Shifting territories : towards a methodology for a creative emancipatory approach to place-making, the role of Spaza shops in Cornubia, Blackburn, KZN

Abstract

This research argues that the idea of a ‘breaking new ground’ initiative in urban planning demands the effort of unearthing existing alternative practices and attitudes in the pursuit of spatial justice (Soja 2010). The study is located in Cornubia, a large human settlement development on the north coast of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa. Contextualised within the national landscape of state-housing provision, and the theoretical lens of place-making and spatial justice, it aims to offer both theoretical and practical insights into the gap between theory and practice in current participatory practices in planning and housing. It explores how creative methodologies may be useful mechanisms for participatory planning, especially in facilitating and translating how residents in housing developments make meaning out of the places they live in. It engages how these may differ, or not, from meaning-making done by state planners and officials. To demonstrate the argument, the thesis uses the example of spaza shops both as a metaphor and a popular initiative. Following on, it suggests that spaza (as creative impulses) owners could take the form of interlocutors who can facilitate dialogue between official top-down planning and quotidian bottom-up operations within the context of the Cornubia development. In doing so, the potential for dialogue in a creative form that already exists ‘informally’ as the popular innovations/manifestations exemplified in the spaza shop, can be revealed. It is in the interstitial space of misunderstanding, where communication often breaks down between the state and the street, that this research has positioned art/creative practice as a way of opening up dialogue within and between individuals, communities, and the state. In addition, arts-based/informed methods, including the use of drawing, Lego blocks, image theatre (drama), and Scrabble are employed as data-generating tools. Furthermore, workshops, focus groups, and face-to-face interviews are conducted to reflect, articulate and reveal the experience of the participants living in a human settlement and their understanding of space and urban planning. The thesis also draws on a series of interviews with the built environment specialists involved both directly and administratively in the project. The objective is to explore the potential for the conceptualisation of powerful catalysts for transformative forms of politics and for providing new sets of resources for urban and spatial thinking Theoretically, the dissertation argues that spazas should be read as popular culture since popular culture is both evasive and resistant (Fiske 1989) and is created “out of the resources, both discursive and material that are provided by the social system that disempowers [the people]” (Fiske 1989:2). Spazas are creative impulses in their own right, developed organically, as critical responses to an environment which has limited access and spaces for the working-class and poor to exercise their various freedoms whether they be economic, spatial, social or cultural.