Open places, scary spaces

In the early evening a group of teens can be seen leaving a house beside Oatland’s North Municipal Park. One boy turns away from the group, heading in the opposite direction; “Going for a walk?” his friend calls sarcastically. “Better take a knife!” yells another.

Oatland’s Park, referred to as ‘the valley’, is deserted. Like many open spaces in Somerset Heights, Oatlands North and Currie Park a skip seems randomly tossed onto the landscape where it leaks refuse broadly in every direction. No children play here and few dog-walkers stray from the tarred roads. “The skips definitely increase what I’d call the ‘criminal element’,” says Captain Jafta of the Grahamstown Police, “vagrants are drawn to the area and we definitely see an increase in petty theft”.

Open spaces should be spots of green tranquillity, injecting some fun into suburbia. Yet we are more concerned with protecting ourselves against what may stray from these eerie, unkempt places into our yards. “The fear of crime has a negative impact on quality of life at the individual, community and societal levels,” says the Human Sciences Research Council, “reducing the sense of trust and cohesion within communities, limiting people’s mobility and hastening retreat from public spaces”. Nicholas Davenport, who looks at the use of common land in Grahamstown in his Masters thesis, found that crime inhibits our involvement in our environment – preventing us from claiming parks and commons as part of our communities, often letting them become more neglected and crime-ridden.

Kim Weber of Pam Golding Grahamstown refers to the use of common land for waste disposal as “a nightmare”, saying that safety in this regard is the number one concern for potential home buyers. “The first thing they do is slap up a great big wall,” she says, adding that the additional costs of security could cut deep into a sellers asking price; “when people see an uncontrolled piece of land their fear of the unknown kicks in, and one of their first considerations will be how much they need to spend to make those worries go away.”
Mandisi Plinga, Makana Municipality’s Director of Community and Social Services, says that while he understands residents concerns “we must interrogate the root cause, not the symptom”. On one level he naturally refers to the socio-economic circumstances of criminals, but residents (and potential victims) must also share in the responsibility. He says; “the skips were put there for garden refuse, now we see that the people living near by put everything in, things that poor people will come looking for”.

Currently the police and the municipality liaise at a monthly meeting in which Plinga says he “is open to discussions to find solutions. However Captain Jafta says that while the police have approached the municipality about improving lighting in these areas little has changed. In the municipality’s defence; while Makana has been awarded a R90 million Development Partnership Grant by the National Treasury “this grant is specifically meant for township/rural development… to redress the imbalances that were left by apartheid” and the municipality is currently focusing on lighting Raglan Road and beyond. Meanwhile attempts to increase visibility in open spaces such as Sugar Loaf Hill by getting rid of scrub and trees at the borders of the suburbs have been stopped due to the threat of erosion.

Evidently reclaiming our open spaces will continue to be a difficult process. While the police and municipality continue to work together to secure the fate of these homes we are left asking; where are the residents?