Bio
Leigh Maurtin is a PhD candidate at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, and a researcher on the CLAIMS to Energy Citizenship in South Africa project. She practised as an architect for 16 years before completing a Master of Urban Design. Her research explores hair salons in Khayelitsha as ordinary infrastructures through which social, spatial, and economic life is organised and sustained. Interested in energy in its broadest sense, she considers both material systems and the energies of everyday urban life, including people, relationships, and practices, as constitutive of city-making. Drawing on multimodal and interdisciplinary methods, her work is informed by Black feminist intersectional thought and Southern Urbanism and examines how visual storytelling can contribute to more inclusive forms of urban knowledge and representation.
