Relational Resilience and Reparative Design: Participatory Practices and the Politics of Space in Post-Apartheid Johannesburg

Abstract

This paper explores how collective resilience is built and sustained through situated, relational, and reparative approaches to design within conditions of deep spatial inequality. Focusing on Johannesburg’s Slovo Park settlement and the long-standing 15 year collaboration between the Slovo Park Community Development Forum (SPCDF) and 1to1—Agency of Engagement, it examines how participatory tool-making—centred on two keystone tools, the Blue File (a community-held, cloud-based knowledge repository) and the Timeline Tool (a multi-workshop planning and accountability device)—supports iteration, voice change, leadership transitions, and decision-making “with the map in hand.” Grounded in Southern urbanist theory and spatial justice scholarship, the paper re-politicises resilience as ongoing negotiation, repair, and shared authorship. It details how a map-based pointing practice translated situated knowledges into spatial choices; how the Blue File preserved continuity and evidence through leadership turnover; and how the Timeline Tool embedded care and transparency. Alongside benefits, the paper surfaces key tensions—expectation management, idea overload, triage and prioritisation, and legitimacy during leadership changes—and shows the concrete decision protocols used to move from many inputs to buildable design options. It concludes with ethical reflections for practitioners working in postcolonial/post-apartheid contexts and offers transferable lessons for allied urban conditions.

1. Introduction

The question of how cities can foster collective resilience in the face of deepening social, environmental, and spatial crises has become increasingly urgent in our era of ecological instability, economic polarisation, and democratic erosion. While global policy discourses often frame resilience through a technical or infrastructural lens, the lived realities of urban inequality—particularly in Southern1 contexts—demand more situated, socially embedded approaches. Across cities within these relational Southern contexts—particularly those shaped by histories of racialised development and exclusionary planning—grassroots organisers, urban researchers, and local governments are advancing new experiments in mutual support, spatial justice, and everyday acts of repair.. These experiments offer important insights into how resilience is not simply about absorbing shocks, but about reconfiguring the structures, relationships, and imaginaries that make urban life possible.

This paper explores these questions through the lens of Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest city and a paradigmatic site of urban contradiction, where neoliberal restructuring overlays deeply entrenched apartheid-era geographies. In particular, it focuses on the collaborative work between the Slovo Park Community Development Forum (SPCDF) and 1to1—Agency of Engagement (1to1), a non-profit design practice established to support spatially marginalised communities in navigating and reshaping the urban systems that affect them2. Drawing on more than a decade of participatory engagements, this study traces how co-produced tools, collaborative design processes, and socio-technical mediations have supported local organising capacities. At the same time, it critically reflects on the limits of architectural practice in addressing the structural dimensions of spatial inequality.

Situating this work within broader traditions of spatial justice [4,5] and relational [2,6], the paper argues that collective resilience must be understood not as a policy end-state but as an ongoing, contested process of co-producing space. Inspired by Paulo Freire’s pedagogies of dialogue and critical consciousness, it examines how design tools and participatory methods have served as generative artefacts—facilitating not only technical understanding but also collective reflection, negotiation, and strategic action. These spatial practices, while often modest in form, speak to larger political imaginaries of repair and redistribution, particularly in cities marked by long-standing disinvestment and marginalisation.

The paper begins by situating the concept of collective resilience within the socio-spatial inequalities of post-apartheid South Africa, drawing on critical urban theory and spatial justice literature. Next, it presents the Slovo Park case, outlining the historical development of the settlement and the long-standing partnership between the Slovo Park Community Development Forum (SPCDF) and 1to1—Agency of Engagement. This is followed by an examination of the participatory tools and methods employed in this collaboration, with particular attention to how visualisation, mapping, and iterative design supported community organising. The fourth section discusses the key actors and spaces that enabled these practices, unpacking the dynamics of intermediation, co-production, and socio-technical mediation with ‘communities’ and the important limits of this term. The fifth section explores the reparative imaginaries that emerged through this work, positioning them within broader debates on Southern urbanism and relational resilience. Finally, the paper concludes by reflecting on the implications of this case for design practitioners and urban researchers, arguing for a more situated, reparative, and justice-oriented approach to resilience.

