‘Muddling-through’:
urban regeneration in Johannesburg’s inner city[1]
Barbara
Lipietz
School
of Oriental and African Studies (University of London)
On
the afternoon of 11th July 2000, a funny thing happened in Newtown,
Johannesburg[2].
An artistic event, staged during the international Urban Futures conference and aimed at ‘interrogating the spaces
left behind after Apartheid’, found itself derailed by a strong gust of wind –
and in the process, revealed something of the unpredictability and
heterogeneity of the hosting city. The event ‘Under Heaven (Alien/Native)’,
orchestrated by Marlaine Tosoni, was to see delegates attending conference
proceedings in the imposing Electric Workshop building, bombarded during their
tea break by 1 500 postcards from a small aeroplane, flying three hundred
meters above their heads. But the wind, at four o’clock on that crisp winter’s
day, was to decide otherwise and propelled the postcards a couple of blocks
east, to the adjacent business district. Arguably the most poetic and
spectacular event of the conference went by, unnoticed. A couple of minutes
later, a group of street children descended on the delegation from Diagonal
Street, selling for R5 each (less than 1 Euro) the handfuls of Alien/Native postcards they had picked up
on the street. Commenting on the episode, Johannesburg–based artist and curator
Stephen Hoobs remarked how ‘a project whose original meaning was about
citizenship and xenophobia became about an unearthing of very real social and
economic needs identifiable at ground level. […] Effectively, the city had
redefined the meaning that Tosoni had intended for her work’[3].
The poignant
irony in such re-appropriation of ethereal images by some of Johannesburg’s
most vulnerable inner city residents was hopefully not lost on the delegates of
this multinational urban gathering, aimed at evaluating sustainable urban
growth in the context of rapid globalisation. No doubt, it served as a stark
reminder of the challenges facing their fraternity in this ‘urban century’ (UNCHS 2001). But more subtly perhaps, it hinted at the
difficulties of planning for, acting in, and making sense of, this ‘axiomatic
21st century city’ (Beall,
Crankshaw, and Parnell 2002). For in Johannesburg, as in other cities of the South
(and of the North[4]!),
all is not necessarily what it seems, and there, as elsewhere, the city appears
ultimately to find ways of impressing its own reality on any visions and hopes
of a different urban future.
It is to these shadowy spaces, these spaces of in-between, and the hybrid apertures that emanate from them, that I want to bring attention to in this paper. As urban regeneration gets underway in the inner city of Johannesburg under the banner of metropolitan ‘African World-Class City’ ambitions (GJMC 2001), I argue that the future of the inner city remains a complex, ambiguous and uncertain outcome. Prestige projects, slum-clearings and broader attempts at formalising the informal in an attempt to ‘extract value from the city’ (Weber 2002) undoubtedly characterise activities of the present-day City Council, and in the process seemingly brings it into the fold of international homogenising practises in the realm of urban development. But reading such developments as merely another expression of neo-liberalism’s victory over the city (ICF 2004) has the unfortunate effect of hiding long-standing structural accommodations as well as a multitude of intricate and often furtive compromises engendered on the ground, on a daily basis. Most fundamentally perhaps, explanations that stress the implacable logic of capital fail to address the context of chaos and confusion within which decisions are made and purportedly implemented. In this paper, I argue that current urban regeneration initiatives in Johannesburg’s inner city are not so much the result of a deliberate neo-liberal policy agenda being pushed forward in a purposive and effective manner but rather, that they are the unfortunate effect of un-imaginative responses to (desperate attempts at times at) dealing with contingency - in a highly complex, fast-changing, and chaotic (let alone violent) inner city environment.
Making
the World City in inner city Johannesburg?
In a move
reminiscent of cities across the globe, Johannesburg’s city managers have opted
to conceive of the future of the city in terms of a well-trodden imagery, that
of the ‘World City’. The city’s unquestionable ‘command and control’ functions
in the regional sub-Saharan economy have, undoubtedly, helped to bolster such
ambitions. But the adoption of this urban vision has arguably a lot to do,
also, with the allure that ‘World/Global cities’ concepts have come to exert in
the world of policy-advocates and city managers (Robinson 2002). Rather indiscriminately derived from World/Global
City literature and its offshoots (Friedmann
1986; Sassen 1991; Sassen 1994), this powerful strand of urban policy work, has
emphasised the value of “going global” and the normative requirement of ‘moving
up the hierarchy of world cities’. That is, in spite of the relatively well
documented polarising tendencies of such development patterns (labour-market
segmentation, class and ethnic conflict, socio-spatial polarisation)[5].
