Overview:
Participatory planning has long been on the periphery of urban development. Achieving inclusive cities through scaling up participatory planning in Africa aims to develop the knowledge needed to move from participatory community-led neighbourhood planning to city-scale planning processes.
In recent decades the world has experienced unprecedented urban growth. According to the United Nations 4 billion people, or 54% of the world’s population, lived in towns and cities in 2015. That number is expected to increase to 5 billion by 2030.
Urban growth has outpaced the ability of many governments to build infrastructure and, in many towns and cities in the global South, provision for housing is inadequate. Consequently one in three urban dwellers live in informal settlements. Issues of insecure tenure, poor access to basic services, and insecure livelihoods are all prevalent. Although local governments may have the desire to improve the situation they are, in many cases, under-capitalised and under-capacitated. Existing planning legislation and practices remain incapable of resolving such issues therefore local residents try and resolve these themselves. Their efforts are, however, fragmented and localised.
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the resulting Sustainable Development Goals vow to end poverty, to achieve gender equality and ensure liveable cities. Multi-disciplinary approaches that build on local action and create strong partnerships are needed in order to advance initiatives and to address the UN Sustainable Development Goals to ensure the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all and to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.
This commitment to ‘leave no-one behind’ highlights the importance and strengthens the significance of citizen involvement in urban development. Academics seek to contribute to new solutions and approaches to problems faced by the residents in informal settlements. Universities have an important role in generating, analysing and monitoring data that can be used by policy makers. However, this should be done in collaboration with local government, local residents and organisations. Citizen involvement and public participation in policy-making and programming should be nurtured and encouraged.
Aims and objectives:
This network aimed to develop the knowledge required to move from participatory community-led neighbourhood planning to city-scale planning processes. The aims and objectives of the project were critical to achieving inclusive urban futures, these included:
- Developing frameworks that built on effective approaches of community-led planning for informal settlement, upgrading at the neighbourhood level, and then scaling these to the city level.
- Locating these frameworks within traditions of alternative planning including participatory co-productive planning, participatory planning and action planning thus strengthening the critical mass of people-centred approaches supporting inclusive urban development.
- This component elaborated why grassroots organisations make a substantive contribution to inclusive urban development and the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals.
- Developing a framework that enabled the integration of community understandings and innovations with academic and professional knowledge.
Achieving these objectives required a combined effort from academics and civil society agencies. While academic researchers encourage civil society agencies to engage meaningfully and substantively, it is difficult to achieve this within academic research programmes. By creating a formal network the opportunity for engagement is created to deliver on a set of shared objectives and to achieve the strengthening of relations between individuals and agencies.
The network was a co-productive knowledge partnership between civil society action research agencies and academic departments. The project combined professionals and academics with a commitment to substantive change and experience at local level. The network was funded by the the Leverhulme Trust and comprised committed partners that have been directly involved in previous participatory planning processes, these included:
- Professor Diana Mitlin, Managing Director of the Global Development Institute at The University of Manchester, is the project lead.
- Dr Philipp Horn, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester’s School of Education, Environment and Development and Postdoctoral Research Associate at The Open University, provides research support to the project.
SDI-affiliated civil society alliances of organised groups of low-income residents worked in partnership with academic institutions. Their participatory efforts at neighbourhoods were presented as best-practice examples in urban poverty reduction. These were:
- Dialogue on Shelter Trust, Zimbabwe
- Slum Dwellers International Alliance, Kenya
- The University of Manchester (UK)
- University of Johannesburg (SA) Design Society Development DESIS Lab [the level that I was involved at in facilitating the project]
- 1 to 1 – Agency of Engagement (SA)
- CURI at The University of Nairobi
- Faculty of the Built Environment at the National University of Science and Technology (Zimbabwe)
All of these departments had a track record of urban development planning. Selected individuals within these departments had established connections with low-income communities, planners and urban professionals within their respective countries as well as sub-Saharan Africa.
South Africa – Year 1
The South African projects were designed as a means to support the action research of 1to1 – Agency of Engagement with the organisation’s collaborative partners; the University of Johannesburg’s DSD DESIS Lab, The Slovo Park Development Forum (SPCDF) and various other grassroots community-based groups working on informal settlement upgrading in Johannesburg.
