Politics and Community-Based Research , livre ebook

This book is a new and courageous examination of the complexity of embedded research. It is an honest and insightful reflection that … challenges and deepens arguments around spaces of participation through theoretical reflection and, more centrally, through the actual experience of the embedded research of Yeoville Studio. It is an important work for this and other reasons.
DR TANYA ZACK, URBAN PLANNER AND WRITER, JOHANNESBURG
We need more of this kind of community-based research. A masterful study on ‘making the invisible visible’ in Johannesburg, the book openly discusses ethical challenges, memory and uncertainty. Through this humbling and exciting experience authors challenge the fundamentals of participatory research while illuminating informality.
PROFESSOR JULIE-ANNE BOUDREAU, URBANISATION CULTURE SOCIÉTÉ RESEARCH CENTRE, INSTITUT NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE, MONTRÉAL
POLITICS AND COMMUNITY-BASED RESEARCH
Perspectives from Yeoville Studio, Johannesburg

EDITED BY
CLAIRE BÉNIT-GBAFFOU • SARAH CHARLTON SOPHIE DIDIER • KIRSTEN DÖRMANN
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg 2001
www.witspress.co.za
Compilation © Editors 2019
Chapters © Individual contributors 2019
Published edition © Wits University Press 2019
Images and figures © Copyright holders
First published 2019
http://dx.doi.org.10.18772/22019103849
978-1-77614-384-9 (Hardback)
978-1-77614-385-6 (Web PDF)
978-1-77614-386-3 (EPUB)
978-1-77614-387-0 (Mobi)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
All images remain the property of the copyright holders. The publishers gratefully acknowledge the publishers, institutions and individuals referenced in captions for the use of images. Every effort has been made to locate the original copyright holders of the images reproduced here; please contact Wits University Press in case of any omissions or errors.
This book was published with the support of the French Institute of South Africa-Research (IFAS-Recherche). IFAS-Recherche was founded in 1995 in Johannesburg. Under the authority of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), it promotes research in the humanities and social sciences about southern Africa and within this framework supports scientific cooperation.

