance?

Addressing this was always part of the ACC’s mission, but it became clear it couldn’t be done solely from within the academy. This pushed us to create Cityscapes Magazine in 2010, designed to cut across and confront these dissonances while anchoring a Global South perspective. From the start, it operated across the divide between research and practice, normalised Southern reference points, and created a space where practitioners didn’t have to perform academic fluency to be taken seriously.

The magazine established a long-term collaboration between co-founders Edgar Pieterse and Tau Tavengwa. It laid the foundation and spirit for CS Studio, which slowly incubated in the centre over the decade that followed.