Stephen Hobbs lives and works in Johannesburg, which he views as "an African metropolis of perplexing contradictions and unpredictable developments in the social, urban environment." Johannesburg was once the powerhouse of South African business, its Manhattan of glittering skyscrapers, but in recent decades corporations have moved into the suburbs to escape high crime rates. After Apartheid laws that forbade Blacks from living in the city were scrapped, many made the inner city their home. Today, Johannesburg no longer has the feeling of a policed White capital that it once had; it is clearly an African city. It stands as a powerful index of transformation - and is a site for innumerable transformative moments.

Hobbs draws on urban vocabularies of images and signs to point to cities' transformative qualities, which are often invisible and ineffable. He has worked with video, photography, and installation to "record" such "intersticial ensembles" as human interactions, meeting points, or merely the traces of sites of transformation in city environments.

He is currently completing a CD-ROM game entitled Out of Order: A Users Guide for a Dysfunctional City. This presents a virtual Johannesburg "built" according to Hobbs' personal urban scheme, where space and place are compressed into a subjective geography that those who know Johannesburg will find both faintly familiar and alien.

From 1994 to 2000, Stephen Hobbs was the director of The Market Theatre Galleries, one of Johannesburg's leading galleries, and presented numerous exhibitions of other South African artists.