In its wake a plethora of policies have been devised emphasising the kind of,
and location of, investment expenditures required to render cities more
competitive ‘in a globalised economy’. Writers of ‘wannabe world cities’[6]
in the South have remarked on the parallelisms between techniques of
‘world-class-city-isation’ and
boosterist urban policies long developed in the cities of the North (Harvey 1989). More recently, the work of urban scholars on the
‘neo-liberal’ city have proved particularly useful in highlighting city
governments’ active role and active engagement in transforming the city into a
potent productive node in the global economy – at the expense, largely, of its
social reproduction functions (Brenner
and Theodore 2002; Nicholls 2004; Swyngedouw, Moulaert, and Rodriguez 2002).
In Johannesburg,
urban regeneration in the inner city seems, at first glance, to be following
rather blindly in these footsteps. After
all, the Inner City strategy’s stated objective is to ‘raise and sustain private investment leading
to steady rise in property values’ (CoJ
2003):84).
Accordintly, the prestige projects of Mandela Bridge, the Newtown
Cultural Precinct and Constitutional Hill, fit the bill of city-marketing and
image-making, characteristic of boosterist urban strategies (Swyngedouw, Moulaert, and Rodriguez
2002). Meanwhile, the encroachment of City Improvement
Districts on the Eastern side of the inner city, the development of
bunker-blocks in the banking district aimed at protecting capital’s stake in
the city, or again, the attempt to foster close relationships with business
through investment breakfasts, etc. - all point to a certain cosying up of
Council with private interests in the city. Such developments, coupled with
evictions of residents/squatters from downgraded and slum-like and
‘obsolescent’ buildings’ (Weber
2002), the apparent attempt to toughen up on city by-laws,
and it is hard to avoid the feeling that ‘World Class’ imageries are in
Johannesburg’s inner-city, as elsewhere, helping to recast urban spaces in the
interest of dominant elites (ICF
2004; Smith 2002). The current buzz around falling office vacancy
rates, increasing rentals, new property developments and the embryonic
emergence of ‘loft living’ in the erstwhile CBD (www.joburg.org.za) would
indicate that such initiatives are in fact starting to bear fruit.
For writers such
as Lindsey Bremner, these policy directions indicate a shift from more
inclusive forms of imagining the post-apartheid central city (Bremner 2002a; Bremner 2002b). She points to the 1997 ‘Myivuke’ vision for the
Inner city, developed in the context of transition and a protracted, often
painful, metropolitan institutional transformation process, as an ideal of
regeneration focused on “stabilising decline and promoting neighbourhood
organisation as a precursor to growth” (Bremner
2000). Borne out of three independent consultation
processes conducted simultaneously by (local and provincial) government
officials, business and community groupings, producing surprisingly similar
outcomes, the inner-city vision was coined as (op.cit):
“The Golden Heartbeat of Africa. A dynamic city that works.
Liveable, safe, well managed and welcoming.
People centred, accessible and
celebrating cultural diversity.
A vibrant 24 hour city. A city for residents, workers, tourists,
entrepreneurs and learners.
Focused on the twenty first century,
respecting its heritage and capitalising on its position in South Africa,
Africa and the whole world, a truly global city.
The trading hub of Africa
thriving through participation, partnerships and the spirit of ubuntu”.
Plans devised and studies conducted
in the ensuing month tried to capture something of the extraordinary changes
that the erstwhile centre of Apartheid economic power had undergone[7].
A concerted attempt to think differently the changed economy of the inner city,
emphasising its heterogeneity, its extraordinary potential for dynamism and
growth, in spite of white capital’s flight and the withdrawal of international
head-quarters (interview with Neil Fraser, August 2002). Urban researcher and
consultant Richard Tomlinson, urged for capitalising on the particularities of
the inner-city, its emerging African-ness, and the potential that turning to
different readings and geographies of economic flows might present for
regeneration, instead of turning to American precept on overcoming inner city
blight (Tomlinson 1999).
