Placemaking in Johannesburg: Developing a Shared Public Space in Jeppestown
On October 27th, 2023, Spaces for Souls led an all-women, all South African panel of place practitioners for the South Africa Regional Roundtable entitled Place Management for Social Transformation.
Placemaking may provide opportunities to improve the quality of life in communities through thoughtful, context-sensitive approaches to the enhancement of public spaces. However, in socially and spatially fragmented urban communities, placemaking initiatives that fail to respond to the specific social and economic challenges lack the depth required to actualize any meaningful improvements in the social or public spheres. In efforts to expand the boundaries of traditional place management practice, the South Africa Regional Roundtable introduced three case studies from communities across South Africa, each grappling with inadequate delivery of urban services, as well as present-day struggles connected to the former apartheid spatial planning system.
Citizens during co-design process sharing their voice about Jeppe Park | Photo provided by Johannesburg City Parks and Zoo
Johannesburg youth providing inputs for Jeppe Park | Photo provided by Johannesburg City Parks and Zoo
In close collaboration with the community, the Johannesburg Parks and Zoo and its partners led the physical transformation for Gilfillan Park (also known as Jeppe Park). Through an extensive co-creation process, the upgrading effort involved various users and beneficiaries of the public space to school children to hostel dwellers, residing in substandard homes constructed under apartheid-era segregated planning. The effort yielded a new vision for an underutilized public space to a community lacking public amenities.
The design and implementation of Jeppe Park sits within the remnants of post-colonial policies of South Africa’s notorious spatial segregation system of apartheid, which continues to perpetuate inequality in service delivery provisions in the regards to public spaces. As an inner -the apartheid era to host Black South African laborers without regard for provision of social spaces.
Various challenges in the management of public spaces in the areas within and surrounding Jeppestown range across the political, economic, social, and physical spheres. Given limited municipal funds and competing issues for them such as housing and workforce development, urban public spaces are often not prioritized. Furthermore, the formal and informal land uses—neglected buildings, taxi services, and night clubs— adjacent to Jeppe Park were perceived to be incompatible with a safe, practical public space. Partnerships across local government, civil society actors, and community members—including the Bjala Foundation, Johannesburg City Parks and Zoo, and the Johannesburg Development Agency— ultimately led to the transformation of Jeppe Park into a space for users.
The exceptional nature of the Jeppe Park project was the extensive community engagement process undertaken by Johannesburg City Parks and Zoo and its partners. This co-design process not only allowed people to participate in co-creation sessions in their own language(s), but also included a variety of users of the park, from school children, to business owners, to hostel dwellers. The results of the co-design process showed that residents prioritized public sanitation provision as a park asset, as well as safety and security.
LESSONS LEARNED
Community members gathered in Jeppe Park pre-construction | Photo provided by Johannesburg City Parks and Zoo
• Co-creation participants should be as diverse as a project’s users. Often times, marginalized or forgotten voices are omitted from community engagement efforts in placemaking practice. Intentionally expanding the definition of “stakeholders” can allow place practitioners to implement their projects and programming more inclusively and sustainably.
• Place management can play a role in providing access to basic services; in some cases, the service provision can address historically embedded spatial inequality. Envisioning placemaking as a service in socially fragmented neighborhoods can attract collaborators from across sectors to financially and/or operationally support the place initiative.
• Place management is an ongoing process that cannot stop at initial co-creation. This understanding should be respected at the onset of place management efforts. Ensuring monitoring mechanisms and consistent engagement with stakeholder post-project can support project sustainability.