Planned stitching, practical suturing: assembling community voices and mobilisation across difference in Johannesburg's corridors of freedom

Makwela, Mike, Dittgen, Romain and Rubin, Margot ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9330-8308 2024. Planned stitching, practical suturing: assembling community voices and mobilisation across difference in Johannesburg's corridors of freedom. City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action 10.1080/13604813.2024.2414369

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Abstract

The City of Johannesburg’s Corridors of Freedom (CoF), launched in 2013, were intended to cut across the economically and racially divided city using infrastructure and interventions in the built environment around new transport nodes. Undertaken in haste for political reasons and projected to be delivered as swiftly as possible, those driving this mega project oversaw substantial consultation exercises, but provided relatively few spaces for direct engagement to shape the project. This paper presents the experiences of a team of engaged-researchers, a long-standing NGO in partnership with University-based scholars jointly investigating the CoF development process. Interested in the ways in which the CoF initiative sought to ‘stitch’ the city together, our contribution to the project was to engage with different communities, clarify their different experiences with participation in the Corridors development and explore the possibility of collaboration across these different communities. Using the conceptual framework of stitching and suturing, the paper, in two parts, interrogates the roles that engaged partners can have in complex and diverse communities and our ability to support engagement. We reveal the limitations of engaged research when faced with political and institutional cycles that do not synchronise with the research projects, and point to the cleavages and disruptions that result when the local state does not systematically incorporate the needs and lived realities of its residents.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Geography and Planning (GEOPL)
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis Group
ISSN:	1360-4813
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	3 October 2024
Date of Acceptance:	1 October 2024
Last Modified:	29 Oct 2024 14:19
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/172569

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