Uniting a Divided City

Governance and Social Exclusion in Johannesburg

Jo Beall, Owen Crankshaw, Susan Parnell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136549502
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

For many, Johannesburg resembles the imagined spectre of the urban future. Global anxieties about catastrophic urban explosion, social fracture, environmental degradation, escalating crime and violence, and rampant consumerism alongside grinding poverty, are projected onto this city as a microcosm of things to come. Decision-makers in cities worldwide have attempted to balance harsh fiscal and administrative realities with growing demands for political, economic and social justice. This book investigates pragmatic approaches to urban economic development, service delivery, spatial restructuring, environmental sustainability and institutional reform in Johannesburg. It explores the conditions and processes that are determining the city's transformation into a cosmopolitan metropole and magnet for the continent.

Part 1

Ways of Understanding
Divided Cities

Chapter 1

Introduction to a Divided City

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INTRODUCTION

For many people, Johannesburg has become the imagined spectre of our urban future. Global anxieties about catastrophic urban explosion, social fracture, environmental degradation, escalating crime and violence, as well as rampant consumerism alongside grinding poverty, are projected onto a city the fate of which has implications and resonance way beyond its borders. No doubt, the experience of Johannesburg is also very particular, not least because of its origins in gold production built on the sweat equity of black migrant workers and its reputation as the quintessential apartheid city. Nevertheless, it is no coincidence that Johannesburg evokes frequent comparison with cities across the North and South. For example, Teresa Caldeira (2000, p1) positions her recent study of São Paulo as a city of walls, alongside ‘cities as distinct as … Los Angeles, Johannesburg, Buenos Aires, Budapest, Mexico City and Miami’. Specifically, she equates the discourses of fear and practices of segregation associated with transitions to democracy in Latin America, the decline of socialism in Eastern Europe and the influx of immigrants into cities of North America with those fears and responses accompanying the end of apartheid in South Africa.

Unlike many other cities, however, Johannesburg was provided with the extraordinary opportunity of reinventing itself, of fundamentally reforming its policies and planning practices and of radically reconfiguring its social and political institutions in the wake of South Africa's celebrated transition from an apartheid regime to a liberal democracy in 1994. The establishment of post-apartheid urban governance in Johannesburg was guided by an exemplary national constitution that values human rights, and was accompanied by no shortage of political will at the local level. However, like cities elsewhere in the world, decision-makers in Johannesburg have been constrained by the need to balance harsh fiscal and administrative realities with growing demands for social justice. New understandings of local government in Johannesburg have been quickly shaped by the imperative of developing rapid and pragmatic approaches to service delivery, urban economic development, spatial restructuring, environmental sustainability and institutional reform. This has left open the questions of whether a balance could be achieved between equity and efficiency goals and whether early commitments to participatory processes and responsive government could be maintained. It is these concrete problems and the solutions used to tackle them that form the empirical focus of Uniting a Divided City, which explores the conditions that frame, and the processes that underpin, Johannesburg's transformation from an inequitable and racially divided city in a pariah state to a cosmopolitan metropole and magnet for the sub-continent (see Figure 1.1).¹

Figure 1.1 A locational map of Johannesburg

The broader reach and analytical contribution of the book stem from the fact that the extent and complexity of urban poverty, inequality and social exclusion in Johannesburg have been habitually underestimated and inadequately accounted for by those trying to understand and intervene in the urban experience. This has put the city under the spotlight because, in looking for a positive rather than a negative scenario of a socially just, democratic and sustainable urban future, international analysts, policy-makers and practitioners are closely monitoring the experience of post-apartheid Johannesburg as it tries to steer and manage complex political, social and economic change (Mabin, 1999). In this sense, the experience of Johannesburg has become a litmus test for uniting divided cities and the future of iGoli, or ‘the city of gold’, has significance for urban governance everywhere.

Uniting a Divided City is unusual in three important respects. First, it is based upon an exceptional assemblage of empirical data and analysis, since it is the product of extended research conducted by the three authors between 1997 and 2001.² Second, it combines a detailed knowledge of the particularities of the Johannesburg context with a broader understanding of how the city fits into international trends and debates. Last, the interdisciplinary nature of the collaboration has given rise to the opportunity of drawing upon a range of research methods and analytical entry points, making possible the compilation of insights that arise out of ethnography, qualitative sociological and organizational research, as well as social survey analysis.³ From the vantage points of sociology, geography and development studies, our different skills and perspectives have provided us with a multifaceted lens through which to identify and interrogate what is both specific and more widely resonant about social change and urban governance in Johannesburg.

Such methodological and disciplinary diversity, of course, begs the question: what dimensions and processes hold such an endeavour together? The first is an abiding interest on all our parts in urban social change. The second is a belief that policy, and policy-relevant academic work, needs to be deeply grounded in nuanced and historically sensitive social analysis. Third, we share a common conceptual starting point. This resides in a commitment to understanding the articulation of structure, agency and the variety of institutions that make up social systems. We are ultimately concerned with how these play themselves out in cities, while recognizing that they do not necessarily originate or end in the urban context. As such, our analysis of the divided city is one that stretches from a consideration of its economic structure to a concern with the social structures that infuse human relationships; from the formal and informal organizations and collectivities that constitute a city's governance, to the micro-level institutions that are constitutive of the everyday lives of its citizens.

ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

In Chapter 2, we reflect on how Johannesburg comes to represent a typical 21st-century city and then seek to explain this characterization in relation to some key intellectual and disciplinary reference points. We begin with a reflection on global urban development and the growth of urban poverty as seen through the literature on Third World cities.⁴ Second, we make reference to debates on social polarization and differentiation in urban centres of the North. Third, we consider debates on urban governance, urban management, decentralization, participation and planning. Fourth, we look at how the interplay of structure, agency and institutions manifests itself in the micro politics of everyday life, with reference to the literature on urban livelihoods, social capital and state–society relations. Finally, we review the literature on social exclusion, pointing out its value as a conceptual framework that has had resonance in both the North and the South, and which allows for a fusion of analytical and operational approaches to divided cities.

Part 2 analyses structural dimensions at the macro level and is concerned with the economic and demographic conditions that frame the divided city. Chapter 3 looks at Johannesburg as a post-industrial city, while Chapter 4 considers the spatial consequences of post-Fordist economic change. Part 3 is concerned with the opportunities at the local level, presented by liberal democratic political reconstruction, and the challenges for urban government and urban management. As such, it constitutes analysis at the meso level and is divided into two chapters. Chapter 5 looks at apartheid and post-apartheid local government in the context of centralizing tendencies and decentralizing imperatives. Chapter 6 looks at city finances and the instrument of the budget under conditions of fiscal austerity; is the budget a vehicle for accommodation and does it reflect multiple interests in the city?

Part 4 looks at the issue of urban governance from below and constitutes the micro-level analysis of the book. It focuses on how ordinary citizens and organized civil society embrace, eschew or are excluded from participatory planning and inclusive governance in Johannesburg. Based on case-study research conducted across several areas of the city,⁵ the chapters are organized around the following themes. Chapter 7 is concerned with the development partnerships in the inner city, which is increasingly characterized by cosmopolitan and transitional populations. It reviews the success stories when the city's partnership is with business alongside the problems associated with reaching out to residents. Chapter 8 is based upon research conducted in the relatively newly formed informal settlement of Diepsloot, taking what is widely recognized as a best practice scenario of participatory planning and interrogating its prospects for democratic and inclusive urban planning in such communities over the longer term.

Chapter 9 turns the spotlight on the older and more established neighbourhoods of Soweto, where increasing social differentiation has particular outcomes in terms of access to, and consumption of, urban services and, ultimately, the nature of civic engagement. Chapter 10 deals with communities that, for reasons of insecurity, choose to exclude themselves. These so-called ‘gated communities’ include an ethnically defined migrant workers’ hostel in Soweto, given wide berth because it is perceived as dangerous but whose residents also cut themselves off from life in Soweto more broadly. They also include the closed residential living arrangements of bounded compounds or townhouse complexes, located in middle-class areas of Johannesburg. Formerly the exclusive preserve of whites, they are increasingly home to a deracialized professional and post-Fordist middle class, as issues of safety and security haunt people across Johannesburg's social and racial spectrum. The book concludes with a discussion that revisits the notion of a divided city and the lessons Johannesburg holds for the prospect of inclusive urban governance.

Chapter 2

Reverberations from a Divided City

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JOHANNESBURG AS A 21ST-CENTURY CITY

The transition from apartheid in Johannesburg has meant that power in this divided city is more contested than ever before. Notwithstanding the acceptance of promising redistributive frameworks of reconstruction, poverty and inequality in Johannesburg are far from being reduced. Erstwhile anti-apartheid activists and ‘comrades’ have very rapidly had to make the transition from opposition and struggle politics to the grind of organizational change. Equally, long-standing city officials from the apartheid era have had to adapt to very different visions for the city. Ongoing urbanization, regional immigration, national emigration and economic sluggishness serve to compound the problems of reconstruction and the contradictions bequeathed by the previous dispensation. The task facing the new Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council (GJMC) is not aided by the presence of a powerful commercial and residential elite who, while not overly demanding of the local state, are reluctant to contribute any further to the needs of the poor. Against a backdrop of fiscal stasis, issues of poverty reduction and redistribution are still under negotiation. The harsh realities of intra-racial inequalities that were hidden beneath the racial hierarchy of apartheid are beginning to reveal themselves. This means that it is imperative that Johannesburg's political leaders and managers begin to move beyond the racial discourse of the political struggle against apartheid in order to confront the changing structural base of inequality within the city, as well.

For many in South Africa, Johannesburg is the test case of urban reconstruction. We would go further and argue that the Johannesburg case has wider significance for how we understand divided cities across the world. Johannesburg can be seen as axiomatic of a 21st-century city in a number of ways. First, Johannesburg is an unequal city. Although a very large percentage of its population is poor, it has a substantial middle and upper-middle class, competing in global financial and trade markets and adhering to international norms of urban consumption and culture. Their expectations of what constitutes a well-run city permeate the aspirations of the GJMC and must be set against the demands of the city's disadvantaged populations. Balancing the state's commitment to global competitiveness alongside poverty reduction, when the current political and policy juncture (and not only in South Africa) means that both objectives carry moral weight, is an essential component of urban governance in Johannesburg.

