Directly to the root, and up

South African neighbourhoods are taking things into their own hands, what is the bigger picture?

“Whose Streets? Our Streets!” then, is a legitimate emotional response to the feeling that even the most minimal of public, non-commodified spheres has been taken from us. Yet in the end, it is simply a frantic cry from our cage. We have become so confined, so thoroughly damaged, by capitalism as well as state control that crumbs appear to make a nourishing meal.” - Cindy Milstein, 2000.

Siyabonga Stengana has reformed over 40 spaces in his community - Mbekweni

Our neighbourhoods and towns are the most fundamental scale of decision making about how we live our lives and structure ourselves as society. This concept is reflected in the South African Constitution and the way we organise local government with ward representation, and is offered mirrored by civic actors with things like street committees, ratepayers associations and area-based development forums.

Across South Africa, our neighbourhoods are battling internal transitions:

• Capturing a piece of the pie: when there's no meaningful socio-economic change, direct actions to force local participation in the public purse are happening more often - often linked to criminally linked community power brokers who also act as local philanthropists and social safety nets. What started as localisation of labour brokering, security contracts etc, has expanded into violent work stoppages and cost overruns with indiscernible lines between contributors to delivery of work and community development, and criminal opportunists.

An BNG housing project under construction.

• Battling asymmetry: cities around the world grow according to certain “laws” of growth - rural to urban migration follows fairly predictable patterns. In South Africa, we experience young, educated people from within South Africa and from around the world travelling to and between our metros, as well as less educated, poorer people from both rural and urban regional sources. This diverse group of people does not arrive in all cities or indeed in all neighbourhoods equally. In a context of poverty, backlogs in supply of basic services and housing, and crime, there are emerging demographic and urban system dynamics that are unique to certain parts of some cities, without any clear governance mechanisms to support them - and both socially inclusive community-led initiatives and divisive operations fill the gap.

• Coming to grips with new technology entrants: be it e-bikes and e-scooters on the Promenade (and possibly soon in your neighbourhood - on a recreational route, or connecting the “last mile” from the bus or train is up to us), drones used for fishing and impacting on carefully managed fish stocks (recently banned), or debates in the neighbourhood WhatsApp group about how much CCTV is going too far (soon to be regulated)- it's clear that (for those who can) technology is enabling, but we don't know how to manage it our shared spaces yet.
  
  

  

Discarded bicycles  pile up in China, after too many dock-less bike share platforms entered the market simultaneously.

At the moment, the “prime-mover” (a variable that is common to all variations of a complex problem) that will accelerate all of the above trends is the cost of living crisis - fuel price increases, and the pressures this will place on food and other goods and services, made worse by pre-existing problems we had (loadshedding, poor port performance, etc).

In cities, people will continue to move themselves, goods and information across neighbourhoods for as long as the social and economic benefits of doing so outweigh the costs (transport, person time, data). This is why decentralised cities - or sprawl - eventually become inefficient to the point where they break up into independent economic nodes. We live in a context where neighbourhoods are spatially far apart, but not independently economically viable, so the current cost of living issue is a serious concern.

Informal waste collectors move around our cities collecting waste to make a small living. Image by Peter Herring.

It is also a threat to the ability of neighbourhoods to collaborate on issues such as those identified above in creative ways that advance social reform for the whole of society.

We risk now, more than ever, becoming parochial in our neighbourhoods, and judgemental of the sound-bites we see coming out about direct action in other areas.

This is an opportunity for policy makers - both inside and outside of government - to understand the roots as they are experienced at a neighbourhood level, but elevate problem solving to a systemic level:

• Baking a better pie: alongside the relevant interventions to strengthen the rule of law and procedural fairness; revise approaches to project design to include social and economic outcomes, include social facilitation upfront (from design stage - not only in implementation), and use the collective medium-term pipeline to develop local supplier markets and stimulate non-governmental demand. 

EPWP workers collect waste. Image by Peter Herring, who also wrote this reflection on the value of the work. Is this the best we can do?

• Governing in contested spaces: The key drivers of social movements like Operation Dudula are poverty, rapid urbanization, and crime. The solutions for each of those are long-term, but there can be short-term visible actions to act as stabilizers - from government, business and socially conscious civil actors. We need to hold these drivers central, with transparent data and stories that build a popular but not populist narrative for change. If we deny these truths, people will feel unrepresented. In areas where there is poverty, contestation for space for work and housing, and crime, there needs to be fairness in how to access the limited resources. There also needs to be active justice for victims of both direct crime as well as systemic injustice - our Mayors, police Minister etc need to be acknowledging in words and in action (budget, teams) past and ongoing spatial injustice and inequity - the new term IDPs of our metros are absolutely critical to demonstrate this. 

• Developing tech-resilience: providing standards for new entrants gives predictability across communities and for innovators, and prevents harm in the form of service discontinuity once it is baked into urban systems, inequities in shared spaces, or abuses of common resources or data, etc. Tech-resilient cities are guided by a framework that allows for an initial experimental stage, with feedback and data, learning about entrant business models, how they integrate into existing public goods and services, identifying vulnerabilities to commons, shared spaces and service continuity, and taking policy-level decisions with regards to licencing, regulations, guarantees, enablement (supportive infrastructure, co-investment etc), or adoption. 

I chose to use an image of Siyabonga at the start of this piece because despite all of the difficulty and “bad news”, there remain good and strong people who are making a difference. Each action on the ground - whether we regard it as “good” or “bad” - is filling a void in governance. To reclaim democracy and guide policy and implementation from the bottom-up, champions for a stronger civil society and a more capable state need to work together across neighbourhoods - none currently has the capacity or resources to do it all alone.