Mickyle Berling

Threads of Dunusa reframes Johannesburg’s second-hand clothing market not as marginal spaces, but as sites of design intelligence, resilience, and civic potential. In the heart of the city’s contested ground, Dunusa thrives through the creativity of traders who transform piles of discarded garments into systems of value, identity, and survival. Their ingenuity, folding, repairing, stretching, layering, constitutes a design methodology rooted in daily practice, where architecture is improvised, and public space is authored collectively.

This project documents and translates those practices into a new design framework. It positions Dunusa as civic infrastructure: a living archive of human agency. Traders are not passive actors in a global waste economy, they are designers of adaptable systems, choreographers of movement, and custodians of urban memory.

The research goes beyond ethnographic observation. It proposes architectural provocations and material strategies drawn directly from Dunusa’s logics, This approach challenges dominant paradigms of permanence and control, advancing instead an architecture of flexibility, repair, and care.

Dunusa’s intelligence speaks to urgent questions of nonformality, circular economy, and sustainability facing cities worldwide. As an architect and researcher, I position this work at the intersection of cultural practice, spatial design, and social innovation, offering new ways for institutions, policymakers, and designers to engage with nonformality as a driver of civic possibility. 

Threads of Dunusa is not a study of scarcity, but a manifesto for resilience. It asks us to rethinking how cities support the intelligence already alive in their streets.