By foregrounding the everyday, situated, and relational work of actors in Slovo Park, this paper contributes to a more grounded and reparative understanding of resilience. It highlights how the seemingly mundane practices of mapping, meeting, visualising, and documenting can become critical acts of urban agency—particularly when embedded in relationships of trust, shared authorship, and ongoing struggle. The Slovo Park case thus offers both a deeply situated perspective on the persistent legacies of spatial injustice in post-apartheid South Africa, and a hopeful, practical example of how architectural and design-based interventions, when rooted in solidarity and co-production, can contribute to more inclusive, just, and sustainable urban futures.

2. Situating Collective Resilience in Urban South Africa

Spatial inequality in South Africa manifests through extreme disparities in access to education, healthcare, infrastructure, and opportunities, deeply rooted in historical patterns of racialised development [7,8,9]. The Group Areas Act and similar policies entrenched a socio-spatial order that continues to marginalise Black and working-class communities [10]. Johannesburg, as Martin Murray [11] and Melissa Tandiwe Myambo [8,9] have shown, remains a city where neoliberal restructuring overlays and compounds historical inequalities, producing landscapes of intensified segregation, exclusion, and real estate speculation. As neoliberal urbanism prioritises market-driven logics, the city’s spatial politics increasingly marginalise the poor, exacerbating socio-economic divides [12].

Against this backdrop, the pursuit of spatial justice, as articulated by Soja [9] and Massey [13,14], becomes central to any discussion of collective resilience. Soja’s socio-spatial dialectic foregrounds how space is both a medium and an outcome of social processes, arguing for a geographically grounded conception of justice that recognises access to resources, services, and opportunities as a fundamental right [13,14,15]. Massey’s insistence on the dynamic, relational nature of space further underscores the importance of understanding how inequalities are continuously produced and can be resisted [13,14]. In the South African context, scholars such as Ivan Turok [16] and Marie Huchzermeyer [17] emphasise that addressing spatial injustice demands a commitment to supporting grassroots struggles, fostering participatory practices, and dismantling the enduring geographies of apartheid.

Johannesburg, where much of this paper’s empirical focus lies, embodies these tensions acutely. The cycles of disinvestment, deterioration, and exclusion that have characterised the area since the late 1980s illustrate the failures of both market-driven regeneration and state-led interventions [18,19]. In the absence of meaningful political representation, marginalised inner-city residents have developed their own networks of resilience, often through informal organising, service delivery protests, and legal action [6]. These collective practices reflect broader patterns observable across the Southern contexts, where urban resilience is not a technocratic exercise, but an everyday, contested, and relational process rooted in struggle and solidarity [20].

Urban resilience in South Africa is deeply intertwined with the persistent spatial inequalities rooted in colonial and apartheid legacies. Marie Huchzermeyer emphasizes that informal settlements are not merely zones of deprivation but are dynamic spaces where residents actively negotiate their rights to the city, challenging exclusionary urban planning paradigms [17]. This perspective aligns with the relational understanding of space, where urban environments are continuously produced and transformed through everyday social interactions and power dynamics. Edgar Pieterse expands these ideas around resilience and emphasises how this must be contextualized within the socio-political fabric of South African cities, where historical injustices have led to fragmented urban forms and unequal access to resources. He advocates for a transformative approach that addresses structural inequalities and fosters inclusive urban governance [21]. Similarly, researchers like Yonas T. Bahta highlight the importance of social resilience in the face of endemic spatial inequality, noting that community-led initiatives and participatory planning are crucial in building adaptive capacities in marginalized urban areas [22]. These contributions underscore that fostering urban resilience in South Africa necessitates confronting spatial injustices and empowering communities through inclusive, equitable, and participatory urban development processes.

By grounding resilience in the politics of space and recognising the relational processes that shape urban life, this paper aligns with calls for a more situated, justice-oriented understanding of resilience. It foregrounds not only the persistent barriers to justice but also the emergent practices of repair, negotiation, and co-production that point toward alternative urban futures. The following sections will explore how these dynamics have been operationalised through collaborative design, participatory tool-making, and multi-stakeholder engagement in Johannesburg, offering insights into the methods, actors, and imaginaries that sustain everyday collective resilience.

