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“Crime and the emerging landscape of post-apartheid Johannesburg”
by Lindsay Bremner
A woman shrieks, blood pumping wildly from her stomach, her life flowing into a municipal drain. A young man walks away with her handbag, rummaging: R20 spending money for the rest of the evening. Johannesburg 1997: A motor car, a television set, a microwave, a bracelet, a pair of sunglasses ...these things have more value than a human being.'
A city shaped by segregation
The city of Johannesburg was founded upon the discovery of gold in 1886. ln little more than a hundred years it has grown from a mining camp into a teeming metropolis of between 3.8 and 4.5 million people. Over the years successive governments, driven by the imperative to extract the enormous wealth beneath the city's surface, took steps to stabilize its rapidly urbanizing population. The practice of racial segregation was the primary strategy adopted - whites and blacks were separated from one another, the white working classes separated from the black, and the labouring classes from the dangerous. The concepts of physical order, health, social stability and control which lay behind segregation brought together the discursive networks of government, urban planning, public health and urban administration.
As Johannesburg grew, the working classes living close to the city centre were gradually relocated in large slum clearance programmes, justified by notions of unsanitary conditions, overcrowding and immorality. The first of these removals took place in 1906, when members of the Washerman's Guild were moved thirty kilometres south-west of the city to Klipspruit (where the Freedom Charter would be signed some fifty years later). The Urban Areas Act of 1924 formalized this process and compelled Local authorities to set aside land for African occupation. A systematic programme began, under which black people were evacuated from the centre to subsidized housing south of the city, in the area that became known in the 1960s as Soweto. By the 1990s, this sprawling dormitory suburb, banally named after its Location in relation to Johannesburg (south western township), was home to approximately 2.5 million people. White suburbs, characterized by large plots and single-storied, free-standing houses were developed to the north of the city centre.
By 1933 the whole of Johannesburg had been proclaimed white, and by 1938 the bulk of the black population had been moved south. The only black spot in the white Landscape to the north was the freehold township of Alexandra about twenty kilometres north of the city centre. It had been proclaimed in 1905 as a white working-class suburb, but was settled from 1912 onwards by black people after attempts to attract white buyers failed. By the 1990s, Alexandra had become a severely over-crowded black working-class ghetto, comprised of single-sex hostels, state-built apartment blocks and makeshift structures in backyards, along pavement verges or on the banks of the Jukskei River. Around it lay the neat suburban mansions of the white bourgeoisie.
Racial segregation became the fulcrum (1) of the national and urban political vision of the apartheid state. Under apartheid, racial segregation, practised by previous governments to promote physical order and social control, became an instrument for the political and social exclusion of African people and their restriction to certain areas of economic life. A host of governmental, administrative and professional discourses, such as urban planning, public administration and criminal justice were built around and contributed to this vision. Modern town planning principles and scientific surveys of housing needs and production processes were the basic technologies of township development; racially differentiated local authorities administered urban areas; racially based legislation controlled every aspect of urban life; the movement of people was strictly con- trolled and policed.
These successive strategies to exert (2) control over the population, overlaid on the geography of the region, where the dominant features are the east-west mining belt, layers of parallel ridges, and an arc of unstable dolomitic land, have resulted in a fragmented, spatially discontinuous city. Areas are buffered from each other, either by natural features or vacant land, on the basis of land-use zoning, income group or race. Like most South African cities, Johannesburg was characterized by a central core, where employment opportunities were located, and peripheral dormitory suburbs until the 1960s, when capital began to relocate to suburban business nodes north of the city- Rosebank, Sandton and Randburg. These remained mainly retail and commercial centres serving the white middle-class residential areas around them. Their development was not accompanied initially by new working-class housing or industrial areas (although Sandton and Randburg began to develop limited industrial bases from the 198os onwards). Apart from Alexandra, the black working class continued to live in the south and commute to the city.
