Informal settlements and urban heritage landscapes in South Africa

Abstract

Informal urban settlements and trade zones represent an increasingly pressing issue for urban heritage developers. In light of the recent revisitation of the UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape, this article explores the current challenges faced at the intersection of heritage practice, urban planning, and informal communities. Heritage recommendations operate within the domain of soft law and their implementation relies on the voluntarism of public parties and the private sector. Such heritage recommendations are thus rarely taken up outside of city improvement districts with recognizable property-owning stakeholders, commercial infrastructures for security, maintenance, and investor marketing. In South Africa, the particular circumstances of the post-apartheid landscape render urban planning frameworks prone to reinforcing the marginalization of informal stakeholder engagement, ultimately perpetuating a socio-spatial inequality such programs set out to mitigate. The civic practices of new social movements and historical knowledge that emerges from the context of informal and neglected urban environments illustrate emergent answers to the exclusionary dynamics of urban heritage planning.

Keywords

urban heritage slums informal settlements Historic Urban Landscape South Africa new social movements labor

Introduction: Post-colonial landscapes in South Africa

As of 2010, more people now live in cities than in rural areas. According to UN-Habitat, one in five people live in squats, slums, or on land that does not legally belong to them. In South Africa, this number is estimated as one in four and potentially one in three by 2050 (UN Human Settlements Programme, 2006). These numbers illustrate that the relationship between informal communities and urban heritage is one of increasing important to consider. By contrast, founding global protocols for urban heritage protection speak to an altogether different context. The 1964 Venice Charter broke new ground when historic preservation shifted “from museum object to architectural monument” (Ruggles, 2012). Yet despite the internationalist ethos of the charter, its emphasis on architectural conservatism and the prioritization of material authenticity restricted the category of the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL). The internationalist vision of the Nara document on authenticity, adopted 30 years later, addressed these issues with the Venice charter, stating that it was not possible to base judgment “of values and authenticity within fixed criteria” (International Council on Monuments and Sites, 1994). With this, the Intangible World Heritage Convention (2003) and the 2005 Convention on Cultural Diversity, UNESCO has, as its Assistant Director General Francesco Bandarin puts it, “cautiously opened the way to a culture-based appreciation of conservation values” (Bandarin and van Oers, 2012: xvi).

The concept of the HUL was proposed in a 2005 meeting convened by the World Heritage Committee. The purpose of the meeting was to revisit UNESCO recommendations for safeguarding of historic urban areas and the modern urban conservation paradigm more generally (Bandarin and van Oers, 2012: 62). The recent reconsideration of the concept of the HUL has recommended placing even greater emphasis upon integrating the concepts of HULs within the dynamic process of urban development. As a result, the phenomenon of increasingly stratified urban contexts may make the issue of the informal urban community in increasingly central one for urban heritage.

Central to the methodological implementation of new urban heritage policy is fostering increasingly intercultural and diverse contexts for civic engagement. Specifically, the 2011 recommendation on HUL states, “civic engagement tools should involve a diverse cross-section of stakeholders” (UNESCO, 2011). With an eye to posterity and austerity, the category of HUL takes on a very specific set of pressures and challenges in the post-colonial and post-Fordist context. In South Africa, growing areas of informal settlement and increasing numbers of unemployed or casual laborers constitute a vital and significant component of dynamic urban culture, increasingly recognized as an irreplaceable site of urban practices of “creativity and resourcefulness” (Bandarin and van Oers, 2012). Long recognized as critical sites whose residents provide key services upon which cities often survive (Scott, 1998), informal urban communities and their landscapes are vital for urban heritage specialists to consider outside of the terms of development. They provide the context for the recognition of alternative HULs as well as providing new arenas for forging best consultation practices. Recognizing the value of emergent techniques of civic engagement in these contexts could foster a more inclusionary vision of urban intangible heritage.

The challenges to understanding the wider urban cultural landscape are many. There is an unmistakable ambivalence with regard to the emergence of urban informal communities, often referred to as “slums”, particularly in the mega-cities of the Global South. For some, “[t]he city appears under siege, imperiled by spatial mutations and occupation by the uncivil masses, a wasteland of broken modernist dreams …” (Prakash and Kruse, 2008: 6). For others, as Žižek (2004) quips, informal communities and landless people’s movements have become abstractly valorized to the point where they are the Left’s new proletariat, such as in the work of Davis (2006). This critical ambivalence stems from the neglect of the historical specificity of informal settlements, resulting in their abstraction. This problem stems from the context of heritage planning and development, where these mobile or informal communities are often presumed to be temporary sites with elusive membership, and consequently no historical application. Methodologically, these presumptions are reflected in a shallow form of consultation and stakeholder engagement, which, in turn, produces equally elusive and mobile forms of inclusion or transparency.