So why then are
we seeing the successful implementation of the prestige, place-making projects
on the Eastern side of the CBD? Why are the residential sections of the inner
city not benefiting from similar attention? Why are community projects
struggling on the ground? And why are people being evicted without necessary
compensatory mechanisms, hawkers’ wares confiscated? Why is a Mandela Bridge
built, and not an improved bus system to ferry Soweto children to the various
education institutions scattered across the inner city? For Ish Mkabela,
long-standing community organiser and consultant to many inner city
regeneration initiatives, stating the question in such dichotomic terms is ‘a
very simplistic approach. The choices are simply much less straightforward than
they appear’. I am enclined to agree with him. Consider this:
19 May: I leave the room
feeling intrigued, flustered. This guy[9]
knows the city so intimately – with a knowledge that few can contest, borne of
so many years of living and treading the city’s darkest corner - those that
somehow reveal the essence of a city. He talks of his job as implementing the
inner city vision, in a way that is particularly South African, that builds on
the dynamics of Joburg, its uniqueness – ‘not those US or UK models that
outsiders want to impose on us’. He talks of the need to start with the basics
and that means, simply, addressing ‘the total chaos out there’ – a chaos made
of 25 years of decay. He talks of the need to negotiate, talk, engage – with
taxi organisations, with drug barons, with residents…But what of that ‘ war
room’[10]?
Hardly a conciliatory environment to think out inner city regeneration. And
those ‘red ants’[11]…
Renewal as warfare? But against whom and for what? The messages seem so
conflicting… And somehow his legitimating of evictions on grounds of health and
safety hazards leaves me uneasy. Does he think I will buy it unflinchingly?
Undoubtedly these are dangerous conditions but what next? Displacement of
intractable problems simply? And what of
developmental obligations, the right to decent housing – let alone the right to
being treated decently? Ma, it’s gentrification, simply – ‘cleaning up means
cleaning out!
I step outside. It’s cold
and bright; the light is almost aggressive. I feel bewildered and out of place,
shaken in my surface knowledge of the inner city by the words I have just heard
– Nigerian drug barons offering to buy up and clean-up Hillbrow in exchange for
a blind eye and the ceasing of police harassment; excrement falling out of
balconies; buildings in such dire conditions that cleaning exercises unveil
cars buried deep under three meters of shit; pacts with illegal tenants to
spruce up the appearance of buildings; stories of rural migrants being
‘intercepted’ at Park Station[12]
and led to ‘vertical squatting’ accommodation (office blocks converted into
informal residential) by organised rental slumlords; an old lady, trying to
light up an electric oven with coal; people selling baths for R2(check) while
no money is being paid into Council accounts; buildings as no-go areas because
of the presence of too many AK47 and threats to Council officials; migrants
evicted in during clean-up operations, back again, grinning and smoking dope
just three weeks later; children stacked in their rooms, with a terrible stare,
because the road to Joubert Park is simply too unsafe for them to tread… And
images of my quintessentially Joburg official sitting amongst Karoo
farmworkers, drinking with them around a fire and telling stories of iGoli, of
the city of gold, of the gangs of Hillbrow and Berea, the hard, dangerous city
life, the life of legends – eyes raptured…
I decide to take a drive. I
stumble on Joubert Park. I’de forgotten just how close it was, how compact it
is. High rise buildings, impossible traffic, taxis conjugating an alternative
grammar of sign languages and traffic regulations. And people in the streets,
everywhere, standing, walking, women carrying such heavy parcels on their heads
I wonder they do not collapse, trim looking professionals, rough and tired old
men, ‘totsis’. Life and chaos - as if anything could happen anytime. A real
city at last? No whites.
Suddenly, commotion. A fire
has broken out in one of the buildings. I see the flames coming out. People
screaming, people joking, a mass assembling far too close to the building until
the fire brigade arrives pushing drivers into another flow of traffic. I am
forced out.
I feel bewildered and out of
place.
20 May I read in The Star that the building was an
illegally converted office block. A creche with more than 60 children on the 8th
floor. No one was killed.
15th
June Open meeting on housing organised by Councillor Mathoma – Ward 59, in
Joubert Park’s Green House[13].
I’m back again in Joubert Park. Night is falling and as I park I am accosted by
a man, looking for the meeting place. He mistakes me for a Council official. He
tells me hurriedly he owns a bakery in the basement of the building that was on
fire the other day and is trying to buy up the building from the absentee
landlord. ‘Water and electricity have been cut off you see. How can you run a
business like that?’ So now people are paying in his account and things are
getting sorted. They’re slowly upgrading the rooms. No, he’s ‘not trying to con
the tenants like so many of these gangster slumlords here, otherwise he
wouldn’t pitch at the public meeting’. He wants to know how he can get help
from Council.
As we walk to the
Greenhouse, we come across one of ‘his’ tenants in the park. He’s the organiser
of the 4th Floor. He’s not coming to the meeting; better off trying
to sell immortellisation of dreams to passers-by with a click of his camera[14].
