Special Place--What Is That?: Significant and Secret Spaces in the Lives of Children in a Johannesburg Squatter Camp

Significant and Secret Spaces in the Lives of Children in a Johannesburg Squatter Camp

Children Outside Childhood

 
Imagine that you and your family have moved to the city from a rural village where you didn't have enough to eat. Imagine that people around you speak many strange tongues. Imagine that, in the beginning, you and your family slept on sidewalks, and still often went hungry, until your parents managed to find space in a new squatter camp on the edge of downtown, where more than 1,000 people settled on 1.5 acres of land. Imagine that there was one water tap for the whole camp, and no toilets, and that the men often drank and fought with guns and knives. Imagine that pedestrians sometimes kicked and spat at you and your friends when you played on the sidewalk, and cars sometimes tried to run you down when you played in the street. Imagine that someone from the rich people's world came to talk with you and asked you, "What is your favorite place?"

This essay is based on a report, Growing Up in Canaansland: Children's Recommendations on Improving a Squatter Camp Environment, that was compiled and edited by Jill Swart Kruger, director of this South African site of the Growing Up in Cities project, which I coordinate for the MOST Programme of UNESCO.[1] I have collaborated with her and her research team since their project's first conception through its different stages of realization, observed their presentations, and visited the camp; yet in writing this essay, I am merely giving a new form to this work whose substance comes from Jill, Peter Rich, who directed the architectural phase of the project, Melinda Swift and Greg Jacobs, who served as research trainers, and Jill and Peter's assistants in anthropology, architecture, and planning—Lineo Lerotholi, Maurice Mogane, Moeketsi Langeni, Nondumiso Mabuza, and Zenzile Choko. Not least of all, this essay and the report on which it is based owe their substance to the fifteen 10- to 14-year-old boys and girls from the Canaansland community of Johannesburg who shared their lives with the researchers through drawings, interviews, walking tours through their neighborhood, and many other activities.

This essay owes its occasion and spirit to a memorial lecture that I delivered in honor of Sharon Stephens, late Assistant Professor with joint appointments in the Department of Anthropology, School of Social Work, and the International Institute at the University of Michigan. Given Sharon's leadership in child research, the lecture was presented at the University's symposium on "Secret Spaces of Childhood."[2]Sharon died from melanoma in June, 1998—only two months from the date of diagnosis. Everyone who knew Sharon understands that, when I relate this, I do not say a small thing.

I knew Sharon when I worked closely with her in the Children and Environment Program of the Norwegian Centre for Child Research at the University of Trondheim from 1994 through 1995, and later when she remained a friend and advisor for the Growing Up in Cities project, which includes the Johannesburg site. The Children and Environment Program which Sharon directed provided a base for the revival of this project, which was first conceived by the urban planner Kevin Lynch in 1970, but which gained new relevance after the United Nations' adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989. According to Article 12 of the Convention, children have a right to express their views freely in all matters that affect them. Agenda 21 of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (1992) and the Habitat Agenda of the Second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (1996) have affirmed that this includes a right to express their views and participate in decisions that affect their cities, towns, and larger environment. Growing Up in Cities implements these principles through research to understand how young adolescents use and value their local environments, and through programs that apply young people's priorities to the improvement of local places and urban policies. Sharon was a passionate analyst of the Convention, particularly with reference to its application to the quality of children's environments.

Sharon also believed that it is urgent that we understand how transformations in our contemporary world alter the "ecology of childhood" in which children's everyday experience is nested within larger circles of influence: migrations, urbanization, mass media, violence, an increasingly interdependent global economy, increasingly fragmented ecosystems, increasing divisions between rich and poor, and on the side of ideas, communication about environmental protection and human rights.[3] Growing Up in Cities responded to her advocacy for research on a global scale that would simultaneously consider the global patterning of environmental changes and the different conditions and experiences of children in particular world regions.[4] With the help of the MOST Programme of UNESCO, the Norwegian Centre for Child Research, Childwatch International of Oslo, and a long list of international and national donors, a global network of project site directors and I managed to re-initiate Growing Up in Cities in eight locations in 1995: Buenos Aires, Argentina; Melbourne, Australia; Northampton, England; Bangalore, India; Trondheim, Norway; Warsaw, Poland; Johannesburg, South Africa; and Oakland, California in the United States. In all cases, we focused on low income areas where young people are most dependent on the resources of their immediate environment.

