Culture-Led Placemaking in Johannesburg: Practitioner Perspectives
Mariapaola McGurk of The Coloured Cube (pic by Petra Mason)
Flyer design by Natalia Tofas
How culture is being used in neighborhood development was the subject of a recent colloquium on ‘Culture Led Placemaking’ in Johannesburg, featuring practitioners as speakers and respondents. Held at the Moonvalley Studios in Bez Valley on 19 October 2019, the day -long event was convened under the banner of Creative City South and the Wits School of Arts Cultural Policy and Management Department (CPM). It attracted some forty-five participants plus a number of young community members. The key focus was to document how arts-oriented practitioners worked with ‘culture’ in neighborhood development. It was a contribution to growing knowledge of sophisticated and innovative ‘bottom up’ approaches to cultural governance.
There were two sets of inputs. The first set was on professional practice by artist-curator led enterprises (The Trinity Session, The Coloured Cube) which have been working on projects in the urban sphere, drawing on local assets and working with arts, creativity and heritage. A number of these projects involved state engagement via tenders. The second set of inputs were projects that work in ‘bottom up’ ways drawing on culture. One was a community based creative-social enterprise from Bez Valley (Makers Valley Collective), the other Revolution Room was initiated by a visual arts agency (VANSA) working with the community in Cosmo City. Respondents included artists working with public projects and social practice and helped provoke discussions.
What is Culture Led Placemaking?
Zayd Minty speaks. (Pic by Natalia Tofas)
Zayd Minty, the Convenor, presented a broad introduction to the colloquium, part of a ten-year research agenda initiated by Wits School of Arts CPM. It recognised that while cities have historically drawn on culture for city making, it has become a form of public policy since the 80s and 90s especially in cities in the Global North. In Johannesburg, we have a history of such public policy stemming from the 90s when the state took over an active informal arts district, Newtown.
This ramped up in the 2000s with state, cultural sector and private sector, each being involved in various culture-led initiatives. In the east of the inner city, there was extensive experimentation with bottom up cultural projects such as the Creative InnerCity Initiative, the Joubert Park Project (JPP) and Keleketla Library. More recently the term ‘creative placemaking’ has become popular - shaping new initiatives such as those in Bez Valley. Although placemaking is a term used often in urban regeneration initiatives, creative placemaking has a specific recent history utilized in the US as a public policy underpinned by a 10-year research project, through incentive funding offered by the National Endowment for the Arts - a fund known as "Our Town". Zayd noted that the literature broadly suggests culture-led placemaking has a series of common features – it is usually collaborative, underpinned by quadruple helix partnerships, has research building on local assets and identities (often through cultural mapping) and works with creativity and memory in building both soft and hard infrastructure for improving quality of life in neighborhoods. It is less an end in itself, since communities have developed strong urban coping mechanisms of their own, but more an opportunity to galvanize vision and engagement around longer term interventions which need collaboration and creativity.
Professional Practice: Working with the State through Procurement
Stephen Hobbs of The Trinity Session. (Pic by Natalia Tofas)
Stephen Hobbs, one half of the Trinity Session, described the company's practise from its establishment in 2001, as an arts collective working as a creative enterprise. He showed how a number of opportunities in Johannesburg, South Africa and abroad, helped shape their work. Amongst this was Johannesburg's 1% for Public Art policy. In the mid 2000s, they were responsible for a number of important public art commissions such as the Juta Street trees, Van den Berg's ‘The Eland’ and Kentridge and Marx's ‘Firewalker’. This was a significant period in which the company was able to experiment with different ways of working with capital budgets. One ‘hack’ included capitalising performance work used as research. More recent work for #ArtmyJozi is a second part of its successful tender for public art along the transport corridors - previously known as ‘Corridors of Freedom’. Here work is being done in a participatory way with communities, drawing on, as in Noordgesicht, local memories and heros, visualising the aspirations of the community, while commemorating its pasts.
Mariapaola McGurk is a founder of Coloured Cube. This creative enterprise emerged out of necessity and Mariapaola has effectively used her skills in visual arts and business in the pursuit of relevant and fulfilling work. In her presentation ‘Creating Opportunity For Placemaking When There Seems To Be None’, she provides a variety of key points and takeaways. She argued that tenders for areas such as placemaking, public art and community engagement were rare and other kinds of tenders can be approached with social practice and placemaking in mind. Showing examples of exhibitions development calls, and transport museum initiatives, she argued creative re-imaging of public sector briefs are possible and worthwhile for cultural workers to consider. However, there are too few people bidding for work out there, and she urged the audience to develop skills and knowledge, by doing - asking questions, reading up, building confidence and in the process learning. "Create the opportunity by using your creativity" she urges. Lastly, she called for a more engaged, outspoken creative sector – emphasising the importance of the "value of culture and creativity" needs to be spoken to more deeply, more especially to those with "the power, finances or networks to allow more placemaking and real engagements to take place."