3. Slovo Park and 1to1: Building Capacity Through Co-Produced Tools

The Slovo Park Community Development Forum (SPCDF) and the work of 1to1—Agency of Engagement represent a critical case study in the practices of co-produced resilience within South Africa’s contested urban landscapes. Established during the late 1980s amid the uncertainties of the transition to democracy, Slovo Park was tactically sited to leverage access to nearby industrial and transport infrastructure, aiming to attract future formal development [23]. However, despite decades of engagement with shifting municipal and national policies, the community remained largely underserved, necessitating the emergence of grassroots organising structures such as the SPCDF to advocate for residents’ rights and to navigate the complex terrain of housing, services, and recognition [24].

The collaboration between the SPCDF and 1to1 since the early 2010s exemplifies an approach to community resilience rooted in participatory design and socio-technical mediation. This engagement was built off of years of multiple other actors supporting the SPCDF. The organisation began as a student project with the SPCDF, and grew as an intermediary organisation, 1to1 positioned itself not merely as a service provider but as a strategic facilitator, working to translate community aspirations into actionable plans while bridging communication gaps between residents, consultants, and government officials [25]. A crucial aspect of this saw the development of various co-produced ‘Toolkits’ designed to support collective agency, these were not exclusively used in Slovo Park, but were used in various projects across Johannesburg. These included instruments such as the TimeLine Tool [26], seen in Figure 1, which visually mapped project stages and responsibilities to facilitate transparent, inclusive planning discussions, and the Community Action Plan Handbook [27], which synthesised resident-driven proposals into structured frameworks for municipal engagement.

The use of such tools reflects a commitment to participatory methodologies aligned with Paulo Freire’s [28] emphasis on visual and dialogical approaches to empowerment. Rather than treating residents as passive recipients of expert knowledge, these tools created spaces for shared authorship, enabling communities to actively shape the processes that affected their lives [29]. Particularly significant was the evolution of the “Blue File,” a cloud-based repository of engagement artefacts and documentation curated with and for the SPCDF. Functioning as both a symbolic and practical resource, the Blue File equipped the community with evidence for negotiation and advocacy, reinforcing their legal and constitutional claims to development [30].

A pivotal outcome of the partnership was the Blue File—a community-shared, cloud-based archive that outgrew the early, often romanticised image of participation as people pointing at maps. While table-top orthophotos with sticker dots were useful ice-breakers, they also risked performative consultation: loudest-voice bias, the erasure of minority preferences in plenary merges, and weak traceability from gesture to built decision. Responding to these limits, the SPCDF and 1to1 formalised protocols (parallel small-tables for women, youth, renters and shopkeepers; weighted merges; a dissent register; and a two-key decision rule) and then translated the analogue ritual into a digital pipeline. Today, the same practice runs through a 3D GIS and socio-spatial enumeration toolset that 1to1 developed and docked into the Blue File. Field teams capture points, lines and polygons in situ on low-cost devices (offline-first, multilingual forms), tagging each feature with who raised it, why it matters, and what trade-offs were noted.

The Blue File remains the anchor: Folder-level permissions and a rotating SPCDF leadership preserve data sovereignty; consent notes, anonymisation where required, and role-based access protect residents while keeping the evidence usable for municipal engagements and legal processes. Crucially, when leadership changes—as it has repeatedly over a decade—the combination of traceable artefacts + 3D/GIS views dampens mandate disputes and keeps the work oriented to collectively recorded decisions rather than personalities. In short, what began as finger-on-a-map has matured into a relational, auditable, and spatially sophisticated decision infrastructure owned by the community.

The practical outcomes of these engagements were visible in Slovo Park’s successful 2016 lawsuit against the City of Johannesburg, which secured formal recognition and initiated a structured upgrading process under the National Upgrading Support Programme (NUSP) [31,32]. Yet the significance of the work extended beyond legal victories. The co-production of tools and strategies worked due to the existing culture of everyday resilience, supporting residents to sustain organised action through political uncertainties and infrastructural delays. In a context where institutional mechanisms of participation often fail to deliver substantive inclusion, the tactical deployment of accessible design tools provided new avenues for community-led planning and decision-making.