Canaansland was the most deprived project site. Yet it is not unrepresentative of the conditions that many urban children face. According to a 1996 estimate, 13.5% of all South African households live in informal settlements, which have become a permanent feature of the urban landscape.[5] According to an estimate of the International Institute of Environment and Development and the World Commission on Health and Environment, more than 600 million people live in life- and health- threatening circumstances, such as squatter camps—many of them children.[6] The children who live in these circumstances are the type of children who attracted Sharon's special interest and concern: those who fall outside dominant categories of the cultural construction of childhood.[7] They endure a precocious burden of hardship and suffering that violates what "childhood" is supposed to mean, and dwell on streets or in shacks built of scavenged scrap material, on land that is often illegally occupied, that violate what "home" should mean. Yet they are children, the most precious resource of humanity's future, who merit the care of their society, of the world's society, all the same. This essay will examine the paradox of these children's position and their promise within the context of the question: What, for them, is the meaning of a special place?

Home as Refuge

 
Canaansland, the promised land, is a popular name for squatter camps in South Africa.[8] People driving by on their way to their apartments or houses in the suburbs may see just a jumble of ramshackle huts, but to the people who have managed to occupy the land, find building material, and construct homes, these sites are already a step up from life on the pavement. Like the Israelites in the desert, squatter residents follow the dream of a fair and free life. Perhaps they may be able to negotiate secure tenure and commit themselves to the process of a progressive upgrading of their property. Perhaps their government may meet them halfway in their efforts and provide basic utilities like sewerage, piped water, and electricity. Perhaps, given their visible presence in the city, the government will permanently resettle them on another site where they will be close to city jobs and services. In a country like South Africa that faces an acute housing shortage, squatter camps represent people's own resourceful effort to address this crisis.[9]

In the Zulu and Xhosa languages, the name for Johannesburg is Egoli, the place of "gold." For people without access to rural land and livelihoods, cities beckon with promise. No matter how intense the competition, in a city one may be lucky enough to find a job to feed oneself and one's family through the formal or informal economy. Through migration and the natural increase of urban populations, squatter camps and shanty towns continue to grow in cities across the Southern Hemisphere.[10]

In Johannesburg, there are jobs for black men in the gold mines that run across the city's southern edge, but until the end of apartheid in 1994 it was illegal for black families to live in the city. They were consigned to black townships south of the mine dumps and tailings, threatened with eviction if they tried to "invade" the white-owned city, or forced to inhabit the city invisibly. With the election of the African National Congress in 1994 and the end of these restrictions, families from the overcrowded townships, impoverished countryside, and neighboring countries moved into Johannesburg and illegal residents came out into the open, changing the downtown population from white to black in the period of a few years, while white businesses and families just as quickly moved north into the suburbs.

For the families who settled Canaansland across from the Oriental Plaza and nearby shops of the city's Indian community on the edge of the central business district, the location offered a number of advantages. Men collected and sold waste material such as cardboard and used tires. Women found day work as house cleaners and nannies in nearby highrise apartments and suburban homes. Both sexes picked up manual "piece jobs." People could shop for food at competitive prices, some store owners gave the community food products after their sell date expired, and church groups donated food. For children, a great advantage was the New Nation School, a half hour's walk away, which accepted street children, charged no fees, and provided a light mid-morning meal of soup and bread. Nine of the fifteen children in our Canaansland project attended there. Four were not in school or dropped out in the course of the study, and two attended schools with fees. Because the camp had no municipal services, toilets in the nearby Bramfontein Railroad Station, the Bree Street taxi stand, and the Oriental Plaza were important amenities. There was one water tap on the edge of the camp, for more than 1,000 people, irregular rubbish collection from an adjacent vacant lot, and no electricity. Despite these hardships, when the children in the study drew their homes and talked about their drawings, it was evident that many families had created centers of temporary stability in this place of insecure tenure. Four drew trees outside their homes, although trees were mainly limited to the camp's eastern border. Three drew flowers—although I saw only one poor potted plant, outside the head man's house, on my visit there. Two added grass and two drew sunrises or sunsets. All carefully drew the content of their home interiors.

Consider, for example, the drawing by the boy "C," and part of its description in the South African report:

 

Or consider the home of the girl "T": one of the children who included flower, grass, and sun. A later drawing by a student of architecture confirmed her layout, and her family's meticulous neatness and creative use of every nook and cranny.

