Diary: Joburg is not my home any more

Between 1991 and 1998, I lived with my family in Johannesburg. In 2001 we sold our house on Bryanston Drive to a retired British pilot, and since then I never returned to Joburg until August this year. When I saw it this time, 'our house' has been bulldozed, garden and trees erased, and swimming pool filled, to give way to new development of gated community.

So Said Uncle George #3

' “Only the paranoid survive”, so there’s only one kind of research that’s good: the kind of research that checks and counterchecks, beyond prejudice, beyond allegiances, beyond what you already know, beyond what you think you see and trust. We need facts and figures, hard dates. We torture the data until they confess.'

Mumbai: Aftertaste

In the most conspicuous sign yet of India's unprecedented prosperity, the country's richest man, Mukesh Ambani, is building a new home in the financial hub of Mumbai: a 60-storey palace with helipad, health club and six floors of car parking. The building, named Antilla after a mythical island, will have a total floor area greater than Versailles and be home for Mr Ambani, his mother, wife, three children and 600 full-time staff.

Draped in hanging gardens, the building will have a floor for a home theatre, a glass-fronted apartment for guests, and a two-storey health club. As the ceilings are three times as high as a normal building's, the 173m tower will only have 27 floors. With property prices rocketing, the building is already worth more than £500m. It is expected to ready for the Ambanis to move in next year. The family currently live in a 14-storey building, Sea Wind. Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Group is India's largest private company, with interests in oil, retail and biotechnology. The 50-year-old became the country's first rupee trillionaire this week, taking his net worth to £14bn.

Urban planners say Mr Mukesh's home is part of a global rush for tall buildings that has seen skyscrapers spring up in Dubai, Shanghai and Seoul. In India, planning rules and a historic antipathy to unrestrained materialism has meant that this race to touch the sky has largely bypassed the cities, which are more notable for their shanty towns and dilapidated housing stock. But experts say the next wave of skyscraper proposals could come in India. (source: India's richest man builds 60-storey home, Thursday May 31, 2007, The Guardian, UK)

During my visit in Mumbai, at the entrance of a newly renovated shopping mall, a teenager was wearing a T-shirt with swastika sign. I asked him if he knows what that symbol means. He replied ‘yes, Hitler; we have democracy in India so I can do whatever I want’.

This is Mumbai today. Well-off citizens disrespect and abuse democracy. And Mumbai is a city that allows this to happen.

Mumbai: Mothers at night

What is it about Mumbai that makes me so sad? It is not about slums or it is run-down. It is about the mothers.

Mumbai is a city that lets her mothers beg on streets, sleep unprotected with her babies. Johannesburg is a city that lets her mothers raped and killed. When I finally could tell my mother something about Mumbai, I told her this, and I told her about Paris too. A Chinese prostitute in Paris worths 7 euros an hour; she is also a mother; she comes from Tieling. I thought about mothers and cities at night.

Mumbai: Sleep

Mumbai: Pride

Mumbai: Lock

Mumbai: People

T-shirt Design

So Said Uncle George #2

'Rules are for breaking.'

Aspiration

Erick van Egeraat designs artificlial islands in the shape of Russia in the Black Sea

I want to say this is sick but I know I AM WRONG. If it can be made and lived in a sustainable way, why not? Architecture has always been the expression of patron's fantasy of the world. Emperor Hadrian has done that with his villa in Tivoli; Japanese have built a Holland Village in Nagasaki... Aspiration drives us; sometimes it is not creative, not tasteful, and not intelligent. But hopefully responsible.

Our cities and architecture manifest how human species relates to its environment. Ultimately our cities and architecture manifest whether our species is worthy of existence. ‘You don’t shit where you eat’. It is basic, it is self-respect, and it is our responsibility.

* Joburg story: Failing to plan is planning to fail

Premise

13 years after abolition of Apartheid, places like Diepsloot continues to 滋生 on South African landscape. Why are the symptoms of Apartheid planning continuing in Post-Apartheid era?
There is no other story about Johannesburg more urgent than examining the cause of continuation of spatial apartheid in the Post-Apartheid era.

Personal narratives are not interesting. Most Johannesburgers are lost anyway- lost in greed, lost in complacency; lost in apathy. Few have the ability to see above and beyond; even fewer are trying to make changes. Lives take place in many parallel places and spaces, as scattered, dispersed experiences (notion of parallel cities).

Architects and urban planners have not taken the opportunity or the responsibility to overcome spatial apartheid. There is no other discourse more poignant than counteracting the consequence of apartheid on an engineered landscape. What are the strategies?

Architecture is caught on as an instrument of urban and social warfare. Yet architecture and urbanism’s ultimate task is provide better and critical alternatives to existing spatial, programmatic, aesthetic and management setups. Can architecture, as a discipline, survive in Johannesburg?

