The People's Parks, Contested Public Spaces and Lost Heritage in Urban South Africa

This project will examine the People's Parks, a creative and political movement that occurred in South African townships between 1985 and 1986. Centred in the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vaal area (now Gauteng province), these parks originated from a grassroots, black youth-led movement that drew on the politics

of the anti-apartheid struggle and the desire to imagine alternative public spaces. Creating parks on unused land, young people made gardens and sculptures out of materials they had on hand, forming a particular visual language. From cannons made out of repurposed car axles to busts of anti-apartheid leaders, these parks articulated 'alternative cultural symbols' in

the face of state repression (Sack, 1989a: 8). By the end of 1986, all of these parks had been destroyed by state security forces. Existing scholarship on the topic focused primarily on these parks as an expression of protest art (Williamson, 1989; Sack, 1989b). Others locate them within the context of anti-apartheid political action (Jaffee, 1986; Steyn, 2002; Suttner,

2005). It has only recently been the focus of renewed academic discussion thanks to the People's Parks Archive (PPA) Project (Cane, 2024). My work as a researcher for this project saw me conduct new archival research on the topic, as well as digitising photographic evidence and compiling a comprehensive bibliography.

This doctoral proposal, the first on the People's Parks phenomenon, would open up critical debates on heritage and the politics of space. This concerns not only South Africa but also communities around the world that grapple with the complexities of contested heritage. 1 Guiding this project are the following research questions:

How do the People's Parks allow us to examine the contested spatial legacies of apartheid South Africa and the nature of memory and heritage? How can community and archival engagement make sense of the legacies of place-making for sites that have been destroyed? How does the use of digital archives and mapping enliven an

understanding of the People's Parks as places? This proposal forms part of my Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership application, and as such I plan to have the University of Warwick as my primary institution with supervision under Dr Jonathan Cane, with co-supervision by Dr Phil Jones at the University of Birmingham's School of Geography, Earth and

Environmental Sciences. This project will use an interdisciplinary framework, utilising qualitative methods of research and analysis that draw on the field of art history, architecture and geography. The existing People's Parks Archive will serve as a foundation for research, with additional archival investigations and

interviews being used to expand on the body of knowledge. These interviews will develop into a participant-based map, drawing on a co-constructive methodology such as story mapping to visualise the spatial nature of the parks