SOPHIA GRAY MINI CONFERENCE | ARCHITECTURE + URBANISM

Cities are expanding faster than many systems can adapt. Housing, water, access, mobility, public space, and design practice now sit inside the same urgent question: who gets to shape urban life, and who gets left out?

The Sophia Gray Mini Conference, held on 27 August at the University of the Free State, took up this question through the theme “Right to the City in an Urbanising World.” As part of the Spatial Reset programme, the event brought global perspectives into conversation with local concerns about architecture, urbanism, and the changing conditions of cities.

Featuring Dr Urs Bette and Dr Deen Sharp in dialogue with Jonathan Noble, the conference created space for a layered discussion about how cities are studied, designed, occupied, and contested. Read more.

The right to the city framed the discussion

The idea of the right to the city asks more than who lives in urban areas. It asks who can access them, influence them, and belong within them.

At the Mini Conference, this theme opened a wider discussion around urban participation. It linked architecture to questions of movement, water, land, public infrastructure, and social life. The city was treated as more than a setting for buildings. It was treated as a shared condition shaped by power, policy, design, and everyday use.

This made the discussion especially relevant to an urbanising world, where growth does not automatically produce inclusion. New development can create opportunity, but it can also deepen exclusion when people cannot access basic services, public space, or safe urban environments.

Dr Deen Sharp brought a critical urban perspective

Dr Deen Sharp contributed a view shaped by geography, architecture, and international urban research. His work on water-responsive urbanism in Africa gave the conversation a grounded and urgent frame.

Water, in this context, is not only a technical matter. It shapes settlement, infrastructure, health, risk, and daily access to the city. Thinking with water means thinking about who benefits from urban systems and who carries the cost when those systems fail.

Sharp’s contribution prompted discussion about urbanization and accessibility. It also raised questions about the forces that decide who can take part in city life. These forces may include planning decisions, environmental pressures, economic constraints, and the uneven distribution of infrastructure.

His perspective helped situate African urban conditions within broader global debates, without treating them as separate or peripheral. Instead, they became central to understanding the future of cities.

Dr Urs Bette positioned design as inquiry

Dr Urs Bette approached the theme from architecture and speculative practice. His contribution examined how design can act as a form of inquiry, not only as a way to produce buildings.

This view expands the role of architecture. It suggests that drawings, models, built work, and design processes can generate knowledge. They can test ideas, question assumptions, and reveal new ways of understanding space.

Bette’s research and teaching experience across Australia and internationally added depth to this position. His contribution framed architecture as both a spatial practice and a critical method. Design became a way to ask better questions about foundations, structures, materials, and urban futures.

Through this lens, architecture does not end at the edge of a site. It connects to systems, histories, environments, and the possibilities that speculative thinking can open.

Architecture moved beyond the single building

A central strength of the Sophia Gray Mini Conference was its refusal to treat architecture as isolated object-making. The dialogue between Bette, Sharp, and Noble pushed the discussion toward wider urban life.

Buildings still matter, but they sit within networks of access, climate, infrastructure, politics, and knowledge. A housing project, a civic space, or a water system cannot be understood only through form. Each one shapes how people live together.

This broader view sits at the heart of architecture and urbanism. It asks practitioners, researchers, and students to think across scales, from the detail of construction to the condition of the city.

Spatial Reset called for more critical urban futures

As part of the Spatial Reset programme, the Mini Conference strengthened dialogue between local and global perspectives. It invited architects and urbanists to respond to urbanisation with more care, more criticism, and more imagination.

The key message was clear: architecture and urban futures are deeply connected. Meaningful spatial transformation begins when cities are not treated as fixed outcomes, but as shared projects that can be rethought, questioned, and reshaped.

The conference left a strong reminder that the future of cities will not be defined by growth alone. It will be defined by the values, methods, and commitments used to shape that growth.