Lindsay Blair Howe is Professor of Urban Development and Spatial Planning at the TUM School of Engineering and Design, where she leads the CUSP research platform. Her work sits at the intersection of urban theory, design, and ethnographic research, exploring how urbanisation unfolds through the relationships between people, policy, and the built environment. 

Working transdisciplinarily across Southern Africa and Europe, her research uses mixed methods—combining qualitative approaches with digital and spatial tools—to foreground everyday life as central to understanding cities. Her work engages deeply with questions of inequality, infrastructure, housing, and mobility, with a particular focus on how processes of centrality and peripheralisation shape lived urban realities. 

In this talk, Lindsay will share insights from her research on peripheralisation and South African urbanism, reflecting on how cities are continuously made and remade through spatial practices, movement, and adaptation—and what this means for more engaged, reparative, and contextually grounded urban design practices.

CUSP is a research and design platform that examines processes of de- and re-territorialisation shaping contemporary urbanisation, with a focus on the gendered and environmental dimensions of inequality. Grounded in a commitment to positioning Africa as a site of knowledge production, the platform works across the Global North and South to connect critical urban theory with real-world design and planning practices.