We wait at the
Green House. Few people. As we wait, I ask about inner city living. Tales of
precariousness, of unemployment, of hard living, of HIV/AIDs. And foreigners,
foreigners…ah these Nigerians, these Ivorians, Mozambicans, Zimbabwean! So many
of them! I hear xenophobic remarks; others that empathise for immigrants’
precariousness in the face of a corrupt police force and home affairs
department. There seems to be a general wrath against crooked management
agents. ‘See, we pay our rents, our water and electricity. And then one day, they
come to cut all that off, say we haven’t paid. But that’s rubbish. We’ve been
paying all along. Why doesn’t Council do something about them instead of
cutting our water off?’
The meeting
starts. Few people[15]
– mainly women, some with toddlers, old ladies, a couple of young well-dressed
men, a worker in his blue overcoat, old men. The Councillor plays quite an
impressive act of juggling exhortation to his electorate, conveying Council
policy and the call to pay for services. The discussion heats up quickly as my
baker clumsily intervenes. He wants to stake out the claim that not all
middlemen, not all landlords are corrupt and profiteering. He wants to find out
how he can spruce up the building and make viable. But he is confronted with an
implacable logic. Who does that building belong to? You can’t just take over
the management of it, even if the landlord has abdicated his role. More
discussions, more exasperation and demands. The general call, it seems - after jokes of wanting to live Sandton style,
some more serious demands for RDP housing - is for Government regulation. Can’t
the Council bring order to the chaos? Why can shebeens[16]
be left to open just anywhere? What will happen to children then? And these middle agents?
The councillor
closes the meeting, calling for more participation and involvement from the
residents, calling for more vigilance, calling for payment for services. He
promises he will take up the complaints to the Council.
People walk out
into the darkness. It’s buzzing outside, chaotic, vibrant – as if anything
could happen anytime.
In Johannesburg’s
inner city, as the street kids from Diagonal Street mentioned at the start of
this paper teach us, what you see is not [necessarily] what you get. Hopefully,
these extracts from field notes taken from my last field trip in Johannesburg’s
inner city (May and June 2004) convey something of the confusion on the ground,
the contradictory pulls and, fundamentally, the basic problems of governance
that such a context confronts us with. As I progressed in my research, talking
in turn to inner city residents, hawkers and taxi associations, property
developers, social housing associations, lawyers, NGO workers, unionists,
business groups, businesses and City officials, an overriding question came
back at me, persistently: what does it mean then, to try and construct more
inclusive ways of living the city, in such a context of disorderly-ness?
‘the 1997 Vision for the city, for sure, talks of Ubuntu, of Johannesburg’s link to
Africa… But what is striking is that the three sectors going away and doing
their visioning came back with one central concept: that of orderliness. And
that’s the significant thing that people often lose sight of. White business
had started leaving for a lot of different reasons before that, but in the
1990s, when it became very disorderly – there was no management of the inner
city, whatsoever! – they could pack up and leave. But poor people can’t and
they need to find ways of trying to survive within that disorder.’
The rapid pace of inner city change, from the erstwhile heart of apartheid economic power to just one of many large business areas of the Greater Johannesburg conurbation is hard to appreciate for any contemporary visitor. A multi-faceted process, the fate of the inner city has been inextricably tied to the moral collapse of apartheid in the context of Johannesburg’s (glibly stated) ‘post-fordist’ economic transition (tertiarisation of the economy and shift from import substitution to export-led growth model). The social and spatial repercussions of such developments are commensurate with post-fordist urban transition in the industrial North. Over the last twenty years, it has undergone most of the developments typical of inner city decline in other parts of the world: relocation of most of the city’s formal sector international and national company headquarters, as well as much of the medium manufacturing enterprises, downgrading of the retail industry to serve the mass market (central city workers and Sowetans largely), de(re)segregation of the residential population from white to majority black, rise in crime, physical decay, evidence of homeless people and street children, etc. (Beall, Crankshaw and Parnell Forthcoming; Guillaume 2001; Morris 1999; Tomlinson 1999).
