ISN

By Walter Fieuw, CORC

One of the salient challenges when capacitated networks of the urban poor build partnerships with the local government is balancing the agency of micro-level interventions and practices with the macro-level structures of governance and body of rules. Perhaps then the most important aspect of forging partnerships is the ability to negotiate and transact around a common set of problems and agendas guided by social and political change. Government is obligated by the Municipal Systems Act of 2000 to create a “culture of community participation” where the community has a direct interest and influence on the design of governance arrangements. The onus lies both of communities and local governments to create these “cultures”.

One of the unfolding “cultures” in the partnership between communities aligned to the Informal Settlement Network (ISN) and the City of Cape Town is forging new institutional alignments through the practice of upgrading informal settlements. CORC reported on the initial partnership formation with the City of Cape Town in August 2011 where the new Mayor Alderman Patricia de Lille made an in-principle commitment to furthering the evolving partnership. Initially 23 projects were identified for pilots to experiment in the new people-centered development approaches the ISN presents. Monthly partnership meetings were held in each of the four City regions: South/Central; Strand/Khayalitsha; Eastern; and Blauwberg. Community leaders and the City’s Principle Field Officers (PFO) and senior engineers in the Department Human Settlements sat together and discussed the development plans, enumeration results, and governance issues. This radical departure from service delivery consultations towards much deeper engagement was a momentous moment. Understandably, this new partnership was wrought with complexity and uncertainty – especially aligning other line departments such as Water and Sanitation, Electricity, Stormwater, etc to these community development plans – which threatened to derail the process. Besides the practical interventions of communities accessing the flexible funding mechanism of the Community Upgrading Financing Facility (CUFF) – housed in the Alliance NGO uTshani Fund – very few upgrades were initiated. The clash of worlds – those micro agencies of community practices meeting the macro institutional imperatives – was both a stammer-and-stuttering and educative-and-edifying curve for all to embrace.

In the embers of a seemingly stalemate partnership, a new spark ignited negotiations and possibilities. This spark was the process of upgrading of Sheffield Road, which have attracted many national and international dignitaries. In short, Sheffield Road provided a case where the incremental upgrading of a settlement through the rearrangement of shacks in a community-designed layout map not only transformed the lived spaces of the settlement, but also forge new innovative institutional imperatives for upgrading. Institutional innovation was necessary as Sheffield Road settlement is located on a road reserve, which means that no development in formal planning procedures would be allowed. Sheffield Road was upgraded, and the City pledged to work alongside this intervention by delivering more waterborne flush toilets in the spaces created by the community. New avenues were being explored to see how city officials and PFOs could work alongside communities to replicate the successes of Sheffield Road. They met in Sheffield Road to discuss the practical interventions and institutional alignments needed to take blocking out to scale.

This short history of the partnership is in lieu of conclusion. Rather, the partnership has the potential to be instructive for replication on national scale. In February 2012, 22 new pilot partnership projects were agreed to. The geographical spread of these projects were true to the need of the City, with eleven projects in the South / Central area, and six in the Khayalitsha / Strand area. Some of the projects (20%) included consolidation and relocation of settlements (those settlements less than 15 households where development is not feasible), some included (40%) formalization and subdivision, and some include (40%) blocking out. Settlements range from very small (7 households) to considerably large (1,284 households). Projects prioritise short term service delivery and long term formalization and infrastructure development.

The deputy-minister of National Department of Human Settlements, Ms. Zoe Kota-Fredericks visited settlements in Joe Slovo Park and formed part of the activities and celebrations.

On Thursday 19 April, the celebrations came closer to home when Mayor De Lille signed the partnership accord with ISN and CORC. At a mass gathering held in Vygieskraal – a settlement of 300 households located behind the formal housing development with the same name in Athlone – the Mayor was introduced to the programmes of the ISN. She saw the community’s demonstration model of the new cluster layout, the enumeration results, and listened to community leaders and the local councilor speak about their experiences.