Citing examples from corporate-driven heritage development as well as urban revitalization schemes, this article charts the various methodological-institutional conjunctures at which community engagement stops short of its own rhetorical commitments. As heritage becomes increasingly wound up within urban development and revitalization projects, it is vital to reflect upon what sorts of stakeholders and constituencies emerge as ideal subjects for this vision of an increasingly self-reliant, sustainable, and disciplined project of civic remembrance. For many urban planners, developers, such informal communities ostensibly represent temporary, historyless, or unruly objects of mediation. Rather than succumbing to these views, engaged heritage consultation and research illustrates that many of informal communities practice rich modes of self-organizing and broader practices of liberal urban citizenship. These traditions epitomize the professed objectives of the HUL project: morally sensible, inclusive, and sustainable modes of curating the practices of dynamic urban culture. They mark the future of the HUL.

Historic Urban Landscapes in South Africa

In post-apartheid and unevenly developed/developing urban landscapes, the colonial legacy of systematic erasure continues to radiate a complex range of effects upon its inhabitants. The history of mechanical displacement and the subsequent process of economic restructuring presents a spatial landscape that implicitly challenges—almost at every angle—the desire for architectural authenticity to emerge from continuities of form, cultural practice, or endurance of original materials (Murray et al., 2007). It was precisely the dense urban conditions of 20th century South African “shantytowns”, and their perceived threat to a minority racial rule that prompted the 1922 Transvaal Stallard Commission. The commission recommended that Africans be “confined to the construction of townships owned and administered by local authorities” (Stallard Commission, 1922). In this way, South African laborers were refigured as “temporary sojourners” in cities. Through a series of pass laws, they were restricted to limited residence periods at designated hostel and labor housing spaces, forced to live as “foreign visitors” in the urban context. Through a series of notorious slum clearances, those already living in cities were relocated in order to pursue their self-determination within bounded homelands appointed by the Verwoerd administration, in each of which the government established a pointedly rural “bantu investment corporation”, to “set up and capitalise individual entrepreneurs” (Stallard Commission, 1922).

In grappling with the public meaning of this colonial legacy, the heritage of urban space in South Africa has been widely understood as being as much about erasure, memory, and sites of loss as being about the architectural landscape available to us in the present (Coombes, 2003). In part, this approach has been in order to prevent perpetuating the original cruelty of historical erasure by inordinately dwelling on those material forms and architectures that, for reasons of historical contingency or colonial policy, remain today. But it is also a rejection of the typical narrative of modernization by which the African city can only ever manifest as a (frequently tragic) residue or reflection of the broader modernity narrative (Cooper, 2002; Mbembe and Nuttall, 2004: 353).

There have been many important re-framings of the legacy of the African city that are relevant to consider in the context of pursuing a more holistic approach to the wider urban environment and the associated intangible cultural practices, values, and memorial dimensions. Because so much of urban historiography has been centered around the story of apartheid and displacement, there has been an almost compulsive emphasis on what Mbembe and Nuttall have termed, “the geographies of poverty, forced removals, and racially based slums” rather than alternative histories of sites of mobility, or affluence, spaces of idleness or play (2004: 353). In the last decade, particularly within the work of AbdouMaliq Simone, mobility and its associated urban practices (the rapid and often unpredictable interchange of contraband, images, music, remittances, and information via billboards, vehicles, wireless networks, tuck shops, etc.) have come to be identified as a key signature of the public cultural life of African cities. In recent work on Afropolitanism, this mobility has come to take on an almost emancipatory vein with respect to the geographies of poverty (Prakash and Kruse, 2008; Simone 2001a, 2001b, 2004, 2005). As Mbembe and Nuttall (2004: 30) state,

Its boundaries have become so geographically and socially permeable and stretched that the city seems to have no fixed parts, no completeness, and almost no discrete center...Turning its back on the rigid rationalities of planning and racial separation, it has become, in spite of itself, a place of intermingling and improvisation. Its very porosity means that, released from the iron cage of apartheid, it can now continually fashion and refashion itself.

Both in the past and the present, the sheer aleatory force of urban circulation is a vital aspect of the experience of urban life in South Africa. Within the context of urban planning, however, this instability of movement comes to instigate a different sort of work. Urban planning, operating within a much more cadastral system of commercial districting and establishing bounded tourism zones, relies on a mesh of formal infrastructures and commercial transparency in order to produce financially viable and investment-friendly development. Increasingly, attempts to mitigate the associated perils of the impermanent stakeholder, such as lack of commercial transparency, eroding infrastructures, and ultimately unmarketable or unviable revitalization districts, have unleashed a “speculative arbitrage on the habits of the poor” (Roy, 2012: 213). Burgeoning urban mobility, then, while at one moment marking the aspirational horizon of the Afropolitan city-dweller, also marks out the frontier where new civic technologies of responsibilization map out the frontiers of entrepreneurial and civic dispositions amid the emergent urban precariat. UNESCO’s renewed recommendation of accommodating the “dynamic nature of living cities” marks a policy directive that situates urban heritage practitioners squarely on both sides of the border between civic governmentality and its counter-publics. The question of informal urban areas, both as a category of analysis and as an actually occurring landscape in South Africa, is critical to understanding how urban heritage will emerge in the future.

