red tape

This morning we put up the wallpapers in KwaThema and did the first design crits. The scope of the work at the two big sites is clear, and so, now are the research topics. The smaller projects less so.

In the afternoon, a meeting with the officials of Ekurhuleni Municipality. The meeting I’ve asked for since February. I’ve brought along three students and three community people, and Tseleng. The meeting is at the Benoni museum. A brick building with a swiss feeling. Inside, the taxonomy of the new South Africa. A room with a display of the desk of the late O.R.Tambo, exile leader of the ANC. Posters in intense yellow and green with the story of his life marching along the walls around. Another room with paintings from sixty, even eighty years ago, gentle oils, foreign scenes with different light. Traditional craft room. Different histories with no sense of intersection.

Our meeting room has no data projector so we use a laptop. There’s no visual thread to run through the story. And no clear excuse for giving them the facts so late, even if its their lack of interest. My sympathies are split between the officials, trying to do this delivery right, and the recipients of their slow services.

Its strange to be on the wrong side of the law here, suggesting simple and obvious procedures and being told to wait, to let this process and that process happen. There’s mention of other proposals that may or may not exist for the beerhall site. The potential danger of the damaged structure. The community representatives put their points across, describe their interest in taking over the running of the projects and their frustrations at waiting for someone to come and clean up the tip that surrounds the beer hall.

And Tseleng makes the point that as a KwaThema youth, he feels inspired by the energy they are bringing to the project and worries about it being bogged down in red tape.

I offer the council three scenarios. They can block the project, we can implement it on the understanding that it is temporary and outside their processes, or we can do it and then accept they will force us to remove everything later. We agree instead to meet with the councilor next week and the relevant departments, in KwaThema, to see what we could proceed with.

We all feel grim going out. I halfjoke should we go for a drink.

It feels like a strange reversal of apartheid roles, we’re the populists with the support of the community for our ideas, waiting for the officials to deign to help. All we can trade on is their appreciation of our directness. Someone mentions guerilla architecture; we can make all our stuff offsite and assemble it overnight.

We drive back past the Bloemenhof Park project, something a team of us worked on a long time ago. Similar scenario, trying to get things done quickly and directly, being blocked by council. Its just been restarted, after ten years. The lights, benches, mosaics are still good.

Then we pass the upgrade to the Harrow road offramp, mosaics and cleaning up. Five minutes later the Greenhouse project, a timber framed centre for urban ecology. Straight on to the Gautrain station site. We’re living in a building site. It seems impossible not to join in.