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

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ated by this relentless speculative growth were parcels
left over between farm boundaries, so-called uitvalgrond
no-one wanted which often devolved to the state.
All of this became incorporated in the disjointed, low-density
undifferentiated grid that in time grew to encompass
the inner city, the white northern suburbs and the black
southern townships. After World War II, a combination of
Afrikaner anti-urbanism and modernist planning theory
encouraged apartheid planners to adopt ideas about moving
the city out into the landscape [Kruger 1997: 566], a
process that dramatically extended the grid/uitvalgrond
pattern. This decentralization manifested itself in African
townships removed from the city, as well as isolated
white suburbs and light industrial parks. This in turn
required expanded transportation networks -- highways
to white suburbs, railways to African townships. Arterial
roads were laid out to prevent direct travel between
racially-differentiated parts of the city, and only provide
access to commonly used parts like the inner city and
industrial areas. Generous rights-of-way created by this
infrastructure, along with easements to restrict contact
between so-called group areas, further increased the
number and scale of intervals in the cartographic grid. In
most cases, these became quasi-natural fragments of the
landscape displaced by the city, and which still surrounds
it: the Highveld, a rolling grassland too dry and cold to
support trees, but which changes dramatically with the
seasons.
The cognitive effects of these cartographic intervals was
not just spatial but also cognitive. This was because, in
white suburbs the street grid was allied with a verdant, imported
European rus in urbe of private gardens, tree-lined
streets, golf courses and parks that made these parts of
the city feel quite ‘unAfrican’. Joburg’s urban forest, one
of the world’s largest, derives from early plantations intended
to supply pit-props for the mines. It was created to
make the city livable for its early white residents, most of
whom saw the park or garden as a metonymic fragment
of the imaginary landscape of “home”. White Joburg’s
gardens and parks exploited the abundant local labor
to overcome the challenges of gardening in this “land of
rainless winter” and embrace the huge palette of plants
that flourished in the Highveld’s constant, temperate sun
and low humidity [Foster 2008: 166-172]. In time, these
streets and gardens became a seamless, phantasmagoric
landscape in which human intervention was naturalized,
residents were insulated from the wider life of the city,
and communing with nature was domestic and private.
[Czegedly 2003: 34-5]. Crucially, it also heightened
differences between the white suburbs and the bleak,
treeless African townships encouraging perceptions of the
township landscapes (as well their residents’ perceptions
of themselves) as “incomplete”. [Beningfield 2007: 217]
Thus, as the city grew, the technocratic logic of efficiency,
functionality and orderly appearance not only came
to dominate the cityscape, it also imposed a cognitive
framework that indexed divisions of race and class, and
relations between humans and nature, as part of urban
modernity. By the time of the transition to democracy
in the 1990s, Joburg’s character had, by default, become
defined by its open spaces. Although these mostly
functioned as a “no-mans lands”, they were quite varied,
including rocky ridges stretching east-west through the
city, riparian corridors, apartheid-era buffers and transportation
corridors, as well as dolomitic and abandoned
mining lands, unsuitable for development due to the
instability and contamination of the land. Today, such
territories “without cultivation or construction, outside the
productive structures of the city, simultaneously on the
margins of the urban system and a fundamental part of it”
would be called terrains vagues. [de Sola Morales 1995]
In Johannesburg, however, such overlooked spaces have
always been part of the cityscape. Especially south of
the city (an area only recently included in city maps),
these have been landscapes of “forbidden experiences”
where dreams and memories impinged on the city of
technocratic subdividers and social engineers. [Beningfield
2007: 192-3]
Remaking the post-apartheid cityscape: ‘environmental
system’ or ‘cultural landscape’?
The GJMC has devoted considerable effort to securing
some of these undeveloped (and often environmentallydegraded)
intervals in the cityscape. Each administrative
region has been required to generate an open space
plan that contributes to broad civic goals of sustainability
while at the same time integrating local land use
and economic development goals. Emphasis has been
placed on restoring wetlands and streams polluted by
mining activity or inadequate sanitation systems. Long
choked by the detritus of urban development and alien
vegetation, urban streams are being reinvented as
natural recreational corridors. Braamfontein Spruit, a 25
km-long river course with several tributaries that rises in
Hillbrow and meanders through northern Johannesburg.
Previously seen as a sewer and a storm water drain, this
modest stream is now described as “the country’s oldest
and longest urban trail”, and even seen by some as the
source of the “mighty Limpopo”. Similarly, the power of
the rus in urbe imaginary persists, even as its uses and
manifestations are changing. Since 2001, the GJMC has
aggressively been planting trees -- mostly native species
-- in the historically sparse southern suburbs, not only
in Soweto, where buffer zones and stream corridors are
being transformed into parks, but also in peripheral areas
like Orange Farm.
Clearly, these strategies are laudable. Improving these
“no mans lands” cognitively re-incorporates them as part
of the city, and expands citizens’ “right to the city”. Clea-
Papers