De Lille reiterated that her vision of an “inclusive” and “caring” City included the formation of new partnerships with civic organisations. The partnership will share the following guiding principles, which Mayco Member for Human Settlement Councilor Sonnenberg presented:

1. Create a shared community vision of the future, especially with regard to informal settlements upgrading and backyard rehabilitation;
2. Identify and prioritise key issues, thereby facilitating immediate measures to alleviate urgent problems;
3. Support community-based analysis of local issues, including the comprehensive review of long-term, systemic problems that confront particular service systems and the need to integrate different service strategies so that they are mutually supportive;
4. Develop action plans for addressing key issues, drawing from the experiences and innovations of diverse local groups;
5. Mobilise community-wide resources to meet service needs, including the joint implementation of sustainable development projects; and
6. Increase public support for municipal activities and local understanding of municipal development needs and constraints.

Balancing micro agencies with macro institutional prerogatives is an on-going series of negotiations and transactions. On the one side, communities need to articulate their development plans in ways that fit into the state’s machinery, and on the other hand, local governments need to move beyond structuralist predispositions of forging collaborative partnerships. These tensions continue to shape the view from the bottom and the view from the top. As this pendulum swings, so the point of accumulation also changes. The challenge going forward will be to build platforms where engagement is centred on the lived experience, and not always the perceived experience made up of imaginations of city builders. On the other hand, it is almost inconceivable to approach city building with an absolute certainty of what is going on and what is needed to make it better. In the narrow openings and cracks in intersections of agency and structure, communities are seeking out the ‘shifts’ in the institutional arrangements which determine the way policy translates into action. For without these strong driving forces, progress towards inclusion and new forms of citizenship will remain rhetorical constructs.

By Walter Fieuw, CORC

Much effort has been spent on crafting democratic spaces where ordinary citizens have a direct voice in the way service delivery is conceptualised and operationalised. Some of these spaces include ward committees, service delivery consultations, IDP workshops and many other democratic structures underwritten by major policy and legislation governing “developmental local government”. This is sometimes called “invited spaces”. However, these structures are often co-opted by political interests and politics of patronage.

Poor communities are often passive bystanders to the development enterprise. Despite the overwhelming odds against them, poor people continue to press through to the heart of inclusive governance. And this can only be realised when power is shared. Organised communities are creating democratic spaces outside the enclaves of government power, and these “invented spaces” challenge the inertia of service delivery paradigms.

This week (27 – 29 February), community leaders from the Western Cape held meetings with chief field officers of the City of Cape Town (CoCT) to showcase the lessons learnt and successes achieved in the few pilot projects initiated under the Informal Settlement Network (ISN). Delegates from Western Cape Backyarders Network, University of Stellenbosch, and the Informal Settlements Management in the CoCT were also present. Since the CoCT agreed to nine pilot projects within the next six to twelve months, ISN has been preparing and sensitising key City officials to the processes implicit in community-driven upgrading, especially that of blocking out. On Monday, the group gathered in Sheffield Road, where the community  has successfully blocked out 116 shacks. The agenda of the meeting was to give city officials insight into the complexity and amount of negotiations that happen to make blocking out happen.

Lisa and Priscilla, two community leaders of Sheffield Road, addressed the group by outlining some of the major happenings since September 2009.

• September 2009: Community is introduced to ISN regional leaders and learn about enumeration, savings, and community leadership
• October 2009: First meeting with the CoCT alongside other ISN leaders. They ask for more toilets in their settlement
• November 2009: Enumeration is completed and reveals that the 116 shacks of Sheffield Road settlement only have 15 toilets. However, it is too dense to install more toilets.
• January 2010: The concept of blocking out is introduced and the community starts measuring the shacks and space it occupies. It is agreed that shacks will be rearranged, and that new shacks will be 15 m² (seeing that there were very large and very small shacks co-existing in a very small area)
• September 2010: Re-blocking of cluster 1. This ensured the buy-in from the other clusters
• September 2010 – January 2012: Blocking-out of Sheffield Road is completed.

