City parks change people’s minds

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City parks change people’s minds

February 12th, 2010

Public parks in Johannesburg’s former township suburbs are alive with people relaxing and finding environmental education, where nine years ago dust, litter, crime and grime ruled.

The change is little short of revolutionary, and near miraculous considering budget and cost constraints. It is also evident that the change is sustained beyond a ‘new broom’ effect from the recruitment of Johannesburg City Parks director Luther Williamson from the corporate world in 2001.

Williamson’s approach is to stabilise erosion, initiate greening on a massive scale, install modest solar-powered water features, and plug in DSTV feeds on big screens with cartoons, education, environmental programmes, and sports.

The programming is named ‘Township TV’. Some ‘radical’ park makeovers were literally done overnight.

Ownership

The metro agency now manages to sustain the popularity and near pristine conditions of its ‘extreme’ park makeovers by sheer vision, ownership, a value proposition, and minimal supervision, instead of rules and security staff.

“I was horrified by the effects of vandalism at my first official visit to parks facilities in 2001,” explained Williamson in an interview with Sheqafrica.com at the City Parks headquarters in Braamfontein.

He sought a formula to permanently change the paradigm of ghetto vandalism, and reasoned that environmental quality, education, social values and behaviour all spring from experience and expectation.

Williamson set out to change these environmental and behavioural elements in tandem, supported by quality governance, maintenance, social contracts, educational drives, and a toilet paper allocation attendant, or ‘toilet mama’ at each ablution block.

Urban forest growing

Johannesburg City Parks is about seven years ahead on its plan to add 200 000 trees to Johannesburg’s famed urban forest, with 175 000 already planted, and expecting to reach the target before 2011. Each new tree is logged by a GIS system indicating its position, species, and planting date. The current survival rate target is 95%.

Densely populated suburbs like Alexandra, Soweto, Ivory Park, Orange Farm, and Diepsloot have pioneered the new park use ethic.

Citizens could not fail but notice. Some planting sessions sere no less extreme than overnight makeovers, with 15 000 people mobilised to plant 6000 trees in ten minutes. The agency is cultivating behaviour change and environmental ethic along with the expanding forest, growing citizenship along with the city.

Shining examples

The park’s website now attracts 50 000 hits per month, half of these from the USA, the rest from NGOs, students, learners, environmentalists and corporate sponsors looking for examples of sustainability. Aid from the World Conservation Union adds to testimony for a functional agency.

Williamson acknowledges that nothing could be changed without a bit of ‘stick’ in support of ‘carrots’ or social advantage. “We encourage and enforce corporate involvement in urban environmental management, with the general target of a tree per employee.”

Employers are assisted by City Parks in joint ventures with greening programmes, park development, cleanup campaigns, and environmental education support to offset their carbon emissions. Mottos like ‘Green Joburg experience’ have developed from the joint ventures.

Increased biomass going to landfill, due to pruning, should pose little environmental problems, while reducing landfill dust and promoting organic breakdown in the long term.

Educational

City Parks run six environmental education centres and work with the Gauteng education department to get their messages about conservation, littering and wetlands across. Their quality management includes measurement of the impacts that their initiatives make on learners, by doing schools audits.

The Dream Park competition among primary schools initiated development of parks in the grounds of participating schools. “People older than 25 rarely change their behaviour or value systems, so I believe we have to change the environmental experience of youth, who could nag their parents and peers into line,” Williamson jokes.

Williamson sees no irony in integrating the pervasive electronic media culture with the green culture. “I reasoned that in this era of Playstation games, our competition were TV, cinema, and sports. Play equipment did not draw people to use parks in sufficient numbers to change communal behaviour.”

Improved social behaviour, on par with workplace behaviour, could not fail to influence domestic behaviour for the better, reasons Williamson. Despite sporadic civil unrest and vandalism of municipal facilities in Diepsloot, for example, parks are now perceived as communal property and were not vandalised in recent years.

Johannesburg’s ‘wired’ parks are divided into areas for passive, active, and entertainment activities. The ‘active’ parts include mini soccer, basketball, beach type sand, and walkways. Up to 5000 people watch soccer games in the ‘wired’ parks, with minimal littering.

ISO 14001 and Sheq

“Health and safety, to us, implies behaviour,” said Williamson. The agency applies an integrated Sheq policy and management system, enhanced in the last three years. From a lost time injury frequency rate of 3.3, the agency had managed it down to below 1.

On the back of guiding corporate sponsors towards sustainable practices, and maintaining green developments initiated by sponsors, the agency has proven highly productive in the last few years, winning a government productivity award.

Service delivery success seems to permeate Johannesburg City Parks, down to quality management systems, good health and safety management performance, and ISO 14001 internal audits.