Informal communities in urban theory

Informal communities, or what is often referred to in urban theory as “slums” have long marked a key “epistemological and ethical” anchoring point within urban studies (Rao, 2012). One side of the discussion identifies such urban landscapes as symptomatic of the extreme income inequality and poverty to be fixed. Particularly in the Global South, they are perceived as symptomatic of International Monetary Fund and World Bank Structural Adjustment Programs imposed upon debtor nations, with the ensuing privatization and stratification of housing markets (Davis, 2006: 63). The other major approach to this discussion sees these informal urban landscapes as providing emergent and even normative models for understanding how global cities are dynamically and flexibly renegotiating global flows of finance, manufacturing, and refiguring the technologies of capital and informational flows in the process. So, global cities of the south rather than cities of the Global South (Appadurai, 2002; Rao, 2012: 674).

In many ways, an urban heritage project taken up within the terms of revitalization and job-creation necessarily straddles both of these approaches. On the one hand, it valorizes and provides historical recognition for landscapes and practices of urban curation, circulation, and culture. On the other hand, it takes the enactment of this recognition as implicitly about identifying particular urban zones to be tackled through job-creation, revitalization, or restoration. This twinned goal imposes a subtle shifting of ethical registers on the part of heritage practitioners, asking that their work bridge what at one moment amounts to a primarily descriptive ethics, that which is entailed in the project of articulating, narrating, and curating widely diverse contexts of urban heritage for global recognition. At another moment, the designation of heritage landscapes as a technique of development, particularly in the processes of nominating, consulting, or evaluating, imposes a far narrower set of normative constraints on heritage practitioners (so for instance, calling upon a far less relativistic approach to the meaning of poverty, or ideal slum alleviation, or what constitutes an ideal stakeholder, or ideal modes of stakeholder engagement, etc.). Within such a system, informal urban areas or older/informal areas of townships can often emerge as “blind spots” in the grid of urban revitalization planning, even as they house critical heritage architectures, sites, and community practices that counteract current failures in the community consultation and development framework.

Post-industrial landscapes

Kimberley is far from an iconic world city such as Cape Town or Durban. With a population under 100,000, the city of Kimberley proper is far smaller than its adjoining townships of Galeshewe and Roodepan (Statistics South Africa, 2011). Yet, as the site of the De Beers Mine and the center of 20th century diamond mining in South Africa, Kimberley is iconic of the post-Fordist, post-extractive landscape increasingly faced by heritage planners, marked by high unemployment, neglected infrastructure, and a perennial faith in the economic promise of tourism (Conlin and Jolliffe, 2011). The city of Kimberley in the Northern Cape emerged as a seething colonial shantytown that rapidly flitted about the Karoo landscape with new diamond discoveries transforming its center practically overnight. By mid-1879, about 10 years after the start of the diamond rush, a colonial policy of locations was implemented and the largest of these, what was originally given the name of “location no. 2”, was formally established.

Today, this historic district of the sprawling Galeshewe township represents one of the oldest townships in South Africa and it provides a stark contrast to the historical architecture found in the formerly colonial neighborhoods such as Belgravia and Ernestville. Inhabitants of Kimberley and neighboring Galeshewe regularly crisscross this divided urban landscape establishing the broader dynamic urban landscape of the former diamond fields. Galeshewe township’s complex history includes many nationally important liberation heritage events. Most notably, it was the site of Pan African Congress founder Robert Sobukwe’s house arrest and the site of the 1952 Mayibuye Uprising where 13 protestors were killed by police as they marched from Galeshewe township to Kimberley (Allen et al., 2012: 65; Swanepoel and Mngqolo, 2011). The example of Galeshewe’s location no. 2 is iconic of historically important areas which risk getting overlooked in South Africa’s post-industrial jumble of burgeoning Reconstruction and Development Program housing development emerging amidst shacks, dilapidated mud-brick houses, and improvizational combinations thereof. Local oral historians and heritage professionals working at the McGregor Museum have identified many “at risk” historic and conservation-worthy houses in this district, including those that were made from a local tradition of mud-brick construction, and many of which mirrored Victorian and Edwardian styles while using locally sourced materials, producing a distinct vernacular as well as an illustrating how these neighborhood architectures negotiated shifting periods of class differentiation and public style over the 20th century (Sephai Mngqolo, personal communication).

Viewed through the lens of urban planning, Galeshewe marks a challenging context for renewal. According to the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats analysis, Galeshewe represents an area with over 30% unemployment, exceptionally high rates of AIDS infection, as well as infrastructural challenges ranging from unpaved roads, lack of signage, to about 5000 households living in “informal dwellings”. As land invasions increasingly evidence the public’s impatience, rapidly implemented local urban renewal programs encounter tensions with local heritage preservation initiatives seeking to protect yet undeclared areas and sites, resulting in such distressing scenarios as a traffic congestion abatement project leveling a series of homes with historical value and the former offices of Pan Africanist Congress founder Robert Sobukwe threatened by private property owners and expansion of a local road (Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1.

Vernacular architecture in area no. 2., Galeshewe.

Figure 2.

Law Office of Robert Sobukwe, Galeshewe.

