Folgender Zeitungsartikel aus der Sunday Times zum informellen Leben auf den Straßen Johannesburgs.

ZEITUNGSARTIKEL >ON THE ROAD<

At the heart of a mining town that grew into sprawling suburbia lies the human will to survive with dignity.
LINDSAY BREMNER takes another look at life in Johannesburg

Mann David, known to his friends and neighbours as "Mannetjies", lives on Beacon Road in Kliptown, Soweto, in a ramshackle brick house. A round, gregarious man in his late 30s, David moved into the house he now calls home in 1970 with his mother, who was a live-in domestic worker for the Indian family who lived there and ran a butchery from the premises. When they moved out, they left the house to David and his mother.
As a child, he remembers doing odd jobs in the shop while his friends, the family's children, went to school. He has still never had any formal education. "I don't speak any language," he says. "I just communicate."
David left his formal job in 1999 to become a volunteer community worker, supporting himself on the proceeds of the spaza shop he set up in his living room.
Here couches and TVs are all muddled up with fridges, loaves of bread and an endless stream of people at the door. He is slowly transforming the room next door into a shiny-tiled, glass-countered café which, he says, is intended as an example to the community.

"We blacks think that business is a few tomatoes and an orange crate," he says. "I want people to see that if I can do this, they can too."

David is typical of a new breed of working-class go-getters, aspiring to a better life, but not wanting to get out of the township.

"I have no interest in duplicating white peoples' lives," he tells me. "I like to live where I can greet people noisily in the street and have a presence in my community."

As we talk, his wife Daphne - a glamorous beauty with curlers in her hair - and the couple's toddler leave the house for the morning parade up Beacon Road to Freedom Square. The historic site where the ANC's Freedom Charter, upon which our present constitution is based, was signed in 1955, is now the market where Daphne does her shopping.
Kliptown came into being in 1904 when the Johannesburg Town Council identified it as the place to dump residents of the former "Coolie Location", after it had been razed to the ground by pneumonic plague that year.
Known as the "Klipspruit Camp", it housed 3 100 people - 1 600 Indians, 142 coloureds and 1 358 blacks - divided into racially separated tent towns. People were allowed to leave only when they could prove that they had a "proper residence" to go to back in Johannesburg.
By the 1950s, brick houses with front stoeps had replaced the tents. Many still stand, albeit precariously, along the roads and scattered between the shack sprawl along the Klipspruit River. The inevitable squatter camp, now called Chris Hani, then called New Look, had already begun to spread.
Back then, Aunt Eva Makoka, now in her 70s, was Kliptown's resident nurse. "Kliptown was a very multi-cultural place," she recalls. "Along Railway Road, Mr Harrison, a white man, lived with his Basotho wife. Next door to him were Indians, and next door to that, a coloured family. We all lived together very peacefully."

In 1955, this highly creolised community living in Soweto's back yard became host to the Congress of the People when it met on a dusty soccer field at the northern end of the town to sign the ANC's popular liberation manifesto.
Makoka recalls closing her clinic early to attend the Freedom Charter celebrations. "But what I recall most vividly," she says, "was that we were prevented by the Congress from eating potatoes. Any hawkers selling potatoes had their stalls smashed. The reason was that prisoners in Bethal were being forced to plant potatoes and were dying in the heat."

Today, Freedom Square is a bustling marketplace where taxis weave between clothes, chickens, fruit and vegetables (including potatoes), motor car scrap, shoe doctors and stalls offering radio and TV repairs. Its edges are lined by rickety stalls, a soft drink depot, a building materials yard and wholesale warehouses owned by Indian shopkeepers who, throughout the apartheid period, were the only race group formally permitted to trade in the area.
Kliptown is not a place with any real boundaries. It extends outwards centrifugally from the intersection of Union and Beacon Roads, fusing with Pimville to the north, Eldorado Park to the East and Dlamini to the west. To the south it merges indistinguishably with the endless shack sprawl continuing down the Klipspruit River.
If necessity is the mother of invention, the government's neglect of Kliptown since 1994 has galvanised its residents to take responsibility for their town's maintenance and development.
Gene Duiker, the slight, arthritic director of the Kliptown, Our Town Development Trust, proudly takes me around the photographic exhibition put together by residents and funded by the French Cultural Institute at the local community centre.
This former transportation depot has been converted into a nursery school, meeting rooms and an exhibition space. Graffiti proclaims that to do art and karate is better than doing crime.