The rapid change
in the socio-economic function of the inner city, the institutional vacuum that
emerged there, has also – lest we forget – provided an unprecedented
opportunity for many previously barred through Apartheid legislation, from an
official right to reside in the (white) inner city. Migrants from rural areas,
migrants from townships fleeing the violence, promiscuity, or surveillance of
elders have flocked into the inner city, just as minority groups searching
refuge from the scrutiny of the ‘orderly’ family (gays and lesbians,
prostitutes, etc.) or the state (Guillaume
2001; Morris 1999; Oelofse 2003). New kinds of activities have taken up the vacated
office space, including small and medium enterprises (garment, printing), black
professionals, NGOs. Informal traders dominate the streets, and the inner city
has become the residential and trading home to an increasing African migrants
population (JICO 1999).[17]
But such a sense of opportunity, in some undeniable ways reification of the victory of the anti-apartheid struggle for urban space, is being threatened by chaos, violence and exploitation of the kind described earlier. In an unmanaged environment, illicit activities have thrived, drug trafficking, scams, prostitution, child trafficking (Gotz and Simone 2001; Morris 1999; Simone 1997; Woolbridge 1999). While this provides a means of livelihoods for some, most formal businesses have had to close down, and many are struggling to survive the onslaught of ever more sophisticated and heavily armed robbers (Cohen 2004). In such an environment, trust evaporates, people live in fear, too often left at the mercy of opportunists. Opportunists that racket naïve or vulnerable residents:
‘people here, they listen to the loudest mouth, it’s
all about power. And I know that there are some of these guys with the biggest
mouth and they can walk into a building and take over and not one resident will
say anything or report it to the police. And they will live in fear, and they
will pay this guy exorbitant prices. Because you see, they make examples in
these buildings. The one across the road, the caretaker was thrown in the lift
shaft and he’s in a wheel chair today – to make an example of him. I’m running
the building now, and you’ll pay me directly’. There’s massive exploitation
going on in there. (interview Martin New, June 2004).
Opportunists that racket elusive communities:
‘The
difficulties we have of mobilising? Well see, you’re dealing with different
people in the inner city – there are plenty of nations in the inner city. Some
buildings that are totally Zimbabweans, they don’t know anything about what’s
going on. It’s difficult to mobilise and teach them. And in the other building
next door, it’s Congolese, but they’re afraid that if they say anything, they
are going to be deported. And there is so much ignorance of the problems and
people wait until it falls on them to mobilise, because there are so many
different people here. If you know too much in a building, the landlords can
just kick you out’ (interview with Thulani Mahome, June 2004).
And opportunists that simply do not pay:
‘The Seven Buildings[18]?
That’s truly a lost opportunity. You see, when disagreement erupted over
affordability, we embarked on a very careful and intricate study of the issue.
And we came up with a whole range of solutions that were carefully discussed
and were explicitly devised with social equity concerns. But ultimately some
tenants did not agree with this kind of equity. Those in particular whose
rental increased because simply their flats were twice as big as their
neighbours’! And then gradually, animosity increased, and there were charges of
corruption. And you had these guys who were calling for non-payment. And it’s
an easy call, you know, people will easily follow. Some because they genuinely
are struggling to pay – unemployment is high. But many because there is this
complete disdain for the other side of the social contract. You have rights,
but responsibilities, well, that’s another story!’ (Interview Michael Oelofse,
May 2003).
The result if of course, major exploitation, a dangerous environment for residents, for users of the inner city, a degeneration of the built environment and a stifling sense of insecurity.
Few in
Johannesburg actually contest the need for some degree of upgrading and
renovating in certain parts of the Inner city. The health and safety hazards
are too real[19] and
only a minority profits from such situations of chaos. But critics argue that
regeneration is being done in order ‘to attract capital, and favour the
generation of higher profits’ – at the expense of poor residents (ICF 2004): 188)[20].
The claim, certainly, has much validity, although it fails to fully acknowledge
the larger role that the Inner city plays within the metro-wide economy, and
the need to preserve, indeed bolster its functioning. Given the ongoing legacy
of the apartheid city’s political economy of space, whereby swathes of the city
were barred from any productive assets, the inner city still represents a (if
not the) major contribution to the city’s overall rates base. For a city almost
exclusively self-financing, the cost of letting the built environment slip any
further into decay is simply too high a price to pay (interview with Lael
Bethlehem, quote Gotz). But if the argument I have been trying to make has any
weight, the dynamics are of decision taking are marked, as well, by
considerations of another kind. Crucially, then, who can a relatively cash-strapped Council turn to, in helping to
provide the necessary upgrading resources?[21]
There have been
attempts at developing shared-ownership and tenant solutions to tackle residential
regeneration. But have (and are) proving particularly difficult to manage, for
reasons alluded to earlier on, compounded by affordability issues and the
difficulty of accessing loans (Oelofse
2003; Rust 2001; Rust, Gordon, and Stewart 2000). So who then … drug barons? The potential is there.
