Participatory Design and Making: Towards People Responsive Public Spaces

This paper presents an action research project that is teamwork between UCT academics and Sustainable Urban Neighbourhoods (SUN). SUN is a consultant for the implementation of the City of Cape Town’s Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading (VPUU) programme. The research is underpinned by the constructivist viewpoint that knowledge creation, application and understandings are a result of multiple actors – with even poor beneficiary communities having a positive contribution to make. The research project reacts to the overt paradox of unemployment/underemployment in a context of numerous unfulfilled needs as experienced by the many unfortunate people excluded from the formal city. Borrowing from the Scandinavian active welfare approach, the project makes use of people’s residual capabilities to design and construct a small public space within one of the interstitial spaces in Monwabisi Park in Khayelitsha informal settlement. The public space, which is design around a municipal water-point, is conceived within a wider urban planning/design framework as an Early Childhood Development (ECD) Centre. It is multifunctional place for children who cannot afford daycare facilities to play in a crime-free environment. The water-point will draw adults to the site and so achieve two aims (1) safety and supervision for the children via adult surveillance (2) attraction of child care-givers to a place where they can interact informally with ECD staff for information exchange, identification of problems and assistance requirements assessment (child nutrition, health, safety, education and development). The space will also provide a platform for other community activities such as a gathering point for the Monwabisi Park Neighbourhood Watch (NHW). This project is conceived as the first designed ECD public space in a future network of several similar such small public spaces. Although this project is modest in scale, its potentially beneficial implications for community wellbeing, emergent academic insights and development of reciprocated partnerships are immense.

The paper’s thesis is that participatory approaches can facilitate empowerment of communities through skills transfer while offering a viable framework for optimal utilisation of limited resources to create safe and responsive urban habitats. The conclusions of the paper look at the challenges and possibilities inherent in active welfare as a synergetic umbrella for efforts by the general public, governments, professionals, civil society, the private sector, and academics aimed at realistically facing up to the informal settlement challenge.