Rory Williams
A community, at its most basic, is a group of people who share something they value. Like a place, a project, an idea, a philosophy or a religion.
There needs to be something they want to preserve or to create, and the energy they put towards that is part of what binds them together as a community. They might be neighbours sharing a park, but if they don’t see its value to them, then it doesn’t add to the community.
This is important, I think, because the more things (or people or ideas…) a community can embrace, the stronger and richer the community will be.
Not valuing or appreciating something is often why neighbourhoods don’t claim for themselves the things that would be good for them as a community. Instead, they let others take over those things, or simply live as if they did not exist, like parks and rivers and alleys that become neglected and dangerous.
We live with different layers of communities. Some big, some small and some just temporary. There is nothing wrong with that, but when we don’t find the areas where they overlap, then we miss the opportunity to work together more strongly and even to create a meta-community that characterises who we are as a society.
A place like Woodstock has a long-established community that seems quite close-knit. It also has newer foreign nationals who have moved in and started businesses, and now another layer of society has arrived with investments that appeal to a particular market. What would it take for them to find each other?
In my work with Open Streets, I want us to explore ways that the physical platform created by opening streets to people (by keeping cars away for a while) can help these overlapping communities find something they value together.
Too often there isn’t that one thing that people can rally around, and each community sticks to its own concerns. Part of the challenge is to make public spaces more valuable to everyone, by rethinking them.
We have so thoroughly abandoned our streets to cars and trucks that we see no value in them, beyond mobility. We no longer care that opportunities for walking are being shut down, or that streets don’t help small business, or that fast driving machines prevent slow, voluptuous living.
In not caring, we have abandoned the processes of planning and design, leaving them to the professionals, when being involved could be a way for us to better understand ourselves as community, and figure out what we want and need.
It’s easy to agree on a few motherhood statements as a vision of what a neighbourhood should be, because they are universal and uncontroversial.
It’s only when people start to grapple with the details that affect them personally that the differences emerge and the discussion takes on the vitality that is needed to really understand where improvements are needed.
When I was a volunteer with the Development Action Group 25 years ago, we tried to provide a bridge between communities and city planners. When the people of Sir Lowry’s Pass Village came and asked us to help them plan their informal settlement, it was a call for self-preservation of a community. They felt it could prevent them from being removed if they demonstrated a viable strategy for upgrading. As engineers, architects and planners, we could assist.
If that process was also to help them strengthen their community organisation and identity, it needed to involve them – in fact, be led by them.
As they figured out where to run streets between their shacks, how to deal with sanitation and where taxis could stop, they could understand how governance and engineering and safety and funding all come together to influence the realm of the possible. They could explore the making of a community from the ground up.
But politicians stepped in and promised to save them, and the unfortunate result was that it stopped short the collaborative process that had begun.
It still saddens me to think where we might be today in delivering not just houses and engineering infrastructure and services, but delivering community itself, if that process had continued and grown across Cape Town. Imagine 25 years of that: the kind of development that lifts people up, nurtures independence, builds true leadership and breeds understanding of the complex nature of building a city of healthy communities.
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