Safety and Peace through Urban Upgrading in Gqeberha
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.
Helenvale Sports Field; Photo Provided by MBDA
Through nearly two decades of iteration, the Helenvale Safety and Peace through Urban Upgrading (SPUU) program addressed socio-economic challenges while supporting infrastructural upgrades in the Helenvale, Gqeberha community to promote a multi-and inter-disciplinary approach safety across the following areas: public space and infrastructure, safer schools, youth employment promotion, and domestic violence prevention.
For practitioners with a limited view of the area, understanding “place” in the context of Helenvale will be difficult and incomplete. A pre-apartheid settlement, Helenvale was established in 1960s after implementation of the Group Areas Act, which removed Black South Africans from the inner city and designated them to substandard settlements on the city outskirts. It also holds one of the highest crime rates in the country, remains an area where service delivery does not meet basic needs of the community, and carries a 72% unemployment rate with citizens averaging R 400 per month.
Though an oppressive apartheid legacy and multi-dimensional poverty complicate the public life and livelihood in Helenvale, Mandela Bay Development Agency Operations Executive Debbie Hendricks asserts that “Life of the place happens in the street.”
“Life of the place happens in the street.”
Through an iterative process of working with community leaders and organizations, the SPUU program implemented place upgrades and programming central to Helenvale’s needs, which included (though not limited to) pedestrian pathways for children to more safely access schools, street lighting along key movement routes identified by community agents, violence and trauma support services that were centralized and later expanded to different access points around the community, and public space upgrades to support community identity and cohesion.
"Music Route" Pathway to School Photo provided by MBDA
Operationally, this program was a partnership between the Mandela Bay Development Agency (MBDA), the Nelson Mandela Bay Metropolitan Municipality, and the German Development Bank (KfW). However, the feasibility of various program elements was especially achievable due to the deep engagement and partnerships with the Helenvale community ecosystem. For instance, ensuring children stayed in school was an objective of the program, especially given 91% of residents do not complete high school. Partnering with school ecosystems (teachers, parents, and students) enabled the program to create designated safety school routes denoted by music, play, and poetry markings where community members could lead children to school, areas that became a recognized ceasefire zones.
In collaboration with community members, public space upgrades, such as the installment of “Kite Boy” (a commemorative statue as tribute to the children in the community who lost their lives to violence) and the revival of a community sports field, allowed the program to be responsive to hyperlocal sensitivities, including physical places to honor lost lives or to activate the community’s right to safe play. With iterative implementation grounded in community voice as critical solutioning to the social ills
that they face, partnerships across public, non-profit, and donor-funded sectors contributed to place improvements that integrated social and physical lenses into innovative programming.
LESSONS LEARNED
“Kite Boy” Commemorative Statue Photo provided by MBDA
• Social methodology and engagement approaches need to take shape in early planning stages. Undoubtedly, place managers and development practitioners need to focus on cultivating skills such as adaptive management, conflict resolution, and coalition building. However, there will always be gaps between what can be learned and what is known within community contexts. These gaps can often be filled by community understanding and experience, which is why place managers must identify and engage those community touchpoints from the start.
• There are no blank slates— transformation starts by working with existing community assets in the forms of people and places. The goal of place managers should not be to transform a place into something incompatible with community needs or experience.
• Iterative processes will beget both failure and success, and projects need to room to transform. Integrated programming requires flexibility. Contrary to urban planning and project management processes, the successes or failures of transformative place improvements cannot be bound completely by timelines, narrow scopes and objectives, or quantitative measurements. Ultimately, place managers will need to expand their perspectives on indicators of improvements.