Overshadowing these landscapes is the most prominent heritage draw of Kimberley, the De Beers’ “Big Hole”—the 463-m wide and 240-m deep hollowed remains of the main De Beers diamond mine. This site emerged in the mid-20th century as an informal depot for historical memorabilia and De Beers somewhat unintentionally fell into custodianship of the first open air museum of the towns mining heritage (Brown, 2005). Upon losing a bid to open a neighboring casino, De Beers decided to maintain the museum with low-cost pensioners acting as custodians (Brown, 2005). Yet coinciding with its final massive retrenchments and the selling of its exhausted underground mining operations, De Beers showcased the Big Hole museum as part of a broader social investment program attempting to reinvigorate flagging heritage tourism development in Kimberley (van der Merwe and Rogerson, 2013) (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Big Hole Museum.

This included a tourism route named the “Diamond Route”, which connects a string of private nature reserves featuring gemsbok, blue wildebeest, red hartebeest, zebra, and kudu. These nature reserves circle the central mining landscapes of Kimberley, and they are presented as the natural culmination of the “full lifecycle of mines”. The tourist who wishes to visit the landscape of the mines can also visit the Big Hole museum complex, which was renovated into a “world class” structure including what is today South Africa’s largest full-scale open-air museum, drawing thousands of visitors a year. Kimberley mine (the Big Hole) and associated industries has even been put forward for South Africa’s tentative World Heritage List with the justification that it marks the site where “the industrial revolution came to Africa”, shaping what are somewhat euphemistically described as the subsequent urban labor systems in Johannesburg and the “origins of the migrant labor system” more generally. Ironically, the only tram which connected the visitor at the Big Hole’s outdoor museum to any part of the actual city of Kimberley had to be temporarily suspended due to the fact that the road risks collapse (along with several other businesses and buildings) into the eroding perimeter boundaries of the Big Hole (Figure 4). At the opening of the diamond route, former De Beers director David Noko stated, “we must preserve the areas where we operate so that people can see the legacy of what we leave behind when we finish mining” (van der Merwe, 2010). Yet the question remains, how does such corporate social responsibility heritage discourse circumvent the sprawling township-scapes populated by former casual laborers, impoverished pensioners and shack-dwellers who continue to live in the shadows of this industrial landscape?

Figure 4.

Kimberley Big Hole viewed from the Big Hole Museum.

This gap between how the landscape of industry is proposed and how it actually mediates daily life for remaining residents is a significant problematic for urban heritage in the wake of deindustrialization. The disavowal of De Beers’ historical ties to the communities of former employees in the Galeshewe township illustrates the socio-economic stakes in the context of our rapidly shifting labor landscape. This intersects with a troubling historical glossing in the corporate-sponsored heritage revitalization endeavor more generally (CSR heritage). The Big Hole Project (BHP), coupled with the Diamond Route, speak to a landscape that circumvents its retrenched communities, illustrating a broader obscuring of the historical roots of labor insecurity within the urban development discourse. Within the sometimes muddled historical logics of planning and urban development, informal communities, “squatters”, can swiftly become jumbled areas to be remediated—people to be capacitated or resituated—rather than marking sites of historically complex and politically rich practice with vital and meaningful connections to the recent past.

Actually existing participatory planning

Such disconnects raise broader anxieties about the role of heritage in the shadow of extractive industry (Esterhuysen, 2012). Kimberley’s Big Hole Museum existing unbeknownst to former employees in Galeshewe’s historic districts is significantly enabled by the rogue nature of concepts such as stakeholder engagement and community consultation. Despite the fact that the BHP had dutifully consulted with local archaeologists and historians, South African ICOMOS, South African Heritage Resources Agency, the Northern Cape Tourism experts, as well as MECs of arts and culture, and despite the local Non-Profit Organization formed between De Beers and local community stakeholders (the Big Hole Trust), in the end, the museum project came to be inexplicably led by a former car show manager (Brown, 2005), and the design and presentation of the visitors room was implemented by a consultancy known as Fuse Communications. Fuse Communications, a London- and Johannesburg-based group, was perhaps most notable for claiming insolvency after having been given a 12 million rand contract by De Beers and owing tens of thousands of dollars to local heritage subcontractors (Hoo, 2007). Many heritage professionals living in or affiliated with Galeshewe, working as Oral Historians or heritage experts at the local museum felt their involvement and input with the BHP was haphazard at best, and certain signaled a troubling autonomy on the part of corporate engagement actors.

The critiques of inadequate stakeholder consultation is rife in the heritage literature in Southern Africa, with consistent demands for better definitions of what is meant by “local communities” or “participation” (Chirikure et al., 2010) or for less Eurocentric categories for custodianship (Pereira de Jesus Jopela, 2011). Cumulatively, these critiques draw attention to the significant fact that even impeccable consultation protocols can fail to translate into the final product of heritage interpretation and regulation if these structures remain disconnected from the consultative process (Masuku van Damme and Meskell, 2009). Moreover, the national heritage resources act does not give an adequately precise definition of what social consultation should consist of, particularly in the context of South Africa’s mass displacement of migrant laborers (Ndlovu, 2011).

