The top of an old water tower offers Mandla Mentoor the best point from which to survey the subtle transformations taking place in his community below.

From here, the view is vast and panoramic: Sprawling, haphazard jumbles of shanties and geometric rows of matchbox houses stretch to the horizon, divided by pockets of barren land. They are Soweto's black townships, created more than 50 years ago by the former apartheid government.

"We call this place Somoho, the Soweto Mountain of Hope," says Mr. Mentoor, a wiry man with a thin goatee and a broad grin, gesturing to the open hillside on top of which the water tower rests. "It has seen both rain and storm in terms of trouble."

Just a few years ago, this 45-acre space that divides Mentoor's township of Tshiawelo in half was strewn with garbage. During the 1980s and early '90s, residents protested apartheid by refusing to pay local taxes, so uncollected garbage soon piled high in Soweto's open spaces. Criminals frequented the area, women were raped, and local people sometimes found abandoned babies and dead bodies in the rubble, Mentoor recalls.

Today, however, the trash is gone, and patches of dusty hillside have been planted with trees and vegetable gardens. Residents have built makeshift theaters and cooking huts, and walls of rock have been piled up to form "dialogue circles" - spaces for meetings, parties, and performances.

Projects like this reflect a "greening" movement that is slowly spreading in neglected urban townships and degraded rural settlements, where most South Africans live. While communities improve themselves for a variety of reasons, Soweto's changes were spearheaded by one individual, Mentoor, on a mission to bring culture and employment to his home. "Through the development of this mountain, the young people are having fun and giving back to their communities.... They are becoming changed people," says Mentoor. "They have ownership of it."

In South Africa, there are several areas that are either under development or ripe for revival. "So many parks and open spaces here you find have no purpose. They're not giving direct benefits to people," says John Nzira of Food and Trees for Africa, a nonprofit organization that works with local governments and communities to turn derelict areas into food gardens and other amenities.

But in the small, northern town of Vryburg, residents planted olive trees along a crime-ridden strip of land between two roads, turning a previous eyesore into a lucrative community venture. Finding productive uses for discarded bits of land builds communities, generates income, improves nutrition, and reduces crime, Mr. Nzira says.

In the densely packed settlement of Diepsloot in the hills north of Johannesburg, with the help of Food and Trees for Africa, unemployed men and women have planted a garden of tomatoes, peppers, spinach, carrots, pumpkins, and medicinal plants on what had been an overgrown plot of land.

"Before, I had no knowledge of farming," says Pepu Mashele, a thin woman who lives in a nearby squatter settlement. She works in the garden nearly every day and earns money selling the produce. "Before, I was just staying at home, but now it's different. I'm generating something."

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