IOnce you drive out of the stylish OR Tambo International Airport, it doesn’t take long for the penny to drop. Also. Johannesburg is the bastard child of the worst aspects of capitalist greed and 20th century racism. Nearly 150 years after its birth, this vast metropolis still bears the scars of the sins of its origins.
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Despite the explosive rise of the black middle class, black presence in formerly white suburbs remains low.
Johannesburg, like Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth and other South African cities, is visibly and traumatically segregated. These cities remain divided.
Johannesburg’s wealthy still live in luxurious locations in the northern suburbs, some restaurants have Michelin-starred food, and house prices are impressive. These areas remain largely white, but are changing at a glacial pace. The workers live in Soweto, Alexandra and other crime-ridden poor black enclaves. This has always been the case in Johannesburg, which remains divided 25 years after the fall of apartheid and 29 years after Nelson Mandela was released from prison.
This economic powerhouse is Africa’s dream city and nightmare city. The population of nearly 10 million people comes from all over South Africa, with increasing numbers of immigrants from Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Malawi and Bangladesh. The city continues to attract people looking for a better life.
What is South African Cities Week?
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Twenty-five years after the fall of the brutal apartheid regime, South Africa’s cities remain deeply divided, both economically and racially. This week in Guardian City, we explore the amazing changes taking place, the challenges we face and the projects that offer hope.
Africa correspondent Jason Burke reports from the Flats, a place rife with violence and death, just a few miles from Cape Town’s stunning beaches and trendy cafes.
Writer Niku Mhlongo writes a love letter to the “other Soweto” that visitors to gentrified Vilakazi Street never see. Hear from Port Elizabeth, where an architect is using recycled materials to transform the city, and Durban, where a surfing school is changing the lives of vulnerable children. Explore the dangerous underworld of the Zama-Zama gold miners operating illegally beneath the city of Johannesburg, visit the all-Afrikaner town of Orania, and publish an extraordinary photo essay by Magnum candidate Lindokuhle Sobekwa. These photos document her life in the former white-dominated area where her mother once worked as a domestic helper.
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The city is unique as the only large city in the world that was not built on the seashore or on the banks of a large river. Because it’s not a trade, it’s a golden child. When gold was discovered in 1884, it was just a patchwork of farms, but it quickly transformed into a chaotic, violent settlement that attracted white adventurers, gold miners (literal and figurative), sex workers, settlers, criminals, shy people, black laborers, and wealth-hungry elites from around the world.
It mutated into a frontier town and grew in colonial fashion. Blacks and whites remained largely separated, with white mine owners building mansions in the rich northern suburbs and blacks being pushed into residential areas in the south.
Apartheid formalized a loose colonial system in the 1940s, creating a reserve army of black workers named Soweto (from the South Western townships), expelling blacks from cities and forcing them to carry dompas (permits) at all times to show their cause. For 46 years, from the formal introduction of apartheid in 1948 until its abolition in 1994, this was the architecture of apartheid Johannesburg. Separate and unequal. black and white. rich and poor.
Then 1994 happened. Mandela and his party, the ANC, took office. Expectations were high for a new South Africa and a new Johannesburg, integrated, non-racial and free from the divisions of the past. Thanks to creative and decisive urban planning, spatial apartheid will be abolished.
That hasn’t happened yet. In my neighborhood, Parkview, a tree-lined, middle-class suburb nestled in the jacaranda shade of the “Landlord” mansions of Westcliff, my family remains one of the scariest few black families. Despite the explosion of a black middle class in the mid-2000s, blacks remain underrepresented in formerly white suburbs across Johannesburg.
There is a reason for this glacial change. Johannesburg is a microcosm of South Africa. The World Bank said in May 2018 that South Africa remains the most economically unequal country in the world. Poverty levels are highest among blacks. White people make up the majority of the elite, or the top 5% of the population. Hence the stubbornness of spatial separation.
After the fall of apartheid, Mandela and his new team vowed to provide previously disadvantaged people with housing, water, electricity and other amenities. They did not expect such a large influx of new residents to the city. Since 1994, millions of people have built huts on the fringes of townships and cities across the country.
The response is to flood these unplanned new marginal areas, some built on dangerous riverbanks, with the construction of small but formal housing. The result is a large amount of new low-cost housing on the periphery of cities, with little or no intentional urban planning leading to integrated housing solutions. The rich stay in the wealthy suburbs, and the poor join other poor people on the periphery.
hope for the future
That doesn’t mean there aren’t changes. In 2016, government statisticians published a series of maps showing Johannesburg as the most integrated of the six major cities. While this picture is encouraging, it also has its problems. Johannesburg’s central business district has a high proportion of black African residents, but the past two decades have been marked by a ‘white flight’ to the northern suburbs. Despite efforts such as rapid bus transit to make it easier for Soweto residents to commute to formerly white areas, Johannesburg townships like Soweto remain largely disconnected from business districts and formerly white suburbs.
Even more hopeful is the City of Johannesburg’s decision in February this year to adopt a first-of-its-kind inclusive housing policy, forcing private developers to make 30% of the homes in all future housing developments affordable, regardless of where they are built. If implemented properly, it could be a game-changer for cities.
Many of my favorite places in Johannesburg have been facilitated by the Johannesburg Development Agency and a few smart and brave private developers. The New Town Cultural Precinct in the CBD is a great example of incorporating commercial development with sophisticated affordable housing.
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Johannesburg’s new policy to make 30% of future housing development affordable could be a game-changer for the city.
Perhaps the trendiest part of the former Joburg CBD is Maboneng, a collection of 55 buildings that JDA has purchased and restored in partnership with entrepreneur Jonathan Liebman. The company Liebman founded went bankrupt earlier this year, and the properties were auctioned off to bargain hunters for well below estimated market value. But it’s still packed with restaurants, hotels, residential apartments, and a major arts center with international artist William Kentridge as a tenant. However, other individuals have also appeared throughout the city.
But Johannesburg’s fate is intertwined with that of South Africa, which experienced a turbulent decade under the leadership of ousted former president Jacob Zuma. The country, now led by former trade unionist and businessman Cyril Ramaphosa, is fighting to tackle the corruption that flourished under Zuma. Prime Minister Ramaphosa is saying all the right things, as he did in London this week, but internal ANC politics are preventing him from introducing vigorous economic reforms to boost the economy in a country where unemployment is currently just below 30% and government finances are deteriorating rapidly.
Young people are restless and increasingly disillusioned with politics. The number of South Africans under the age of 20 who registered to take part in May’s general election was the lowest since at least 1999, according to data from the Independent Electoral Commission. Registration among 18- to 29-year-olds, the largest segment of the voting population, is at its lowest point in at least a decade.
You can feel the frustration of young people. Each morning’s traffic bulletin warns of youth protests that block major roads by burning tires and stones to demand services and jobs. It’s a ticking time bomb.
But there is a sense in South Africa that things can be turned around. Our cities can then become more inclusive, more livable, and more humane.
Justice Malala is an award-winning journalist, television host, political commentator, and newspaper columnist. His book on South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy will be published in the United States next year.
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