 
The South African report concluded that, "Although the children commented that their homes were very cramped and that they spent time indoors mainly when it was wet, cold, or night, they appeared to take pride in their families' attempts to make the available space livable and comfortable."[13]

"Secret Spaces of Childhood" invites readers to imagine worlds away from adult oversight and intrusion: the hollow inside the hedge, the corner under the stairs, the treehouse hidden in the leaves. But what about the many children in the world who have no hedges, no trees, no houses with empty spaces? Where do they find special "spaces of childhood"? The drawings of the children in Canaansland remind us that for children in dangerous worlds, the safe centers that their parents create are special places. When I visited the camp in 1997, Johannesburg had the highest crime rate of any city in the world. The downtown business district was especially dangerous. Criminals often ran into the camp to hide, and adult residents often drank too much and then, not rarely, stabbed or shot each other. Theft was an ever-present threat. For children in these urban areas that James Garbarino has termed "war zones," home is the primary refuge.[14] Children's freedom to create places of their own presumes a safe center to move out from. The children in Canaansland, who saw their parents erect their huts with their own eyes and who sometimes assisted in the construction, knew how special, how necessary, how not to-be-taken-for-granted these shelters are.

Places of Conviviality

 
The children in Canaansland—like children at other Growing Up in Cities sites around the world—gave detailed accounts of convivial places: places where people were friendly and accepting and there were always interesting activities to observe or join. It was evident from the Canaansland children's drawings, interviews, and neighborhood walks that they rarely ranged beyond walking distance of their homes. Girls and younger children were kept especially close to home, given heavy downtown traffic, a high incidence of child abuse, and fears of kidnapping by medicine men and women who used children's body parts in their brews. Nevertheless, the path home from school offered some irresistible detours, and although a local park was forbidden to some, groups of friends managed to slip away to play there for short periods when their absence would not be noticeable. At their best, these attractions qualify as a favorite place.

In drawing exercises, two girls drew a garage that they visited on their way home from school (admittedly, not directly on the way). Here is the account of "B," who drew the garage when she was asked to draw "the area where you live."

 
When the children took the project team on walks to share their regular routes and places of importance, they showed local shops where they bought groceries or drinks or played video games, the local cinema, the garage, a grassed area where they played ball, and Phineas McIntosh Park, which had trees, a sports ground, and playground. The garage and park were shown as favorite places to stop on the way home from school—although they were in the neighborhood of Fietas, several blocks west of the school, whereas home was several blocks to the east.

All of these were busy public or commercial places, not at all "secret spaces" away from the eyes of adults. They resonated with similar places described by other project participants in Argentina, India, Poland, and Norway. For children who live in densely populated urban areas, few places are truly secret in the sense of "for children only." But frequently, engaging multigenerational places with accepting adults offer compensations of their own.

And in their own way, they may be secret. After the first Saturday walk when Canaansland children led the research team to places of significance, the researchers showed up again on the following Saturday and asked the children, with their mothers standing around, to show them other places that they used in the area of Fietas west of the camp. "What?" said the children . . . and they staunchly denied that they ever visited Fietas. It is probably no coincidence that B's drawing of the garage in Fietas includes a conspicuous clock for keeping track of the time before she would be missed at home.

Encounters with City Government

 
What is remarkable is that, in the midst of the severe poverty and harsh conditions of the squatter camp, these children and their families managed to create lives approximating normality: homes of refuge and order; daily routines of chores, school, and play; a fabric of nearby city resources. Yet when the project team led the children through exercises to envision "the best place to live" and changes that would improve Canaansland, the children had a clear sense of what their community needed.

The best place to live, they agreed, would have electricity, piped water, and toilets, and nearby in easy walking distance there would be facilities like ball fields, a park with a playground, a swimming pool, shops, and a school. When the girls and boys divided into separate groups to draw short-term improvements that would make Canaansland a better place, they concurred on most points: public toilets, more water taps, more refuse collection sites, a safe play space on the vacant lot opposite the camp, and a security fence. The boys also wanted a few shops in the camp and the girls wanted the tree-lined side street between the camp and the vacant lot closed to traffic.

