Johannesburg | Public Life and Urban Space
Philipp Rode
MAKING PUBLIC LIFE
Say ‘Public Space and Urban Life’ in Johannesburg and people will probably view you with suspicion.‘What on earth do you mean by that?’ they are likely to ask. Do you mean the streets of kasi (the township), where we hang out on weekends? Or downtown Joburg,where the pavements are lined with endless piles of tomatoes, bananas and cheap Chinese clothing? Or the traffic intersections where the poor try to sell us coat hangers, bin bags or a blind relative? Or do you mean Joubert Park,where the unemployed spend all day lying sleeping in the sun? Or Zoo Lake, whose car park is turned into a luxury car showroom by Lenasia’s youth every Sunday afternoon? Or the Mary Fitzgerald Square in Newtown, which the City has successfully managed to sanitise and strip of all life? Or no, perhaps, you mean the malls of Rosebank, where the trendy swank, or the Nelson Mandela Square in Sandton,where we all imagine ourselves to be in Italy? Well, in fact, I mean all of the above. For all are spaces in which the cocoons of private worlds are exited for a while, to meet friends, rub shoulders with strangers and construct the public life of the city.Yet what kind of public life and what kind of city is this?
Under apartheid, public space and urban life was colour coded. Black and white lives might have brushed shoulders, but they inhabited different worlds, or rather the world they inhabited meant very different things.Where they did intersect, a whole administrative apparatus of laws, bylaws, prohibitions and punishments was mobilised against this intersection. This denial of common rights or a common destiny produced a dual city and a dual nation, diverse urban worlds existing side by side in the same geographical space.
This legacy underpins the kinds of public life and urban space taking shape today. The first kind is formed in commemoration of the struggle against apartheid. A number of symbolic public buildings and spaces serve as sites for the mobilisation of new collective histories and bodies. For instance, the Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication in Kliptown, commissioned by international competition in 2001, celebrates the 1955 signing of the ANC’s liberation manifesto, the Freedom Charter. This monumentally scaled square is lined by parallel loggias containing a 3,000 seat hall, art gallery,museum, offices, shops and, as yet unoccupied small scale trading spaces.Annual national commemorative events fill the space,which is otherwise however starkly dislocated from the bustle of daily life around it.
The second kind is underpinned by the culture of protest, now centred on human rights, civility and the independence of the rule of law.New and old forms of public associational life (Trades Unions, The Treatments Action Campaign, the Homeless People’s Movement etc) visibly assert the rights and demands of people on the streets of the city. At the same time, others (religious sects, continental migrant networks, criminal syndicates etc) pursue modes of associational life based on principles of invisibility, rendering the city’s streets fluid and secretive.
Given the intractability of apartheid’s urban geography,many of Johannesburg’s citizens spend large parts of their day in cars, trains or mini-bus taxis, travelling from their places of residence to work and back.This daily migratory pattern offers endless opportunities for the elaboration of public life, or at least for the interaction of strangers in public space.Traffic intersections, highway verges, train carriages,minibus taxis and their ranks have become intense orchestrations of public and private interest. In the inner city, nodal interchanges – Jack Mincer Square,Metro Mall and Faraday Market – attempt to align these. Their spatial, programmatic and aesthetic arrangements construct new hybrid urban typologies, new sites of contestation and new modes of urban life.
At the same time, in Johannesburg’s post apartheid economy, an instant, spectacularly wealthy (and increasingly black) élite have emerged. Life is centred around money, its acquisition and display.Habits of lavish spending, on the body, cars and houses and their interiors, fuel a consumer economy of dizzying proportions.Architecture constructs the public theatres of consumption and display in this economy – the shopping centres, casinos, homes, clubs, bars, restaurants and gyms – in and through which wealth and its signifiers circulate. Ersatz places like the Nelson Mandela Square,Melrose Arch, and Montecasino become the centres of this middle class world. They offer the opportunity to forget the racial city by gazing into magical mirrors of frozen and imaginary pasts,while, at the same time, reducing public space to sites where private interest and consumer choice dominate.
Living in Johannesburg today then, as a vast experiment in how to inhabit apartheid’s ruins, exhibits a number of contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, its nascent public life is taking shape around new official narratives, modes of associational life, meanings of money and everyday travail. On the other hand, its public space is viewed and experienced by many as out of control and dangerous. It is bounded on by fences, palisades, walls, gates, private security guards, cameras and other defensive security technologies. Public life withdraws into the interiority of the private realm (hotels, homes, malls, gated enclaves etc) and urban space is abandoned to featurelessness and neglect.Building more robust intersections between the two becomes a priority.
Lindsay Bremner,Honorary Professorial and Research Fellow,Wits School of Arts,University of the Witwatersrand
