South Africa Workshop
Cartographies of Care:
Mapping Women's Everyday Journeys and Stories across Pretoria CBD
Urban public spaces are never neutral—they are shaped by histories of power, exclusion, and daily acts of negotiation. In South African cities, and especially in the downtown area, public space remains a deeply contested terrain, haunted by the spatial legacies of apartheid, urban transformation, and sustained inequalities. Yet, it is also a place of quiet defiance, resilience, and adaptation, through various practices of encounters, movements, waiting, and caring. For women, navigating the city is an ongoing act of both necessity and risk; to move through urban spaces is also to engage in acts of care—both for oneself and for others.
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This workshop centers women’s everyday journeys and their intersections with downtown. Their routes, routines, and detours are a vital form of urban knowledge. We ask how observing, narrating, and mapping women’s movements could expose latent hierarchies and how the lens of care could reconfigure the urban map. Women’s labor underpins urban life: the networks of solidarity they build, the way they read and anticipate risk, and the strategies they employ to foster safety and connection. These are forms of embodied knowledge that could transform how cities are designed for safety, inclusion, and belonging.
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Through participatory mapping, we invite participants to collectively trace these embodied experiences in Pretoria, turning everyone’s stories into collective spatial critique. This is not just an exercise in documentation—it is a form of reimagining and reclaiming. What if a “map” (in various forms like songs, paintings, performances, etc.) prioritized experiences and emotions over street names and numbers? What if it highlighted not just cartographic coordinates or urban landmarks, but the everyday places and practices of joy, solidarity, and care?
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July 21-24, 2025
FAQ
What is this workshop about?
You are invited to a workshop about women’s everyday journeys navigating Pretoria‘s CBD. The workshop collectively shares everyone’s daily experiences of navigation, connections and challenges of (un)safety.
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Who are invited?
Young women who live and/or work in Pretoria, regardless of nationality or background: Whether you walk, commute, care for others, or run a business in the CBD—your experience and opinions matter.
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How will you take part?
Participants will share stories among each other, reflect on their daily routes and routines, and take part in a hands-on collective mapping session. No previous experience is needed—just your everyday knowledge of the city.
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What will you get out of it?
A space to be heard and to listen; to share and to connect with others. Together, we will co-create maps of Pretoria from women’s perspectives—an artwork, a statement, and a resource for thinking about safety, inclusion, and belonging in urban space.
Please sign up before June 15, 2025 to one of the 3 channels, include your name, age, area of residence/work, some lines about yourself, and why you are interested in the workshop.
1: WhatsApp or SMS 072 064 2610
2: email to : yotmmedia@gmail.com
3: Scan QR Code above to fill the online form
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The Workshop and Outputs
DAY 1
The Youth on the Move team along with the Centre for Advanced Scholarship (CAS), finally kicked off the Cartographies of Care workshop that looks at mapping women's everyday journeys and stories across Pretoria's Central Business District. Various working women from the CBD, Yeast City Housing along with invited artists and architects gathered together at the CAS to learn about care and mapping.
The workshop opened with a lecture by Dr. Stephan De Beer who spoke of visibilising the bodies of women in urban space to the participants. In the later part of the day, the entire group of participants divided themselves into two groups and walked through Pretoria CBD around the Yeast City Housing. Subsequently they came back and marked their routes on a map that will now begin to get layered with more recordings of care in the coming two days.
DAY 2
The Day 2 of Cartographies of Care workshop started with a common sharing of everyone's experiences of walking and being in the city. Subsequently, Wilna DeBeer spoke about her long standing work with women in the region and the Twane Leadership Foundation. The overall group then split into three smaller teams to journey along the everyday routes they take to map the associations and relationships with different parts of the city. In figuring out places to eat, the teams ventured to different parts of the city, before they came back to the TLF for documenting first thoughts about their walk and the routes they would take on the coming day.