This was a reasonable and feasible list. During this initial research phase of the project, Jill Kruger, the project director, had been busy networking to ensure that it would be possible to move from research to action. When she approached Isaac Mogase, the Mayor of Greater Johannesburg, to ask him to hear the children's priorities, he agreed to host a workshop which would include the four district mayors, urban planners, and policy makers from the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council and the four local councils, non-profit organizations and other institutions concerned with children, and privileged young people from the city's Junior and Mini Councils. He agreed to Jill's proposal that they would hear the children's presentations and form groups, on the same day, to make concrete plans to address the needs of the children in Canaansland in particular and squatter families in Greater Johannesburg in general. A workshop date was set for May 17, 1997.

The children in Canaansland were given invitations notifying them about the workshop and asking them to come to a preliminary meeting to prepare their presentations. At this meeting, the children agreed that two girls and two boys should speak on behalf of their group. When the researchers asked whether they knew what "democracy" meant, some said no and others said that it meant freedom to do what you want. After the researchers explained that it meant not just doing what you want but also taking responsibility and doing the job properly if you agree to speak for other people, the children put the names of four boys and four girls on the wall, and voted by each putting a green sticker for a girl and a red sticker for a boy under their chosen names. They then summarized their concerns under four categories that each elected representative would present in turn: improved housing, sanitation, the need for a quiet place where they could gather and do homework, and the need to be treated with respect by people in settled homes. The research leaders later took the four representatives to show them the Metropolitan Council room where they would speak and to rehearse their roles.

The goal of Growing Up in Cities is to use work with children as a catalyst to initiate inclusive community planning that will integrate all ages and both sexes. With the research with the children completed and a groundwork laid for implementation, it was time to broaden the process to include all interested community members. Therefore a meeting for Canaansland adults was called, the work with the children was reviewed, and the purpose of the mayor's workshop was explained. The adults who attended elected four representatives of their own—two men and two women—and identified their own priorities to better their children's lives. Most of their priorities overlapped with the children's, but they also wanted a crèche for the younger children, and the men recommended activities such as soccer and karate for the boys and netball and tennis for the girls, whereas the women also wanted a library and lessons in first aid. Over time, the process that started at this meeting culminated in a formally organized resident-based Canaansland Development Committee, which continues to operate to this day. Its membership of men and women, with child representatives invited to speak on issues related to children, is a leap forward from the initial meeting when the research leaders first introduced Growing Up in Cities to the community, when only men sat in the council and the head man sat at a distance, within earshot but conspicuously removed from this meeting on the topic of children, which he considered beneath his dignity as a man.[16]

The mayor's workshop went successfully. The mayor, who had suffered as a township child himself under apartheid, led the children into the lecture theater with a rousing marching song and opened the proceedings. The Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council and a doctor from the provincial Department of Health spoke next, followed by the children, the researchers, and the Executive Officer for the city's Department of Urban Policy and Strategy. The officials and guests then divided into five groups to draft a program of action related to the needs of Canaansland, general policies for squatter settlements, and a strategy to make Johannesburg a "child friendly city."

When the children in Canaansland were first asked to make drawings of their homes and the area where they lived, they hesitated and expressed fear that "people will laugh at our drawings"; and as the project began to attract attention, they begged the researchers not to disclose their names for fear that people would discover that they were squatters and tease them cruelly. By the time of the Mayor's workshop, each child in the group wanted a drawing posted on the workshop wall, name attached. When the children were later asked to evaluate the research process and the workshop, several of them mentioned the pleasure of drawing, and a boy noted that one of the best moments for him was in the middle of the workshop, when Nondumiso, a member of the research team, showed their drawings on the overhead projector. "Then," he said, "I felt so proud for all of us."

The resulting recommendations for Canaansland were divided among those that the community could do for itself, those that were the responsibility of the local government, and those that would require external donor funding. The city agreed to make short-term improvements in the camp until resettlement to a permanent location could be negotiated. Canaansland adults made clear that they considered it crucial to stay close to the downtown, where they had opportunities to earn small amounts of cash and where they received food donations.