Importantly, this approach also addressed the complexities of multi-stakeholder dynamics, recognising that resilience-building in informal contexts requires negotiation across divergent value systems and institutional constraints [18]. By developing adaptive, iterative instruments like the UISP Road Map [33] and the Spatial Engagement Tool [34], 1to1 and the SPCDF were able to foster relational spaces that allowed city officials, technical consultants, and residents to engage in more co-productive means. These relational infrastructures, as seen n Figure 2, however partial and fragile, represent vital components of collective resilience, enabling communities to maintain agency within and against dominant urban planning paradigms.

The work between Slovo Park and 1to1 underscores how community resilience can be materially and relationally supported through participatory co-design practices. The emphasis on visual communication, iterative engagement, and the strategic use of toolkits demonstrates how resilience is not merely an outcome but a process—one embedded in everyday acts of negotiation, translation, and repair. In the next section, the methods underlying these practices will be further unpacked, highlighting how relational mapping, visualisation, and participatory prototyping contributed to strengthening collective capacity in Johannesburg’s contested urban spaces.

3.1. Methods for Mapping, Connecting, and Strengthening Practices

The practices of collective resilience observed in Slovo Park were underpinned by deliberate methods of engagement, mapping, and tool development that enabled community members to organise, assert agency, and sustain pressure on local authorities [31]. Central to these methods was the strategic use of participatory and visual tools designed to overcome both linguistic and technical barriers that typically exclude marginalised urban populations from urban planning processes [29,35]. The co-development of these tools—from diagrammatic planning aids to interactive maps—formed the foundation of an inclusive design methodology that sought to democratise spatial knowledge and strengthen community organising capacity.

The design approach employed by 1to1 and the SPCDF was grounded in a Freirean pedagogy of visual dialogue, which views drawing and representation not simply as communication devices but as tools for consciousness-raising and critical action [28,36]. For instance, the TimeLine Tool enabled stakeholders to understand and debate phases of urban upgrading projects without needing to interpret architectural drawings or technical reports [27]. Likewise, the UISP Road Map, seen in Figure 3, broke down the abstract and technocratic stages of informal settlement upgrading into accessible, step-by-step formats that supported meaningful participation by residents and local officials alike [33]. These tools did more than inform; they created a common language that made negotiation and collaboration possible across institutional and socio-political divides. Moreover, these methods were intentionally iterative, evolving in response to community feedback and shifting political realities. This adaptive quality was critical in the context of Johannesburg’s inner-city governance, where institutional instability and policy discontinuities frequently stall or reverse development efforts [18,19]. Through continuous co-production, the tools remained relevant, responsive, and usable beyond a single engagement cycle. As such, they supported a deeper, process-oriented understanding of resilience: not as a fixed outcome or set of capacities, but as the ability to adapt, organise, and sustain collective action within volatile urban ecologies [37].

The methods also foregrounded spatial literacy as a critical component of resilience. The Backstory Project, for instance, used the Spatial Engagement Tool, as seen in Figure 4, to curate temporary public exhibitions in inner-city Johannesburg, enabling residents, government officials, and urban practitioners to collectively reflect on contested histories and emerging possibilities [38]. These interventions helped situate spatial production within a wider politics of recognition and representation—a necessary condition for achieving spatial justice, as argued by theorists such as Nancy Fraser [39] and Doreen Massey [13,14]. By foregrounding local narratives, the project expanded what counted as legitimate urban knowledge and whose voices could shape urban futures. Importantly, these methods worked across and within institutional boundaries. Through collaborations with the University of the Witwatersrand’s Centre for Urban Built Environment Studies (CUBES), civil society actors like SERI, and various branches of the City of Johannesburg, 1to1’s methodology acted as a bridge—a socio-technical mediator that connected top-down policy frameworks with bottom-up demands for justice [40]. This intermediation not only supported collective learning across actor groups but also enabled the development of shared spatial imaginaries that could drive long-term action. For instance, the UISP Road Map Tool served not only as a planning tool but also as a negotiation device, enabling the SPCDF to assert their development priorities within formal forums [27].