"We are working on signing a lease with the City Council for this building," Duiker says. "Then we will be able to raise money to renovate it."

Bob Nameng is Eve Makoka's son. This Rastafarian and self-appointed youth club coordinator organises soccer, basketball, beauty pageants, clean-up campaigns and talent contests. His mother's house doubles as a soccer club. David works closely with Nameng to keep the youth busy and stimulated.
For instance, David and his friends have turned the old family butchery adjoining his house into an auditorium, raked seats and all. Here he shows "soap operas and American action movies" for R2 and, every so often, hosts a "talk show" where Kliptown's youth are invited to say what they feel and think about anything they please. Drugs, Aids and crime are most often on the agenda.
Thanks largely to the tourist-pulling potential of Freedom Square, the authorities are about to pour more than R500-million into upgrading housing and to develop the square through an international design competition.

But when these necessary improvements happen, will all the little practices of "making do" that Kliptown's residents have developed to survive, be respected and kept up? The way of life here exemplifies the multilayered communal experience that the majority of white South Africans have cut themselves off from.
People have little money and even less faith in the post-apartheid system. Most are unemployed. During the day, they walk the streets, talking, gambling, shopping. They meet outside Lucky's Shoe Repairs or the sangoma's shop to gossip; they wash or rebuild cars at Bob's Place with pickings from the scrapyard.
Life is lived on the street as much as possible. Houses like the Davids' that front the promenading main street are prized observation spots from where one can greet and meet acquaintances and do deals.

The typical Kliptown front stoep doubles as a living room, complete with sofas and orange-crate seating and within hailing distance of neighbours. The living room is a hair salon, grocery shop and advice centre. Homework, committee meetings and soccer spectating take place around the kitchen table.
Hospitality is a celebration of the neighbourhood "superfamily", given and received with no formality. Guests simply arrive and take part in whatever is going on - cooking, eating, repairing the door lock, throwing a screed, peering under the scrap car's bonnet.
These socio-spatial practices contrast dramatically with those of the middle class, with its monofunctional spaces and demanding rituals of hospitality - invitations, doorbells, hallways, cloakrooms. For the South African middle class, the home is an autonomous family domain into which guests are selectively and ceremoniously introduced. The private world of the home and the public world of work or leisure are distinct and separate.

For the working class, these overlap and merge. Inside and outside, public and private, family and community, work and home - they are extensions of the same. "In Kliptown," David tells me, "we all know one another. We live in one yard." It is this attitude to, and use of, space which is transforming the roads, streets and pavements of Johannesburg since apartheid loosened its grip on the city, reinstating them not as thoroughfares, but as common ground for public life.

Johannesburg boasts about 9 000km of road. First came the haphazard, hastily constructed trails which connected the city's gold diggings to one another. These were soon overlayed by an orderly, domesticating grid of city and suburban streets, scrupulously managed by bylaws and health inspectors.
During apartheid, roads became symbols of oppression and sites of resistance. Forced removals, the movement of troops and armoured vehicles, marches, roadblocks, running street battles: the culture of the street was a highly politicised one.
As apartheid ended and the road was liberated, it became, for many, synonymous with anxiety. It brought strangers into our midst and those strangers were distrusted, feared and often armed and dangerous. A new landscape of razor wires, electric fencing, motorised gates, road closures, sentries and security patrols turned the road into a paramilitary zone.
Simultaneously, it was claimed by a myriad of small-time traders, domestic workers and informal institutions as a site of conviviality, livelihood and leisure; as extensions of their homes. Its liberation brought new freedom of movement between rural and urban areas and new migrations across national boundaries.
The road became a paradoxical symbol of fear, mobility and freedom.

