Martin J. Murray is Professor of Urban Planning at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and Adjunct Professor at the Center for African and African-American Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of many books, including Taming the Disorderly City: The Spatial Landscape of Johannesburg after Apartheid and Revolution Deferred: The Painful Birth of Post-Apartheid South Africa.

CITY OF EXTREMES

THE SPATIAL POLITICS OF JOHANNESBURGBy Martin J. Murray

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4747-7

Contents

List of Maps………………………………………………………………………………………………….ixList of Illustrations………………………………………………………………………………………….xiPreface………………………………………………………………………………………………………xxviiAcknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………………………….xxxiAbbreviations…………………………………………………………………………………………………1INTRODUCTION Spatial Politics in the Precarious City……………………………………………………………..23PART I Making Space: City Building and the Production of the Built Environment………………………………………29CHAPTER 1 The Restless Urban Landscape: The Evolving Spatial Geography of Johannesburg……………………………….59CHAPTER 2 The Flawed Promise of the High-Modernist City: City Building at the Apex of Apartheid Rule…………………..83PART II Unraveling Space: Centrifugal Urbanism and the Convulsive City……………………………………………..87CHAPTER 3 Hollowing out the Center: Johannesburg Turned Inside Out…………………………………………………137CHAPTER 4 Worlds Apart: The Johannesburg Inner City and the Making of the Outcast Ghetto……………………………..173CHAPTER 5 The Splintering Metropolis: Laissez-faire Urbanism and Unfettered Suburban Sprawl…………………………..205PART III Fortifying Space: Siege Architecture and Anxious Urbanism…………………………………………………213CHAPTER 6 Defensive Urbanism after Apartheid: Spatial Partitioning and the New Fortification Aesthetic…………………245CHAPTER 7 Entrepreneurial Urbanism and the Private City…………………………………………………………..283CHAPTER 8 Reconciling Arcadia and Utopia: Gated Residential Estates at the Metropolitan Edge………………………….321EPILOGUE Putting Johannesburg in Its Place: The Ordinary City……………………………………………………..333Appendix……………………………………………………………………………………………………..337Notes………………………………………………………………………………………………………..423Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………….463

Chapter One

The Restless Urban Landscape

The Evolving Spatial Geography of Johannesburg

Johannesburg somehow happened. It developed as needs surfaced, gratifying requirements that were current, but not always that adequately. The city was conceived with neither forethought nor love. — Ellen Palestrant, Johannesburg One Hundred

Johannesburg after apartheid has become a vast, distended metropolis without obvious or fixed boundaries—an amorphous, unruly, metropolitan polyglot in which, contrary to modernist expectations, there is little connection between the built environment and urban identity. The loosely defined density and agglomeration of the urban form is reflected in the declining significance of the historic downtown core as the primary locus of business activities, upscale retail commerce, and public entertainment, on the one hand, and the accelerated pace of peripheral urbanization (or the urbanization of suburbia), on the other hand. The centrifugal pressures of decentralization, fragmentation, and sprawl have reinforced the continuing mutation of Johannesburg from what was originally a monocentric city comprised of a dominant central core and dependent suburbs into a polycentric, postindustrial metropolis, a random assemblage of highly differentiated and relatively autonomous nodal points spread unevenly across the metropolitan region. In a sense, Johannesburg is not really a single place, but a makeshift patchwork of different places, each with its own particular sociospatial character. From the start, the accidents of geography and history left their mark on the physical shape of the city. While the historic urban core sprang to life around the east-west orientation of the mining belt, the awkward topography of seriated ridges provided a natural barrier that divided the affluent northern suburbs from the working-class districts, sprawling townships, and informal settlements to the south. The unplanned approach to city building produced a disjointed urban landscape fragmented into a collage of more or less self-contained communities long before the onset of apartheid rule. The political ideology of racial separation confirmed and strengthened these divisions, setting into motion further compartmentalization with long-term, tragic consequences.

Put broadly, Johannesburg after apartheid resembles what Michael Sorkin has called the “ageographic city,” consisting of a “swarm of urban bits” without a central place. The bits that make up the greater Johannesburg metropolitan region are loosely connected by a complex highway network, an international airport, and most important, an unfinished assemblage of so-called clean, high-tech, postindustrial enterprises; banking and financial services firms; and luxury entertainment sites catering to affluent business travelers. The twin pressures of a contracting center and an expanding periphery have contributed to the unsettling sense of a disjointed, awkward metropolis under the continuous strain of disintegration. Seen through the wide-angle lens of the extended metropolitan region, the sprawling Johannesburg megalopolis approximates a kind of land’s end of the geographical imagination, a jumbled mosaic of geographically dispersed and disconnected places lacking the strong gravitational pull of a cohesive central core, extending outward without apparent logic, purpose, or direction. The hybrid patterns of dispersed growth and decentered sprawl have fostered the impression of a formless urbanism in constant flux, a boundless megalopolis in conflict with stability and orderliness.