Consultation and stakeholder engagement are decidedly central technologies by which urban governance negotiates diverse participants (stakeholders) and dynamic contexts (Cruikshank, 1999; Ellis, 2012). A recent piece by anthropologist Dina Rajak (2012) explores how consultation can unfold within the corporate-public context of “Platinum City”, a conglomerate of mining concerns in Johannesburg’s Rustenberg mining belt responsible for nearly half of the world’s platinum. Rajak’s (2012) ethnography explores the enactment of stakeholder engagement according to Rustenberg’s integrated development plan (IDP). The IDP review process, a cornerstone of South Africa’s municipal development forums, provides a setting for stakeholders to engage with the direction of sustainable initiatives and provide input on new directions for social development investments.

Yet, as Rajak (2012) illustrates through her account of the actual structure and language of IDP meetings, the distinction between “formal stakeholders” and “informal stakeholders” produced critical differences. The complaints of informal stakeholders, while nominally included, were invariably dismissed and treated as a temporary issue. Compounding this was the public perception that some form of clientelism with informal settlements was being capacitated through Anglo-Platinum’s IDP meetings. As a result of this perception, alternative municipal welfare resources for informal settlements were actually attenuating. This ultimately brought about a scenario where, “informal settlements have become the subject of competing attempts to deny rather than assert social responsibility” (Rajak, 2012: 258). The role of stakeholder engagement extends beyond the purely corporate context as increasingly urban revitalization initiatives are undertaken through a contract bidding system requiring private consultants to liaise among diverse internal government departments as well as increasingly diverse public stakeholders.

City improvement districts and urban heritage

The role of cultural heritage in the urban context is increasingly centered around the speculative wager that historic districts carry the potential to promote economic growth and sustainable development. The African National Congress’ shift from its initial (Keynsian) Reconstruction and Development Program to its Growth Employment and Reconstruction Program (GEAR) in 1998 meant that broader policies of trade liberalization were coupled with the effective restructuring of municipal government policy. Urban initiatives were devised according to the vision of cities as emergent financially independent private sector entities. Consequently, urban heritage initiatives were directed within typical private partnership policy charters for city improvement districts (CID) or business improvement district (BID) frameworks, which looked something like “Municipality Inc.’s” (Miraftab, 2007).

In South Africa, such urban planning frameworks are often not tailored to the specificities of the post-apartheid landscape, indeed Cape Town’s CID having been modeled after Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s BID program for New York’s revitalization in the 1980s (Miraftab, 2007). The attempt to generalize gentrification policy and import municipal planning policies into contexts with extremely incommensurate socio-political histories is redolent of what Peck (2010) terms “fast policy”. The adjustment of such fast policy transfers to the local, “path-dependent” context sets the current challenge for urban heritage in a post-apartheid landscape. This fast-paced infusion of new constitutional legislation, ready-made policies made to fix societies in transition has given heritage practitioners the frustrating sense of negotiating a policy landscape in which there is a “lack of any meaningful integration of the heritage laws and the general urban and regional planning systems” (Ndoro and Pwiti, 2005: 160).

Of particular importance within the post-apartheid urban context is the influx of informal squatting communities and informal trade networks in the wake of the 1991 repeal of the apartheid Group Areas Act. Ironically, these informal landscapes, symptomatic of the diminished productive capacity of the post-Fordist urban economy, are set in friction with the prevailing entrepreneurial sentiment among developers. For developers, the best way to resolve the sustainability of the deindustrialized city and to progress toward orderly housing development is to expedite the upgrading and elimination of informal areas. This has ultimately produced such contentious legislative efforts as the Elimination and Prevention of Re-Emergence of Slums Bill in the KwaZulu-Natal in 2004 (subsequently overturned in the Constitutional Court) (Huchzermeyer, 2011). In the KwaZulu-Natal Province, Durban’s tourism industry generates over three billion rand, supporting tens of thousands of jobs, yet Durban continues to rank only fourth in the nation for tourism, falling second to Cape Town. The impediments of crime, overcrowding, and informal settlements are perceived by planners to be the greatest contributing factors (Maharaj, 2006: 268)

For planners, and the heritage specialists who must work with them, these informal areas or gray economic zones of the post-industrial landscape challenge the goals of attracting private investment for readily identifiable tourism zones in which entrepreneurial forms of self-governance can be reliably elicited. Even when subjected to the deliberative context of robust civic debate and community consultation, sites that impede the prevailing culture of urgent development seem to ultimately concede the primacy of gentrification, with contested burial sites such as Cape Town’s Prestwich Place Memorial producing a public ossuary as an unlikely appendage to the edgy yet cheerfully named Truth Coffee Shop (Shepherd, 2013).

The technologies by which participatory civic engagement and urban citizenship more generally have drifted into the paradigm of neoliberal governmentality are ascendant and bear critically upon the lived experience of urban life (Collier and Ong, 2008; Ong, 2006). These same technologies have very real ramifications for the project of public history and heritage. As consultative techniques and stakeholder engagement seem to move from the traditions of urban planning to heritage (rather than the reverse direction), these processes aggregate very particular sorts of historical landscapes and materially mediated pasts, rendering some historical narratives more sensible than others and inculcating certain temporalities over others (Herzfeld, 2009a, 2009b). Here, the potential exclusions of vulnerable spaces of urban informality, materially transient practices, and robust counter-publics become increasingly urgent for urban heritage practitioners to recognize.