Project manager: Inga Norenius
Copyeditor: Inga Norenius
Proofreader: Lisa Compton
Indexer: Tessa Botha
Cover design: Pete Bosman
Cover photograph: Lerato Maduna
Title page photograph: Solam Mkhabela
Typesetter: Newgen
Typeset in 11 point Arno Pro
We wish to dedicate this book to three key figures among our community partners – Maurice Smithers, without whom the Studio would not have been born; George Lebone, who gave the Studio wings through the breadth of his experience and networks in Yeoville; and Edmund Elias, who perhaps most clearly understood the possibilities opened up by the Studio, and continues to work with us to this day.
Contents
Acknowledgements
SECTION A: INTRODUCING THE BOOK
1 Why tell the story of Yeoville Studio?
Claire Bénit-Gbaffou
2 Introducing Yeoville: Context and representations
Sophie Didier and Claire Bénit-Gbaffou
3 Exploring the politics of community-engaged research
Claire Bénit-Gbaffou
SECTION B: NARRATING: THE POLITICS OF CONSTRUCTING LOCAL IDENTITIES
4 Introduction
Sophie Didier
5 Being young in Yeoville
Potsiso Phasha
6 Africa Week Festival in Yeoville: Reclaiming a social and political space through art
Pauline Guinard
7 Love stories
Willy-Claude Hebandjoko, Claire Bénit-Gbaffou and Shahid Vawda
8 Managing xenophobia and constructing Yeoville community in public meetings
Claire Bénit-Gbaffou and Eulenda Mkwanazi
9 Yeoville as a transgressional space: Voëlvry and the Afrikaner counterculture of the 1980s
Maria Suriano, William Dewar and Clara Pienaar-Lewis
10 Leaving Yeoville
Sophie Didier and Ophélie Arrazouaki
11 The Yeoville Stories project: Looking for public history in Johannesburg
Sophie Didier and Naomi Roux
SECTION C: RECOMMENDING: FROM UNDERSTANDING MICRO-POLITICS TO IMAGINING POLICY
12 Introduction
Sarah Charlton
13 My place in Yeoville: Housing stories
Kirsten Dörmann, Mpho Matsipa and Claire Bénit-Gbaffou
14 Urban compounding in Johannesburg
Kirsten Dörmann and Solam Mkhabela
15 Community land trusts and social inclusion
Heinz Klug and Neil Klug
16 Building stories
Claire Bénit-Gbaffou
17 Learning from low-income living in an inner-city suburb to inform policy
Sarah Charlton
18 Sharing a flat in Yeoville: Trajectories, experiences, relationships
Simon Sizwe Mayson
19 Running a spaza shop
Mamokete Matjomane
20 Integrating the ‘community’ in the governance of urban informality at the neighbourhood level
Mamokete Matjomane and Claire Bénit-Gbaffou
SECTION D: POLITICISING: COMMUNITY-BASED RESEARCH AND THE POLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE
21 Introduction
Claire Bénit-Gbaffou
22 Street trader stories
Nicolette Pingo
23 Designing with informality: Towards an urban design framework for Yeoville’s main street
Abdul Abed
24 Street photography and the politics of representation: A portrait of Muller Street
Claire Bénit-Gbaffou and Sally Gaule
25 Knowledge construction in a multi-disciplinary perspective: Portraying Natal-Saunders Street
Solam Mkhabela, Claire Bénit-Gbaffou and Kirsten Dörmann
26 Knowledge capital and urban community politics in Yeoville
Obvious Katsaura
27 Activists in their own words
Eulenda Mkwanazi and Nicolette Pingo
28 Knowledge production and the politics of community engagement: Working with informal traders in Yeoville and beyond
Claire Bénit-Gbaffou
Contributors
Photography credits
Acronyms and abbreviations
List of tables, figures and boxes
Index
Acknowledgements
No book is a single person’s adventure, but this book even less so than any other.
The book is the tip of an iceberg – a reflection on a much broader research initiative, Yeoville Studio, undertaken by the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) between 2010 and 2012, and involving more than 300 students and 20 staff, including some from other departments. The book itself includes only a few of the Studio’s participants, young and senior scholars alike. They committed to the Studio and to Yeoville, beyond the class project, and did not give up editing and updating their work in spite of the many years it took to finalise the book: we thank them all. The book is dedicated to the young scholars who are authors in the book: Abdul Abed, Ophélie Arrazouaki, Pauline Guinard, Willy-Claude Hebandjoko, Obvious Katsaura, Mamokete Matjomane, Simon Mayson, Eulenda Mkwanazi, Potsiso Phasha, Nicolette Pingo, and Naomi Roux, who now have become experienced and engaged professionals – activists, academics, artists and officials – and whom we saw blossoming within the Studio. They are making us proud.
This book is not about community voices: it is about scholarly reflections on what it has meant to engage with one specific community in post-apartheid Johannesburg, as academics, researchers and educators. Yet of course these reflections were born and developed in multiple deep, heated or friendly engagements with a number of community members in Yeoville – meaning, people involved in Yeoville public life who partook in our workshops, activities and events. We would like to honour in particular Suzanne Afoué, Elisabeth Lethlaku and the Yeoville Women’s Forum, Angelina Motsepe, the late Aura Msimang, and also pay tribute to all the micro-traders of Yeoville, who were at the core of many studies, student projects, interactions, workshops and events – even today, their livelihood and place in the city remains unrecognised. Their stories form one key thread of this book.
There were also more sustained conversations – central to opening our minds and keeping our feet grounded – with our three community partner leaders. Maurice Smithers, who at the time was the director of Yeoville Bellevue Community Development Trust, opened the possibility of the Studio in the first place through his dedication to the development of the neighbourhood. George Lebone, the chair of the Yeoville Stakeholders Forum, deepened the engagement with a variety of residents in Yeoville through the breadth of his social network. And Edmund Elias, the spokesperson of the South African National Traders and Retailers Association, who joined the partnership mid-way, sustained it, and grew it far beyond Yeoville Studio. We thank them for their trust, for their engagement, their openness and generosity, and for their friendship. We hope the book is another moment in this conversation.
The Studio and the book could only take place in the context of institutional support. Wits University and the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment – the School of Architecture and Planning in particular – were enormously supportive, granting us strategic funding to carry the project. We are especially grateful to Emeritus Professor Alan Mabin, Head of the School at the time of the Studio, for his faith in us and what appeared at first to be a crazy venture. We also express our deep appreciation to the Centre for Urbanism and Built Environment Studies (CUBES), a platform in the School that works to bring together urban research, pedagogy and community engagement for students and staff – objectives that were exemplified in Yeoville Studio.
We found a second, continuous and enthusiastic, responsive and patient, supporter of the book in the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS) – an institute