Planning moved slowly forward, and donors committed funds to build a playground and a children's center that could double as a crèche for the younger children in the mornings and a homework center for older children in the afternoons (courtesy of the Dutch Embassy and a children's fund of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation). Then six months after the workshop, when Mayor Mogase was out of town and following a questionable three days' notice, the community was violently evicted and resettled on empty veld 44 kilometers outside of Johannesburg in a region known as Thula Mntwana, Zulu for "hush my child." City workers and private contractors wielding batons and sjamboks (a rawhide whip) and armed with police dogs and guns rounded the people into trucks and tore down their homes for a city contract fee of 1000 Rand per hut (when 1800 Rand was the median monthly income for families in South Africa). Some of the building equipment and belongings were loaded on the trucks, but when people tried to protect their other belongings, gasoline was poured on this "refuse" and it was set on fire. The Canaansland families were dropped on empty land with lots marked out and chemical toilets provided, but otherwise without food, water, or protection from heavy rain at first, and distant from transportation, jobs, shops, and other services. The nearest, distant primary school charged fees that were prohibitive for most of the families. The eviction was carried out the weekend before the children were to have taken their end-of-the-year exams.[17]

Places of Solidarity

 
For sixteen months following the eviction, the former camp site sprouted weeds. Then large notice boards appeared that proclaimed that a social housing project for persons earning less than 3500 Rand per month was to be built there. Thus the government is responding to the need for affordable housing . . . although this solution is not, unfortunately, affordable for residents with monthly incomes below 800 Rand per month, like the site's former residents. The company that owns the private security firm that tore down the squatters' huts has doubly profited from the eviction, as it also owns the water trucks that now deliver water irregularly to Thula Mntwana, where residents of nine other downtown camps were also dropped on adjacent land.

For people who consider squatters a scourge, these poorest of the poor have been put out of sight and out of mind. Those people have benefited from the evictions at the expense of the squatters. In Thula Mntwana, adults have lost access to income. The children have lost their affordable and accommodating school and the network of places where they found pleasure. There is no neighboring community to give food donations. There is no public transportation, and taxi fares to the city are exorbitant. Families have had to begin rebuilding from the bottom again, without access to all the opportune materials, bargains, income options, and services which downtown districts harbor.

Community organizers who advocate principles of people-centered development often quote the words of Lao Tzu:

 
In the Programmes of Action signed at the Earth Summit and the World Summit for Social Development, world governments committed themselves to a participatory philosophy of development that builds on human dignity. Instead, as one man in Canaansland said, he felt as if he and his community had just been "thrown away."

Distant and difficult to reach as the children now were, members of Growing Up in Cities continued to work with them. They arranged for leadership training for adults from the Canaansland community and neighboring communities, to empower them to negotiate with the local government for recognition of their rights and needs. They lobbied on their behalf for garden allotments, as space was now plentiful and the community's already marginal nutritional status had been further weakened, and they insisted on secure tenure for the housing lots, children's center, and playground. After months of obstructions, the government agreed. In the beginning, when there was no food or resources of any kind, they obtained emergency donations of food and other necessities from the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund and arranged for their storage in the metal shipping container that had already been purchased through Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation aid to serve as a shell for the construction of the children's center.

When the children drew their new location, every drawing gave a prominent place to the shipping container. In the midst of the barren veld, it served not only the practical function of storing necessities, but also as a focal point for the community. As the highest point, it cast some shade from the burning summer sun, and therefore its shade made a place for women and children to gather. It also stood as a testament to the fact that the community was not completely abandoned: not by the project team and the many organizations that now stood behind them.[19] To someone who may justifiably feel thrown away by society, concrete expressions of support of this kind form places of solidarity that demonstrate that other people in the world recognize one's existence and affirm one's rights and needs.

Therefore one may still believe in oneself. Lineo Lerotholi, a student of architecture in the Growing Up in Cities team, went to visit the Canaansland children in Thula Mntwana after a few months' absence. She said that she was struck by the children's self-assurance and social competence as they enthusiastically welcomed her, so different from their shame and fear at the beginning of the project, despite the trauma of the eviction.

The irony is that the participatory, people-centered development process that Growing Up in Cities exemplifies is the most practical, proven means to reduce poverty and set communities on a course of cumulative improvement.[20] Yet few international aid agencies are prepared to implement such a decentralized process. Although one of the goals of post-World War II aid programs has been to strengthen human rights, including the right to self-determination, this goal has been overshadowed by that of helping developing countries contribute to the world economy by exporting commodities and low-cost manufactures and importing the products of the developed world, regardless of how inequitably the gains from this exchange may be distributed. For these purposes, large loans have been given to build highways, airports, factories, processing plants, and military arsenals, leaving many countries bent now under the burden of overwhelming debts.[21] Correspondingly, most aid agencies are evaluated by their "efficiency" in passing large sums of money through minimal numbers of staff. The kind of small scale grants and loans needed by communities like Canaansland, combined with support from facilitators, trainers, and other resource people, represents an alternative development path that has yet to gain dominance, despite evidence of its efficacy. Yet it is on this grassroots level that places of solidarity are constructed that demonstrate to people in need that there are other people who have acknowledged their value and invested in their well-being. The prominence of the container in every Canaansland child's drawing suggests that concrete expressions of support of this kind create a well-noticed form of special and sustaining places.

