Louwrens Botha is a PhD candidate in the research group Urbanism and Urban Architecture, working on the European consortium project 'CoNECT: Collective Networks of Everyday Community Resilience and Ecological Transition'. His work looks at community spaces and practices in urban neighborhoods as sites of agency and transformation. Through ethnographic fieldwork in local 'buurthuiskamers' ('neighborhood living rooms'), he studies the way these spaces help residents to collectively navigate challenges, make daily life more pleasurable, convivial and rewarding, and prefigure alternative ways of future living. This demonstrates the transformative, imaginative dimensions of community resilience, and connects daily life challenges to ideas of post-growth living, concrete utopias and urban commons.

Louwrens studied Architecture at the University of Cape Town (MArch, 2015), with a graduation thesis titled Transformative Infrastructure: retrofitting the Apartheid city. The project interrogates the way modernist planning logics were employed by Apartheid-era planners to design a racially segregated metropolis with social, spatial and economic impact to this day. By challenging what is meant by 'infrastructure' in the contemporary city, the design proposal seeks to subvert this legacy, creating transformative impact precisely at these points of division.

In 2018-2019 he completed an MA Urban Design at the University of Sheffield (cum laude) focusing on particpatory design, social inclusion and the urban commons. For his thesis, Basic Space: establishing a diverse economy of urban living, he studied (and lived with) a commoning initiative in Rotterdam occupying vacant buildings to experiment with alternative forms of living, working and collective governance. The thesis employed the human needs model and the diverse economies framework to position this community as challenging neoliberal and consumerist practices by prioritizing agency, synergistic satisfiers, and non-commercial exchange.