If Cape Town, South Africa’s self-styled Mother City, has found its niche as the consummate tourist city in the new South Africa because of its relaxed atmosphere and boastfully laid-back lifestyle, then Johannesburg after apartheid has come to exemplify the contradictory dynamics of “fighting for the global catwalk,” where aspiring world-class cities, in their quest to claw their way up the ranked global hierarchy of desirable metropolitan locations, compete with one another by promoting image-conscious regeneration strategies that are attractive to large corporations and provide upscale leisure. With around 3.5 million residents (or an estimated population of 6 million to 7 million, if the extended metropolitan region is included), Johannesburg is far and away the most populated urban center in South Africa, and one of the largest megacities on the African continent. This vibrant metropolis has become a genuine melting pot for a growing number of lifestyles, heterogeneous interests, and diverse ethnic and racial identities. Despite its rather bland and inauspicious topographical setting, Johannesburg after apartheid has brought together all the material and symbolic characteristics of a genuinely globalized metropolis. It is at once the principal locus of multinational corporate headquarters; the major transportation hub and gateway to the southern African region; a sought-after destination for work-seeking migrants from as far afield as Senegal, Nigeria, Congo, and Somalia; a safe haven for stateless refugees and political exiles fleeing repressive regimes elsewhere in Africa; and a Mecca for aspiring entrepreneurs, artists and musicians, black intellectuals, lumpen bourgeois pleasure seekers, and young, white bohemians who have abandoned the leaden sterility of suburbia. As a city of extremes, Johannesburg appears to lead a double life, where the everyday existence of urban residents remains highly stratified along the color lines of racial difference, polarized along the class lines of unequal opportunities in life and work, and fragmented along the spatial lines of walls, gates, and barriers. On the one hand, the city projects a glittering image of wealth and splendor, bringing together the kinds of economic vitality, global-cultural magnetism, and appropriate qualities of life that approximate the coveted status of world-class city. On the other hand, it reveals a seamy side of destitution, neglect, and squalor. Johannesburg is simultaneously an economic powerhouse embedded in the space of flows of global capitalism, and a gritty sweatshop where super-exploited toilers churn out cheap consumer commodities for high-volume markets. It is a place where those who do not have to work can lead lives of luxury, and those who cannot find work are reduced to begging and stealing. As the site of such incongruous paradoxes, Johannesburg is South Africa’s reigning “heterotopia,” an actual place that embodies at one and the same time the transcendent hopes and dreams, the dystopian fears and nightmares, and the contradictions and ironies of the post-apartheid social order.

Johannesburg without Boundaries: The Centerless Sprawl of the Extended Metropolitan Region

The city centre … this splendour of glass and steel and concrete, an immense pride and yet a strange brittleness in the crowding of buildings. It was a subtly disquieting combination: this sense of impressive permanence coupled with a feeling, compounded by one’s view of [Johannesburg] from the air, that it could all quite easily be knocked down like so many dominoes…. [It] was a city of wild ideas and grandiose design. — David Robbins, Wasteland

The social dynamics that have continuously shaped and reshaped the spatial geography of the greater Johannesburg metropolitan region over the past 120 years require a rethinking of conventional theories of urban morphology, which typically begin with the assumption of a structuring central place that regulates an adherent landscape around the twin symmetries of density and agglomeration. For all sorts of reasons, some idiosyncratic and others not, the spatial physiognomy of the Johannesburg megalopolis fails to conform to the classical monocentric image of a singular and vibrant urban central core, characterized by peak concentrations of population, fixed capital investment, and employment opportunities, surrounded by concentric rings of industrial and residential clusters receding in density toward the periphery, and linked laterally with specialized zones defined by such functions as commercial and manufacturing land use. The complex processes of urbanization that have shaped the greater Johannesburg metropolitan region have fostered contradictory patterns of growth and development that cannot easily be grasped within existing analytic paradigms and conceptual frameworks that seek to make sense of urban transformation and metamorphosis. Instead of the conventional radial-concentric model of urban evolution, in which intensive concentration of the central core takes place in tandem with the extensive expansion along the dependent suburban fringes, the spatial configuration of the Johannesburg conurbation combines high-density concentration of multiple nodal points along with low-density suburbanizing sprawl spread haphazardly across an extended metropolitan zone. This fragmented, decentered pattern of spatial growth and development — sometimes called the “extended metropolis,” “exopolis,” “postmetropolis,” “dispersed metropolis,” “metropolitanization,” “sprawl city,” “the hundred-mile city,” or “the city turned inside-out”—forces us to transcend the misleading dichotomy between high-density urban core and low-density suburban peripheries. Without the conventional signposts of the modernist city, the seemingly boundless Johannesburg metroscape and its rapidly urbanizing peripheries can be visualized only in discrete fragments, fleeting and sometimes conflicting images that offer little by way of a coherent understanding of the whole.

