Abstract
This paper aims to give an evocative rather than technically descriptive portrait of the city of Johannesburg, attempting to reveal how a logic which structured the city around control and segregation is disrupted more by the informal flows of life than by the rhetoric of spatial and economic transformation that characterizes the city since the demise of apartheid. In the face of a specifically engineered physical dispersion and segregation, and in tension with both physical realities and government policy, the urban poor have been re-territorializing the city, undermining the legacy of rigid apartheid spatial segregations. This is opposing the paradigm of a world shaped and controlled by power and rational social planning with one built around relational networks and basic needs, and characterized by informal practices. The paper argues that if liberated by the vocabulary of a hegemonic Westernized culture, informality can reveal itself to be a counter-strategy capable of generating a means of response to the failure of certain urban mainstreams tied to a market economy.
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Notes
- 1.
The Municipality of Johannesburg officially identifies these building as “bad buildings.” Even though there are not official estimations of the numbers of these vertical slums, activists keep their number and conditions under control ≪Bad buildings are poorly maintained buildings, usually in the inner city, which threaten the health and safety of occupants. Johannesburg has approximately 1500 bad buildings and at least 180 informal settlements≫, from “Cities Need to Plan with the Poor, Not for the Poor,” by The South African Civil Society Information Service (http://sacsis.org.za/s/story.php?s=1564).
- 2.
In 120 years, more than 40,000 tons of gold have been extracted from the Witwatersrand basin, along with cadmium, uranium, cobalt, copper, zinc, manganese, titanium, and other heavy metals (Rossouw et al. 2009). Mining activities and dumpsites occupy approximately 12,200 km2 of land area in the Witwatersrand basin: some of which now serves as residence for a dense urban population in Gauteng Province, including a large part of the Johannesburg area, defining the mining belt. While much of this land is occupied by informal settlements, a rapid formal conversion of buffer areas around the dumps to residential land use is taking place, mainly operated by former mining companies trying to reposition themselves as real estate developers, while the gold reef is being depleted.
- 3.
The Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP) is a post-apartheid policy framework set in place for responding to the extensive housing stock deprivation for previously disadvantaged citizens. Between 1994 and 2001, the RDP delivered over 1.1 million cheap houses, accommodating 5 million of the estimated 12.5 million South Africans without proper housing. Critics of the RDP point to poor housing quality as the chief problem being faced. Critics also note that new housing schemes are often dreary in their planning and layout—to the extent that they often strongly resemble the en masse bleak building programs of the Apartheid government during the 1950s and 1960s.
- 4.
Homelands were areas of land set aside for black residents during the apartheid era. It was intended that all black residents be relegated to a particular homeland.
- 5.
There are, however, a series of good practices in terms of in situ, participatory upgrading—fruit of the work of NGOs, universities, and research centers, as well as capable and motivated professionals. But these approaches remain far from being understood and brought “at scale,” also due to a substantial overlapping in the different levels of Governmental agencies, often conflicting each other and approaching upgrading in very different ways.
- 6.
For more detailed information about the Mayoral Clean Sweep and the sanctions system applied to street sellers, see Tasmi Quazi and Richard Dobson, Redefining “Clean-up” of informality, from the blog: Asiye Etafuleni (http://aet.org.za/2013/11/redefining-clean-informality-2/).
- 7.
For more detailed information about the new Major Herman Mahaba’s approach to inner city regeneration, see Dennis Webster and Alana Potter, “Herman Mashaba’s pro-poor plans for Joburg seem a bit rich” (available at https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/2017-05-12-herman--mashabas-pro-poor-plans-for-joburg-seem-a-bit-rich/), and Keaton Allen-Gessesse and Lwazi Mtshiyo “The poor pay the cost for Joburg’s inner-city overhaul” (available at https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/national/2017-06-01-the-poor-pay-the-cost-for-joburgs-inner-city-overhaul/).
- 8.
From an interview with Prof. Phil Harrison in The Urban Challenge, documentary released in occasion of the World Architecture Conference “Sustainable Human(e) Settlements,” held in Durban (South Africa) on September 2012 and available at http://vimeo.com/47652514. Phil Harrison is the South African Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, and he is a member of the South African National Planning Commission.
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La Mantia, C. (2018). Humanizing Urbanism. On Embracing Informality and the Future of Johannesburg. In: Petrillo, A., Bellaviti, P. (eds) Sustainable Urban Development and Globalization. Research for Development. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61988-0_4
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