Second, Johannesburg is a city whose economic base is in transition. The economic transformation of Johannesburg goes well beyond the decline of traditional mining and manufacturing sectors in the mid-1970s, although these patterns are evident in the city. Economic change in Johannesburg is also about deliberate economic restructuring, which saw a shift from import substitution to export-led growth from the late 1970s. In the post-apartheid era, it is also about the search for an economic future for the city and its environs, based upon the development of a high-tech hub for the regional and sub-Saharan African market. While neo-liberal economic reform has been forced on many cities of the South through the imposition of International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank structural adjustment programmes, such direct intervention has been unnecessary in South Africa, which embarked on its own process of economic liberalization in synchrony. Less deliberate but equally constitutive of economic transition in Johannesburg is growing economic informality. Incorporating and managing, rather than controlling and marginalizing, the unregulated economies of the poor is an imperative of 21st-century governance, and one that increasingly is not confined to cities of the South.

Third, Johannesburg is a cosmopolitan centre. Its diverse population hails from across South and Southern Africa, the African sub-continent, Europe and Asia. Many of its citizens maintain strong rural or small-town links. Johannesburg is a multilingual, religiously diverse and polycultural city. As the authorities in Johannesburg are aware, negotiating difference is a crucial aspect of combating social exclusion and managing urban social cohesion. Fourth, unlike most internationally atypical cities of the North, Johannesburg's population is expanding. More akin to cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America, it lies at the centre of a rapidly urbanizing region and must face the challenges of sustainable urban growth. Among these challenges are the provision of services alongside the simultaneous maintenance of the urban fabric and the rural hinterland.

Fifth, Johannesburg is a city in which the public and private sectors are renegotiating their relationship and that is seeing a drift towards privatization, not just of infrastructure and services, but also affecting land development regulations, building codes and social services. The impact of privatization on the poor of Johannesburg and issues of conditions of employment, affordability for residents and overall social justice are emerging as central challenges to democratic urban governance. Sixth, public–private–community relations are being renegotiated. The ruling African National Congress (ANC) party in South Africa has been unapologetically centralist; but a combination of pragmatic imperatives, political sleight of hand and international influence is seeing elements of decentralization penetrating urban planning in Johannesburg.

Finally, in terms of the responses of citizens to urban change, Johannesburg straddles a potential divide between the opportunities presented by an impressive legacy of popular democracy and the constraints imposed by the political and civic disengagement of an increasingly fragile and disillusioned populace. In the urban context, this means that the inclusive forces of active advocacy, accountable government and participatory planning processes have to compete with the divisive forces of political apathy. They must also compete with a frequently uncivil society – problems familiar to other cities where local elections fail to attract voters and where the streets and public spaces are no longer inclusive public spaces.

These seven general tensions that underpin urban social exclusion and the challenges of contemporary urban governance provide some sense of why Johannesburg, although having been caught up in the specificities of post-apartheid transition, increasingly represents the more general challenges of governing a divided city. In turn, these seven tensions infuse our analysis of structure, agency and institutions as they operate at the macro, meso and micro levels.

WAYS OF SEEING DIVIDED CITIES

Whether read from the macro, meso or micro scales, cities are not only sites of economic development, vibrant centres of social and cultural creativity or sites of political innovation. They are also places of disadvantage and division and can be divided along a range of axes, including class, race, ethnicity, gender, generation and length of urban residence. Reconstructing divided cities can likewise take place along very varied and sometimes quite different axes. In this section, we review three main bodies of literature that have been drawn upon to understand social fracture in an urban context, such as occurs in Johannesburg, straddling as it does the processes of urban change evident in both the North and the South. The first is the literature on Third World cities, which focuses primarily on issues of urban poverty. The second relates to inequality and derives mainly from debates happening in the North. These are concerned with issues of differentiation and social polarization within cities as a result of the spatial and social changes deriving from shifts from Fordist to post-Fordist production processes globally. It is an engagement with these debates that primarily informs Part 2 of the book, which lays out how we see and analyse the structural underpinnings of Johannesburg as a divided city.

Urban Poverty in Cities of the South

A necessary, but by no means sufficient, starting point for understanding divided cities in the South is the literature on ‘Third World cities’ (Drakakis-Smith, 1995). This invariably starts from the premise that the critical issue to be addressed is urban poverty. Indeed, our original joint studies on Johannesburg (Beall, Crankshaw and Parnell, 1999; 2000) were part of a broader comparative research programme on urban poverty and governance in cities of Africa, Asia and Latin America, which situated itself within t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• PART 1 WAYS OF UNDERSTANDING DIVIDED CITIES
• PART 2 THE CHANGING SPATIAL STRUCTURE OF THE CITY
• PART 3 INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSES TO URBAN CHANGE
• PART 4 LIVING IN A DIVIDED CITY
• Notes
• References
• Index