On Tuesday, the group met in Burundi, a settlement unknown to the CoCT until the community joined the ISN. The settlement is 13 years old, and the enumeration conducted there revealed 1,600 shacks housing 4,500 people only had 53 toilets and 18 water taps. The agenda for Tuesday’s meeting was to address the aspects of community design in blocking out. This includes the measuring of shacks, identification of clusters, setting up of cluster / block committees, and spatial mapping. On Wednesday, the group discussed the presentation of scale models to influence the wider community and the showcasing of demonstration blocks. Some community members are usually skeptical about blocking out when the concept is introduced. They are not comfortable with the idea of disruption, and sometimes distrust ISN leaders coming from other settlements to explain the processes implicit. But after one cluster has been completed, the wider community is anxious to start construction in their clusters.

The ideal of deepening democracy and realising citizenship is constantly under threat, as is the concept of community. It is only when communities generate a locally responsive knowledge – a knowledge that narrate their lived experience and their visions of a preferred future – and “flow” in this knowledge, when communities can showcase and influence policy, growing in and through the process.

By Walter Fieuw, CORC

The formal and the informal co-exist in Joe Slovo Park, Milnerton, Cape Town. Joe Slovo Park is a formal township established in the 1990s when City planners sought to eradicate informality, especially that of Marcomi Beam, and establish a low-income neighborhood. Those who were not catered for in the formal houses invaded open spaces in the newly laid-out township. This “re-informalisation” resulted in a juxtaposition of formal houses and informal backyarder shacks. In Mshini Wam, one such neighborhood of backyarder shacks located in-between the boundaries of formal RDP houses, the shacks are densely arranged and struggle to gain access to basic services. Backyarders had to pay up to R50 a week for water they fetched from the formal houses before the City installed a few taps. From this snapshot of Google Earth, the densely arranged shacks in-between formally allocated plots with RDP houses are clearly visible (Mshini Wam is located in the block between Democracy Drive, Hlosi Drive and Ingwe Drive in the greater Joe Slovo Park)

A photo of the blueprint (dated 2006) where Mshini Wam is now located.

Joe Slovo Park as a whole has been characterised by big and small fires – such as the October 2006 fire that destroyed 42 shacks leaving 70 residents homeless – and violence. Mshini Wam has also endured such fires and approached the City of Cape Town for emergency relief services. It was at this stage that the City introduced the community to Informal Settlement Network (ISN). After the community completed the enumeration, they moved on to measure the shacks and prepare spatial plans for the blocking out of their settlement. This week (27 February to 2 March), 13 students from the University of Botswana’s Architecture and Planning school joined Mshini Wam “community architects” to finalise spatial plans for clusters. The idea is to move shacks in the path of an U-shaped road that will become the circle road connecting Democracy Drive and Hlosi Drive. This will ensure a critical pathway for emergency services.

Thabo, one of the community architects, notes that the settlement has strong solidarity and a sense of community. In their settlement constitution, no one is allowed to waste unnecessary water at the public taps area by for instance, washing their hands with no bucket. This is done to ensure that minimal stagnant water builds up where children will contact water-born diseases such as cholera and typhoid fever. Any one that does not agree with this arrangement will be fined with a R100 penalty or asked to leave the settlement. They have also used their collective savings to upgrade the public taps area by building a concrete base.

“In projects like these, the community does its own planning” said Mr. Tema, lecturer of the University of Botswana. “The City can then partner and collaborate with the community and deliver services in the newly created open spaces. This opens possibilities to improve living conditions in-situ”. A group of students working on the mapping of the cluster close to the Hlosi Drive exit-road mentioned that working with a community that has taken the initiative shifted their ideas of collaboration. “In such an approach there are no white elephants because they are the ones making these plans. They own the process and there are no wasted resources.”