Making cities like Johannesburg safer also involves helping the people who live there feel safer, urban experts said on Thursday.
”Fear is such a powerful element associated with cities,” said Professor Sophie Body-Gendrot, of the Centre for Urban Studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, France.
In South Africa, it seemed that the state is not doing enough to give people a feeling of security in public spaces or in their homes, she told a short workshop on safety and civility in cities, organised by the University of the Witwatersrand’s School of Architecture and Planning.
The workshop was held ahead of an Urban Age Conference, starting in Johannesburg on Thursday night.
She said societies need a long-term shared vision of a future to improve security.
Body-Gendrot emphasised the ”inclusive nature” of European cities. She said in France, the perception of security was social, a ”common publicness”. ”Private security” was seen as paradoxical.
She referred to the Hello neighbour campaign in parts of France, which encouraged security through good neighbourliness. It involved youth in public housing projects in a public security campaign, which resulted in a drop in crime.
Commenting on the increasingly fortified nature of Johannesburg, Body-Gendrot said in violent societies the right to stay alive becomes a priority, and that fear and knowledge of crime ”reinforces the legitimacy of living within a fortress”.
Professor Ed Soja said industrial cities around the world were undergoing their greatest transformation ever.
He said urban areas were becoming more densely populated and the differences between urban and suburban areas were being obliterated.
”This is what’s spurring gated communities, what’s spurring fear,” said Soja, who is from of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and the University of California in Los Angeles.
He said even when crime statistics did not increase, the fear remained.
Manager of the Johannesburg City safety plan Nazira Cachalia said South Africans were hiring private security and moving into gated communities.
”The notion of fear has definitely impacted on people’s notion of civility.”
She said fear of crime was influenced both by experiencing it and hearing of others’ experiences. ”Those sorts of fear and mentality issues become more and more entrenched.”
Soja said moving forward meant building coalitions, particularly with civil society, which gave people ”a model of something other than despair”. He said it was possible to change the fortified nature of a city like Johannesburg.
”The geography in which we live shape our lives … but we produce that geography. If we produce it, we can change that aggressive geography.”
Cachalia said there was ”definitely” a recognition by the state that it was responsible for security. Local government was also realising it must take responsibility.
”Those notions of civility, of safety, are contested terrain … particularly in public spaces.”
Cachalia said Johannesburg was used by a range of people — and that the city must look at the challenges of economic growth and social cohesion.
”How we as local government respond to these challenges is critical.”
Cachalia said security in public spaces was not just about law enforcement, but also about what those spaces were designed for.
Professor Richard Sennett of LSE and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology talked of the development of an informal social order. In extreme examples like Mexico City, where there was huge distrust of police, this informal order replaced policing.
”Density plus diversity equals informal social control,” said Sennett, explaining that if there were enough people in an area and they were diverse enough, a level of social control would develop.
This could develop into extreme cases of ”summary justice” by crowds.
Sennett said public spaces could be managed, for example by creating spaces without fences, so that a degree of beneficial social control over behaviour would develop.
”The idea is that visibility, the theatre of seeing other people’s behaviour, rules the design.”
He said this removal of barriers was the opposite of gated communities, which were not conducive to social control.
Karina Landman, urban researcher at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, said the dynamics of transformation in South Africa are ”incredible” and that this contributed to feelings of insecurity. She said some people saw transformation itself as a threat.
”It’s fascinating, but it’s also scary,” said Landman.
The Urban Age Conference is the fifth in an international two-year series, following ones in New York, Shanghai, London and Mexico City and ahead of a final conference in Berlin in November. The conferences, organised by the LSE, debate how cities are studied, planned and managed. — Sapa