Slovo Park at a Glance

Slovo Park is situated in a politically and socially sensitive stretch of land south of Soweto. The community has been known by national government as Nancefield, by local council as Olifantsvlei and in the last five years as Slovo Park – named in honour of South Africa’s first minister of housing and former Umkhonto we Sizwe General, Joe Slovo.

The forced changing of identity reflects an on-going struggle faced by the leadership of Slovo Park to gain recognition as a legitimate settlement to access governmental support. This battle has been fought through constant shifts in governmental policy, power and promises for the community of Slovo Park. Their only tactics comprising of service delivery protest, painstaking formal requests for upgrade and currently a lawsuit against the City of Johannesburg.

Currently the community of Slovo Park with its development partners are strategizing this key social and political move.


THIS SITE SERVES AS A PORTAL FOR THE COMMUNITY OF SLOVO PARK & THE VARIOUS DEVELOPMENT PARTNERS TO SHARE THE JOURNEY OF RE-DEVELOPMENT.


NEWSFEED



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Sunday, October 17, 2010

Day 5:Casting Foundations

The pre-mix arrived before me so when I arrived there was a heap waiting to be mixed with the cement in Maparas tavern and cast into the trenches.



There was much debate as to how much should be mixed in at a time and consensus was reached to add 3 bags per cube which would be exactly all of cement.





Work commenced in the mixing of concrete just north of the building with all the debates continuing until Frank Mapara arrived with his voice of reason (he had been away at his mothers funeral who had died at the age of 115) Mapara showed them how to step the foundation and how to use a spirit level to asses the horizontally of the footing.





I left at 10am to attend a meeting with government and piki-tup with regards to their clean-up campaign which will take place on the 21st. i asked Piki-tup if we could use there TLB again and they were very obliging and stated we could have it on the 20th before there campaign.






When I returned the foundation was just about finished but needed 3 more bags of cement to be completed, so we returned to Kliptown but this time we were only given one bag of cement.







After we finished casting the foundation everyone was pretty exhausted after a very long week, we discussed what needed to be done next and resolved to think about it on Saturday.