Landscape – Great Idea! X-LArch III - Department für Raum ...

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Urban imageability & open space in
post-apartheid Johannesburg
Jeremy Foster
Dept. of Landscape Architecture, 440
Kennedy Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca NY
14850, USA (e-mail: jf252@cornell.edu)
Abstract
The social, economic and morphological legacies
of apartheid, as well as new forms of citizenship
created by neoliberalization, have challenged
conventional planning models ability to address the
evolution of South African cities like Johannesburg.
This paper considers the role urban open space
might play in welding this historically-divided city,
where residents have very different expectations,
spatialities and memories, into a cognitively imageable
metropolis. It argues that minimal but differentiated
improvements to the city’s residual open spaces
would allow different ideas of nature and as well as
different forms of memory to coexist. Encountered
through patterns of movement, such undecidable
natural landscapes would weave a “memory-scape”
that strengthens the city’s cognitive legibility and
promotes a pluralistic “phenomenology of locality”.
Keywords
Imageability, open space systems, memory, difference,
temporality,
Introduction
Johannesburg after apartheid
Post-apartheid South African cities have challenged
conventional ways of thinking about the relationship
between planning, development, and social justice. This
is especially true in Johannesburg, where the social, economic
and morphological legacies of the apartheid years,
have collided with new forms of citizenship created by
economic deregulation and uncontrolled in-migration
from the rest of southern Africa and Africa. Purportedly
Africa’s wealthiest city, Johannesburg (or, more colloquially,
Joburg) is paradoxically experiencing unprecedented
levels of poverty, homelessness, crime and urban decay
today. The formal divisions of apartheid no longer exist,
but Joburg has become a city of overlapping realities.
Reconstituted by multiple new constituencies, its economy
is increasingly shaped by mobile users and politically
unaccountable publics. [Bremner 2006: 86]. The new political
order has transformed long-standing citizens’ physical
and imaginative “right to the city”, bringing greater
freedom of movement and residence, but also seemingly
endemic crime and cycles of urban decay, abandonment
and re-appropriation. [Bremner 2000 & 2002]. As in
many other globalized cities, hypereal zones of spectacle,
surveillance and control mingle with derelict spaces
of material and economic entropy left by mobile capital.
[Cairns 2006: 197]. This has created an increasingly
heterogeneous and incoherent cityscape, where conventional
urban taxonomies are strained to breaking point,
and ‘common cultural referents’ have been replaced by
a multiplicity of expectations, spatialities and memories.
[Bremner 2002: 171; Vladislavic 2004: 6] In this sprawling
metropolis, citizens pass each other like tourists,
and the public realm is permeated by an air of imminent
danger outside securitized office parks, themed gated
communities and spectacular shopping malls.
The Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council created
to weld this previously-divided city into a single entity
has struggled to redress the effects of past injustices still
felt by many residents, while simultaneously enhancing
sustainability and meeting market-driven, cost-recovery
mandates from the state. The GJMC also recognizes
that transforming Joburg into a “world class city” in which
more than 10 million residents feel a common sense of
citizenship requires cultivating what one commentator
calls “a sense of experience, (a) phenomenology of locality
which creates, moulds and reflects perceived ideals”.
[Czegedly 2003: 38]
Urban process and landscape character
No discussion of how people identify with cities they live
in can avoid referring to Lynch’s concept of ‘imageability’,
which held that certain patternings of urban spatial
components help inhabitants develop a shared cognitive
image of the city and shape their attachment to it. [Lynch
1960] Given Johannesburg’s entropic built environment,
conventional wisdom would suggest that we should
look to the city’s open spaces for this legibility. The raw
materials are not propitious, however. Renowned for
its lack of natural features or scenic beauty, Joburg was
established in the late 19th C. “in the middle of nowhere”
by mining interests – speculators, capitalists, entrepreneurs,
engineers – who had no long-term urban visions.
Its physical growth has been characterized by speculation
and an over-determination of supposedly “rational”
solutions to social problems. Not only were the town’s
first surveys, effectively, mining claims based on older
farm boundaries, but its initial expansion followed the
underground gold reef, in an east-west direction. The city
became a patchwork of districts in which street patterns
reflected the irregular shapes of the original farms rather
than any plan to orchestrate these tracts into a coherent
city. Subsequent extensions varied little from the original
grid, creating a harsh cityscape with few intentional
public spaces, significant street corridors or landmarks
[Murray 2008a: 160-1]. The only significant intervals cre-