Taken together, these methods—grounded in co-production, visualisation, iteration, and dialogue—worked to recognise and reinforce the everyday capacities of communities like Slovo Park to organise, persist, and reimagine their urban condition. In doing so, they extended the field of participatory urbanism beyond mere consultation into the realm of co-authorship and strategic action. As the next section explores, these methods were not neutral but deeply shaped by the values, relationships, and imaginaries of the actors involved—revealing how resilience is always a situated, political, and collaborative practice.

3.2. Actors, Mediators, and the Spaces of Resilience

The resilience displayed by the leadership of Slovo Park was not the result of isolated effort, but rather the outcome of a dense network of relationships between residents, activists, practitioners, researchers, and officials who co-produced strategies, tools, and spaces of resistance and transformation. Identifying and understanding the roles of these actors—as initiators, mediators, and multipliers—is essential to unpacking how collective organising takes root and sustains itself under often hostile urban conditions. In this context, resilience does not emerge from infrastructural robustness alone but is embedded in the social infrastructures that allow people to act together meaningfully over time [3].

At the centre of these efforts stands the Slovo Park Community Development Forum (SPCDF), a representative body composed of elected members from across the settlement’s various social, religious, and economic groupings. The SPCDF has consistently acted as the primary initiator of community-driven development efforts, balancing demands for services with strategic legal and political advocacy [23]. The SPCDF exemplifies what Bhan [1] describes as a “southern urban political subject”—a collective actor that emerges from and adapts to conditions of structural neglect, exercising agency through incremental mobilisation, naming, and negotiation.

The role of 1to1—Agency of Engagement was that of mediator, translating across institutional languages and political logics. This mediation was not neutral but consciously reparative—aiming to shift power toward the community by designing tools and processes that foregrounded local knowledge and priorities [25]. As “socio-technical intermediaries,” 1to1 enabled dialogue between the SPCDF and state actors by crafting participatory infrastructures such as the Blue File, the UISP Road Map, and the Spatial Engagement Tool [30,34]. These artefacts functioned not just as communication devices but as what Freire [28] might call “generative themes”: entry points for critical reflection, strategy, and collective action.

Multipliers in this network included university researchers, particularly those affiliated with the Centre for Urban Built Environment Studies (CUBES) at the University of the Witwatersrand, legal practitioners from SERI, and sympathetic officials within the City of Johannesburg. Their support expanded the impact of local organising by legitimising claims in legal and policy spaces and offering platforms for wider visibility. Importantly, the effectiveness of these actors was contingent on their ability to maintain trust with the community and to work relationally—that is, through ongoing dialogue and responsiveness rather than extractive or technocratic engagements [18,41].

Equally significant are the spaces in which these actors operate and through which resilience is made visible. These include not only physical sites such as the Slovo Hall, seen in Figure 5, and the temporary spatial installations created during the Backstory Project [38], but also ephemeral and administrative spaces like community meetings, planning workshops, legal courts, and digital archives. These become what Simone [2] terms “platforms of urban life”—spaces where overlapping claims, imaginations, and practices are negotiated. By curating such spaces, the SPCDF and its partners created conditions for mutual recognition and alignment, allowing divergent actors to find common purpose.

In this sense, the work of Slovo Park and its collaborators challenges conventional spatial binaries—informal/formal, user/expert, planner/resident—and instead reveals a more complex ecology of resilient practices, grounded in shared authorship, situated tactics, and iterative design. These relationships and platforms not only enable everyday survival under conditions of precarity but also lay the groundwork for transformative imaginaries—visions of the city as just, inclusive, and collectively governed. As the paper will explore, such imaginaries are not abstract ideals but materialised through the practices of repair, co-production, and political persistence that define Southern approaches to urbanism.

