Politics and Community-Based Research

Perspectives from Yeoville Studio, Johannesburg

Sarah Charlton, Sophie Didier, Kirsten Dörmann, Claire Bénit-Gbaffou

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781776143863
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Staatsbürgerkunde & Bürgerrechte

Politics and Community-Based Research: Perspectives from Yeoville Studio, Johannesburg provides a textured analysis of a contested urban space that will resonate with other contested urban spaces around the world and challenges researchers involved in such spaces to work in creative and politicised ways.
This edited collection is built around the experiences of Yeoville Studio, a research initiative based at the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Through themed, illustrated stories of the people and places of Yeoville, the book presents a nuanced portrait of the vibrance and complexity of a post-apartheid, peri-central neighbourhood that has often been characterised as a 'slum' in Johannesburg. These narratives are interwoven with theoretical chapters by scholars from a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds, reflecting on the empirical experiences of the Studio and examining academic research processes. These chapters unpack the engagement of the Studio in Yeoville, including issues of trust, the need to align policy with lived realities and social needs, the political dimensions of the knowledge produced and the ways in which this knowledge was, and could be used.

SECTION C

Recommending: From understanding micro-politics to imagining policy

12Introduction

SARAH CHARLTON

In this section of the book we turn to the materiality of living conditions in Yeoville, in particular the house and home, and the neighbourhood micro convenience store. Ways of occupying houses, yards and flats in Yeoville, as in some other parts of Johannesburg, had become dense and intense, multi-use in nature, and frequently non-compliant with City regulations. Throughout the city there was no effective response to housing trends emerging from changes in the socio-economic and demographic context, reflecting a gap in national housing policy, limited and unreformed urban management tools, and municipal capacity overwhelmed or distracted by other pressing issues. In Yeoville, stressed buildings and living conditions had become a major concern for our Studio partners.

From diverse angles the Studio scrutinised physical conditions, residents’ experiences, social and management arrangements, and the contestations and innovations around these. Analysis of local and micro dynamics became the basis on which to build policy commentary and to facilitate discussion of it – a form of engaged research interactive not only with ordinary residents and community partners but also with its policy, regulatory and institutional environment. Authors’ contributions in this section thus extend beyond analysis to propose ways of intervening – through policy proposals, pilot projects or governance mechanisms, for example – in other words, to ‘recommend’.

Ambitious to use grounded research to inform more directly policy impasses and conundrums, the Studio convened a series of ‘roundtables’ or dialogues with housing practitioners and local authority officials at the end of the project. Despite frank discussions, these ultimately had limited success in shaping inner-city housing approaches, as Sarah Charlton’s chapter reflects on and accounts for. Amongst the constraints – such as restrictions in the policy environment, alternative political imperatives and limited pressure from residents – was also the disconnect of City departments from the Studio: they had neither partnered in the work nor invited housing policy input. Nevertheless, a core member of Yeoville Studio with direct and important fieldwork experience, Simon Mayson, subsequently became a key driver within the City of a fresh and innovative inner-city housing plan.¹

Though concentrated on Yeoville, the chapters here explore an issue of central concern across the global South, one almost universally elusive in housing policy approaches: affordable accommodation in locations of access or opportunity for poorer city residents. In centrally placed Yeoville several features provide a potent case-study site: a high demand for accommodation from people with limited resources; the absence of formal, regulatory-compliant, and well-managed low-income housing; and a state overwhelmed by or inattentive to the situation. Lack of state oversight has provided opportunity for poorer people to appropriate buildings for budget accommodation, but it has also arguably contributed to precariousness and vulnerability: in the overcrowding, lack of building maintenance, overloading of engineering infrastructure and landlord–tenant practices operating ‘below the radar’ of official oversight. Practices and their consequences are at times visible and apparent (for example, in the evidence of building decay) but often hidden behind the facades of outwardly compliant and formal buildings.

Yeoville Studio enabled a multi-dimensional examination in one locale, in some depth, tackling socio-legal aspects, built-form issues, governance dimensions and, crucially, the lived experience of residents. Aspects resonate with housing debates elsewhere on new provisions of housing micro-spaces (see, for example, Few et al. 2004; Huchzermeyer 2007) or appropriations and adaptions of older forms of housing (Custers 2001), as well as the pervasive intertwining of income generation with places of residence, through home-based enterprises, for example (Kellet & Tipple 2000).

In the opening vignette Kirsten Dörmann, Mpho Matsipa and Claire Bénit-Gbaffou simply yet powerfully illustrate diverse living conditions as seen through the eyes of their occupants. Some point to brutal and harsh living spaces; others are more neutrally portrayed. We get a clear sense of people and places in intimate configurations. Later, in Simon Mayson’s chapter, a thick description of living in a communal flat extends and deepens the resident’s gaze. Formed over several months, this unusual documentation of spatial configurations, organisational systems and personal relationships highlights just what levels of negotiation, cooperation and management are required, and hints at what forms of conflict must be kept at bay.

Residents’ accounts are grounded within particular spatial configurations and activities. Kirsten Dörmann and Solam Mkhabela’s chapter discusses ‘urban compounding’, inspired by the physical transitions and adaptations that have enabled new uses and relationships in Yeoville. Houses have transformed internally through multiple rooms and spaces for rent, and externally through backyard rooms and kiosks. Of key importance is the interface with public space: the role and potential of this edge in people’s lives in conditions where internal spaces are minimal and intense, and much of life is played out externally. Stimulated by actual practices, the discussion also introduces proposals and dreams for future ways of organising.

