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For many people, the glass is always half empty. Instead of seeing the impressive strides Johannesburg has taken over the past few years, they focus on the negatives. In response, Neil Fraser points to numerous positives.
 A COUPLE of weeks ago I attended a two-day session for directors, executive and non-executive, of all the municipal-owned entities (MOEs): Joburg Power, Joburg Water, Pikitup, Metrobus, Joburg Tourism, property, roads, and so forth.
The session was handled as the annual general meeting of every City MOE - there are some 15 in all - and the chair of each entity had to report to the executive mayor and the mayoral committee on the results of the previous financial year, successes and failures over the past year, their plans for the future and the challenges they anticipated.
I remember coming away with a couple of major impressions, not all new, but some a reinforcement of previous opinions. First and foremost was, "Wow, this is a big city to manage and few people actually understand the complexities that it presents." So many citizens are fixated on the potholes outside their house that they miss the essential big picture. Secondly, was the extent of what was being done, the incredibly broad endeavours by lots of people dedicated to their particular passion, the hurdles that have to be overcome and the quality of the various independent chairpersons.
Newspaper report
I thought about that again when I was hit by a headline in last week's Dispatches section of the Sunday Independent: "Joburg's world-city dreams dashed", with a horrific (for umlungus anyway!) picture of a meat vendor on a pavement in Jeppe Street (the picture was five columns wide by about 17 centimetres high - do you know how much an ad that size would cost?), and another of gridlock on the corner of Sauer and Pritchard streets - quite conveniently taken from the newspaper's offices.
Had the headline and pictures appeared in its more sensation-seeking Sunday competitor, it would have been somehow more in keeping with the genre. However
Keith Beavon, for whom I have great admiration, is undoubtedly someone who, as James Clark puts it, has "more knowledge of the anatomy of Johannesburg" than most. His book, Johannesburg, the Making and the Shaping of the City, is factual and fascinating rather than the emotive, personal diatribes about the city that have been in vogue over the past number of years. It is a must for anyone wanting to understand where this city comes from and what the forces were that shaped it. It is not strong on the future but that wasn't its object.
Clark is a wonderful and much admired journalist who also was involved in, and worked in, the inner city for many, many years. Among other works, he edited Like it Was - The Star - 100 years in Johannesburg, 1887 - 1987, which provides a rich history seen through that newspaper's pages. By its nature, not exactly looking into the future of the city.
So here we have two eminently qualified individuals, experts in the city's past, of which both have had many, many decades of experience, ruminating about the future of a city that has undergone cataclysmic changes in just the last decade.
The physical change undoubtedly colours their bi-focals as they peer into the future.
Real change
But the real change we have undergone has far less to do with the physical. Only 14 years ago, what is now Johannesburg consisted of 13 local authorities that were defined along racial lines, not just "Johannesburg, Sandton, Randburg and Midrand", the umlungustans of a past period as mentioned in the article.
Those 13 local authorities have been restructured into the current metropolitan complex, which is spread over some 2 300 square kilometres and is home to probably some four million people (2001 census 3,2 million). It is a metropolis, for the first time in over a hundred years, the responsibility of a single, democratically elected local government.
Sure, there have been many mistakes in getting to where we are, but considering the sheer complexity of what has had to be dealt with, that we have structures in place and that most of them work reasonably well, is, to my mind, quite miraculous. And the City and all its MOEs bar one got clean audits. That alone is quite an achievement.
Beavon raises a lot of weaknesses, some inherent in the layout of the city, such as our tight grid of roads and small street blocks; others being historical issues that have largely been inherited, such as poor planning; bad public transport; lack of law enforcement (which started with the last council in the previous regime), leading to thousands of hawkers on the pavements today; the shopping malls to the north; ageing infrastructure (the lack of maintenance of which for decades was attributable to councils in the previous regime); and then the modern issues of shanties; the Gautrain project; minibus taxis; and, of course, Eskom's "rolling power shedding".
