James Delaney inspects one of the aloes at his park, known as The Wilds, in Johannesburg, South Africa on Nov. 22.Madelene Cronjé/The Globe and Mail
James Delaney picks up his trowel, digs a hole in the dirt and plants another succulent in one of Johannesburg’s most beloved parks. Technically, it’s another breach of the bylaws in South Africa’s biggest city.
“Almost everything I’ve done here for the past 10 years has been illegal,” he told The Globe and Mail with a grin.
Mr. Delaney, a Johannesburg-based artist, has an often-tense relationship with the bureaucrats in the city’s parks department. But his tireless efforts, along with the labour and donations of the hundreds of volunteers he mobilized, have revitalized a 16-hectare public space known as the Wilds – a park that had been menacing, dark and overgrown for decades.
Just last year, city officials called out the police to arrest him for building a wheelchair-accessible path in the 85-year-old park without their permission.
He halted the project briefly – but later managed to finish the job. It was another illicit step forward for his campaign to revive the once-abandoned park, offering hope of new strategies for combatting crime and decay in one of Africa’s biggest cities.
“This was a very dangerous place,” recalled Thulani Nkomo, a migrant worker from Zimbabwe who became the first to work with Mr. Delaney on rehabilitating the park in 2014.
Artworks by James Delaney can be seen throughout the park.Madelene Cronjé/The Globe and Mail
“We pruned the dead branches off the trees and made a nice view, so that people can feel safer,” Mr. Nkomo said. “Now it’s much better than before. People come here from all over to enjoy it and take photos. They find it amazing.”
For years, Mr. Delaney and Mr. Nkomo were often the only people in the entire park. They chopped down bushes and cleared the dense jungle from the paths, creating open vistas that felt less dangerous. Over three years, they cleared the equivalent of about 50 truckloads of branches.
Later, Mr. Delaney planted thousands of indigenous plants and used his art expertise to create 100 brightly coloured metal sculptures of owls, antelopes and other African creatures, which he added to branches and lawns across the park.
The artwork soon became one of its most popular features. The park now attracts about 10,000 visitors a month.
Thulani Nkomo works as a gardener in The Wilds and has been working alongside James Delaney for 9 years.Madelene Cronjé/The Globe and Mail
Despite its occasional harassment of him for failing to follow official rules, Johannesburg’s parks department has generally tolerated Mr. Delaney’s unconventional methods. After first allowing his group to “adopt” the park, it later deployed its own staff to reinforce his unpaid work.
Johannesburg, the country’s economic capital, has a grim reputation. Tourists usually avoid it, heading to Cape Town instead. Johannesburg’s six million residents tend to stay in their geographically segregated suburbs and townships, a relic of apartheid spatial planning, even three decades after the end of the system of white minority rule. High walls and electric fences symbolize the fear of crime. Many parks have become no-go areas.
Yet some areas have thrived, a product of clever urban planning and public-private partnerships of the kind that worked in the Wilds, often attracting a racially mixed crowd of visitors with art and design.
“You could view this as looking after nature, but actually we’re more in the business of engaging and entertaining people,” Mr. Delaney said.
“The more they’re entertained and charmed and seduced, the more they’ll come back, and the more they’ll fight for the space to be well-maintained. It’s got to be alive. That’s what makes a public space safe. If it doesn’t have people, it won’t be safe.”
A mosaic of Jock of the Bushveld, famously immortalised by Sir James Percy FitzPatrick, at a viewpoint overlooking the Johannesburg skyline. FitzPatrick lived in a house bordering the park while he was writing the book.Madelene Cronjé/The Globe and Mail
The artist first discovered the Wilds when he moved into an apartment that overlooked the park. Neighbours told him the park was too dangerous to visit. None had ever been inside.
When he first dared to visit, he found collapsed trees, crumbling stonework, empty ponds, dense foliage and broken benches. Even the parks staff, who occasionally mowed the lawn near the entrance, were too frightened to venture into the interior.
After his initial cleanup, Mr. Delaney’s non-profit group, Friends of the Wilds, signed up about 3,500 volunteers and raised about 3-million rand (about $210,000) to fix the waterfalls and add other features, including his wildlife sculptures, before the city finally took over.
“Artworks are really powerful to bring life to a space, but it’s much better done by residents, not the city,” he said. “The park is largely unpatrolled, but it feels safe.”
The strategy was successful. In a city where millions live in overcrowded high-density housing with little access to green space, people trek to the park from all over. They hold birthday parties or fitness classes; they take wedding photos or enjoy the indigenous forest. Some walk to the park from poorer neighbourhoods in the nearby city centre. Others drive from as far away as Soweto or Pretoria.
The success of the Wilds has helped inspire the rehabilitation of other parks in Johannesburg, where neighbourhood groups often ask Mr. Delaney for advice on how he turned the space around.
He still struggles to balance the city’s bureaucratic regulations with the more nuanced needs of the park itself. Parks officials continue to cite obscure bylaws to halt his work, even ordering the police to shut down a gourmet coffee kiosk that had opened at the entrance. (It later reopened.)
“It’s a juggling act between the authority and the volunteers,” he said. “Within city parks, we’ve got friends, and then we’ve got people who get in the way. I’ve always had to navigate this territory. It’s like a microcosm of politics on a larger scale. You find people who are determined to do good and people who are determined not to.”
The city rejected the wheelchair path for a long list of reasons that Mr. Delaney considered illogical: “I just went ahead and built it anyway. They called the police on me, but I went back and carried on. The police apologized – they said they could see we’re doing good work. It was like a farce, the most ridiculous situation.”
Then there were the park benches. A city official insisted they must all be painted a standard green.
“The benches were all broken, so we fixed them, and the volunteers painted them in all these crazy colours,” Mr. Delaney said.
“They illuminate the park and bring life to it. And when the parks people came and tried to paint them all green again, I said, ‘Look, you’re going to be up against a lot of angry volunteers who put a lot of time into this, and I don’t think you want that kind of backlash.’
“They tend to back down when public opinion is not in their favour. That’s the only way we can win.”