“We started benchmarking to the ISO environmental system standard in June 2009, and are still closing out some major findings,” explained Meyer. “We will do a first stage readiness audit before the Soccer World Cup in June, and should be ready for ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 certification in 2011 financial year.”

The Sheq management system meanwhile is geared towards ISO certification, and benchmarked to the OHSAS 18001 H&S standard.

The acid test for sustainable parks is clean and working ablution facilities, of which 70 blocks have been refurbished to minimise water and electricity use.

Johannesburg runs 14 utilities, agencies or companies, like City Power and Pikitup, each with a board and management structure. Agencies, like Parks, generate little income and run on rates and taxes. “Budgets are tight and my approach is to ensure returns on each expenditure,” explains Williamson.

Parks operations executive for environment and infrastructure, Patrick Meyer, wishes he could prove the common belief that Johannesburg had the largest man-made forest in the world. “At The Liveable Community Awards in London, where we won seven awards, we mentioned this belief and were challenged to prove it.”

JCP is planning a tree census to measure the urban forest canopy of Johannesburg and to benchmark against other metropolitan cities. “This could be a good research project for master and PhD students,” said Meyer,

The string of international and local awards from bodies like UNEP, decorating the boardroom, proves that this agency is rated among the best in the world. The string of parks features photos in the corridor.

Legal obligations

Johannesburg City Parks is a section 21, non profit agency of the metro, mandated to develop, maintain and conserve designated public open spaces, according to a Service Delivery Agreement. The agency uses its subsidy in the most productive manner possible to effectively cover its portfolio and create environmental value for citizens.

The agency is governed by section 21 of the Companies Act of 1973, Municipal Finance Management Act.56 of 2003, Preferential Procurement Regulations, Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment Act, Municipal Systems Act, Water Act, National Conservation Act, National Environmental Management Act, Heritage Act, municipal bylaws, and voluntarily applies the code of ethics of the King Commission on corporate governance.

The King 3 Report offers an ethical framework for the organisation and its board in terms of fairness, accountability, responsibility and transparency. The agency has attained nine consecutive clean audit reports by the Auditor General.

Johannesburg parks portfolio

Parks and arterials; 2343
Developed parks and arterials; 7103 hectares
Undeveloped parks; 4751 hectares
Nature reserves; 1202 hectares
Street verges; 500 hectares
Trees on streets; 1.4 million
Trees in parks and open spaces; 1.5 million
Cemeteries; 35, using 904 hectares
Crematoria; 2
Nurseries; 4
Water surfaces; 174 hectares
Bird sanctuaries; 366 hectares
Trails and river trails; 107km
Environmental and education centres; 6
Fleet; 306 vehicles; 127 trailers
Contractors are inspected daily

Carbon footprint calculator

A carbon footprint calculator is posted on the Johannesburg City Parks website to assist companies, organisations and individuals in determining their environmental impact, and the number of trees they should plant to offset their carbon footprint.

Parks itself has instituted carbon reduction and energy reduction measures, like energy and water audits at facilities to reduce consumption, retrofitting of buildings for reduced energy and environmental impacts.

Parks and Pikitup together located composting and recycling drop-off sites in all regions, to reduce travelling distances.

Recycling bins are being placed in parks, with a further tender underway, aiming to reduce the volume of waste to landfill.

Lawnmowers will soon be replaced by machines running on bio fuel or gas. A hybrid energy vehicle is being tested. and solar powered battery packs will soon light up some parks at night.

Security fencing

Fencing around some larger parks, as at Kloofendal in Roodepoort, serves to obstruct crime and vagrancy, keep dogs away from small game like hyrax and birds, conserve vegetation, prevent rubble dumping, and keep small antelope species that may become overstocked in larger parks like Klip River, Rietfontein, Melville Hills, and Walter Sisulu botanical gardens in Roodepoort.

The expensive concrete palisade fence at Kloofendal is now patrolled daily, and breaches are speedily repaired. Breaches due to traffic incidents are repaired by an insurer.

Not for sale

Responding to perennial initiatives by developers to obtain parts of parkland, and an earlier declaration by Johannesburg Property Company that it was ‘open to offers’, City Parks say their job is to protect and maintain public open spaces. “We jealously protect our parks and the proper function of parks,” said Cooke.

Wetlands

In Soweto, the agency is linking various green areas by paths, and rehabilitating the Klip River and Klipspruit wetlands, a project that would eventually cost R600-million.

A full environmental impact assessment (EIA) will be done before City Parks venture below the flood line, extending its ethic of environmental and communal health to wetland management.

PHOTO CAPTIONS:
Johannesburg Parks director Luther Williamson.

Johannesburg parks and cemeteries operations director Geoffrey Cooke, City Parks director Luther Williamson, with environment and infrastructure operations executive Patrick Meyer.