Warwick Junction, Durban, Peter Robinson and Richard Dobson
After: The Traditional Herb and Medicine Market, Photograph Terence Hogben for eThekwini Municipality
Before: Herb and traditional medicine traders, Photograph City Health for eThekwini Municipality
Leopold Street pavement displays, City Health for eThekwini Municipality
Before: The unused freeway spur, Photograph Richard Dobson for eThekwini Municipality
New Market Road Pedestrian Bridge, Photograph Terence Hogben for eThekwini Municipality
The Traditional Herb and Medicine Market, Photograph Terence Hogben for eThekwini Municipality
Useful indigenous landscaping, Photograph Terence Hogben for eThekwini Municipality
Mural on the western freeway abutment of the Traditional Herb and Medicine Market ‘Nomkhubulwana’ by Community Murals Project, Photograph Richard Dobson for eThekwini Municipality
The creative use of public space in Warwick Junction, Durban
Peter Robinson and Richard Dobson report on a grassroots-led approach to making places for people in South Africa
Introduction
At all levels of society, people use urban space creatively and often such creativity is brought about by adversity or necessity. Warwick Junction, which is situated on the fringe of Durban’s inner city, provides some interesting examples of how the city’s poor and disenfranchised people have used public spaces and infrastructure in ingenious ways to establish informal trading activities. In response to these, the local municipality (eThekwini) has adopted a number of innovative approaches over the past ten years to engage with and support these informal activities. Today, Warwick Junction is a thriving informal business centre contributing significantly to the city’s economy, and has been the subject of several best practice awards. The twin themes of this paper are therefore the indigenous transformation of several public spaces by poor people driven by sheer necessity and innovative urban management approaches to this informal economy.
Warwick Junction background and context
Historically the area around Warwick Junction was occupied by mixed mainly business and residential uses. As the city’s trade and transport networks expanded it became an important point in the local space economy and a natural market place. Although informal trading had been harshly controlled during the apartheid era, by the early 1990s nearly 4,000 traders were working along its congested sidewalks. The area had been badly neglected and was so rundown that it was described in a local newspaper as a ‘cesspit’. Yet its locational advantages meant that Warwick Junction became the hub of the city’s informal economy and offering a means of survival and a form of employment for many of the city’s poor. It also provided services for the vast majority of Durban’s population who lived (and still live) in distant townships and informal settlements lacking adequate services. It was these circumstances that forced informal traders to convert spaces such as pavements and street corners into places to trade.
In 1996 the city council launched an urban renewal initiative – the Warwick Junction Project. The project was mandated to focus on safety, cleanliness, trading and employment opportunities, and the efficiency of public transport among other issues. An area-based team, eventually headed by Richard Dobson dealt with issues as diverse as curbside cleaning, ablution facilities, childcare, pavement sleeping and a community forum against crime. Investigations into these issues resulted in a number of sub-projects involving substantial capital works. Within three years, the project had achieved dramatic improvements to the urban environment that still remain today, while at the same time supporting the informal traders.
Today, Warwick Junction is the city’s primary transport node with the confluence of rail, minibus taxi and bus services. Berea Road Station is the busiest commuter interchange in metropolitan Durban with 460,000 daily commuters; 2,000 minibus taxis operating from 22 taxi ranks; 130,000 daily taxi departures; and 70,000 bus and 70,000 train commuters pass through Warwick Junction daily. The annual turnover of the 8,000 market and kerb-side traders is estimated to be in the region of Rand 1-billion. The context in which this activity occurs is important in understanding the driving forces of this bustling informal economy. Many of the commuters live in under-served residential areas with no refrigeration, so that perishable goods have to be purchased daily. Many also receive ad-hoc incomes, thus reinforcing a daily pattern of shopping. Furthermore, the minibus taxis which many depend upon to reach their homes, limit the amount and size of commuter packages. The daily informal economy is therefore responding to the large numbers of commuters with goods and services, being available near to the bus and mini-bus taxi ranks, with rapid transactions to avoid delaying customers en route.
A recent assessment of the Warwick Junction Project identified five specific interventions exemplifying the innovative approach taken to management of the informal economy. These are the:
- Traditional herb and medicine market
- Mealie cookers facility
- Buy-back centre for cardboard salvagers
- Brook Street central market
- Bovine head cookers facility and food court.
This article will focus on the first and the most catalytic of these interventions.
Traditional herb and medicine market
The use of traditional herbs and medicines is an integral part of contemporary urban African custom and diet. Since the 1980s, traditional herb and medicine traders had recognised that the vibrant Warwick Junction offered an obvious market place. They began operating illegally and dangerously on the sidewalks alongside busy public roads. The trade was unregulated and no facilities were provided. Despite these inauspicious circumstances, the traders made effective use of the spaces, and many of the traders (mostly women) lived on the sidewalks in order to keep their products secure at night (the sheer quantity of goods making it impractical to move on a daily basis). These traders and the Izinyanga (traditional doctors) are the point-of-sale in a complex supply chain, which involves harvesting and transporting herbs and medicinal products to Durban from various parts of the province.