The emphasis on vulnerable, historically marginalized, transient or impoverished counter-publics critically counterbalances the methodological calcifications that inhere within outdated academic epistemologies (Baird, 2012; Haber, 2013; Meskell and Scheermeyer, 2008; Shepherd, 2003). It also responds to the excesses of an unchecked deregulation of public history, where a certain speculative logic places value in the past unevenly, in a manner decidedly tilted against urban culture at its most dynamic. What Fabian (1983) initially explored as anthropological allochronism (the rhetorical distancing of the temporality of the Other) is very much at work “out there” too. For heritage, it has mutated into a geo-spatial distancing: a technology of producing partible landscapes and saleable historic urban districts—“boutique heritage”. Such areas, “old towns” and other HULs proliferate and within them, new normativities surrounding cultural labor are cultivated, such as within Bahia’s Pelourinho World Heritage Site (Collins, 2012).

Importantly, grassroots movements and informal settlements, even as they represent temporary sites which are not standardized or which exist across multiple districts (or which are enacted in opposition to municipal property regulations—such as land invasions) are of growing interest to world heritage specialists.¹ While the slippery techniques of consultation, stakeholder recognition, and development seem to elicit a predetermined set of civic dispositions rooted within the aspirational culture of urban elites (Ellis, 2012), it is of note that the South African National Heritage Council (NHC) is leading efforts to counteract what it perceives as a deepening of urban fragmentation and separation being perpetuated by a poorly integrated “boutique heritage approach” (National Heritage Council [NHC], 2010).

At the same moment, the NHC as well as its cognate organization, the South African Heritage Resources Agency, are institutionally enmeshed in broader governmental restructurings focused on optimizing legislative mandates within the terms of capacitation and service-delivery. Particularly in the context of rapid urban development, the heritage sector is under unprecedented pressure to streamline uncoordinated (at points non-existent) provincial heritage offices, site grading schemas, as well as out of date permit-granting systems into a so-called one stop shop system for developers. Heritage professionalism, according to a 2009 expert panel convened by the NHC, must increasingly target speedy delivery of access to permits and sites, aiming toward a “development-friendly heritage management” that “save[s] developers money” and above all, produces an “environment of certainty” for developers (NHC, 2010). Increasingly, comprehensive survey databases, integration within Spatial Development Frameworks, and Infrastructural Development Plans are pushed for heritage managers beleaguered by a crippling absence of public resources, administrative backlogs, and labyrinthine protocols as well as the challenge of maintaining the increasingly unsustainable budgets of failing remote sites. In this context of transitional heritage implementation, the integrity of stakeholder consultation, and the sorts of impact these outreach methods can have outside of credentialing the related site(s) comes in as a necessarily secondary set of priorities.

Yet seemingly at odds with this state of affairs is a growing optimism surrounding new modes of private sector involvement (Marschall, 2010) and the potential that populist mediation has for grassroots-driven institutional change (Appadurai, 2006; De Cesari, 2011; Roy, 2009). The question this raises in the context of South Africa is whether or not there is something “inherently and necessarily conservative” about neoliberal “arts of government”, as Ferguson (2010) puts it, or whether such techniques as consultation and stakeholder engagement can “migrate across camps” and become taken up fully within the terms of alternative populist practices of urban citizenship.

The promised land: Urban informal communities and the evolution of stakeholder engagement

Its about you recognizing me as a human being, or my humanity.

You don’t have backlog for that … its not a question of budget constraints.

S’bu Zikode

What is provocative about some of South Africa’s informal land settlements is that their central role in a burgeoning urban rights movement would seem to counteract the received wisdom that informal settlements are dormant sites awaiting development. Like so many other informal settlements, despite its architecturally precarious quality, the Kennedy Road Settlement in Durban, KwaZulu Natal, represents a decidedly historical urban landscape (Figure 5). Many of its occupants have been living there since the 1970s, displaced by the mass evictions caused by the Inanda dam. When the area was zoned as Indian during apartheid, occupants were displaced or had to reside in secrecy. Yet when apartheid laws were relaxed in the 1980s, former residents returned to find old friends and neighbors and return to jobs in the affluent neighboring Clare Estate, or to scavenge recyclables from the adjoining Bisasar landfill, the largest municipal dump in Africa (Pithouse, 2005). Today, Kennedy Road is best known for the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement that formed there in 2005. Abahlali baseMjondolo campaigns for shack dwellers’ reasonable access to basic service delivery such as water, electricity, and toilets, and in the process Abahlali has emerged as a model of urban citizenship in informal settlements across South Africa (Gibson, 2011; Pithouse, 2006).

Figure 5.

Kennedy Road Settlement, eThekwini, Durban.

The story of the emergence of Abahlali is especially fascinating due to its unlikely origins in the context of a series of failed municipal consultation. Before there was Abahlali, there was the Kennedy Road Development Community, a comparably small-scale organization that held its first elections in 2000, culminating in a much-anticipated formal meeting with Durban municipal departments of waste, water, and health in 2004. There was much excitement about this meeting among members in the Kennedy Road settlement. The group had been given the impression from previous exchanges with municipal authorities that the sit-down consultation would both provide an opportunity for the city to collect vital information about their settlement, which, in turn, would result in an historic outcome favorable to the improvement of their quality of life.

