City Planning as a primer for community development

Last night it had rained harder than ever before in Johannesburg. The longest deepest quenching rain. Yet this was the year of the drought, the worse since 1980 and Johannesburg was the only place where the rain kept falling. Here the biophysical region is known as the highveld ‘high bush’ once a serene grassy savanna now a pulsating metropolis. The region consists of a vast metropolitan complex called Gauteng. The Gauteng city-region consists of three metropolitan cities, of which Johannesburg is one. This is the place where the great historian Charles Van Onselen describes ‘from whenceforth gold was vomited from its innards’. It’s a rough place. The rains come to tame us. During the dry winter, it is cold, biting and brown. In Spring the early rains come to cleanse. This morning I take the highway to a municipal city. The sky is dim grey. As part of my new job, managing the upgrading of large slum settlements, we are visiting a number of housing projects. The invite made by a senior politician. Roger the politician is a tall burly man in his fifties. He is a force of nature, dedicated and steadfast. He grew up in this town. He says his work is not a job. It’s a calling.

Along the highways, in and around this sprawling city-region, mine dumps rise up like monuments to the by-gone era of the gold mining industry. If one travels east, along this path, we ride parallel to one of the largest gold outcrops in the world. The mine dumps are the only visible remnants of the sheer wealth that was dug out from the ground. In between these mine-dumps are waterways and marshlands. There are mega-townships (some with more than 100,000 people), snake in between waterways, green fields, marshland, and mine dumps.

The townships, a seemingly benign name, is the location of poverty, violence, and repression. If you know township life in South Africa, then you know too intimately the oppression of space. Most townships were built for Black people in the 1950’s, they modeled the times of global Fordism. Uniform, same size lots, with concrete box houses, turning circles, single entry and exit points for security control and surveillance, situated in the middle of nowhere. The urban planners of the time like factory workers on a production line, using the same template. Peoples lives and homes were treated like product commodities. If Henry Ford invented the production line and was the king of mass production, then South Africa’s Apartheid government are the masters of producing sterile mass-produced housing for Black people.

Our plan today is to visit various housing projects. I believe the site visit is designed to stir, to get officials into action. We jump into a large bus, through byways and turns, we are escorted by the metro police department. When sirens go off, and traffic is stopped so that the bus can make its way through the streets. There is a certain power here vested in the state. Our first stop is a former mining hostel. The hostels are remnants of forced migratory labor, created during Apartheid, they are males only low-density housing for mine workers. Even though mining is gone, the mining hostels remain as a brutal legacy. 

The bus drives right into the hostel, followed by the metro police. Heavily armed. The hostels have always been the place of violent uprisings. Single-sex hostels were designed to provide cheap labor for the gold mines. The rains have made puddles everywhere. I follow the group into the center of the hostel, we form a semi-circle and the metropolitan police are all around. The official in charge of upgrading the hostel reads a dry technical monologue, with words like impact assessment and environmental audit... Something about a heritage study. Something about an assessment of bulk infrastructure. The words float into the morning sky. The puddle of water in front of me reflects the brokenness above. A red brick three-story building mangled and decrepit. The latrine pipes are on the outside of the building, the bottom end has broken off, they have blackened with age, there is white stained mist just where the vertical latrine pipe is, the interaction of minerals in the water with the red brick. There is a section at the bottom of the building where the bricks have been broken off, and where the second layer of the inside wall is exposed.

There is a stench of rotting carcasses. and when I notice at the bottom of the wall arranged like some macabre sacrificial ceremony almost 100 hundred skulls of sheep heads. The layer beneath are older carcasses and on top fresh skulls with remnants of blood, probably slaughtered from the night before, ready for sale at a nearby market. Jagged black horns stick out from the heads. There is mud everywhere. The hostel houses approximately some 100 families. By the time the official has announced the plans to upgrade, the sun has come out, shining miraculously and exposing mounds of rubbish, plastic bottles, coke cans, floating over a sea of open sewerage water. We stand around uncomfortably in this monument of neglect. Roger breaks the technical monologue and barks, “when you make your people live like animals it brings out the animal in them”. 

As the project manager begins to speak about a plan of action about the timing of an environmental impact assessment about an electrical engineering certificate that needs to be completed, my mind drifts. We rush our exit, leaving the hostel amidst a halo of police sirens. We return to the government offices; I get off the bus and return to a quiet spot where I parked my car. I watched the stillness of the sky, interrupted by a group of larks circling and play-dancing around each other. I have come to realize that they dance this dance every morning, there is a lake nearby and the ritualized trance, is performed without interruption. They seem to be in absolute sync, just moving effortlessly together.

This is about a community planning and building process, long and hard but durable. The technical solutions represent a false existence that detracts from reality. It is the reason why progress has been so slow in the country where there is an abundance of talent and skills. The very thing which we believe gives the state its legitimacy, a thing called technocracy is robbing us all of connecting us to our humanity and to our innate ability to find solutions through community dialogue reified by collective action. I worry that the human side of urban development has been eroded by the increasing technocratisation of the city-state, this is true in most cities in the world.

More than ever, that in this hyper-paced world of mega-cities and technological ‘smart cities’ we are becoming eclipsed by the sheer scale of the problems we face. To solve these problems, we need to go within and steady each other, we need to build community and find a way to dance together. We need to find answers through watching and listening and speaking, followed by some tough courageous action. We have to create our solutions and then own them. Taking responsibility and building our resilience one day at a time, it is possible, we just need to flip the script.

Stephen Narsoo

City Experience Writer, Speaker, Planner.