“The investment made in the development and management of urban spaces yields immeasurable social returns. However, we recognise that we are still far from a city where public space works for us in this way. It is fully acknowledged that gated communities and boom neighbourhoods with high walls dominate the South African landscape. Not only do these react to crime prevention responses, they also undermine social cohesion at the neighbourhood scale. In fact they enforce the converse effect of creating unsafe spaces. Contrast this with hustle and bustle of a township street where crime is still currently very high but the response has not been fortressing. The standard of the houses is incomparable but the quality of social interactions far surpasses that of so-called safe neighbourhoods.”
“One type of public space that has emerged since 1994 is understandably that which commemorates the struggle against apartheid. Symbolic buildings and public spaces have been built as sights for the presencing of occluded histories and the mobilising of collected bodies. The Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication in Kliptown celebrates the 1955 signing of the ANC's liberation manifesto, the freedom charter. Public life in this space is monumental and commemorative, an annual or twice annual affair. Otherwise it is starkly dislocated from the bustle of daily life around it. Perhaps it is always like this when urban space is conceived as grand political gesture but surely, I would ask, it should now be layered with the multiple registers of public life, of selling of exchanging, of celebrating of playing if it going to fulfil the revolutionary potential of the charter whose signing it commemorates. Or perhaps is there another agenda here, precisely to bury the charter, to entomb it in order that its revolutionary potential is stilled?”
