Tau Tavengwa is the founder and coeditor of Cityscapes, a biannual magazine/journal hybrid focusing on exploring and understanding cities in Africa; Latin America and South Asia. He is cofounder of Cityscapes Collective, a loose collection of academics, designers, journalists, artists, filmmakers, architects and designers and urban culture practitioners based in Cape Town, South Africa, whose flagship project is Cityscapes magazine, now entering its 6th year. Tavengwa has a background in architecture, museum design, and art and architecture publishing. His work primarily covers urban issues in the Global South, manifested in exhibitions, publications, books, events, and film. He has curated exhibitions on architecture and design as well as an extensive exhibition about inequality and complexity in the city of Cape Town, entitled City Desired. He was also guest curator on the 2016 Rotterdam Architecture Biennale. Book projects include Counter-Currents: Experiments in Sustainability in the Cape Town Region and Rogue Urbanism: Emergent African Cities as part of his work with the African Centre for Cities. Tavengwa is former creative director of Art South Africa Magazine (now renamed Art Africa Magazine), one of the continent’s leading art magazines, as well as founder and editor of Snapped, a quarterly publication dedicated to showcasing emerging photographers on the African continent. He has also worked as creative director and concept designer on the Cradle of Mankind’s Maropeng Museum as well as the De Beers Big Hole Diamond Museum. During his Loeb Fellowship year, Tavengwa plans to explore the next phase of the Cityscapes Collective toward establishing a coherent movement of practitioners and academics based-and working to resolve various urban challenges-in cities across the Global South.