The actual meeting unfolded less promisingly. On the day of the meeting, the senior most member of the organization had been specifically chosen to enter the municipal offices first. However, he was immediately inauspiciously shooed to the side of the waiting room, hailed with an expression of casual annoyance—“eh baba!”—as administrators noted his muddied boots. After what appeared to the uninitiated to have been an uneventful meeting, what followed for the community was a protracted waiting period. There was a promised report, which failed to materialize, and the community slowly became aware through alternate contacts in the municipal network that one of the central ministries had, in fact, been opposed to their attendance from the start. In a subsequent meeting with the housing municipality, during with a conciliatory patch of land close to easy bus transport was promised, results again failed to materialize concretely (after assiduously watching the land preparations over weeks, it came to be understood that the land was being granted to a private businessman for a bricklaying yard). At this point, the Kennedy Road Development Community mobilized and responded with civil protests. Their march blocked one of the main arterial roads to central Durban, and as a result, members were swiftly subjected to 14 arrests, exposed to police harassment and subsequently, the organization received prominent media coverage.

Figure 6.

Birds in a Cornfield Exhibit (Masekeng), Museum Africa, Johannesburg.

Within months, a cascade of attention from academics, lawyers, and innumerable neighboring informal communities produced Abahlali proper. In conversations with one of its key founding members, S’bu Zikode, the experience of the initial meeting played a critical if unexpected role. Zikode related how it was specifically his experiences attending meetings as a community representative which made him increasingly aware of the vulnerability of individual stakeholders or small-scale stakeholders, specifically their being susceptible to a form of dismissive or purely pro-forma consultation. In the municipal context of Durban, he recalled how disastrously inconsequential the presence of the Kennedy Road Development Community’s senior-most member might have been without the presence of other members. He also felt very strongly that the emotional distress placed upon one individual to have to relay the experience of being received as insignificant or having to personally relay a failed engagement back to a group was not conducive to healthy or honest stakeholder engagement. The recalcitrant emphasis on profoundly communal formation, then, is not merely expedient or an accident of informal settlement life with Abahlali. It was a direct response to a keenly felt awareness of the power of bureaucratic indifference to marginalize individuals who cannot signal “proper” civic enthusiasm or the business professionalism of the ideal stakeholder for reasons of poverty, poor dress, continual health issues, or unfamiliarity with the proceduralist culture of municipal meetings and workshops more generally.

Equally concerning for Abahlali members was the experiences of engagement with cosmopolitan circuit of progressive movements. The subsequent flood of support from the international NGO community and academic community produced anxieties about the perils of being identified as stakeholders in the context of unregulated engagement with organizations that often were profoundly decontextualized from their experience of informal urban life. From some organizations, members recall with amusement being given guidebooks on “how to protest”, and from the national government they were advised that their protests would not be heard unless they were appropriately channeled through the formalized structures of the Slum Dwellers International (a 70 million dollar Bill and Melinda Gates foundation initiative). As a result of these experiences, today, one cannot join Abahlali individually, but must form a collective of at least 50 individuals before they can become a “friend of Abahlali”. For members, it is important that their organization, their culture and their priorities emerge from within each unique informal context, as one group joins another, they echo the sentiments expressed during the first united march of Abahlali, as each group hailed one another; “we are not here to support you but you are part of us, we are here because we feel we live in the same conditions as you”.

Today Abahlali consists of 25 informal settlements in the KwaZulu Natal, and 35 across South Africa. In October 2009, Abahlali famously won the repeal of the slum clearance act of KZN in the Constitutional Court (Constitutional Court of South Africa, 2009) and continues to garner international recognition for their achievements. They unquestionably represent the living struggle for the Right to the City, the right of all urban inhabitants to experience their fullest inclusion in urban politics and life. When considering the vulnerability of informal communities in the consultative context, and the problem of “who” to consult in the context of urban displacement, Abahlali presents an urban constituency that has worked to legitimate the practice of stakeholder engagement in order to disable the excesses of corporate, municipal, and international attempts to relegate such encounters to footnotes in policy reports.

The organization of Abahlali is decidedly in response to the experience of failed consultation and its forms of stakeholder engagement by the municipality. It is a radically autonomous, horizontal, and decentralized collective, and the net result is that there is an entrenched set of organizational techniques employed with foreign non-government organizations, development organizations, and scholars which also means that any collaborative endeavor with Abahlali will necessarily foster a new bar for best practices and a legitimated quality of stakeholder engagement. Yet the vibrant urban practice of Abahlali is as much about the dynamic frontiers of urban development as it is radical urban citizenship.

The technologies and practices of Abahlali are a new benchmark of both participatory democracy as well as best practices by responsibilized citizens, and this is self-consciously articulated as such by the organization. Municipal indifference and shallow stakeholder engagement has produced a counter-governmentality emphasizing the centrality of pragmatic urban governance—one that is steeped in the daily culture of urban survival. As Zikode related from Abahlali’s downtown office headquarters, there is a strong sense that the techniques employed by government and municipal officials lack the dynamism, transparency, and awareness of the political stakes in neoliberal governance. With reference to municipal managers who seek to only consult with organizations such as Abahlali in the most nominalist terms, Zikode states, “maybe we have more solutions than you have. Don’t pretend to be knowing everything, the very same beneficiaries could help you to deliver”. This echoes an emergent sensibility among scholars who identify “poor peoples’ practices as a public good, a commons and a public resource from which the indeterminate political future of urban spaces emerges” (Elyachar, 2012: 122).