DAY 3
Our group's experience spanned 4 days, filled with exploration, creativity, and collaboration. On Day 3, we embarked on a city walk, uncovering the historical significance of landmarks, roads, and buildings. As we strolled through the streets, our guide shared fascinating stories and anecdotes, bringing the city's past to life. This experience not only deepened our understanding of the city's rich history but also sparked ideas for our end project. We brainstormed potential concepts, deciding on a final presentation that would showcase our discoveries.
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DAY 4
On Day 4, we focused on crafting our project, unleashing our creativity through painting, cutting, and assembling maps of the city. We attached personal memories and meanings to each place, making the project truly unique. Throughout the process, we felt cared for and supported, which allowed us to fully express ourselves and explore our creativity. This collaborative process was a fun and engaging way to bring our ideas to life. As we worked together, we fostered camaraderie and creativity, resulting in a meaningful and artistic representation of our journey. Our end project was a testament to the city's history and our collective imagination.
Organisers
Lene le Roux, University of Pretoria
Nolwazi Mkhwanazi, University of Pretoria
Min Tang, Tongji University
Anuj Daga, School of Environment & Architecture
Ying Cheng, Peking University
Supported by
Urban Studies Foundation
University of Pretoria
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Institutions
Yeast City Housing (YCH)
Tshwane Leadership Foundation (TLF)
Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship (CAS)
Participants
Elizabeth Mojakisane
Elizabeth Mashego
Emily Tladinyane
Katharina Bruck
Kawthar Jeewa
Masefako Thole
Nsiki Mhlongo
Portia Machaba
Puleng Ndlamini
Scholastica Kupata
Senzeni Marasela
Taryn Mntambo
Thandeka Shabangu
Zanele Thomas
Logistics and Ground Support
Kirsty Nepomuceno
TRANSFORMATIONS
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The group 'Transformations' first questioned the spatially bounded and socially stigmatized image of Pretoria’s CBD/inner city. We challenged this by mapping our own homemaking practices, which have been constantly on the move and stretched across different spaces of the city. We discussed how these practices not only transformed ourselves but also offered alternative understandings of Pretoria’s history and image.
Through storytelling of personal journeys and collective walking, members shared with one another their most vulnerable moments, as well as the violence they had experienced or witnessed. These exchanges opened up reflections on the care we practiced—care that emerged while building connections with people and places, and while finding ways to re-establish ourselves within the city.
The highlighted personal stories and everyday practices became ‘windows’, co-created with our artist, and together with the mapping of mobile homemaking and shared walking routines, they formed our cartographies of care—embodied in layered temporalities, spaces, and meanings.
THE CARE WALKERS
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The group The Care Walkers carried out a performance project titled “Walk of Care” in downtown Pretoria. Through collective walking (bound together by a red thread), they followed the everyday paths of local women—moving through spaces of care and others they rarely enter, such as government buildings and museums. The walk became both a way to reimagine these places and an act of self-care, prompting reflection on what care can mean.
In Marabastad and Burgers Park, where the women often support unhoused communities, the walk brought moments of recognition—they encountered those they had once cared for, and others who had cared for them. In contrast, at official heritage sites like Melrose House and Church Square, they gathered personal stories from women in public spaces, disrupting the silences of official history.
Besides a walking performance, the project also concluded with an art installation: on a piece of cloth traditionally used by sangomas, each woman hand-stitched an object symbolizing care—a tissue used to wipe away tears, recycled materials collected to support one’s family, a daughter’s drawing, and bottle caps representing migrant women encountered during the walk—especially street vendors.
PRETORIA FINDERS
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The group 'Pretoria Finders' used found material to collage on drawings of their pedestrian impressions in Pretoria CBD over the two days, presented in the form of a "Passbook Map". This A4 sized passbook referenced the historical passes that controlled access of people of colour to different spaces in parts of South Africa historically. Here, the exercise subverts the above exclusionary practice into one that documents and reclaims the everyday spaces that the participants traverse, into a collage of drawings and urban excess that create individual maps. These are then joined in a manner that can be read as a book, but open fully to become a situationst cartographic map of care.