Places of Possibility

 
Children's special places are not just in the present. They may also exist in the imagination as possibilities for the future. In the new location in the veld, the children again drew where they lived and their ideas for its improvement. The boy "S" combined the different themes of this essay in one drawing.

In the upper left corner, colored in red, he drew his house as his castle, with a road from the front door to the very important next-door amenity, a toilet. Next to the toilet stands the storage container. In front of a row of shacks, a small garden of maize and flowers has begun to grow. The water truck and a beer van are arriving, and a woman is preparing home-made beer in a shebeen. S's battery-operated TV has pride of place in the bottom right corner. More than a third of the area is covered by a park with trees, grassy lawn, and a playground with a slide and swings. But there is no park like this in the veld, so what has he done? Did he misunderstand the directions? No, S explained that it is the Phineas McIntosh Park—one of the children's favorite places that they "never" visited in Fietas. Now it is more than forty kilometers away, at the old location, but S has carried its image with him and superimposed it on the new site, where it now serves simultaneously as a memorial to a special place of the past and as a model for the creation of a better future. His picture demonstrates that happy memories of former places can serve as possibilities for reinventions.

The work with the community has continued. After someone opened a shop, the container was freed for conversion into the children's center. A class of students from the Department of Architecture at the University of Witwatersrand came to do a charrette where nineteen children contributed drawings of their ideas for the study center and crèche, including a playground, trees, and gardens which will one day form necessary food sources. Applying the children's and students' suggestions, Peter Rich created a design with an earth berm along one side of the container for cooling (which the children can climb to sit and play on the roof), a wide overhanging roof for shade, openings for ventilation, and the playground in front.[22] A nursery donated trees and the Rand Water Board demonstrated how to plant them in the most water-conserving way. In May 1999—two years after the initial meeting with the mayor—Mayor Mogase returned for the center opening and tree planting ceremony, and Joe Mafela, a popular comedian, volunteered to serve as master of ceremonies, to the delight of the crowd. The children named the center Ubuhle Buyeza: "good things are about to happen."

The Canaansland Development Committee remains intact, composed of men and women, including women who defend the children's right to speak about issues that concern them. The Local Council has promised that all of Thula Mntwana will be upgraded over the next five years . . . spurred on, most likely, by the national and international visibility that Growing Up in Cities has brought to the situation. With patient commitment from all sides, good things may happen. Yet the hard fact remains that rather than building on the accomplishments and opportunities in the city center, Canaansland and the other communities like it have been consigned to beginning again, in a barren setting without means of income, services, or affordable schooling. Unless the government of South Africa and international donors act quickly to address the problems of homelessness and squatter communities more wisely, these people, with all their hope and potential, will indeed be thrown away. But problems do not go away in this way. Just as racial apartheid failed under the old regime, leaving behind disastrous legacies of violence, an apartheid based on the geographic segregation of rich and poor will not serve the hopes for peace of the new world order.

This essay has focused on these children who are culturally and literally "out of place" in their society as a reminder that the special places of childhood need not necessarily be secret and apart from adults. Although it is true that children need places where they can create worlds of their own making, just as importantly they need opportunities to work together with adults to create better shared worlds. For those like the children in Canaansland, they need opportunities to work cooperatively with people of all ages in order to create better conditions for themselves, their families, and their communities. Otherwise, if adults do not engage with children to understand what they have, what they need, and what they can do, the fragile resources that they and their families have assembled—the shelters of home, convivial places, and networks of local resources—become indeed invisible and secret spaces that can be abruptly and unapologetically destroyed.