The spatial form of the greater Johannesburg metropolitan region resembles a vast, polynucleated conurbation consisting of a spatially dispersed galaxy of relatively autonomous growth poles—what some urban theorists have called “peripheral urbanization” or the “urbanization of suburbia”—connected with a partially hollowed-out, stagnant, and declining center. This tangled skein of high-density downtown office buildings combines with low-density suburban communities stretching over extraordinary distances, industrial and manufacturing pockets located on the peri-urban fringe (particularly on the East Rand), far-flung black townships and impoverished informal settlements south of the city center, and widely dispersed commercial nodes and residential enclaves of varying degrees of affluence and exclusivity. Seen from a bird’s-eye view, the elevated motorway encircles the southern base of the central city, straddling the old Main Reef Road that defines the east-west corridor of abandoned mine properties, and demarcates a massive catchment area more than twice the size of either Wall Street or the City in London. It is here in the historic downtown core of Johannesburg where the preeminent mining houses, well-established banking and insurance companies, and large-scale corporate holding companies at one time or another located their glitzy headquarters buildings and central office facilities. This densely packed built environment—once the premier downtown hub of accumulated wealth and power, and the leading commercial and consumer showcase on the African continent—contains a veritable hodgepodge of buildings of varying purposes, sizes, and architectural designs. Massive tower blocks, sleek skyscrapers of glass and concrete, and huge multiblock facilities dominate the vertical skyline. These bulky megastructures cater to a wide variety of activities, including banking and financial services, information technology, back-office processing, warehousing, transport, light manufacturing and artisanal production, wholesale and retail commerce, and government service.

The Johannesburg inner city includes the central city, as well as adjacent office, industrial, and residential areas like Braamfontein, Hillbrow, Berea, Joubert Park, and Doornfontein on the east; Marshallstown, Jeppestown, and Malvern along the southern fringe; and Mayfair, Newtown, and Fordsburg on the west. The central city, or central business district, is an area of approximately one square mile, bordered on the west by the north-south M1 motorway, on the south by the M2 motorway, on its fluid northern side by the railway line on the southern edge of Braamfontein, and on the east by Harrow Road and the Ellis Park sporting complex. Surrounding the central city is an area of similar size comprised of high-density residential suburbs, manufacturing and storage sites, and commercial zones.

In cities everywhere, circulation and movement lie at the heart of urban life. The expansive, interlocking transportation grid of the greater Johannesburg metropolitan region is not only a tangible medium providing flexible pathways through a maze of disparate zones, areas, and localities, but also a visible expression of the connections between geographically dispersed locations. The elaborate network of multi-laned motorways, ancillary feeder roads, and rail lines function as arteries in an extensive urban circulatory system that quickens the pace of movement and commerce. These passageways are the ties that bind the urban fabric together, creating sinuous links that encourage purposeful interaction between what might at first seem to be disconnected places. Yet the sheer scale, complexity, and density of these transit routes contribute to the sense of placelessness in the post-apartheid urban landscape. Automobiles, mini-taxis, and trains facilitate easy access to distant places, yet they ensure exclusion from others. They lubricate the transfer of value—people and goods—from one locality to another, yet they create boundaries, demarcate zones, and reinforce hierarchies between different places. High-speed motorways give city travel the kind of elasticity that promotes space-time compression, but these thoroughfares are also the source of great tedium and frustration caused by endless delays in traffic jams, and of the frightening sights of road rage, carjacking, and accidents with terrible carnage and pointless loss of life. The extensive growth of concentrated commercial and retail space outside the Johannesburg central city—what Joel Garreau has called the “edge city” model—has pulled the economic center of gravity away from the downtown business district and relocated it outward, in what were once the spatially dispersed suburban peripheries. Beginning in the 1990s, the main locus of economic development dramatically shifted to the axial corridor connecting central Johannesburg with Pretoria, a hundred kilometers (or about 62 miles) to the north. New office complexes and upscale shopping centers line the northern exits along the main north-south artery (the M1 expressway), attracting an affluent clientele and business enterprises that are vacating the central city. Without a clear opposition between the historic downtown core and its peripheries, there is virtually no visual break in the solid pattern of urban development starting from Johannesburg’s central city, extending through the northern suburbs, and ending at Pretoria. The principal growth poles for high-density office space and upscale retail commerce—the main sites of peripheral urbanization—can be found at Rosebank (about ten miles north of Johannesburg along Jan Smuts Avenue), at Sandton (situated in the heartland of the affluent northern suburbs), at Midrand (located about halfway between the Johannesburg central city and Pretoria), and in the northeast around Kempton Park, near the Johannesburg International Airport. The Ontdekkers Road, the gateway to the West Rand (notably Roodepoort, Krugersdorp, and Randfontein) connects the central city with a rapidly expanding number of new commercial and residential nodes—concentrated pockets of relative affluence—that have proliferated on the western fringe of the metropolitan area and spread northward along the outer ring road (the N1) toward Randburg.

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