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

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ning up degraded wetlands, planting street trees and creating
new parks are tangible ways of redressing historic
inequities, providing amenities that anchor communities,
and educating urbanites whose historic exclusion from full
citizenship has promoted a lack of environmental engagement.
It is no accident the rhetoric surrounding the improvement
of these so-called “internal landscape assets”
often draws on a broader green, nation-building agenda
that has replaced the anti-apartheid struggle, and seeks
to raise public consciousness of South Africa’s fragile environmental
resources [Beal, Crankshaw, & Parnell: 2000:
836]. Defining these open spaces in quasi-scientific, “environmental”
terms also helps juridically and territorially
defend them against land invasions by squatters, a major
problem on the northern and southern outskirts of the city.
How does this “environmental” regeneration of open
space contribute to the less tangible, intertwined project
of strengthening Joburg’s overall environmental image?
So far, there has been little discussion of the cumulative
effects of these local modifications, or how they might
cultivate “(a) phenomenology of locality”. Describing
each region’s open space as an „environmental system“
or „recreational amenity“ suggests that its performance
as open space is unrelated to connections, patterns and
synergies at once less local and less utilitarian. It also
ignores current landscape architectural discourse, which
argues that theories based on either visualist models
(which exclude ecological thinking) or environmental
models (which exclude cultural representations of space)
fail to describe the innate undecidability of the landscape
medium, which embodies at once culture and nature, the
collective and the personal, the natural and the artificial,
the static and the dynamic. [Berrizbeitia,117]. This
undecidability is heightened in urban landscapes which
both function, and are encountered, as components of
multiple spatial or relational networks.
Joburg’s open space system obviously has a critical role to
play in shaping the imageability of a city whose cognitive
illegibility has long been seen as symptomatic of the moral
incoherence of the political order that created it. Not so
obvious is what kind of landscape this open space system
should become, what kinds of broad-scale strategies or
vocabularies might best ameliorate this cityscape that
cannot now be wished away. In Joburg, I would argue, answering
this question requires acknowledging that this cityscape
is, fundamentally, the product of social and historical
processes. The accelerated time of ahistorical thinking
and acting has become pervasive, both in the city’s overall
morphology, and in its constantly reconstructed built fabric
[Murray 2008a: 2]. This is a cityscape whose alienating
character stems as much from constant (but unsuccessful)
attempts to erase traces of the past as from its lack of
distinctive natural features and the inhuman “rationality” of
racial segregation [Murray 2008a: 164].
This suggests that the recuperation of temporality may
play a crucial role in re-envisioning Joburg’s urban landscape.
As in most cities, Joburg residents’ sense of the
city -- both in terms of how and where they live, and what
they ‘see’, experience and identify with – is ineluctably
shaped by the spatial arrangements of a previous order.
The meaning of cityscapes resides not in the spatial
configuration of these cityscapes alone, but in their use,
and memory of that use [Murray 2008b: 149]. Furthermore,
the process whereby urbanites become citizens – in
other words, develop a sense of belonging -- involves
a cognitive assimilation of “cyclical” time of daily life to
linear “historical” time that links contemporary endeavours
back to intentional origins, and which is encoded
in the planned city. In post-apartheid Joburg, however,
this assimilation is complicated by differences between
previously-empowered residents and recent arrivals. The
former perceive the city shaped by a familiar combination
of modern rationalism and scenographic nature as poised
in a linear relationship between past and present, while
the latter perceive it in terms of affective histories that
reference ancestral traditions and practices grounded in
bio-physical processes and routines [Lloyd 2003: 113-4]
Although different, both subjectivities encode taken-forgranted
patterns in the world people intuit as “natural”
[Olin 1996: 98] and through which they situate themselves
as “inside” or “outside” Western modernity. Crosscutting
these cultural subjectivities is the legacy of recent
socio-political history, which can lend the same urban
landscape very different meanings for different residents
– for example, gardens that evoke fond memories for
some but associations of servitude for others, or pine or
eucalyptus plantations that are seen as invasive exotics
by some but “beautiful forests” by others. [Barnard 2006:
109; 2007: 166].
Conclusion: landscape strategies of temporal transformation
All of this makes conventional forms of landscape conservation
– and improvement -- problematic at best in
contemporary Joburg. On the other hand, it suggests that
transforming Joburg’s open space system into an agent
of collectivity requires being attuned to a broad range
of landscape subjectivities, and how the productive play
between these might transform open space over time.
As territories “belonging” to no–one in particular, where
the “pre-modern” nature (re)infiltrates the city, Joburg’s
open spaces – especially cartographic intervals that are
also unimproved African veld – currently invite different
groups to develop their own subjective integration of “modernity”
and “nature” (and therefore, “linear” and “cyclical”
time). Long latent in Africans’ unofficial use of the city’s
open spaces, this multivalency is more evident today,
when (for instance) ridges have become popular sites for
traditional African initiation and religious ceremonies.