As Martin New explains:
I sat in discussion with one of the big Nigerian guys [drug dealer]. And was saying: ‘Give me Hillbrow! we’ll turn Hillbrow. I’m making R1.5m/month in your country. I won’t tell you how. I’m not allowed to have a job, open a bank account, own a car.’ But they drive the biggest Mercs and BMWs and wear the biggest gold chains. ‘I’m putting that money in my own country. But let me open a bank account in your country and I’ll invest there!’ And that’s how Chicago and places like that grew – through bootlegging, and things like that. So they [the nigerians] reckon they can clean it up, upgrade, invest, make it safe. How they’de get there? We could never work that close with them… Because their money is not clean money… we can’t become partners with that when they don’t tell us where it comes from and we can’t allow them to do it either. But there sure is a problem with our legislation that doesn’t acknowledge the presence of these people. They’re coming and they’re going to stay here. So what do we do?’
Well the answer is quite simple for most City officials – you court the private sector. You try and bring them back in. For Lael Bethlehem, head of the City’s Economic Development Unit:
‘The main point for me is this: what drives a city?
it’s private investment. I wish it wasn’t like that, trust me. But unless you
have a very large state sector with very large resources - and that only
happens if you have an economy that can feed that sector, the life blood of
most economies is the private sector. Check the inner city: private sector
started pulling out. And the public can step in to an extent, build Mandela
bridge, Metro Mall, Newtown, and pour the kind of money we have poured there.
But that money is starting to dry up and go elsewhere. The only thing that
really sustains a city, an area is private people putting their money there –
individual households maintaining their property or corporate owners. So… if we
declare ourselves to be un-interested in private investment then we are failing
to take responsibility for future generations’.
Courting the private sector, for these City officials then, has more to do with a desperate response to an highly intricate situation of spiralling decay, a pragmatic response to the disorderly city, to disorderly civil society. These claims, when lodged in the unstable and chaotic terrain of on-the-ground (attempts at?) implementation cannot, it seems to me, be entirely dismissed.
Perhaps though, such a perspective needs to be tempered with a more critical (even if empathetic) look at Council’s initiative, in particular the tools with which it attempts to navigate this highly complex and volatile environment. For why, in this urban regeneration process, do we see the grand prestige projects coming off the ground first? Undoubtedly because the financial resources have been made available by a Province preoccupied with upping Johannesburg’s Inner City’s contribution to Gauteng ‘smart Province’ ambitions[22]. But perhaps also because such heavy investment projects, with their heavy weight of symbolism are simply the best way the Council can conceive of showing its control over the disorderly city? Of showing that it is now in charge, working for the city as whole? For Executive Mayor Amos Masondo certainly, Newtown, Mandela Bridge, Constitutional Hill are not purely targeted at international capital. The re-imaging of the city is very much aimed at his electorate – the thousands of Sowetans and other citizens living in the sprawling settlements to the South of the city. For them, the Inner city is the point of access to the economy; and they need to be shown that Council cares about their city (interview with Sandy Lowitt). A point with some degree of legitimacy[23], but not entirely convincing as the most adequate response to decay and disorder in the city…
And yet, the
infrastructural response to the management of chaos remains a notable
characteristic response by Council (with the varying help of Province). In the
face of sprawling hawkers, invading informal taxis, Council’s response has been
to build taxi ranks as well as hard structures for hawkers to park their wares
in and trade from. Certainly the approach stems from an attempt to deal with the
undeniable conquest by hawkers of public space in the wake of the transition
and appended institutional vacuum[24]. At its most ambitious, it is also an attempt
at fostering something of an entrepreneurial class in a sector that counts many
survivalists/too easily homogeneised. In the case of the taxi industry, the
rationale has been to organise and limit the potential deleterious effects of a
highly dangerous industry on both passengers and the immediate
environment/vicinity. But ongoing confrontations between taxi associations and
the Council[25], the
occasional violent displays of anger and frustration by hawkers (often couched
in xenophobic discourse), shows that raising hard infrastructure is not only
easier to implement, but also insufficient, in dealing with such complex and
little understood economies. Graeme Reid, not averse to the infrastructural
response /solution to urban management, readily concedes:
[Government’s] inclination is to respond with: it’s
going to be like that, it’s going to be great, etc. and it fails to recognise
that there’s a lot of other things happening, that people have to survive and
that they’re going to create ways of surviving, and how do you incorporate that
into your own processes. The failure possibly at Jack Minster[26]
was, […] having engaged with the associations, being quite good in trying to
understand the businesses and designing the facility to accommodate the way
taxi associations run their businesses, making it more efficient… When it came
to managing the business on an ongoing basis, we stopped doing that, we just
assumed that it would run on its own. And I think that having gone through this
whole intense process of engaging
with traders, to come up with this notion of market places, and all of that, it
was almost an assumption that everybody would then go on and be happy and
everything would be all right, and we weren’t geared up to continue some form
of engagement. (interview, June 2004).