Because informal social movements such as these represent a tremendously important aspect of urban cultural life in South Africa today, they are important to think about as a critical aspect of South Africa’s urban liberation heritage. ABM is not the only such organization in informal settlements, there are many including the Landless People’s Movement (Gauteng), the Rural Network (KwaZulu-Natal), and the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, which along with Abahlali, collectively constitute the Poor People’s Alliance. The poor people’s alliance, in many critical ways, marks the contemporary legacy of the urban practices of liberation heritage of South Africa, and the critical and historical intersection of the urban space and poverty with the rights struggle. Such a connection between the informal settlement and political organization has been thoughtfully engaged and memorialized within museum contexts, such as the “Birds in a Cornfield” installation in Johannesburg’s Museum Africa, the Lwandle Migrant Labor Museum in the Helderberg Basin, and the Worker’s museum in Newtown, Johannesburg (Figure 6)¹

For a fascinating discussion of the Birds in a Cornfield Exhibit, see Coombes (2003: 79–89).

. There have even been museums architecturally inspired by the materiality of the shack as redolent of struggle memories, particularly with the evocative “memory boxes” of the Red Location Museums situated in the eponymous township of Port Elizabeth (Baines, 2007).

Yet the tradition of political organizing within the township and the informal settlement has yet to be recognized as a living intangible heritage that is inextricable from the South African urban landscape and which houses the tradition of perhaps South Africa’s most internationally recognized heritage, the modern struggle for effective redistribution of rights and participatory democracy. Because these new social movements necessarily unfold outside of formal housing, property ownership, and the formal demarcations of proper citizenship, because, with the casualization of labor they operate outside of the tradition of labor unions, these current struggles are often construed as separate from the historical rights struggle in South Africa, rather than existing as their continuation, merely inscribed with the conditions of the neoliberal urban precariat (Friedman, 2012).

Conclusion

In 1954, UNESCO sponsored a conference in Abidjan on the topic of the social impact of industrialization and urban conditions in Africa, centering around the pivotal role of wage labor and colonial/post-colonial development to cultural changes in the urban landscape (Cooper, 2002). As early as the 1950s, Georges Balandier’s work in Brazzaville shifted the traditional anthropological categories of urban analysis in order to make sense of urban “makeshifts” and “unrest” that demonstrated informal urban networks as both symptomatic of “badly realized” development of late colonialism and “Africans struggling to build new communities in their own ways” (Cooper, 2002: 12). Within the context of development and governance, the persistent indeterminacy of informal spaces continually evoke the anxiety as to whether such sites mark the decline of the liberal development project, or whether they are about a certain ascendancy of the neoliberal laissez-faire citizen, in which urban migrants secure “makeshift” platforms for attaining expanded urban participation. This is the history of urban “flux and reflux”, where urban mobility pitches between being only the residuum of the inadequacies of colonial mobilization or contemporary development, to what is actually constitutive of “citiness” (Nuttall and Mbembe, 2005).

Expanding urban heritage to explicitly address the central quality of informal communities and their practices marks several critical opportunities of relevance in the post-industrial urban context. It gives the opportunity to address the mistaken notion that informal communities (and by association, their inhabitants) have no architectural, material or cultural history that could be widely appreciated as either important or universally outstanding. In the context of the new economy and post-industrial globalization, addressing the heritage of dislocated or foreign enclaves in urban spaces is arguably a global and ascendant project. Slums or informal settlements mark the daily enactment of practices that materially and bodily assert the right to the city even in a profound state of socioeconomic disenfranchisement. These practices give meaning to the urban landscape as an agent of social change and political practice. Sensitizing a global audience to these sites as possessing formal histories, meriting considered engagement with regard to their histories, practices, and political life, presents a project which is necessitated in the context of urban revitalization, identifying social capital, or revitalization through tourism. It provides an exceptional opportunity to revisit practices of consultation and stakeholder engagement that are critically in need of challenging engagement and, in the process, it provides an opportunity to revitalize the very concept of dynamic urban heritage.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This paper was first presented at the Stanford Conference on The Conservation of Historic Urban Landscapes and Sustainable Development in May of 2013. Special thanks to Ron Jennings, Rosemary Coombe, Lynn Meskell, Thabo Manetsi, Carolyn Nakamura, Melissa Baird, Albino Pereira de Jesus Jopela, Sophia Labadi and David Morris for their assistance in discussing these ideas. I am particularly grateful to Sibusiso Innocent Zikode and Reverend Mavuso Mbhekiseni for their generosity and hospitality. Imikhonzo evela yepulazi i kuya imijondolo.

Note

Author Biography

Lindsay M. Weiss is a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University in the Department of Anthropology and the Stanford Archaeology Center. Her work examines the politics of public history and heritage in contemporary South Africa.

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