REVERSING URBAN INEQUALITY IN JOHANNESBURG

from ARCH SA - March 2021

THE ARCHITECT AND PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILTY

By:Ms. Althea Peacock, LemonPebble Architects & Urban Designers, Johannesburg

Reversing Urban1 Inequality in Johannesburg is edited by Dr Melissa Tandiwe Myambo.

This collection of essays by spatial practitioners, historians, anthropologist, political economists and other researchers is indicative of the multiple authorships of our physical sociopolitical, economic, historic landscape.

This review briefly reflects on some of these snapshots that consider the interconnectivity of the disciplines weighing in on this examination of Joburg.

The anecdotal and dramatic accounts, as in the first paper, are endemic responses and reflective of engrained and pervasive attitudes of privilege that govern daily spatial practice.

There are descriptions of some of the city’s initiatives for redressing spatial (in)equity and what the implications of those initiatives have been or were intended to generate.

The discussions presented here are those with which spatial practitioners should be engaging. Some do and some refuse to, but seeing the ugly underbelly of spatial segregation is necessary. The forces and decisions perpetuating that segregation must also be scrutinised, particularly as they have been amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic. The disturbing, persistent legacy of Apartheid spatial planning still manifests as phenomena of restricted access, dislocation and displacement of people and remains a strategy for making “desirable” places in the city.

Dr Myambo delivers a powerful critique on Gentrification as not merely sanitising and injecting capital into a degenerating environment. It is also erasure and forced removal. It is exclusion and selection of who is [un]desirable, reinforcing the enclave paradigm and fuelling xenophobia.

There is discussion on the commodification of our past, and how this manifests spatially, with clear disparities in the telling of which and whose history by whoever is given the platform to do so. Thus, Other narratives are subverted and excluded or silenced in favour of the preferred, more popular narratives, which are endorsed and marketed as the only version of the (palatable) truth that is relevant. This is an opportunity to question the value/authenticity of history, its authors and the context of constructing those retrospective narratives.

Dr Dondolo delivers a thought-provoking case for examining our own perceptions of what we believe is the truer version of a [spatial] history. This theme is expanded on in the next paper by Tanzeem Razak, who speaks of the “commercialisation of our history” as something to collect and Instagram. Is it, no longer, the intense, ugly, difficult and damaging phenomenon that has left scars on the land and its people, both physical and psychological? But there is a silver lining it seems. By questioning our elitism we are given agency, by being able to interrogate from alternate perspectives and acknowledgement that there are Others to engage with to create full representation and participation.

That imperative towards representation or even acknowledgement of the people living in our cities is expanded in “Life Behind the Shop”. It is these unseen, un[der]represented and silenced stories that create, connect and constitute living in our cities.

Understanding economies, informality, global effects on emerging markets, and historical and social narratives as threads, which when woven together, make this intensely dynamic and polymorphic city. It is a reflection to and of the global attitudes to people and place, which is why we so often can recognise spatial inequity in the world before other people do.

These provocative essays are but a starting point for more spatial practitioners and other professions involved in the curating and decision-making that forms our cities.

Our current global context has given us trauma and tragedy. Consequently, we have been gifted vulnerability and the discomforting opportunities wrought by resistance to change and anxious necessity.