MALAIKA MAHLATSI | Time to rethink policy on public spaces in SA

In her profoundly important book titled Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, feminist human geographer Katherine McKittrick argues that all across the world, black women are forced to live in locations that have high levels of violence and structural poverty.

She contends that geography is a human construct and that a history of slavery, colonialism and imperialism has resulted in the racialisation of space. While her work focuses largely on the Caribbean and continental North America, it is relevant to the African continent where we too experience the effects of colonialism and imperialism on our land.

In SA, the land question has remained very important even in the post-apartheid dispensation.

It is made especially important by the growing levels of food insecurity, the exponential increase in informal settlements, the crisis of migration and the impact that climate change is beginning to have on our urban settlements, as seen in the recent floods in KwaZulu-Natal where hundreds of people were killed.

This understanding of the significance of the land question informed my career choices and is the foundation on which my activism is built. As a geographer and urban planner by profession, I am interested in the ways that space in general shaped society – and vice-versa.

In my first master’s degree, I studied how food security is linked to land ownership, and how townships and informal settlements in Ekurhuleni are battling chronic hunger. In my second master’s degree, I studied how “urban renewal” in Marshalltown, Braamfontein and Jeppestown is displacing poor and vulnerable communities.

In my third master’s degree, which I am pursuing with the Institute for Water Research, I am studying how water insecurity is experienced differently in historically black townships in Nelson Mandela Bay metro in the Eastern Cape. My interest in spatial issues was born on the streets of Soweto where I grew up. For this reason, I am extremely excited that the City of Johannesburg will be launching the Centre on African Public Spaces (CAPS) at Thokoza Park this coming Sunday.

CAPS is a resource hub for public space enthusiasts, urban practitioners, community groups, spatial justice activists and scholars dedicated to connecting, sharing, and advancing knowledge, and growing expertise related to African public space.

It was formed by the City in collaboration with UN-Habitat Global Public Space Programme and the GIZ Inclusive Violence and Crime Prevention Programme. The most significant aspect of the institution is that it places communities at the centre – ensuring that ordinary people have a say in how public spaces must be re-imagined and reconstructed.

This is important because in the past, government, multilateral institutions, academics and the private sector have been making decisions about public space without having any input from communities. The problem with this approach is that it reduces people to mere spectators of developments happening in their own communities.

No meaningful solution to a problem can ever be found when those who are experiencing the problem are not sitting at the table where the solution is being developed. It creates a sense of isolation that translates in people feeling like things do not belong to them.

I have always argued that this is one of the reasons that people in townships across our country destroy infrastructure when they protest. They do not have a sense of ownership because things are done to and for them, rather than with them.

It is deeply symbolic that CAPS is being launched in a township that best reflects the complex politics of space. We must all be invested in this centre because black matters are spatial matters.