Responding to the urbanist’s challenge of making people “get it”

In a recent exchange with a contact I raised the point that I do not think the challenge of getting the public to grasp the nature of urban interventions so that they can organically pick it up and sustain it themselves is something we’re ever going to make any headway on. At least in the South African urban contexts I have worked with. My (to be fair, very limited) experience with urban interventionism and what can be deemed as an “urbanist” movement as a whole is that ultimately it seems the same ground is retread constantly with every newly inspired intervention but just with new vernacular and new concepts to make it seem different and fresh. Fundamentally the politics of representation in that ground treading stay the same and the structure of power budges only an inch here and there almost as a form of appeasement.

It’s why I’m becoming increasingly interested in foundation level urban education and public pedagogy. These are struggles that the average person must and should claim for themselves, it is not the responsibility of urbanists to take on the urban missionary mantle to deliver interventions that can save cities. Urbanists come with their own bias and their own situated knowledges that may do more harm than good. What’s the point if these are not strategies that are not self-actualised at every conceivable level by lots of different groups, each finding their own relevance in true citizenship action that cuts across social-difference. That approach works — it’s the bedrock of communities like Valhalla Park when they are faced with do or die situations like breaking point housing issues.

But if you can work from the perspective that an urbanist can become a public co-educator rather than a missionary — one that engages with these existing strategies and struggles, to base a method of working that situates its own relevance in helping when help is called for and not when its deemed necessary by the urbanist — well, then I think we can begin to see real radical democracy take hold. It’s a role change that focuses on enabling and sponsoring emerging and creative forms agency that have potential to bring down structural impositions that although may be invisible to us, are very real to other groups. It’s a key change from a mode of urbanist intervention that is banging a head against the same structure and the forces that keep the structures in place, expecting some change, and then tacking on people as an “inclusive” and “collaborative” methodological tickbox second.

But that requires a massive shift in thinking and how we as researchers, interventionists, communicators, urbanists see our own role. How we understand the impact of our own being, our positions and our identity. It requires a degree of self-reflexivity that I actually don’t know is possible. It’s only going to be with that reflexivity and a total shift in how we think of our actions and our responsibility and role to publics (multiple forms of public life beyond the extremely limited “public” sphere we see as reality from our position and operate in) that the status quo begins to shake rather than only budge a mere inch. It also requires a commitment to a form of urbanist thinking and engagement that is brave in being cautious; favours long, slow processes over instant gratification; and is selflessly driven for a greater, communal good that operates on the quiet, mundane everyday rather than an ego and brand driven, spectacle filled interventionist mode.

Until then, we as urbanists are the status quo and we’re unwittingly reinforcing it and sustaining it with every intervention and action we take. We operate in a very thin clean veil of what we perceive as being the reality of the city and city life — meanwhile underneath the veil the mass of low-middle working class continues to fester. I don’t think many urbanists (from researchers to designers, communicators to architects, creatives to educators and everything else in-between) realise that with the gate-keeping power that they wield and the intrinsic positional bias they hold, when it comes to the everyday struggles and strategies of majority urbanites they’re far too often part of the problem rather than the solution.

I have been guilty of this myself.