Tau Tavengwa, 2019-2022
Curriculum Vitae
Tau Tavengwa is the Founder and Co-Editor of Cityscapes
Magazine, a biannual print magazine focused on exploring and understanding cities in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia from the perspective of a broad array of actors that include academics, policy-makers, artists, photographers, architects, and activists who work in, and possess an on-the-ground understanding of, the many urbanisms of these regions. He was a 2018 Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. In addition to being an LSE Cities Associate at the London School of Economics, Tavengwa is also Curator-at-Large at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. He has a background in architecture and museum design, and art and architecture publishing. His work in the last 10 years has been focused exclusively on urban issues in the Global South as part of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, where he is still a member of the Urban Humanities cluster. Tavengwa has also curated several exhibitions on art, architecture and design, as well as exhibitions aimed at exposing the complex nature of life in cities. He was Guest Curator on the Rotterdam Architecture Biennale, and has contributed to various exhibitions, including the Chicago Architecture Biennale and Vitra’s Making Africa exhibition. In addition to his work with the Datarama team at the Max Planck Institute, he is currently exploring the establishment of a collaborative platform for policy-makers, activists,-practitioners, and academics working to tackle various urban challenges in cities across the Global South. This will not only facilitate direct contact and familiarity with each other’s work, but also seed ways to collaborate across borders and territories in parts of the world striving to overcome similar urban challenges.
Research projects
- CompleXities: transformative urban ideas from the (rest of the) world (completed)
- The DATARAMA: advancing immersive data visualization for the Social Sciences (completed) (with Steven Vertovec, Norbert Winnige, Alexej Matveev and Jonathan Portelli)