Noëleen Murray is an architect and interdisciplinary scholar based in Africa. Since 2014 she has held the University of Pretoria Research Chair in Critical Architecture and Urbanism, the creative impetus for this edited volume. Affiliated to the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria, she was previously the director of the Wits City Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where she also held the Andrew W. Mellon Chair. With architectural degrees (BAS, BArch and MArch) and a PhD in African Studies from the University of Cape Town, her key writings include Desire Lines – Space, Memory and Identity in the Post-apartheid City (2007); Becoming UWC: Reflections, Pathways and the Unmaking of Apartheid’s Legacy (2012) and Hostels, Homes, Museum: Memorializing Migrant Labour Pasts in Lwandle South Africa (2014), co-authored with Leslie Witz, which received the Michael M. Ames Award for Innovative Museum Anthropology from the Council for Museum Anthropology of the American Association of Anthropologists.

Jonathan Cane is an Assistant Professor of History of Art at the University of Warwick and a research associate in the Research Chair in Critical Architecture and Urbanism, University of Pretoria. Cane holds a PhD in art history from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and is the author of Civilising Grass: The Art of the Lawn on the South African Highveld (2019), a queer and postcolonial study of gardening. A specialist in spatial and environmental humanities, his work focuses on the poetics of struggle against oppression in the Global South. His practice-based research and design work has been exhibited and published on numerous platforms. His two decades of output have resulted in video artworks, installations, several typeset and designed publications and, most recently, web-based works. He was the exhibition designer of Monsoonal Multiplicities (2021) and co-leads an ongoing research and archival project on the People’s Parks Archive.