. . .
vollständiger Artikel "Crime and the emerging landscape of post-apartheid Johannesburg" von Lindsay Bremner in:
"Architecture Apartheid and after"
Hilton Judin and Ivan Vladislavic
NAI Publishers, Rotterdam 1998
by Lindsay Bremner
A woman shrieks, blood pumping wildly from her stomach, her life flowing into a municipal drain. A young man walks away with her handbag, rummaging: R20 spending money for the rest of the evening. Johannesburg 1997: A motor car, a television set, a microwave, a bracelet, a pair of sunglasses ...these things have more value than a human being.'
A city shaped by segregation
The city of Johannesburg was founded upon the discovery of gold in 1886. ln little more than a hundred years it has grown from a mining camp into a teeming metropolis of between 3.8 and 4.5 million people. Over the years successive governments, driven by the imperative to extract the enormous wealth beneath the city's surface, took steps to stabilize its rapidly urbanizing population. The practice of racial segregation was the primary strategy adopted - whites and blacks were separated from one another, the white working classes separated from the black, and the labouring classes from the dangerous. The concepts of physical order, health, social stability and control which lay behind segregation brought together the discursive networks of government, urban planning, public health and urban administration.
As Johannesburg grew, the working classes living close to the city centre were gradually relocated in large slum clearance programmes, justified by notions of unsanitary conditions, overcrowding and immorality. The first of these removals took place in 1906, when members of the Washerman's Guild were moved thirty kilometres south-west of the city to Klipspruit (where the Freedom Charter would be signed some fifty years later). The Urban Areas Act of 1924 formalized this process and compelled Local authorities to set aside land for African occupation. A systematic programme began, under which black people were evacuated from the centre to subsidized housing south of the city, in the area that became known in the 1960s as Soweto. By the 1990s, this sprawling dormitory suburb, banally named after its Location in relation to Johannesburg (south western township), was home to approximately 2.5 million people. White suburbs, characterized by large plots and single-storied, free-standing houses were developed to the north of the city centre.
By 1933 the whole of Johannesburg had been proclaimed white, and by 1938 the bulk of the black population had been moved south. The only black spot in the white Landscape to the north was the freehold township of Alexandra about twenty kilometres north of the city centre. It had been proclaimed in 1905 as a white working-class suburb, but was settled from 1912 onwards by black people after attempts to attract white buyers failed. By the 1990s, Alexandra had become a severely over-crowded black working-class ghetto, comprised of single-sex hostels, state-built apartment blocks and makeshift structures in backyards, along pavement verges or on the banks of the Jukskei River. Around it lay the neat suburban mansions of the white bourgeoisie.
Racial segregation became the fulcrum (1) of the national and urban political vision of the apartheid state. Under apartheid, racial segregation, practised by previous governments to promote physical order and social control, became an instrument for the political and social exclusion of African people and their restriction to certain areas of economic life. A host of governmental, administrative and professional discourses, such as urban planning, public administration and criminal justice were built around and contributed to this vision. Modern town planning principles and scientific surveys of housing needs and production processes were the basic technologies of township development; racially differentiated local authorities administered urban areas; racially based legislation controlled every aspect of urban life; the movement of people was strictly con- trolled and policed.
These successive strategies to exert (2) control over the population, overlaid on the geography of the region, where the dominant features are the east-west mining belt, layers of parallel ridges, and an arc of unstable dolomitic land, have resulted in a fragmented, spatially discontinuous city. Areas are buffered from each other, either by natural features or vacant land, on the basis of land-use zoning, income group or race. Like most South African cities, Johannesburg was characterized by a central core, where employment opportunities were located, and peripheral dormitory suburbs until the 1960s, when capital began to relocate to suburban business nodes north of the city- Rosebank, Sandton and Randburg. These remained mainly retail and commercial centres serving the white middle-class residential areas around them. Their development was not accompanied initially by new working-class housing or industrial areas (although Sandton and Randburg began to develop limited industrial bases from the 198os onwards). Apart from Alexandra, the black working class continued to live in the south and commute to the city.
. . .
vollständiger Artikel "Crime and the emerging landscape of post-apartheid Johannesburg" von Lindsay Bremner in:
"Architecture Apartheid and after"
Hilton Judin and Ivan Vladislavic
NAI Publishers, Rotterdam 1998
SMMVN - Dez 13, 19:14
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