JOHANNESBURG'S Human Development Strategy offers an opportunity to get the community back on board when taking urban renewal decisions.
Neil Fraser
May 16, 2005
THE Central Johannesburg Partnership (CJP), of which I was executive director from its establishment on 1 August 1992 until stepping down at the end of February this year, started life as a trilateral organisation. Its three founding sectoral partners were business, the council of the time, and the community.
The community was mainly represented by members of the activist community organisation Actstop. Actstop had been prominent in fighting the apartheid government on many of the tragic Group Areas Act interventions.
In the CJP it was a cohesive group, united by a common goal, which was able to articulate and present the case for the centre city community. Understandably, the group was then focussed on accelerating democratic change and I learned a great deal from its representatives, George Sejaphala, Cas Coovadia, Moses Moeshoeshoe, Zed Mangaliso, Sisa Njikelana and many others.
With the local authority elections in 1995 leading to the establishment of the first democratic city council in the history of the city, the CJP's three sectoral parties agreed to a divorce. Each would now take on an independent, but co-operative role.
Many of the community leaders associated with the CJP were absorbed into various levels of government, some into business. Nearly all the previous council officials and elected councillors rode off into the sunset and the CJP became a non-profit organisation representing business interests; after a further restructuring two years later it emerged as a private, non-profit organisation focused on the urban renewal of the city.
The new independent role of central city community emerged in 1996 under the banner of the Johannesburg Inner City Community Forum (JICCF) and the three sectors continued to engage one another bilaterally and trilaterally in a new structure, the Johannesburg Inner City Development Forum (JICDF), which was established specifically to develop a vision for the central city.
The central city area stretches from the M2 in the south to the top of Braamfontein Ridge in the north, the M1 in the west to Harrow Road in the east.
The three sectors were joined in the JICDF by provincial government and labour for the visioning process. The process itself was quite unique - none of the parties around the table were that comfortable with each other to collaborate totally on a visioning exercise and so four "visions" were produced - those of business, the council, provincial government and the community. These were later welded into a single vision.
For me, although heavily involved in the business visioning process, the most meaningful vision produced was by the JICCF, the community group. This was probably because of the four sectors, it was the most broadly focused.
After the vision had been agreed, the development forum was superceded by a Section 59 committee, the forerunner of the current Section 79 or Inner City Committee. The Section 59 committee was actually established to oversee the implementation of the agreed vision and the community continued to be represented on that body by the community forum.
When the first interim democratic metropolitan council structure (made up of four council sub-structures - remember those confusing days?) gave way to the current metropolitan structure in 2000, the community representative body, the JICCF, was disbanded. In terms of the new council structure, the community would be represented at ward level and the weight of community involvement in the Inner City Committee disappeared.
I believe that this was a great loss to democratising the city. The more I visit other cities or read about urban renewal, the more the presence of strong inner city community representation is apparent.
When I look at the processes adopted by various levels of government for a wide variety of issues (lately that for the development of the provincial government precinct in the inner city), I suspect that the absence of a strong, representative community body has allowed the authorities to water down the processes until they become empty shadows of democratic government.
I certainly miss the value that the voice of the people who walk and live in the city brought to our earlier processes. Yes, I know that, theoretically, democratically elected councillors are the voice of the people. But are they and can they ever be such when they have to toe party lines?
And business is as business always was, circumscribed by the "bottom line". So it comes as no surprise when a business representative distances himself from publicly opposing a government development patently not in the city's interests because his name may affect his corporation's business dealing with that particular level of government.
Thus it is the community that brings an ameliorating voice to the table - and that voice seems to be stilled these days.
All of this is why the City's Human Development Strategy (HDS) that I mentioned last week is so important. In its introduction the HDS reads, "Human development is about more than development and how it relates to people, and it is about more than economic growth. Human development is about enlarging people's choices.
"A human development perspective recognises that people are the City's biggest asset and that they need to be supported and encouraged to realise their full potential so as to become fully fledged urban residents."
Stephen Goldsmith, a previous mayor of Indianapolisin the US, in his book Putting Faith in Neighbourhoods - Making Cities Work through Grassroots Citizenship, says, "The breakdown of the family and the steep rise in criminal and antisocial behaviour proved devastating to urban neighbourhoods.
"I saw this firsthand while serving for 12 years as prosecutor in Indianapolis before becoming mayor. During that time I worked hard to ensure that those engaged in antisocial and improper conduct paid the full legal consequences. Among other things, I prosecuted record numbers of individuals and held noncustodial parents responsible to their children and community," he writes.
"But despite my belief in the importance of strongly enforcing the legal consequences of destructive behaviour, my experience as prosecutor impressed on me the limits of law and authority without a properly functioning society. Unless attitudes, values and habits change, few permanent benefits follow. Civil society, it turns out, depends as much on these factors as on the rule of law," Goldsmith says.
If we are going to change attitudes, values and habits, if we are going to rebuild a properly functioning society, then we need a sweeping but well planned approach such as the HDS seems to suggest but which must be administered at an enabled grass-roots level.
As Goldsmith says, "...rule driven, top-down, one-size-fits-all bureaucracies and programmes are all but incapable of providing help for people in an individualised way. Instead they are good at treating everyone equally, even when the treatment is not good."
He then argues the case for "an active culture of community-based institutions". Using such institutions, Indianapolis launched a Neighbourhood Empowerment Initiative. One of the four guiding maxims of the initiative was, "Neighbourhood participation does not automatically work by inviting citizens to the decision-making table.
"It requires training, resources, partnerships and accountability that help community leaders adequately convert their knowledge and concern about the area into results."
I would hope that, as he finalises the City's budget for its next financial year, our executive mayor will prioritise the further development of Strategic Direction Three of the HDS, "Building the prospects for social inclusion in the city", by providing substantial funding for such training.
Last week I suggested that Strategic Direction Three created a fantastic opportunity for business partnership through their corporate social investment activities.
Yesterday I spoke to representatives from a number of graduate schools from, I think, 16 African countries brought together in Johannesburg by the Gordon Institute of Business Science (Gibs). In fact, it was in preparing the short presentation, "Urban Regeneration Problems in a Dual Economy" that I started musing over this issue of community participation in the urban renewal process.
It also struck me just what an unbelievable resource the education sector provides. What a partner it would make if all the city's education organisations offered continuous programmes, not at executive level, of which we have plenty, but at community leadership level and community resident level.
What about a Community Resource Centre that can take the HDS forward through citizen and civil society education? We could become the model for the country and beyond in citizen development.
Have a great week!
Neil
