South Africa township gets pre-2010 'extreme makeover'
- Feature
Diepkloof, Johannesburg - The goalposts went up first, acting as a metaphor
for the challenge that lay ahead over the following 24 hours in South
Africa's Soweto township: to build a public park from a piece of wasteland
in a single day. Under pressure to meet its targets on greening areas
that were starved of trees and parks under apartheid by the 2010 football
World Cup, Johannesburg City Parks pulled together all its resources this
week and pressed fast-forward.
The inspiration for the two-hectare Diepkloof Xtreme Park came from the
Extreme Makeover television series, in which people first, then homes,
around the world, offer themselves up for rapid facelift.
The beautification of Diepkloof, a poor Soweto district of matchbox houses
and high crime levels, began at 5 p.m. on Thursday evening.
With six hours to go to the unveiling of the park by Johannesburg Mayor
Amos Masondo Friday, around 200 workers were still busy unrolling bales
of instant grass and planting flowers and trees.
The basketball court had yet to be tarred and and the ground under the
children's swings was waiting for a protective coating.
But a bulldozer was already smoothing a sand soccer pitch, new pathways
wound past a freshly-plastered ablutions block. And a giant TV screen,
on which Sowetans who cannot afford to attend the matches will be able
to watch the World Cup, had been erected.
"We have taken our lead from 2006 World Cup in Germany," Jenny
Moodley, spokeswoman for the Parks body said, adding: "It's going
to be a hard act to follow.
For the 2006 tournament Germany set itself ambitious targets ("Green
Goals) on water conservation, recycling and reducing emissions.
Johannesburg has its own World Cup environmental legacy programme, aimed
at, among other things, greening disadvantaged areas like Soweto by giving
them 200,000 trees.
With over 6 million trees, more per square kilometre than any other city
in the world, Johannesburg is the world's largest urban jungle.
But the leafy canopy is very unequally dispersed.
The wealthy, mainly white suburbs to the north of the city are home to
most of Johannesburg's trees and 78 per cent of its parks - although residents
of these areas rarely use public parks.
The areas into which the non-white population was crammed during apartheid
still have little to no shade from the blistering African sun - and no
green lung to absorb the dust from the city's gold mines.
Soweto is coated in dust from the mine dumps that delineate the township
to the north.
"To address the backlog of environmental amenities - trees, parks,
nature reserves - in previously disadvantaged (black, coloured and Indian
areas) we need about 1.2 billion rand," says Luther Williamson, managing
director of Johannesburg City Parks.
At the Parks current level of funding - 40 million rand for new projects
in 2008 -redressing the imbalance will take 30 years.
Hence gimmicky "extreme" projects, that attract media attention
and, hopefully, more corporate sponsorship.
A South African cement company, PPC, donated 450 bags of cement and a
handful of employees, who spent the morning planting flowers.
"This is like an archaeological dig," Craig Waterson, PPC sales
and marketing director, says, hacking at a flower bed with a hoe. "Over
there we found a piece of pink porcelain."
"It's going to be nice as long as there's security,"says Vincent
Mkhumbeni, a young man from Diepkloof standing in line for a "piece
job" (casual job) laying grass.
The media company, Primedia, that donated the giant screen, on which Sowetans
will watch two local football teams do battle on Saturday, has also thrown
in 24-hour security.
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10 May 2008
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