Magnes Mabaso was a domestic worker in Killarney until 1998 when, as she puts it, her "old lady died". "But I much prefer my new job," she says of the life she invented to replace domestic work. She sits, day in and day out, on the corner of Riviera and Main selling peanuts, cigarettes and sweets to passing pedestrians.
She makes R30 to R40 a day, from which she helps to support all four of her adult children. An ironing board covered in plastic serves as her stall; newspapers on the ground as her carpet. At sundowner time, Magnes and her friends sit on orange crates eating raw peanuts and drinking water from yoghurt containers.
"Now I can sit and talk to my friends while I work," she explains, as she sells a cigarette for R1 to a man about to catch his taxi. Next to her, a man offering shoe repairs plays cards with his mates, while across the street, vegetable sellers mind each other's children.

A few blocks away, Francois Morgan stands at the intersection of Houghton Drive and Harrow Road with his begging board, as he has done each day for the past six years.
One of 11 children, Morgan grew up in an orphanage. Though he is a registered construction carpenter and plumber, he can no longer find a job - a situation he attributes to affirmative action. Instead, he entertains passing motorists with his brilliantly ironic cardboard signs which parody middle-class life - "Holiday house needs fixing", "Poodles need grooming" or "www.poorbrother.com" - and which earn him R60 to R80 a day.
He tells me, with a twinkle in his eye, that he "dreams up what to tune the people" each day as he walks to work from his shack behind the house of a black family in Berea.

Gladys Kubayi is in her late 40s and lives in Chiawelo, Soweto. Each year since 1994, she has spent the summer months buying mealies from a farmer in Brits and getting up at 4am to journey to Noord Street, the site of one of downtown's busiest taxi ranks. She arrives at 5am and makes the fire on which she will braai mealies all day, selling them for R3 each. On a good day, she makes R200.
Kubayi is one of many who, each year between late October and May the following year, participates in an intricate, colourful drama, as mealies, the staple diet of South Africa's rural people, are brought to town and sold on the city's streets.
Rustic women in colourful Shangaan cloth, coal smoke rising from vacant lots, braziers carried by young men around the city's streets - these are the visible signs of a complex configuration of informal urban-rural trade.
Unlike Kubayi, who is self-employed, Johanna Sibiya, a young woman in her early 20s, sells for a farmer from Hammanskraal. During mealie season, he provides food and lodging for her in Bramfisherville, a shack settlement in Dobsonville, Soweto.
"We are well looked after," she says, telling me that she earns between R120 and R500 a day.
"Our parents told our boss to treat us like children. They even told him to punish us if we misbehave. But he treats us right. He gives us money for food and there is someone to cook for us when we get back in the evening."

Others are not so lucky. Lena Skosana comes from KwaNdebele and has sold mealies since 1992. She, like others she works with, is paid just R20 a day, irrespective of her sales.
"Our boss treats us very badly," she says. "We sleep in the open next to the truck. Sometimes people steal our clothes and blankets. We do not have a place to bath or change."

Many of these women are not here by choice. They have children to support and no way of doing so in their villages. By word of mouth they hear of farmers taking their stock to town and looking for sellers. Many end up on the city's streets for years, building up solidarity and camaraderie among themselves. "Sometimes we gossip and fight," says Sibiya, "but we do what we do because we don't want to be prostitutes or our children to become thieves."
Domestic workers, mealie sellers, barbers, the unemployed: their presence on our streets has transformed Johannesburg.

From being the ultimate zoned, controlled and compartmentalised city, it is now characterised by messy intersections and overlapping realities.
Poverty has, for the first time, become visible. Ordinary, everyday lives, which were excluded from the city by Western urban management practices, town planning codes or by the legal and administrative apparatus of apartheid, have brought distant geographical, social and cultural worlds into contact.
In the spaces between corporatised communities and gentrified enclaves, an idea of the city as common ground for public life is beginning to emerge.

It may be anathema to middle-class notions of guarded space and fixed identities, but this is important territory. It allows livelihoods dependent on the solidarity of shared routines and the mobility of the road - a way, however fragile, to survive.