Actors and Agents

1) What are the remaining planning regulations from Apartheid era which perpetuate spatial segregation and programmatic segregation?

2) What is the governmental urban planning departments doing?
How ‘planned’ is Johannesburg in Poat-Apartheid era? What are the underlying planning principles? Programmatic, density, plot size, building height, comprehensive infrastructure, transport-related facilities, public facilities, green ratio guidelines?
What does urban renewal mean in Joburg? Making more precincts. Compartmentalizing areas and concentrate activities. What are the advantage and disadvantage? Does it work? How does it work? Research area: New Town and inner city. New Town cleaned up, money comes in, gentrification.
How is Sandton and Midrand planned? Why are the developments unchecked?

3) What are practicing architects and urban planners doing?
Eg. MMA’s 2010 FIFA masterplan can manage the crowd? The plan is truly catalyst for urban re-generation? Can Joburg be saved by FIFA?
Eg. San Souci project illustrate how top-down and bottom-up have no intersection.) (Individual architectural efforts and moments do not add up; ad hoc; no substantial or accumulative output. This refers to governmental planning strategy.
4) What is the architectural and planning education doing?

5) What are the developers doing?

6) What are the community leaders doing?
Eg. Kliptown, Bolo talking about project here, project here. All the projects are in phase 0.1; nice fantasy and imagination. There is no method or framework to channel governmental planning process , ie. Community participation without comprehensive framework or structure.

7) What are people doing?
Who are the residents of Diepsloot? Why do they settle in Diepsloot? Where do they work? Where are they from? How do they live (salary R1000 per month)? How do they build? How do they move around the city? What does local government do about this settlement?
Who are the residents of Dainfern? How is the property acquired? How do they relate to Diepsloot and its residents?
(interview and analysis in scale)

Radical Intervention

Zoning concept, such as using terminologies like precinct, is outdated. It is the old cliché of modernism, garden city planning principles, which fundamentally rendered spatial apartheid. What are the strategies?

1) Abolish zoning plans: need radical planning strategy which maximize mixture of programmes, density, users, 24hour programme, time share, building heights, mobility devices etc.

2) Radical re-zoning: conceptually and physically perpendicular to Apartheid divisions.
Existing city is compartmentalized into enclaves of sameness. Ie. Each sub-city, such as Midand, Sandton or CBD, has the same ingredients within itself , but each sub-city is zoned for different purposes. This is essentially the spirit of spatial apartheid. The old zones or compartments have to be completely subverted and re-divided for maximum mixture of ingredients. So that municipalities have to deal with all realities of a city- rich, poor, density, centre, periphery, main roads, commerce, social facilities, etc.

New Civic Life

What are the new forms of public/civic life?
New civic space is open or limited? New rules of inclusion and exclusion?
Measure and map the physical, visual and tangible
Evaluate spatial typology, location: Constitutional Hills (civil), Braamfontein (street), Zoo Lake (park), Walter Sisulu Square (monument), etc.
Management mechanism behind the spaces and events (research)
How social lives take places in new civic spaces (observation)
Commercial porgrammes: casino, shopping mall are where all races go for entertainment and consumerism, but this does not provide basis to formulate a community. After leaving commercial enclaves, people no longer communicate; lives deviate. (illusions of Post-Modern life)

Limited Access

Road closure map

Ladder diagram: omnipresence of cul-de-sac

Privatization: schools, sports, security, road (how can these civil rights be private!!!?)
Access = civil rights. One can access places and spaces by freedom, under the protection of laws.
Making things public = making life public

2010 FIFA opening the City?

Opening and securing the city for once 2010 FIFA for all time afterwards
What should be the positive input of FIFA for Joburg?
How does FIFA Johannesburg master plan work?
How will visitors be moved around the city?
Crowd management before and after a game
Celebration, drinking, hangout
Security measurement, policing, patrol route, barrier fence
The effort to guarantee an open city is to confine small areas of openness?
How open is this openness and to whom? Outside this open zone is less open than before FIFA? (more open inside = less open outside, because unpleasant things will be excluded to the outside?)
How to measure inside and outside?
How will inner city react to FIFA effect? Ground level programmes and activities will be squeezed upwards into vertical setup? Is this an opportunity to formalize different ‘tribes’ in vertical compartments?

Need research source:

1) Government road plans and road closure maps
2) Johannesburg Metropolitan Region master planning blue prints
3) 2010 FIFA master plan

Architect- a Public Intellectual

The new architect is a public Intellectual. Being public is as important is being intellectual. The days of working in one’s nice little studio on nice little projects are over.

