Martin J. Murray - Taming the Disorderly City: The Spatial Landscape of Johannesburg after Apartheid

In Invisible Cities , Italo Calvino recounts the story of a Venetian traveler, Marco Polo, who entertains the aged Tartar emperor Kublai Khan with apocryphal tales of the cities he has visited in his travels around the vast empire. In time, it gradually becomes evident that each of the fantastic places that Marco Polo so artfully describes is really one and the same place: the city of Venice. For Calvino, cities are constantly evolving places that resist objectification, summary, and closure. As open-ended aggregates subjected simultaneously to both centripetal and centrifugal forces, cites never congeal into cohesive universals or submit to totalizing perspectives. Among many other things, Calvino was concerned with the connection between memory and the experience of urbanity, or how place is the product of a relationshippart internalization of existing external realities and part intersubjective projection onto space. For him, since all cities are different cities wrapped into one (metaphorically at least), travelers never have to leave home to discover the strangeness in the familiar (Calvino 1974; see Curtis 2001, 5665).

It can be said that, speaking figuratively, Johannesburg resembles Calvinos invisible Venice, for it is a prismatic, kaleidoscopic, and ever-changing metropolis that contains many cities in one (De Boeck 2002). It is at once a city of monumental architecture and abysmal slums; a city of luxurious playgrounds for the rich and empty wastelands for the poor; a city of utopian fantasy and dystopian anxiety; and a city of collective memory and intentional forgetting. Johannesburg is a place that cannot be truly grasped in its entirety as some kind of fixed and stable whole, since its morphological form, its places, and its people are in constant motion, continuously changing and evolving in ways both planned and unplanned, anticipated and unanticipated. The physical remnants and cultural artifacts of past times are repeatedly subjected to destruction and ruination, whether the result of deliberate intervention or the consequence of benign neglect. The endless cycles of building and rebuilding have endowed the urban landscape with a contingency and elusiveness that make it difficult to classify, categorize, and define. This ontological instability attached to the built environment has resulted in a gap between the city and its representations, that is, between its provisionality and the efforts to explain its erratic patterns of growth and development in terms of conventional models, paradigms, or deductive theories of urban transformation (Abbas 1994, 442445).

Well-established image categoriesmost apparent in political commentaries, journalism, fiction writing, documentary film, popular media, and urban scholarshiphave portrayed Johannesburg after apartheid as a sprawling metropolis in constant flux, a disorderly and edgy place that is formless in structure, illegible in appearance, and difficult to decipher, manage, and negotiate. Like all other cities, it consists of highly differentiated and heterogeneous spaces that reflect a great diversity of experiences, activities, and lifestyles. Enthusiastic image makers have never tired of drawing attention to the city as the Worlds Greatest Gold Producer, the New York of Africa, the City of Record Sunshine, and the Heartbeat of South Africa (Sihlongonyane 2005, 22). But beneath the glittering veneer that endowed Egoli, the City of Gold, with its distinct qualities of place is a recurrent tale of boom and bust, of reinvention, recreation, and make-believe. It is a complicated story that did not end with the demise of apartheid, but has continued to unfold as powerfully new schisms along class and racial lines intersect in new and different ways to reshape the city for future generations (Robinson 2002; Sawhey 2002; van Niekerk 1999).

As Johannesburg struggles to shed the visible (and not-so-visible) reminders of its odious past as the quintessential apartheid city, the city has become something like a prism through which we can focus attention on a host of questions concerned with the connections between the social forces reshaping the built environment, architecture, and urban design, on the one hand, and enduring social and racial inequalities, national identity, and citizenship, on the other. As with all cities in South Africa, the urban landscape of Johannesburg continues to bear the marks of racial separation and class division. With the end of apartheid and the transition to parliamentary democracy, Johannesburg finds itself in a virtual frenzy of future projections, and, in line with the roseate image of the rainbow nation, in the midst of intense debates about how to reshape the urban landscape in conformity with the genuine commitment to racial harmony. The lack of regular work, affordable housing, and social security for ordinary people has engendered increased demands for the right to the city, including spatial justice and legal enforcement of the entitlements of full citizenship. In seeking ways to position Johannesburg among elite cities with world-class aspirations, city builders have struggled to balance market-driven growth with the maintenance of social safety nets for the poorest of the poor. Yet these boosterist visions of a radiant future are both haunted by structural legacies and collective memories inherited from the past and undermined by city-building strategies that seem oblivious to addressing persistent inequalities of the present (see Huyssen 1997).

Put broadly, this book is an invitation to look at Johannesburg and other cities not only in formal and functional terms but in figural and symbolic ways as well. To make sense of the city-building processes that have spatially reconfigured the urban landscape of Johannesburg after apartheid requires the adoption of an interpretive approach that is capable of acknowledging the interplay between surface layers and the deep structural forms, that is, between scenographic visionscapes saturated with aestheticized images and their underlying material conditions of existence. The urban landscape consists not only of a built environment subject to radical alteration and modification but also of a constellation of outward signs that convey a host of overlapping, intersecting, and sometimes conflicting meanings. The visible appearance of buildings and other assembled material objects that make up the cityscape always gives rise to intuitive or evocative allusions. City-building processes oscillate between creative interventions, the fashioning of something new that never existed before, on the one side, and selective destruction, erasure, and elimination, on the other. The result is a hybrid layering of architectural sites, woven together and juxtaposed in sometimes strange and seemingly odd combinations (Boyer 1992; 1994a, 3, 5, 9, 19, 21, 25).

The methodological approach that informs this book seeks to bypass the crude reductionism, one-dimensionality, and abstract qualities of many deductive theories of urban transformation. Instead of trying to forcibly shoehorn the individual case of Johannesburg into a single explanatory logic derived from such available theories as urban growth machines, global cities, and postmodern urbanism, I seek instead to retain the detailed richness, complexity, and heterogeneity of the urban experience by focusing on different parts of the story and how these separate pieces fit together into a coherent whole. This synthetic approach, which manages to convey some sense of the panoramic totality of the city through the patchwork assemblage of fragments, finds a great deal of its inspiration in Walter Benjamin and his writings on Paris, particularly the unfinished Arcades Project (Benjamin 1999, 3336, 65, 87). It involves the identification of persistent themes or common threads that, when brought into relation with one another, constitute something akin to a unified totality. This way of thinking, which resembles a montage of seemingly disconnected glimpses of city life, enables us to approximate a holistic vision of city building in Johannesburg after apartheid (Harvey 2003, 1819).