"This is my life," says Gladys Kubayi. "If I had a means of survival other than sitting here and getting harassed by the police, I wouldn't be here. All I'm trying to do is to make a living in an honest way."

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Folgender Zeitungsartikel aus der Sunday's Paper. Erweiterung zum in Urbane Entwicklung unter Simulation beschriebenen, das Kopieren anderer architektonischer Stile.
Besonders am Schluss gibt es ein wichtiges Zitat (ist makiert)
erschienen: 2004/09/19 12:00:00 AM

ZEITUNGSARTIKEL >FROM ITALY TO BALI-HOO<
In case you hadn’t noticed, the Joneses have left Tuscany ...
PENNY SUKHRAJ

JUST when you’ve moved into your new home that looks like a Tuscan villa, everyone is rushing to get their piece of Bali.
After the fake French Provençal and Tuscan developments — à la MonteCasino — that have popped up all over Joburg, the new trend is for tropical, imitation-Balinese homes with names like Bali Hai.
Developers and architects say South Africans are tired of European-style designs and are now buying into the idea of homes that conjure up idyllic island holidays in Indonesia.
But sceptics say it is just another fad that will blight the landscape with copycat architecture.
The style is characterised by dwellings in earthy colours with low-hanging roofs, expansive windows and dark woods in lush surroundings.
“This is another trend which has taken off now, because people have had enough of Tuscan,” said ProProp Project Development’s Vee Paulo, who is building at least three Balinese-style homes in Joburg.
New Moon Property Developers, under the directorship of William Bester, recently completed a multimillion-rand complex at Hartbeespoort Dam called Birdwood Estate.
“We’ve been building Tuscan houses for the last five years, and it’s all getting to look much the same,” he said.
Joburg estate agent and developer Charlene Leibman said Balinese-styled developments were popular and selling well. “Indonesian and other Eastern furnishings are also in vogue . . . and complement the Balinese style,” she said.
Industry experts say the new trend was inspired by the style of the exclusive Zimbali Lodge and Zimbali Estates, on the North Coast of KwaZulu-Natal.
“Since then, we’ve had huge demand for this type of style,” said Willem de Klerk of Atrium Architects, who is convinced the Balinese style is better suited to South African lifestyles.
“I think the style suits our climates better. There is a flow and integration between exterior and interior spaces, very conducive to South African outdoor living. And the use of the dark wood in furnishings and design is very much in again,” he said.
But while authentic Balinese style makes use of exotic dark wood, preferably iron-hard teak that resists tropical humidity and hungry termites, the South African version features dark-stained and cheaper meranti.
In Bali, walls are often made of sun-baked bricks or even chunks of coral, but the local version is bricked, plastered and painted.
Said Paulo: “South Africans are too spoilt to have the genuine thing. Even with the Tuscan style, it had to appear Tuscan, but was very far from the real thing back in Italy. Everything here had to be brand new and sparkly.
“And very little indoors is Balinese. But people here like this style specifically because it is a contemporary take on a traditional style, which happens to be in vogue at the moment. One is able to dress the rooms according to personal tastes, without being too period-restricted.”
Architects argue that features such as the double-pitched roofs are not just an appealing exterior feature but are in keeping with South African conditions.
“They keep the sun out during the hot summers. And one need not shut the windows during the stunning Highveld storms,” said De Klerk.
Architect Les Barnes said the Balinese style would go down well in sub-tropical areas such as KwaZulu-Natal.
De Klerk said if people embraced the principle of using natural materials, their buildings would have more chance of surviving fickle fashion trends.
But some believe it’s all just a fad.

Professor Lindsay Bremner of the Wits School of Architecture, said the trend, like any other, would pass when the fashion changed again or when developers changed their minds.
“Balinese is very tropical, and we’re not tropical at all. This is just another marketing gimmick and another exoticised image of a fantasy world.”
Bremner said South Africans were preoccupied with “fake and fantasy”.
“And what it’s really about is a refusal to be here, a refusal to embrace our locality, sense of place and history, and a general refusal to be part of what this country is,” she said.