Bottom up Practices?
Tumi Moroeng, director and founder of Makers Valley Collective (MVC), led the audience into the second part by activating a pop-up carnival. This demonstrated the project's belief in participatory creative approacheswhich positively shift and make places. The project’s key aims are to "promote and help create better access to information, markets, networks and maker spaces where people of all backgrounds come to learn how to work with their hands, to explore, experiment and where barriers are overcome inclusively and equally". Tumi suggested that he has recognised his practice as placemaking over time by experimenting - "not knowing what [he] was doing" initially - and he has grown to understand it as connecting people and connecting them to space. As a result, the MVC is rooted in partnerships with communities in Bez Valley, but also has footprints, by way of relationships with locally based cultural workers, in a range of communities in other areas of Gauteng especially. As a community-based practitioner, his main concerns centred on support from outside his immediate community. He raised questions about government processes which often ignore communities in the development of briefs and involvement of projects, and of private sector players who have to be convinced to see the value of working outside their comfort zones. Tumi's high level of charisma, positivity, his strong leadership abilities and drive, show the high bar needed by leaders in the field. It also raises questions - how do we foster new leadership, how do we pass on leadership?
Molemo Moiloa, an independent researcher and arts practitioners spoke to the project ‘Revolution Room’, an initiative undertaken from 2013 onwards run by artist Vaughn Sadie in Cosmo City. This was a collaborative project over an extended period of time which, "seeks to explore new ways that artist lead projects and organisations can mediate and reflect on their process in the public realm, through participatory practice and interventions in ‘common space’." Cosmo City is a post-apartheid neighborhood, which had some laudable intents at its outset, but has unwittingly replicated some of Apartheid's urban planning principles in its design. This has resulted in class divisions being spatalialised. Molemo spoke to two key issues with relevance to the session: support to and development of a critical community of practice; and the exploration of structures of resident relations that ensure relevance, engagement and accountability. Working with communities and their political dynamics is difficult. Recognising the complexity of working in such contexts, Molemo's key take out was the processes of selecting artist participants. Done through a panel which chose artists from an open call, Revolution Room ended up with artists without sufficient community engagement skills. This led to various culture clashes. The decision-making forum for the project had to take into account that there was already a highly visible and active set of community initiatives operating. The development of a research unit and space to serve was thus vital, with participatory mapping of cultural assets central to its work - linked to the development of a community archive. This element of the governance structure sought to further transparency and the co-production of knowledge, towards fostering generative space. Ultimately the community identified 4 new research projects - two of which -"backyarding" and access to education – moved forward - far from artist driven initiatives. The end result included challenges around participation and limited mutual learning, raising many questions around governance and its link to practice.
Building a Community of Practice
Myer Taub, Angel Khumalo, Kyla Davis and Avril Joffe (Chair)
A robust discussion was set off by respondents - artists and activists: Angel Khumalo, Myer Taub, Kyla Davis - who spoke to their own experiences from the field. The seession was chaired by Avril Joffe of the Wits CPM. They suggested that both visual and performative approaches have a role in placemaking initiatives. Three key issues emerged, each of which suggested attention be placed on questions of governance and research.
The development of a more equipped community of practice was seen as vital for furthering culture led placemaking. There were valuable experiences shared by, for example Stephen and Moiloa around mapping, while Mariapaola's proposition to think more creatively around tenders was useful. There was a call for ongoing dialogues and sharing what is happening more consistently. The organisers agreed to respond once they have a proposition. Invitations were offered to use upcoming platforms to further debate - including an Orchards Project event (10 November) and the Makers Valley Festival (March 2020).
The second was questions about what culture could mean for placemaking in South Africa. What place do African knowledge systems have, for example, in this? What does tradition, family and gender mean for our practices? What is the role of knowledge from other parts of the African continent and in the global south? There are no easy answers to these, but they flag the need for greater engagement on understanding concepts in specific contexts.
Lastly, the ways in which engagement happens with the state was flagged as an area of exploration. Communities and artists were unclear about how local government functions in relation to partnerships and procurement. This means knowledge about democracy and accountability is needed.
Ultimately culture is one (very small) part of what local government currently does, and if practitioners want to influence greater engagement with working with culture for sustainable development at neighborhood level, emphasis is needed on building collaborative knowledge and action and improving ethical practice. This creates opportunities for greater research and development.
Presentations by speakers can be accessed here.