4. On the Limits of ‘Community’ and Repair

While the language of “community” is often mobilised within architectural discourse as a means of affirming collective agency and promoting inclusivity, its uncritical deployment can obscure more than it reveals. Particularly in contexts marked by enduring spatial injustice—such as post-apartheid South Africa—the invocation of “the community” risks essentialising and flattening the heterogeneity of urban life. As this paper argues, spatial justice and collective resilience cannot be meaningfully advanced through generalised assumptions of cohesion, shared interests, or consensus. Rather, these aims must be rooted in a more careful interrogation of who is being referred to, represented, or excluded when spatial practitioners and institutional actors invoke the term “community.”

Drawing from reflective practice and project-based engagements in informal settlement upgrading, this study identifies a persistent challenge: “community” is too often operationalised by professionals, government officials, or donor frameworks as a stable, knowable entity—suggesting harmony where there may be tension, or unity where there may be deep contestation. This framing not only misrepresents the complex realities of informality and grassroots organisation, but also legitimises reductive interventions that overlook internal hierarchies, exclusionary mechanisms, and political differences. As Hamdi [42] and others have argued, “community” can refer to a community of place, interest, identity, or practice—each carrying distinct implications for how participatory processes are designed and how agency is distributed.

For architects working within socio-technical urban conditions, this ambiguity becomes particularly problematic when used to justify externally imposed design decisions or tokenistic participatory processes. In practice, those identified as “the community” are often those most legible to institutional systems—frequently local leaders, politically connected figures, or organisational representatives who fit within bureaucratic expectations. As discussed in Bennett [43], this tendency can result in exclusionary dynamics, whereby the most vulnerable groups—including women, migrants, informal workers, or renters—are systematically marginalised from spatial decision-making. Worse still, it can entrench extractive forms of engagement that co-opt participation for project validation, while bypassing the actual lived experiences and needs of urban residents.

Thus, within architectural and planning practice, there is an urgent need to move beyond romanticised or managerial conceptions of “community.” Instead, practitioners must cultivate a critical awareness of how the term functions within systems of power: Who defines it? Who benefits from its use? Who is rendered invisible or illegitimate by its deployment? These questions demand a situated approach—one that foregrounds positionality, historical injustice, and the uneven conditions under which spatial knowledge and claims are made. Over fifteen years of collaboration, the changing leadership within Slovo Park continually tested these assumptions. Elected committees shifted multiple times, sometimes bringing fresh energy, at other moments reopening old debates or stalling agreed actions. Each transition required re-negotiating legitimacy: revisiting decisions, re-explaining processes, and re-securing consent. Far from being a neutral backdrop, leadership change became a structuring condition of the work, reminding us that “community” is not a fixed collective but a moving field of actors with evolving priorities.

For 1to1 and for myself as a practitioner, this demanded long-term presence and ethical agility. The role was less that of a designer delivering a project and more of a steward of relationships and memory—curating tools like the Blue File, maintaining the data, and facilitating recurring “handover” dialogues so that agreements outlasted any single committee. These cycles were not only logistical; they were political acts that recognised the right of new leaders to reinterpret mandates while holding them accountable to earlier, collectively recorded commitments. In this sense, the practice itself became reparative: working with and through turnover, rather than despite it, and treating continuity as something to be co-produced over time.

Rather than abandoning the term altogether, this paper calls for its re-politicisation. Recognising community as a constructed, contested, and dynamic category opens space for more reflexive and reparative modes of practice—ones that foreground intersectionality, difference, and the co-existence of multiple subjectivities: shown in Figure 6. In doing so, architectural practitioners can shift from designing for imagined communities to working with situated actors whose conflicts, negotiations, and aspirations actively shape the urban fabric—multiple communities within a spatial community of an informal settlement for example. Such a shift requires not only methodological adjustment, but an ethical orientation toward accompaniment, care, and accountability.

In this context, reparative approaches offer a critical framework for rethinking participation, presence, and power. In post-apartheid South Africa, repair is more than technical maintenance or symbolic restitution—it is a lived, situated practice that engages with the unfinished project of reparations. It demands that spatial practitioners confront the legacies of spatial violence, institutionalised neglect, and racialised dispossession that continue to shape urban life. Repair, in this sense, is not about restoring what once was, but about reconfiguring relationships, infrastructures, and imaginaries in ways that recognise harm, affirm dignity, and enable co-authored transformation.

