Mickyle Berling

Dunusa is more than a marketplace. It is a living archive of resilience, dignity, and adaptation, where discarded garments gain new value and people craft futures out of scarcity. Located within the contested urban ground of Johannesburg’s CBD, Dunusa reflects the entanglement of migration, survival economies, and self-organised spatial practices. Here, planning is not imposed from above but written daily by traders and customers, whose movements and negotiations give rhythm to the city.

This research positions Dunusa as both cultural and civic infrastructure. It examines the material improvisations, spatial ecologies, and collective agency that sustain it as a site of cultural production. Traders fold memory, identity, and resistance into the very fabric of their stalls, creating a civic resource often overlooked by formal planning.

Through architectural and urban analysis, this study seeks to bridge the disconnect between informal trading spaces and conventional city-making. It proposes design interventions that respect the socio-cultural logics already present, while amplifying the voices and practices of those who keep Dunusa alive. By prioritising lived experience, oral histories, and embodied knowledge, the project challenges exclusionary urban paradigms and argues for a more inclusive, responsive approach to public space.

Dunusa is not a marginal economy, but a vital form of city-making. It is proof of the power of ordinary people to sustain and reinvent Johannesburg’s urban future.