Many of these - not all, particularly the last one where the finger must be pointed at the central government - are hardly the fault of the regime from 1994 onwards. For instance, the huge "shopping malls that sprang up in the white northern suburbs, rapidly drawing the wealthier people from shopping in the city" can hardly be placed at the door of the current council. They were the result of the greed of previous city councils for the rates incomes they offered and the greater greed of the developers, who effectively incestuously raped the inner city retail sector - (many of the "northern" developers were the same institutions that held property in the inner city.)
American influence
As my friend Graeme Reid wrote (Reframing Johannesburg): "In significant ways the development of Johannesburg's metropolitan area has followed the route of many cities in North America. The Johannesburg city centre of old was the 'capital city' - certainly in economic terms - and the central business district, often referred to as 'New York on the Highveld'. But the preconditions for decentralisation were laid in the 1960s, when the government copied the American car-centred freeway system, providing convenient mobility for a wealthy minority to the north of the Johannesburg city centre.
"The establishment in 1969 of Sandton, north of Johannesburg, as a separate white local authority laid the basis for the development of Johannesburg's first 'edge city', which competed with Johannesburg by offering lower rates and favourable zoning for commercial and retail developments.
"Other factors drove the process of decentralisation to the north of the city centre. Land values and rentals were high in the city centre. It suffered from its own particular problems of being too big: shaped by poor planning and location decisions of planners and investors alike, the city became spread out, with office workers 'needing a car or public transport to make a meeting'
(Inner City Economic Development Strategy). But there was no internal public transport system, and the problem was compounded in the 1970s by city planners who, in an attempt to address traffic congestion, severely limited the number of parking bays allowed and available
"The second and more rapid phase of decentralisation in the 1990s was driven by other and mostly non-economic factors, related to the fundamental changes that occurred in South Africa beginning in the early 1990s
During this period, a hiatus in decision making occurred in the white Johannesburg city council, which, led by the liberal democratic party, was keenly conscious of the fact that it was the last whites-only local government.
"Faced with a new constituency which had not voted for it, it struggled to deal with and respond to the changes facing the city and to develop systems of management that were not reliant on the exclusionary laws of apartheid."
After 120 years of colonial and apartheid government, and between 30 and 40 years of urban decline, everyone expects the "new" government to wave a magic wand and "return" the city to regain "the status of a world-city" literally overnight. Firstly, urban decline is a fairly rapid phenomenon; like a disease, it spreads rapidly when untreated, which was the case until probably 1996. And, like a disease that has been allowed to invade every aspect of the city, recovery is slow, medicines take time to work through the system.
Political paralysis
From 1996 to 2000, the focus was on restructuring the apartheid-based local government structures - a period of "political paralysis", when urban management was off the agenda. But then the previous five years had also been a period of political paralysis for reasons enunciated by Reid in the earlier extract.
From 2000 onwards, the focus swung back to urban renewal - but not on the basis that many whites wanted: the ability to sit on Stuttafords' or John Orr's balconies sipping tea in absolute safety after window shopping, as they had done in days of yore. It was clearly recognised that the inner city was no longer the centre of growth in the metropolitan area but that it was positioned in a pivotal location with regard to the consolidating formal economic hub stretching from the inner city to Midrand and Pretoria in the north and OR Tambo International Airport in the east, "as such it is able to provide marginalised communities from the south of the inner city an entry point into the formal economy".
What was needed was to address, for the first time in its history, the needs of the majority of users of the city. And that has happened and is happening, despite the accompanying pains.
Accomplishments
Let's list just some of the accomplishments since 2000 / 2001 that the article ignores in order to sensationalise the woes:
The first major public transport facility in the city centre, the Park Central Jack Mincer development - while some may view it as chaotic - works and has been instrumental in producing
new efficiencies that have resulted in the time taken on some routes to be reduced by 45 minutes as well as increased business for taxi operators.