To practice repair is to be present: not only physically, but relationally and politically. It requires time, humility, and a willingness to be accountable to those most affected by spatial injustice. This form of practice resists the abstraction of community as a planning category, and instead grounds itself in shared processes of meaning-making, conflict navigation, and material co-creation. It is through such reparative work that architecture can begin to support not just participation, but participation that is emancipatory, redistributive, and structurally responsive.

In this way, repair becomes both a method and a politics—a situated, iterative, and collective response to the question of how to build with others, in the wake of broken promises and unfulfilled rights. It invites a practice that listens as much as it designs, that remains attentive to difference, and that recognises its own complicity in systems it seeks to transform. From this perspective, “community” is not a fixed object of design, but a field of relations, struggles, and solidarities—constantly negotiated through the practices of care, co-production, and critical presence. In the South African context, practices of repair carry a particularly charged political and historical weight. They are not merely technical or aesthetic acts but are deeply entangled with the country’s unresolved need for reparations—not only financial or juridical, but also spatial, relational, and symbolic.

In informal settlement like Slovo Park, repair becomes a way to engage with the enduring legacies of apartheid spatial planning, systemic neglect, and racialised dispossession. It is through the repair of relationships, institutions, and physical environments that communities reclaim agency and articulate alternative forms of justice. As such, repair is not only an act of maintenance but of making-visible—drawing attention to what has been broken by systemic inequality and insisting on its transformation. These everyday, community-based forms of repair confront the gaps left by formal restitution processes and demonstrate how architecture and design can participate in reparative justice by supporting the incremental, iterative, and collective reconfiguration of space, governance, and belonging. In this way, repair operates both as a method and as a politics—a means of holding open space for recognition, care, and co-authored futures in post-apartheid urbanism.

5. Discussion: Transformative Imaginaries—Repair and Southern Urbanism

The practices of resilience emerging from Slovo Park are not solely reactive strategies to urban exclusion; they also embody transformative imaginaries—alternative visions of what the city could become if structured around principles of justice, inclusivity, and care. These imaginaries are forged through everyday acts of repair, negotiation, and collaborative spatial production. They resonate with broader Southern urbanist theories, which challenge dominant narratives of urban development by foregrounding situated, relational, and reparative modes of engagement [1,2].

The concept of repair is particularly vital to understanding the imaginaries that sustain Slovo Park’s long-standing struggle. Rather than aspiring to an idealised or “perfected” urban condition, the community’s practices reflect what Berger and Irvin [44] describe as a reparative practice—an ongoing, reflexive process of making and remaking spaces, relationships, and institutions despite their inevitable imperfections. Repair here is not a return to a former state but an act of collective reimagining and restructuring, carried out amidst broken infrastructures, precarious tenures, and shifting political landscapes.

This reparative approach aligns closely with the work of Liz Ogbu [45], who advocates for “healing-centred design” as a way of addressing historical trauma and fostering resilience through spatial interventions. In Slovo Park, the collaborative development of the Blue File, the TimeLine Tool, and the CAP Handbook were not only technical exercises but symbolic acts of claiming space, rights, and dignity [27,28,31]. These artefacts made visible the collective aspirations and struggles of the community, offering new narratives against the pervasive imaginaries of informality as failure or criminality [46].

Moreover, the relational spaces cultivated through co-design processes—community halls, workshops, exhibitions—fostered a multi-authored vision of the city. This vision rejects the binary of formal versus informal and instead embraces the heterogeneous, iterative, and negotiated character of urban life, a perspective championed by Southern urban theorists such as Simone [2] and Castán Broto [47]. Through these collective spaces, new imaginaries of citizenship and belonging were materialised, wherein residents are not merely beneficiaries of state largesse but active co-producers of the urban commons.

The capacity to imagine and materialise alternative futures is, as Massey [48] argues, deeply political. It involves contesting dominant spatial narratives and asserting the legitimacy of marginalised forms of life and organisation. In the case of Slovo Park, the imaginaries of a more just city were not imposed by external actors but grew from the relational and reparative practices of the community itself, supported by intermediaries who recognised the transformative potential embedded in everyday acts of spatial agency [39].