As this essay was written in honor of Sharon Stephens, it will close with her words. In her introduction to a special issue of the journal Childhood on "Children and the Environment," Sharon made a case for the need for interdisciplinary research teams to understand "the ecologies of childhood, where global forces are played out in the worlds of children's local experience."[23] This focus on children's environmental experience, she noted, would expose the problems of top-down, centralized state and international agency programs that fail to recognize local needs, experiences, and forms of knowledge, at the same time as it would show the insufficiency of community-based programs to solve problems without external help. She concluded by quoting the Chilean poet, Gabriela Mistral, and then added words that could be applied, equally well, to this essay's general theme:

Notes

1. Jill Swart Kruger, ed., Growing Up in Canaansland: Children's Recommendations on Improving a Squatter Camp Environment (Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council/UNESCO, 1999). The MOST Programme (Management of Social Transformations) is the social research branch of UNESCO that tackles issues of social development and environmental management. Updated information on the Canaansland project is available on the website http://home.global.co.za/~sjk/guic.htm.

2. This lecture was made possible through the generosity of the Center for European Studies.

3. Sharon Stephens, "Children and environment: local worlds and global connections," Childhood 1994, 2 (1/2), 1-21. Sharon borrowed the term "ecologies of childhood" from Cindy Katz, "Textures of global change: eroding ecologies of childhood in New York and Sudan," Childhood 1994, 2 (1/2), 103-10.

4. Sharon Stephens, "Notes on NOSEB Children and Environment Program," unpublished report for a board meeting of the Norwegian Centre for Child Research, 24 November 1995.

5. D. Van Tonder, "The road to Egoli: historical roots of urban squatting on the Witwatersrand," MUNIVRO 1997, 13 (2), 6-7, as cited in Jill Swart Kruger, Growing Up in Canaansland, 6.

6. Jorge Hardoy, Sandy Cairncross and David Satterthwaite, eds., The Poor Die Young (London: Earthscan Publications, 1990); World Commission on Health and Environment, Our Planet, Our Health (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1992).

7. Sharon Stephens, "Children and the politics of culture in 'late capitalism'," in S. Stephens, ed., Children and the Politics of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 3-48.

8. The following account draws heavily on the report Growing Up in Canaansland, edited by Jill Swart Kruger, except for a few incidents drawn from my e-mail and conversations with Jill and other project members.

9. Jorge Hardoy and David Satterthwaite, Squatter Citizen: Life in the Urban Third World (London: Earthscan Publications, 1989).

10. David Satterthwaite, The Scale and Nature of Urban Change in the South (London: International Institute for Environment and Development, 1996).

11. Jill Swart Kruger, ed., Growing Up in Canaansland, 23.

12. Ibid., 24.

13. Ibid., 26.

14. James Garbarino, No Place to be a Child: Growing Up in a War Zone (Lexington: Jossey-Bass, 1991).

15. Jill Swart Kruger, ed., Growing Up in Canaansland, 27.

16. Jill Swart Kruger, "Children in a South African squatter camp gain a voice," in Louise Chawla, ed., Growing Up in an Urbanizing World (London: Earthscan Publications, 2000).

17. This report on the eviction is taken from the South African project web site at http://home.global.co.za/~sjk/guic.htm.

18. As quoted by Chris Maser, Russ Beaton, and Kevin Smith, Setting the Stage for Sustainability (Boca Raton: Lewis Publishers, 1998), v.

19. In addition to organizations that have already been named—the MOST Programme of UNESCO, the Children's Hour Helping Fund of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, the Dutch Embassy, and the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund—allied organizations included the Programme for Human Needs, Resources and the Environment of the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, which helped cover the costs of research and the report publication, UNICEF, which helped finance research assistants, the Adult Based Education and Training Unit of the University of South Africa, which provided the empowerment training, the Law Department of the University of South Africa, which gave legal advice, the Methodist Church, which gave food donations, and Street-Wise, a non-profit organization for street boys whose staff and board of directors gave invaluable practical assistance throughout the project.

20. For discussions of this approach to development on the urban front, see Akhtar A. Badshah, Our Urban Future (London: Zed Books, 1996), Sheridan Bartlett et al., Cities for Children (London: Earthscan Publications, 1999), and Chapter 13 of An Urbanizing World by the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

21. G. A. Cornia, R. Jolly and F. Stewart, eds., Adjustment with a Human Face, Vol. 1: Protecting the Vulnerable and Promoting Growth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Susan George, A Fate Worse than Debt (New York: Grove Press, 1988).

22. Peter Rich, "Design for a children's center in a squatter camp," South African Architect, April 1999, 30-1.

23. Sharon Stephens, "Children and environment: local worlds and global connections," Childhood, 1994, 2 (1/2), 1-21.

24. Ibid., 17.

Top of page