It is followed by the massive Metro Mall taxi rank and trading market and the Faraday taxi rank and muti market.
The Civic Theatre returned from financial disaster to one of the top performing theatres in the country, internationally recognised and with one of the highest attendance rates imaginable.
The Nelson Mandela Bridge and M2 on-and-off ramps that connect north and south to Newtown, were built, which has resulted in huge public and private investment - Mary Fitzgerald Square; No 1 Central Place; the Sci Bono technology centre; the refurbishment of the Turbine Hall into A-plus grade offices (rentals on a par with Sandton); the refurbished Premier office block; Quinn Street high income residential, Brickfields middle income residential; the refurbishment of the Newtown Hotel, and numerous projects in the pipeline due to start over the next 12 months.
Vacant office space in Life Centre and Edura House has been filled with BPO tenants, and construction of the city's first new office tower in over 20 years has begun, with another central city tower in an advanced stage of planning; commercial space in Diagonal Street has been converted to high grade institutional; the redevelopment of Main Street and Gandhi Square has attracting top names in coffee shops and restaurants; there has been a huge increase in investment in the Standard Bank "super precinct"; Absa is building a R1,1-billion new building to complement its already massive investment in the Absa campus.
Investment
There is focus of new multi-million rand investment on precincts such as Constitution Hill, the fashion district, Jewel City, the Hillbrow health precinct, and the New Doornfontein and Bertrams areas. The public environment is being upgraded in Braamfontein, the fashion district, Jewel City, Ellis Park, the high court precinct ,and now Hillbrow, Berea and Yeoville.
And residential accommodation - about 5 000 "new" residential units have been provided in the inner city between 2001 and 2006 from refurbishments and conversions of commercial space to residential. At least another 5 000 units are being constructed and the City aims to increase the number of inner city units by a further 75 000 to 100 000 over the next 10 to 15 years. The inner city population has grown from 120 000 people in 1992 /93 to over 200 000 by 1996, 257 000 by 2001 and is now (2007) estimated at 343 000. And you want that to happen with no pain.
On the transportation front, I also am not a Gautrain fan, but it is happening and is already attracting major new investment around each of its planned stops, however few they may be in comparison to London. Beavon points out that the London underground started in the 1860s - Johannesburg was not even a dot on a map at that stage, nor was it for another quarter of a century. While metropolitan London and Johannesburg have roughly the same area (London is, in fact, smaller) we have a population of about four million and metropolitan London has a population of between 12 and 14 million.
And construction has also started on the Bus Rapid Transit system - give another five to 10 years and we will have a transportation system that can compete with any other emerging city.
My personal tracking of investment, which I'm sure is not all-inclusive, shows that between 2001 and 2006 some R7,5-billion was invested in the inner city, and that known projects over the next five-year period, 2007 to 2012, will be at least double that. In 1998, the value of new investment in the inner city was R23-million, in 2005 it was R351-million.
City in transformation
Joburg's world-city dreams have not been dashed - not even load shedding will do that - although it may take slightly longer to get to where we are aiming. Joburg is a city in transformation, albeit slow and steady, albeit beset by the many problems enumerated in the article, and more, but there is an intense desire and a political will for it to happen and a band of people determined to make sure it does.
What is taking place and has taken place on the ground over the last seven years makes nonsense of the talk of grumpy old men. Eish!
See you in the city.
Neil
Walking tour
The "Alle kaartjies asseblief!" bus tour looks at horses, trains, trams and trolley buses on Sunday, 10 February. Take a trip on a modern bus to see some of the spots of early transport in Johannesburg.
Getting there was done at a more leisurely pace, before the havoc of the highways, when road rage and travel stress were unheard of.
The cost is R115 and booking is at Computicket. For information, telephone Gaynor Antonakis on weekdays between 9am and 1pm, on 011 482 3349.
Meet at Sunnyside Park Hotel at 1.45pm, depart at 2pm.
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