Social Infrastructure

When I reach at least thirty, I want to have been married with at least two kids. I want to be one of the best engineers in and out of South Africa. I want to play a role in the society that has brought me up. Everybody plays some type of role that allows for our everyday living. It can be the man I buy my coffee from in the morning or the engineers that built the University of Cape Town that I attend everyday of the week. As human beings we become social by these interactions that we take part in in our everyday lives, some we are even oblivious to. We socialise with other human beings, animals and the infrastructure that is place for us to have those everyday lives. This paper will expound my now understanding of ‘social infrastructures’ and the role this understanding has played in my awareness of community engagement. It will further go on to show whether all of this has shaped me into a more active and engaged citizen. As a civil engineering student this will mostly be based on physical structures of infrastructures, but I still acknowledge other types of infrastructures like the internet etc.

Social infrastructure is the ability of people to use and benefit from the built structures and norms to maintain social processes. Infrastructure only becomes social when used by a group of people who ‘socialise’. These people and their social processes are called communities. This goes to say that to understand social infrastructures, we need to first understand what is meant by the term ‘community’. People live in systems. They have cultures and trends that they follow to make sense of their being or just simply give meaning to their lives. There is too many of us and too much that the world offers for us to try and live by ourselves. We need each other. This is why we have communities. Throughout the Social Infrastructures course, I have understood community as a field of space where a collective of peoples socialise and form covalent bonds. The difference is that in this covalent bond, the electrons are the individuals’ ideas with them as the molecules. This definition is not confined by geography or race but the reality we live in and social constructs have forced us to look at it that way. “In South Africa, for example, the term ‘community’ has for some time been used as a gloss for talking about predominantly black poor groups” (Rohleder et al, 2008). We will always be grouped by our identities courtesy of the fat harsh history of our country.

Link et al (2011) suggested that communities are complex and looked at in different ways. His understanding of community along with mine shifted from what he defined as “a unified locality and full of residents banded together by similar interests and a geographic identity” (Link et al, 2011). Hunter Link brought up how to engage with communities in the processes their development because these communities are multi-faceted and that can be an advantage to professionals. We need to look at communities from these different ways to make the best decisions possible and efficient for our communities. The people who use and how these people use the infrastructure depends on their access to this infrastructure. In Cape Town, people are distributed into different communities based on race and income range. How much you make will determine how close you live to the city and how good are the services you will receive. This is universal and not only in Cape Town. As individuals we organise ourselves with people that look and have the same living standards like us. This is evident in mono-racial communities.

In District 6, at the heart of Cape Town, the history there shows light on diversity in communities. Their struggles while growing up turned them into a united front. They share the idea of returning home and sharing their history of how they were evicted from their homes in order to build the Cape Town you see right now. In that, they found happiness and comfort. That is what makes them a community and not just a group of people. This brings me to community engagement. This group of people of more than sixty thousands were unwillingly evicted from their homes by people who just wanted to build something else. This is a struggle that still exist in today’s communities where developers come and build in this communities and not engage with the community. Some of these developments may be beneficial to the community but every change made within a community may it be infrastructural by a community non-member affects people’s lives. If you are going to make someone a cup of coffee, you need to know if they would like to have milk with it or not, or how many spoons of sugar they would like, or if they want that cup of coffee at all.

As professionals in practice, we look at our structures and artefacts from a technical engineering viewpoint, but these engineering products are going to be used by people. The void or space between the making of these structures and how they are going to be used and who is going to use them is where conceptualise community engagement. This is like incorporating these structures into the community. This why community does not have a fixed definition but needs to conceptualised depending on why you are engaging with that particular community and why you render it a community. How people use and maintain social infrastructures depends on whether they have a sense of ownership of that infrastructure as Coetzer (2013) suggests. He goes on to emphasises that “… built artefacts are not in themselves powerful enough to make this part of the world a better place. Community participation and ownership of a design project and its active involvement in managing the facilities developed is critical” (Coetzer, 2013).

Engineering has social benefits and how individuals and communities respond is different as a result of, and acknowledgement of, social processes. This brings value to extensive social research. Some of this research has shown that there will be challenges in this processes – from resistance, power dynamics as indicated by Onyx (2008) to cultural differences as suggested by Winkler (2013). In Civil Engineering there is term “serviceability” which in simple terms refers to whether a structure is still considered as useful or not. This adds more reason why community engagement is useful and vital. Contributions in perspectives help reach the aims of the professional projects and solutions to community needs and problems. Community engagement is complex and must be built up by co-production of knowledge and put together point of views.

Some of the other challenges as the scholars in a study shared by Winkler (2013) identified is entry into communities. Both Winker (2013) and Onyx (2008) advise that to have an effective community engagement process you need to form good relationships with the community. Long lasting relationships that will built that base of trust between you as the developer of just a non-member of the community and the community itself. If the community does not trust you then you will not get what you want. Winkler (2013) further went to indicate that not every party involved in the engagement stands to benefits from it. Like the residents of Barcelona and Europe whose benefits from the engagement are not evident immediately after. Some of the residents still live in shacks and are still unemployed. The question of trust we saw from the in-class re-enactment of a community meeting where residents were not willing and not prepared to hear what the officials had to say regarding their issues because they believed they were just going to feed them with lies.

In Arendse (2014) different partnerships are explained from local, local-local and local-external connections. Local connections being those between local groups and or in communities. Local-local connections being the horizontal relationships between and within communities. The ones that involve external parties like developers being local-external. These link the parties in decision making and assisting in the co-production of information which push for better communities. People leave their communities to move to cities becoming the main problem of urbanisation because in their communities the services are not sufficient as a result of bad engagement between authorities and the individuals in the communities. If the authorities understood the people they are catering for, the provision of services would run more smoother and would be sufficient everyone living in these communities.