Clearly the demands are too complex, the needs too great - and demand to be met with a multi-faceted approach. Rolling out more taxi/trading complexes as is prefigured in the Council’s budget (CoJ 2004) will do little to address the situation, when the operational budget fails to follow suit (interview with Keith Atkins, May 2004). But even then, the issue remains unsolved. How does one try and engage constructively with a taxi industry (with undoubtedly legitimate grievances) that receives no official support when it carries up to (check)% of the population? (interview with Graeme Reid, Martin New). And how does one engage indeed, when the industry is highly organised in its destabilising capacity[27] but incapable of proposing any constructive way forward in its desire to engage as a ‘Black Economic Empowerment’ partner of Council (Interview with Ish Mkabela, June 2004)? As for hawkers, how does one manage to provide differentiated support in such a sea of need? How does one support emerging entrepreneurs while not undermining the livelihood strategies of the survivalists? And how does one find interlocutors when most of the posturing associations seem to have but a tenuous link with ‘members’ on the ground (idem)?
Faced with disorderly, fluid and often ambiguous counterparts, it seems, Johannesburg officials are still struggling to find their voice. To an important degree, the less than successful policies of Council towards these (and other) informal sectors of the economy are not so much the result of a disinterest with engaging with such communities, but rather the failure, at times, to explore and expand difficult and time-consuming alternatives[28]. Muddling through then…
This paper has tried to argue that inner city regeneration in Johannesburg has less to do with the whole-hearted application of neo-liberal precepts, than to rather desperate attempts at reaching some kind of control in an inordinately confused, fluid and chaotic environment. Faced with limited resources, City officials are forced to partner up with inner city constituents in their quest to put a halt to urban decay - but the choice of working partners is proving, on the ground, disappointingly narrow and painfully difficult. Attempts to engage with ‘civil society’ in order to devise more inclusive and neighbourhood-based approaches to dealing with the urban environment, have shown to be highly frustrating more often than not, leading to numerous dead-ends. Drug barons, unsurprisingly, do not provide a legitimate alternative. In such circumstances, the courting of business interests seems perhaps, an unpalatable, but unavoidable recourse.
Daya – Inner city resident and baker
Ish Mkabela - …
Keith Atkins -
Neil Fraser -
Sicelo Mabaso – National chairperson of Top Six Taxi Management
Thulani Mahome - inner city resident and at times, activist with the Inner City Forum.
Yael Horowitz -Programme Manager: Johannesburg Development Agency
[1] This paper is based on research underway as part of completing a Phd on Johannesburg’s present city development strategy. The research is funded by SOAS’ Fellowship Grant and SOAS’ Additional Fieldwork Award.
[2] Newtown is situated on the western front of Johannesburg’s inner city, adjacent to the ‘old’ Central Business District. Various waves of regeneration initiatives, starting as early as 1904, have sought to redefine this original brick-making area. The latest such endeavour is aimed at bolstering its status as a cultural centre for the city (see: www.newtown.co.za).
[3] For more details about the Alien/Native event and other artistic contributions to the Urban Futures cultural programme, see (Hoobs 2001). For an account of the overall Urban Futures conference, see (Mabin 2001).
[4] Note on the need to bridge the gap between literatures that speak of the developmental South and the developed north – clearly inappropriate in the context of Jhb. ???
[5] Of course, polarised cities are not exclusively post-fordist, global cities (Hamnett 1994; Marcuse 1989). The literature on colonial cities, on cities in the Third World, on southern megalopolis, also points to polarised urban experiences. Nor are all ‘cities in globalisation’ equally as polarised. There is thus an inherent danger in these rather broad sweeping comments and concepts such as ‘world cities’, ‘post-fordist cities’ that need to be eschewed in favour of more precise characterisations for specific cities.
[6] The expression is from (Stanley 2003).
[7] See for instance (GAPP 1999; Tomlinson and Rogerson 1999).
[8] Title inspired by the article of (Swilling, Simone, and Khan 2002).
[9] Martin New, Inner City Task Force coordinator and manger. Interview conducted in Johannesburg on 19th May 2004.
[10] The ‘war room’ is the Inner City Task Force meeting room. On the walls, spears, shambock?, and photos of the squalor and filth found in some of the ‘reclaimed’ buildings. I learn later that the spears and other such weapons are part of the booty found in buildings during clean-up operations –those that the Council has allowed to be displayed. AK47s and other firearms are still in the Evidence department.