Suzette van der Walt from 1to1 – Agency of Engagement used the grant to develop a series of action-research tools that were identified as missing support elements to the process of upgrading, these included:
- A ‘Codes of Engagement’ for practitioners, community leaders and local government to work by
- A tactical workshop to bring together the City of Joburg with the SPCDF – that was shelved
- A ‘roadmap’ that helps unpack the challenges and difficulties of implementing the Upgrading Informal Settlement Programme policy
- A discursive ‘Kickstarter’ tool to help a grass-roots based organisation co-develop a project with partners
Codes of Engagement:
The grant facilitated the inclusion of several grassroots development practitioners to join the tail end of the Architecture Alternative Practice Module. This supplementary workshop aimed to co-develop a series of principles that 1to1 – Agency of Engagement had been collecting since its inception with the experience of the invited practitioners, community leaders and NGO representatives with the students.
The workshop used facilitated visual thinking process to identify a set of suggested practices that could make working with different groups of people, specifically, grassroots organisations more respectful, responsible and productive.
The outcome was a set of Codes of Engagement that can be accessed by students, community and technical people to share on a global platform: Youtube – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ueKVEOBiaM
USIP Support in Slovo Park:
The workshop aimed to support the Slovo Park Development Forum who are still working with the City of Joburg/City Power to upgrade Slovo Park under the Upgrading Informal Settlement Programme (UISP).
The aim was to conduct a short co-productive workshop that would mimic the UISP process on a single neighbourhood block in order to demonstrate how the practice of participatory upgrading of informal settlements can work within the UISP framework (which allows for participatory practice) and choose a single block to do this.
The ultimate goal was to create a set of demonstrable outputs (documentary, diagrams e.t.c) as well as training city officials and the community in the process. 1to1 was working with Wits University’s planning department and the National Upgrade Support Programme (NUSP) to outlay the broader nature of participative informal settlement development practice in South Africa and are building good relationships with them.
Unfortunately, due to the passing of the leader of the SPCDF the entire project was shelved to allow for a period of mourning – and as a result, the opportunity was lost.
A road map for Informal Settlement Upgrading for SA .
The intention of the ‘road map’ is to visually demonstrate the challenges and opportunities that exist in the current UISP policy process.
Due to issues in implementing the upgrading of informal settlements in South Africa, there are many programmes, processes and policies in place to address the provision of housing or the upgrading of informal settlements. The tool was meant to serve as a support element for local officials, community leaders and NGO practitioners in planning and navigating the UISP policy.
The tool development was divided into 3 phases of production:
- Data Collection,
- Assimilation, and
- Presentation.
In the data collection phase, 1to1 collected information from various experts in the field of informal settlement upgrading, including government officials, grassroots community groups and academics.
The manifestation of this process was be an interactive tool that communicates data in a visual, accessible manner for various stakeholders to commune around a single tool to understand their roles with relation to the primary goals and in relation to each other. It also served as a culmination of research for the case studies involved to make their endeavour worthwhile.
The Kickstarter Pack:
The Neighbourhood Kickstarter Pack was designed as a dialogue tool to support the early stages of developing a project brief with residents and grassroots leaders of community-based organisations.
The first pilot project was developed in Slovo Park with the Build a Future, the Youth Forum and the SPCDF where the beta version was piloted. It served as a kit of tools for communities of neighbourhood makers to use when determining their project brief, budget requirements and develop funding proposals to establish their projects.
The resources within the tool served as a basic set of tools to guide the process towards well-planned, well-supported build projects, ensuring the maximum likelihood of success and maximum buy-in from a variety of stakeholders.
The tool is being further developed with various partners of 1to1 and refined towards a public delivery and sharing.
South Africa – Year 2:
The second year of the grant focused on field testing the previously developed tools (Codes of Engagement, Timeline Tool (UISP Road Map), Community Action Planning (CAP) Tool and Neighborhood Kickstarter Pack) and deepening the base from which the tool data is developed. Further interviews with city officials, NGO experts and grassroots organisations were conducted in this period. This has included the addition of the Kliptown Leadership in the process and active facilitation by Dumisani Mathebula with 1to1 – Agency of Engagement. The work with the SPCDFcontinued and the tools were field-tested with the leadership during the early stages of their City of Johannesburg led development – in the form of electrification.
The tool sets were compiled into a digital platform that took the form of an application accessible by phone and web. The app was not meant to replace the tool, but rather carry the exercise and practice of engagement into a more accessible format for practitioners in Johannesburg as well as the Leverhulme Research Network.
Outomes:
More on the network and how it attempts to achieve these aims can be found here: https://www.gdi.manchester.ac.uk/research/groups/urban-futures/scaling-up-participation-in-urban-planning/