In the early 1990s, when there were approximately 500 traditional herb and medicine traders, the municipal Health Department began work to manage the health and safety challenges. This resulted in the formation of a street committee with elected representation, documentation of the traders’ needs and aspirations, and the establishment of a Self Employed Women’s Union. This preparatory work was to provide the Warwick Junction Project team with a sound basis for other interventions.
At the inception of the urban renewal project in 1996, the traditional herb and medicine traders were a major concern as the area that they occupied had become overcrowded - suggesting that additional space was needed. Furthermore it had been tacitly accepted by the traders and municipal officials, that although Warwick Junction was the right part of the city for this trade, the sidewalks were not appropriate for traders, as they were narrow (too small for trading and passing pedestrians) and the adjacent roads very busy.
Of equal concern at the time was the management of two redundant freeway spur roads that crossed the railway corridor adjacent to the Berea Road commuter station. As open, unused space, the spurs were continually being occupied opportunistically for informal dwellings. Valuable urban management resources were being spent preventing wholesale occupation of the spurs. The creative response to these two concerns was to establish a central Market for the traditional herb and medicine traders on the unused freeway spurs. The informal traders could then acquire much needed, better and safer spaces, and prevented opportunistic invasions.
The Market provides space for about 700 traders. It consists of off-street open roofed stalls with 6 sqm per trader and twelve semi-enclosed Izinyanga kiosks, which could be secured with metal roll-down doors facing onto the pedestrian routes. The Market also has roofed stalls on the outer edges of the freeway configuration, creating a contained space with a measure of tranquility within the busy transport and pedestrian hub. There are individually metered water points throughout the Market, each shared by about 10 traders, and two public toilet blocks.
In order for the Market to operate optimally, it was necessary to connect the end of the freeway to an adjacent pedestrian bridge to provide a new route over the rail corridor. In December 1999, the Market Bridge was identified by the (South African) Sunday Times as one of the architectural ‘Best in the Century’: ‘This is one of the first South African structures which addresses – and celebrates – the informal traders who have come to dominate our city centres. The building, which is not much more than a pedestrian bridge with some shady pergolas, is located at the city’s commercial centre, where hawkers, shacks and shabeens cluster around a busy transport intersection. Lightweight structures with shading devices made of wattle branches announce the entrance to the market. The transient quality expresses the informal trading patterns of the hawkers who ply their wares on the bridge.’
Associated with the off-street Market and located in an underpass are the ‘lime sellers’, selling kaolin, a high quality white or brown clay, used for medicinal purposes because of its high calcium content, or as traditional sunscreen. Subsequent phases of the Market have seen the addition of forty more kiosks for Izinyanga, a herb processing facility and landscaping. This landscaping included trees which continue to be protected by the local Traders Against Crime. Another innovative piece of urban space management was achieved through the planting of indigenous aloes along the road verges. The dead, dried leaves around the base, which the local authority would normally have had to remove, are harvested by the herbalists for snuff.
Innovation
What was particularly innovative about the use of space in Warwick Junction? At the outset, the herb and traditional medicine traders seized the opportunity of using the sidewalks for trading, storage and living. Secondly, the City Health department acknowledged the significance of this cultural and social activity, and decided to engage with rather than try to exclude the informal traders. This has had wider and local benefits, namely the use of public space as a developmental tool, coupled with the value of having an area-based team was innovative. The consultation process around the herb and traditional medicine traders (and other interventions mentioned above) was qualitatively different and better than previous approaches. This resulted in a seamless transfer from the sidewalks to still affordable premises in the new Market. A leader of the traders noted that the project ‘afforded the opportunity to participate on a sustained and continuous basis in negotiations about their needs and priorities and the Council’s concerns in a low-key way, often on an issue- by-issue basis.’ Finally the spatial response, recognising the freeway spurs as an untapped resource, relieved previous congestion and dangers, and unlocked what was to become a catalytic project around which others were built.
Conclusions
Creativity in the design of urban spaces is not confined to forms of large squares and boulevards, up-market residential developments, or shopping malls and office parks, but can occur in poor areas of a city, and often in small spaces. Nor are creative design and the transformation of urban space the preserve of built environment professionals. The evidence from Warwick Junction shows how different groups in the city have used the spaces in and around disused infrastructure to set up a number of informal economic activities. Furthermore this case study offers a model for urban managers faced with the dilemma of whether to exclude or to work with the informal sector. The experience of Warwick Junction stands in stark contrast to how the informal economy is approached by most local authorities; the approach developed through the project is a model of what is possible in developing country cities. According to Hart ‘Durban has provided exhilarating proof of how poor people, in sensitive collaboration with urban planners, can enliven a city centre, generate employment for themselves and expand services for the population at large.’
Peter Robinson is at the School of Architecture, Planning & Housing, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and Richard Dobson is an architect.