[11] Workers of a private security company (Wozani Security), dressed in red uniforms and hired to carry out the Council’s ‘clean up’ operations. There have been many complaints of violence and looting during evictions.
[12] The main railway and bus station in Johannesburg, converging flows of people from South Africa’s hinterland and beyond into the inner city.
[13] The Green House project is a community environmental programme, operating on a shoe-string in Joubert Park, heart of the smallest and most densely populated ward in the country.
[14] I later learn that there are about 45 ‘park snappers’ in Joubert Park, specialising in ‘make-believe’, creating and recreating identity of city dwellers. Their portraits were recently exhibited at the Johannes burg Art Gallery as part of The ‘Park Pictures’ exhibition is a project of the Joubert Park Public Art Project. See
[15] Later, I am told that people are disillusioned about Councillors’ ability to effect change.
[16] Informal bars.
[17] Johannesburg has always been a city of migrants. In his song ‘Stimala’, Hugh Masekela portrayed in such simple but poignant words the plight of miners coming from all over Southern Africa to work in Johannesburg’s mines. The Inner city was also the home of European migrants in the …[check] (Morris 1999). But since the fall of apartheid and the opening of South Africa’s borders, a new wave of immigrants has descended onto Johannesburg, dominated by Africans from West and Central Africa (Landau 2004).
[18] The Seven Buildings Project, combining seven different buildings in Hillbrow and Joubert Park into one upgrading initiative, was the first and most important tenant-based project in the Inner City. The project was meant to provide accommodation on a non-profit basis, enabling the poorest of its tenants to find secure tenure in the Inner city, while empowering them directly to exercise choice over how Government’s housing subsidy was to be utilised. The project collapsed after months of bitter internal management disputes, the accumulation of huge arrears as rental payments plummeted and service payments ceased altogether. Rumours of corruption and mismanagement further undermined the project’s credibility (Oelofse 2003)
[19] The fire I witness in Joubert Park is one of the many that break out in the inner city during the winter months. During my previous trip, during the South African winter of 2003, a fire erupted in the Drill Hall, an imposing building, home once of the Treason Trials and then squatted by over a hundred families. The fire claimed the life of 2 residents and acted as an impetus to tackling so called ‘Bad buildings’ in the inner city (interview with Paul Jackson).
[20] Further exemplification of this approach can be found on the following websites: southafrica.indymedia.org; www.afp.org.za; www.zabalaza.net or again in (McKinley 2003).
[21] The fact is that arguably, much more pressing needs are experienced in the townships and sprawling informal settlements.
[22] Interview with Sandy Lowitt, May 2003. Blue IQ’s website: www.blueiq.co.za
[23] The rationale is not entirely devoid of legitimacy. Prestige projects have their role to play, certainly, in fostering the sense of the city as ‘collective actor’ (Le Gales 2002). And I am reminded of the comments by a Lenasia-based caterer, organising sustenance at a book launch in the brand new Constitutional Hill: ‘This place you know, it’s wonderful. It’s so good that people can have a place to talk freely now.’ – And you think it’s good that it is in the Inner city and not say in Soweto or Lenasia? ‘Yes man, the Inner city is where it all began. We can’t just let it go down the drain. And Mandela bridge… I look at it and it gives me goose pimples!’
[24] Rather ironic that public space is to no small degree, captured by hawekrs on the one hand or the private sector through Business Improvement districts on the other!
[25] The argument (as in other confrontations), has ostensibly been over the very low contribution demanded of taxi drivers for using the new facilities, as well as over the management of these facilities.
[26] Jack Minster taxi rank was the first rank constructed by Council and aimed at providing facilities for taxi ranks, etc… decrire plus. For more details, see: (Gotz and Simone 2003; Gotz and Woolbridge 2000)
[27] During my 2004 field trip, a major lock-out of taxis was organised at the central MetroMall taxi rank and traders’ complex, risking to endanger the economic viability of the complex. Meanwhile, Faraday Taxi Rank has been sitting for nine months un-occupied because of the non-cooperation of taxi associations. A white elephant in effect… (interview with Ish Mkabela, with Sicelo Mabaso).
[28] Of course, the fact that it is much easier to motivate for and receive budget allocations for visible infrastructural development than it is for training and capacity building activities, is not entirely innocent to such developments. The problem is further compounded by the recent adoption of performance management tools whose impact seems, at this stage, to be stifling government innovation (general personal observation and interview with Yael Horowitz, May 2004).