Why Can Public Participation in Johannesburg Be Successful, Yet Sustainable Change Unsuccessful?

Abstract

Public participation aims to extend democratic and governance processes beyond the state, bringing relevant stakeholders into local decision-making processes about issues that directly affect them. Decisions made about how urban environments are designed, shaped and used must be made by a range of actors, most importantly those who use these environments every day. In Johannesburg over many years, Sticky Situations has been drawing on participatory processes to bring actors from all sectors of the city together to co-produce parks and public urban spaces. However, despite many participatory projects, Sticky Situations struggles to realise long term success of most projects. Our work demonstrates successful, prolonged and extensive engagements and collaboration with all stakeholders, yet an inability to realise many sustainable outcomes. Despite this we keep loyal to participatory processes whilst scratching our collective heads, wondering why these processes fail to transform our city. This paper aims to interrogate this conundrum; evaluating Sticky’s participatory work in parks and public open spaces in Johannesburg’s inner city. Drawing on case studies, we re-conceptualise parks and public open spaces through an African urbanism lens to highlight the tensions inherent in a City vision of what parks and public spaces should be and the reality in how they are used every day. We evaluate the disjuncture between the workings within the City and the needs of communities on the ground. Ultimately we have found that despite the legal framework and many official’s desire to embrace public participation, Municipal systems and structures simply have no space for civil society and the dynamic nature of community engagement, causing failures within projects intended to be sustainable. This additionally results in further breakdown of relationships between communities and the Municipality that is attempting to serve them, compounding the challenges within our Inner City Parks.