This role is to bring the agenda of architecture forward to the public and to call for involvement of the discipline in the public realm.

As an intellectual, he/she stands for and is the guardian of certain nonnegotiable values.

As a public figure, he/she communicates the message and moderate the debate, with the purpose to realize certain vision.

As an instructor, he/she identifies the collection of issues and concerns, and translates his/her response through design and strategy and finally intervenes with real matters. He/she directs the design team members to represent the proposal with appropriate medium.

As an organizer, he/she arranges the collection of representation and relationships to achieve an intended and calculated effect.

* From Banham to Joburg

Reyner Banham is definitely one of the most influential architectural/urban theorist for me. The book on 4 ecologies of LA is particularly brilliant.

The starting point is to see the city as systems, for him, ecologies. He sees how landscape (nature) sets the datum for the city, and how artificial interventions (man-made) interpret and explore that landscape. From the urban systems, architecture is not singular incidents but a part of that ecology. It’s quite simple really.

What is important is this way of thinking ‘city as ecologies’ makes situations and mechanisms of the city ‘mappable’ and identifiable. Seemingly dispersed incidents start to connect visually, physically or conceptually. This method is particularly significant in its time. In 1971, Paris still taught beaux-arts and London AA students were drawings timetables for revolutions. Koolhaas’ AA graduation project ‘Exodus’ was made the year after (1972). Exodus was one of the few architectural projects at the time which wanted to address architecture and the world through design and scenario. Banham’s take on LA was comparatively way more advanced and liberated from European’s old schools. Above all, the entry of ‘ecology’ is the entry of urban discourse in architecture discipline. Banham’s 4 ecologies were ‘still’ the guidelines when I researched in LA in 1998 with Stan Allen (now dean in Princeton). I guess after Banham there have not been better didactic methods in understanding urban systems of LA.

I think about cities in systems, ie. ecologies. But when it goes with Joburg, suddenly one lacks nature to set the datum. In Joburg, my datum is mining belt, Apartheid and architectural/urban theoretical backbones of Apartheid’s spatial organizations (garden city, modernist functional zoning etc). This is evident in my thesis at the Berlage Institute.

It is very interesting to compare Cape Town to Joburg in ecological terms. Cape Town’s racial, social and economic divides have not changed as visibly/physically as in Joburg. My assumption is that nature (sea and Table Mt) sets too strong of a datum for Cape Town’s urbanization to mutate substantially. Whereas in Joburg, datum is artificial; rules can be bent and re-interpreted. It’s very interesting.

So in the way, from this way of reading the ecologies of these 2 cities, I am assuming this: Joburg has more potential to overcome spatial apartheid than Cape Town. And the next hypothesis is: so if Joburg’s datum is Apartheid’s design tactics (garden city, zoning etc), in order to undermine spatial apartheid, these datum’s have to be intervened or destroyed. This hypothesis is in my Joburg text to you. This is a thesis, which can take at least 4 years to pursue, and for a city, definitely will take more than decade(s) to overcome. I hope for an open Joburg, but if the enemy is not identified, it will be hard to propose the right strategy, especially for a city of such a scale.

Now think again, who will be able to make a difference in such a big scale? Politicians. Not architects. Those who have the instruments do not have the knowledge and courage; those who have the vision do not have the power. What’s new? If architectural proposals are too implicit and indirect, maybe other medium could be more expressive and efficient. This is why architects have to be public intellectuals. Being ‘public’ is as important as being ‘intellectual’. The days of making nice little projects in one’s little studio is over. Architects have to have public voices especially when the scale of problem is urban.

Johannesburg: Inner city and migration

The migration of Chinese has immense impact on local economies. We saw how cheap Chinese goods shaking South African informal trade sector. We also witness how Chinese informal (and formal) economy and people trafficking rendering European cities. I am thinking about Paris, Rotterdam, London, Belgrade... And Joburg, downtown's main language is now Portuguese. It is cosmopolitan African. But the entire inner city is territorialized. Zimbabweans are swamping into South Africa and eventually into Joburg downtown, 1000 people a day, meanwhile 2010 FIFA is under preparation. Rumor says Mozambican women are sold for 500Rand per head.

Where do we go from here?

Hillbrow, looking from Ponte Tower

Fashion Precinct near Jogubert Park, looking from a flat inhabited by Zimbabwean immigrants

Modernist flat inhabited by new users

Mothballed 'Johannesburg Sun Hotel' for sale

Ethopian restaurant on 7th floor in a inner city flat. The entire building is occupied by Ethiopian traders

Photographs taken on 17 August 2007 by SW Chu

Johannesburg: Panoramas

Kliptown, Soweto

Dainfern, Midrand

Photographs taken in August 2007 by SW Chu