Critically, these imaginaries are not static blueprints but living, evolving frameworks that adapt to shifting political, economic, and environmental conditions. They are anchored in the embodied knowledge of residents who understand resilience not as a matter of surviving crises alone but as the ongoing project of building places of dignity, recognition, and possibility. The co-produced methods and infrastructures developed in Slovo Park thus not only address immediate needs but also contribute to a broader reparative urbanism—one that confronts the structural legacies of spatial injustice while imagining and enacting more equitable futures [49].

Towards which, the case of Slovo Park demonstrates how grass-roots resilience, when rooted in relational practices and reparative imaginaries, can offer critical insights for the ecological transitions and urban transformations demanded by our current era. This is shown in the iterations of the hall in Figure 7. Rather than seeing resilience as a mere return to stability, it should be understood as a transformative force—capable of reshaping cities from the margins through practices of hope, repair, and collective imagination.

6. Conclusions

This paper has explored how collective practices of resilience emerge, evolve, and sustain themselves through situated, relational, and reparative engagements in contexts of deep spatial inequality. Using the case of Slovo Park and the work of 1to1—Agency of Engagement, it has shown how citizen-led organising, participatory tool-making, and socio-technical mediation can enable communities to assert agency, build capacity, and co-produce alternative urban futures. Drawing from relational theories of space [48,49,50] and frameworks of spatial justice [13,39], the paper argued that resilience must be understood not as a technical solution or a policy outcome, but as an ongoing, negotiated process of collective imagination and repair.

Key to this process are the actors who initiate, mediate, and amplify everyday practices of resistance and renewal, and the methods and infrastructures that preserve those practices through time. The participatory tools developed in Slovo Park—especially the Blue File and the Timeline Tool—illustrate how design can act as a vehicle for building organising capacity and sustaining decision-making well beyond a single project cycle. What began as hand-drawn “people pointing at maps” evolved into a 3D GIS and socio-spatial enumeration platform that records votes, trade-offs, and household data while keeping authorship and access in community hands. By versioning every choice and linking it to visual evidence, the Blue File enabled continuity across more than fifteen years of shifting community leadership, reducing disputes and anchoring new committees to collectively recorded decisions.

The Slovo Park case also underscores that participation is rarely seamless. Leadership turnover, expectation management, and internal contestation repeatedly tested the stability of agreements and the patience of all actors involved. Far from being obstacles to be overcome, these tensions became structuring conditions of the work. They demanded that 1to1 adopt an evolving role as long-term interlocutor and custodian of process memory, ensuring that knowledge, rather than personalities, guided subsequent design moves. This hard-earned capacity for iteration is what transformed participatory mapping from a single consultative moment into a living governance system.

In doing so, the project highlights the importance of Southern urbanism perspectives that embrace informality, difference, and relationality as generative forces in city-making [3,36,43]. It shows that community resilience is not simply a reaction to crisis but a politically charged, proactive practice that reimagines and reconfigures urban life in more just, inclusive, and sustainable ways. For practitioners, the term “community” must therefore be approached critically. Working with a heterogeneous and evolving collective means recognising that community is not a fixed subject but a dynamic field of relations and negotiations, where legitimacy must be repeatedly renewed.

The reparative approach in architectural practice emphasises ongoing, reflexive processes of making and remaking spaces, relationships, and institutions, acknowledging their inevitable imperfections. Initiatives such as the Blue File, the Timeline Tool, and the CAP Handbook were not only technical exercises but symbolic acts of claiming space, rights, and dignity—offering counter-narratives to persistent imaginaries of informality as failure. Engaging in reparative practice requires a willingness to inhabit uncertainty, to design with rather than for, and to treat continuity itself as a collective design outcome.

The Slovo Park experience shows how grassroots resilience—rooted in relational practices, long-term memory infrastructures, and reparative imaginaries—can inform the socio-spatial transformations demanded by our current era. Rather than viewing resilience as a return to stability, it should be understood as a transformative force, capable of reshaping cities from the margins through sustained practices of hope, repair, and collective imagination.