Homing in on retail and other economic practices within residential fabric – enormously significant across contexts of poverty, joblessness and inequality in the global South – Mamokete Matjomane’s vignette introduces us to the spaza shop, a small convenience store taking many different guises and forms. Excerpts from interviews with traders and their customers show us why this is a pervasive and persistent activity, offering not only basic necessities in a handy location but also a personal touch for some residents living alongside these often unauthorised structures.

In their subsequent chapter, Matjomane and Bénit-Gbaffou tackle attempts to facilitate appropriate governance of these spaza shops: local leaders’ understandings of the trajectory of neighbourhood change through which spaza shops became widespread, and their mobilisation, of a sort, against municipal clampdown in order to try to manage the phenomenon better. But these initiatives largely failed to establish alternative governance models, with competing organisational agendas, the lack of a common forum, and fragmented leadership and institutional structures helping to account for this. The limited acceptance by authorities – and some residents – of the inevitability and in fact desirability of mixed-use neighbourhoods that spazas help build remains a core problem.

Fundamentally, how to manage space in the interests of multiple city dwellers but particularly poorer residents is at the core of many issues encountered. Heinz Klug and Neil Klug’s chapter makes a concrete proposal on the potential and relevance of community land trusts for housing provision in places like Yeoville. Underpinning their discussion is how land value and access to affordable housing can both be retained for low-income residents. Drawing from examples in the United States and elsewhere, they show how the ownership of improvements on the land (such as buildings) can be separated from the land itself. The chapter tackles the issue of housing affordability from a legal and planning perspective, and considers the City’s potential and powers to play a role in a new model for the provision of low-cost housing.

Illustrating the difficulties of management practices and what can be at stake in this, Bénit-Gbaffou’s vignette narrates key moments in the lives of four different buildings, providing brief but potent glimpses into diverse forms of building management and the tenant experience of this. These portraits showcase the delicacy of ‘buildings systems’: the complex mix of management, behaviour, responsibility and ‘life’ that influence the operation and experience of a building. Sarah Charlton’s chapter contextualises such systems and micro-practices of tenants and landlords in relation to low-income housing policy and practice in Johannesburg. With accommodation conditions, associated economic activities and management of these little debated in housing policy, the chapter accounts for the local government’s predominant responses of either censure or neglect, at the time. It reflects also on the experience of bringing work from a teaching and research studio into dialogue with the views of housing managers, niche financiers, humanitarian and rights organisations, and city officials, in which both the contributions of the Studio and its limits were revealed.

Together, these contributions engage with one of the ‘practical and urgent crises’ identified with partners for attention in the second year of the Studio (Bénit-Gbaffou, this book). Though there were limits to the direct assistance the Studio could provide, research prompted the development of significant practical guides for tenants and landlords, and multiple actors beyond the Studio debated inner-city housing issues connected to their work. Rich and engaged grounded research perhaps spawned ambitions for a policy and strategy contribution beyond its scope and its institutional make-up; at the same time its multiple dimensions and angles demonstrate the power of this approach.

Note

1ICHIP, the Inner City Housing Implementation Plan (2016). RebelGroup, commissioned by the Johannesburg Development Agency and the City of Johannesburg Department of Housing.

References

Custers G (2001) Inner-city rental housing in Lima: A portrayal and an explanation. Cities 18(4): 249–258.

Few R, Gouveia N, Mathee A, Harpham T, Cohn A, Swart A & Coulson N (2004) Informal sub-division of residential and commercial buildings in São Paulo and Johannesburg: Living conditions and policy implications. Habitat International 28(3): 427–442.

Huchzermeyer M (2007) Tenement city: The emergence of multi‐storey districts through large‐ scale private landlordism in Nairobi. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31(4): 714–732.

Kellett P & Tipple AG (2000) The home as workplace: A study of income-generating activities within the domestic setting. Environment and Urbanization 12(1): 203–214.

13My place in Yeoville: Housing stories

KIRSTEN DÖRMANN, MPHO MATSIPA AND CLAIRE BÉNIT-GBAFFOU

These are tales of coming to Yeoville and finding a home there. The stories are not rosy; they show the challenges of finding decent places to stay: stories of cramped spaces, exploitative landlords, evictions and extreme mobility, densities and lack of amenities, aspirations to leave while being trapped in the area. But they also demonstrate a place of friendships and networks that can provide, for some time, a place for free or sub-market rent; the centrality of the place and the opportunities it opens to; a housing market that offers flats in all shapes and sizes, adaptable to shifting households and fragile situations.

These housing stories have been collected in the context of community housing workshops facilitated by second-year architecture students and their lecturers, where Yeoville residents told their residential stories and mapped their homes. These housing portraits were consolidated in discussion with participants, and were publicised in various community events in Yeoville.

GEORGE LEBONE

FIGURE 13.1: George Lebone

I like the central location of my place. I relate a lot to Rockey Street. It gives me an advantage as a community activist.

Biography

George came to Johannesburg from Ga-Rankuwa, North West, and stayed in Meadowlands a short time before moving to Yeoville in 1998. He lived in a flat on Webb Street for two years, then in a house on Natal Street for 14 years. Thereafter he live...