Kundani Makakavhule

Dr Kundani Makakavhule is a registered Town Planner and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Town and Regional Planning at the University of Pretoria, and a Core South African Lead Partner for the DAAD-funded Global Centre of Spatial Methods for Urban Sustainability (SMUS). She is currently based at the Institute for Environment and Sanitation Studies, University of Ghana, as an ARUA/Carnegie-Mastercard Early Career Research Fellow. 

She holds a PhD in Town and Regional Planning from the University of Pretoria and is currently completing a Master’s degree in International Human Rights Law at the Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria. Her work focuses on the intersections between public space, waste management, urban planning, and human rights, with broader research interests in planning law, policy, and institutional capacity. 

Dr Makakavhule has published in leading journals including Built Environment, Journal of Urban Design, and Urban Design International, and is co-editor of the Routledge volume Decolonising the Built Environment: Process, Product, and Pedagogy. Beyond academia, she has led and contributed to municipal capacity-building and planning support initiatives in partnership with Anglo American and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), as well as major policy and capacity-building projects for the South African Local Government Association, the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation, and the Department of Land Reform and Rural Development, and actively supervises Master’s and PhD research.