In a visit to Observatory Civic Association, we saw developments that failed miserably because the community was not informed of the decisions to make those developments. In the same community you will find organisations that are for those developments. This brings about perspectives in community engagement in Social Infrastructures. The people of Observatory produce solutions by themselves and have organisations inside Observatory with different mandates and can critic solutions and decisions. When all these organisations come together and share information, they have made observatory what it is today. Perspective is the way see things from our experiences. Imagine the outcome if professionals engaged with the ‘disabled’ during the production of infrastructures as Vic and Randall suggested. Vic and Randall are disabled and have problems moving around the city.

I do not understand why our infrastructure does not allow access for disabled people. The infrastructure we have creates barriers and limitations. Mobility in a city like Cape Town provides a sense of belonging to everyone that lives in it. If we do not allow disabled people to move around Cape Town, we are not accepting in our society. There is too much ignorance in planning and design from academic professionals. We need to plan cities so that they are socially just and equitable and environmentally sustainable. Have Infrastructures that are inclusive, allow for mobility and can create jobs. The understanding of social infrastructures will help challenge the ignorance and further contribute positively to the evolution of professionals, more especially engineers.

As individuals and active citizens to roll our sleeves up and recognize our potential in social and community building.  Remain motivated and courageous to stand up for the virtuous practices and stand against vicious approaches and strategies in our communities and country at large. Think consciously and inclusively of other people's perspectives and have understanding that there is no right and wrong perspective. Most of all understand despite our differences of race, power, opportunities and even cultures, it all narrows down we are all human beings. Same flesh, same blood. Ernest Sirolli in his Ted Talk says that we need to shut up and listen. For a better social infrastructure, we need to give people the power to speak and voice their concerns so that we provide solutions to problems we understand very well.

Growing up I have believed that people who ask for services from the government are just people who want free things and are not willing to work for the things they want. I have always believed that we should appreciate the things that the developers provide for us. We do not have the skills to create the infrastructure and they are there to do for us. In all that, people have always insisted on rather not having the infrastructure than having the white people coming to our township and imposing it on the people. In this course have seen the attachment that have towards their homes. People simply want to be involved. In our CIV1005W in the University of Cape Town in a chapter where we improve informal settlements, always insist that engineers should use the people in the community to build whatever solution they have came up with. This creates jobs for the people in the communities and it provides opportunities for these people to acquire skills and for them to be involved in decision making processes. If you created it yourself, you will appreciate it and treat with care.

However, there will always be people who will never be satisfied with the infrastructure and the progress of their community like the residents of Observatory who do not want developers coming into their community to come and build buildings that go higher than six floors but sing that they want people to come in to learn their tradition and history. They have organisations that overlap and some just hinder development just because the developers are rich white people. It is annoying. We all hate white people, but progress is progress. Observatory is a great place to be in, but it can be better, and they stand to benefit themselves. You start to wonder if their infrastructure is even for the social or it is just a bunch of private property. I believe there are more suburbs like it around South Africa and the entire world. Learning from these different communities should shape engineers to be better.

In conclusion, Social Infrastructures are the built environment that we build to aid and maintain our every social processes. It how we give life to this environment and keep them relevant by using them for their functions. There is a whole entire process in between building these artifacts and making them viable for their functions for humans which is the engagement with the community that you are making them for and who are going to use them on an everyday basis. For those communities appreciate them and sustain them they need to be involved in the design and decision making processes during the making of these artifacts to give them a sense of ownership and just to simply empower the less fortunate communities. We need to incorporate inclusion in the making of our artifacts. We need to be aware there are people with less abilities than us who want to move around the city and the country and we need to offer that mobility to those people. If we all have mobility we will feel welcomed and comfortable in the cities we live. We link this to the industrial work experience and field. As a young emerging professional, I will have challenges incorporating this course to my work. Especially when your work colleagues and boss all care about just getting the work done confusion, Ambiguity, Uncertainty and Hyper-connectivity of society's problems. Keeping in mind that some of these problems are interlinked and dynamic. Therefore, while solving one issue another one crops out. The need for continuous learning in a reflexive society Dominant neo-liberal economic forces. We need to beat and fight against forces that accelerate inequalities and material value and greed that normalize and breathe out more instabilities.

References:

Arendse, W., & Patel, Z. (2014). ‘No messing in Bonteheuwel’: The role of social capital and partnership building in sustainable community development. Wetenskaplike artikels, SSB/TRP/MDM (65), 1-11

Coetzer, N. (2013). Op Ed Cape Times – Water and washing meeting place.

Link, H., McNally, T., Sayre, A., Schmidt, R., & Swap, R. (2011) The definition of community: a student perspective. Partnerships: A Journal of Service Learning and Civic Engagement, Vol. 2, No. 2 Fall 1-9.

Onyx, J. (2008) University-Community Engagement: What does it mean? International Journal of Community Research and Engagement. No 1 (2008): 90-106.

Rohleder, P., Swartz, L., Carolissen, R., Bozalek, V. & Leibowitz, B. (2008) ‘Communities isn’t just about the trees and shops’: students from 2 South African universities engage in dialogue about ‘community’ and ‘community work’. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 18(3), 253-267

Winkler, T. (2013) “At the coalface: University-Community Engagements and Planning Education, Journal of Planning Education & Research, 33(2) 215-227