On Nature

As a student studying civil engineering student on a sociology based Dialogue, I thought it was important to observe the incorporation of green spaces into urban landscapes, the interaction between the built and natural environments, and also how it affects urban dwellers in the South African context.  Johannesburg, the biggest man-made forest in the world, featured plants and trees growing along the sidewalks.  Places like the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Maboneng, Johannesburg feature backyard gardens, adding to the greenery amongst the concrete.  Furthermore, right in the middle of Johannesburg lay the Siyakhana Garden, an initiative driven by the University of Witswatersrand. Siyakhana, meaning “building up one another” in Zulu, is a garden reformed from wasteland formerly used for not else but crime.  The director of this initiative, Professor Michael Rudolph, focused on the public health implications of projects like the Siyakhana Garden, envisioning the garden to be a gateway to a more nutritious South Africa.  The provision of healthier foods and better means to prepare it derived from the research done at the Siyakhana Garden could help to lower the nation’s high diabetes rates.  Additionally, the garden represents a safe haven for the community where people can walk through, schools can visit and learn, university students can get job experience, and community members can volunteer.  Some sustainable developments of the space that can be incorporated elsewhere by the public are solar panels made with few resources, waterless bathrooms with flush-less toilets which could be a revolutionary means of mass water conservation, the use of cats for rodent control instead of poison, and the development of 1 meter agricultural box plots that could be utilized regardless of space restrictions of city living.

Siyakhana Garden

Weeks later, in Cape Town, we visited the Philippi Horticultural Area.  This area consisted of farmland comparatively more vast than that of Siyakhana Garden which the PHA is battling the city over to prevent the rezoning of.  Nazeer Sonday, a leader of the PHA’s activism, spoke to us about how a farm is an ecosystem, and single crop fields are basically deserts.  These principles are reflected in the rows of diverse crops planted next to each other at the PHA. Nazeer uses heritage farming, which consists of passing down agricultural knowledge generationally, along with present techniques from American farmers in North Dakota and California to build a prosperous, nutritious future.

PHA

            After the fall of the apartheid regime, the South African national government decided not to redistribute the land concentrated in the hands of the white minority.  At Siyakhana Garden, one of our speakers, Bonolo, detailed how similar initiatives could be a vehicle by which black South Africans could reclaim their land and gain economically, by starting agricultural cooperatives on a larger scale which would promote collective upward mobility.  At the Philippi Horticultural Area, neighboring land is hoarded by owners who allow their property to become wastelands by neglecting to care for it.  To make matters worse, we drove past informal settlements populated by workers of neighboring farmlands.  This left me wondering how any land could go unused when there is so much necessity.

Our experiences at the Siyakhana Garden and the PHA could be juxtaposed with our walk though farmland in Soweto, a township in Johannesburg.  The township was built downwind from mine dumps and from the waste of the gold mines that shaped the economic prosperity of Johannesburg.  Because of this, these areas contain excessive quantities of radioactive material like uranium, and the soil is full of chemicals like arsenic, lead, and asbestos.  The crops grown here are tainted by these chemicals, correlating to the rising number of birth defects in the Soweto population.  Water of the area also has a high total dissolved solids content and level of acidity unfit by the American standards, as our guide David van Wyk stopped to sample local water sources on our walk through the township.

In addition to my thoughts on health and land distribution, I also thought a lot about the commercialization of natural space.  We visited a game reserve in a different province of South Africa on one of our weekends, where the animals roamed on conserved land without fences or restriction imposed by development.  While I appreciated this concept, I couldn’t help but feel like the placement of the luxurious Sun City resort on the borders of this land and tourists like us paying to drive through felt like an infringement on natural space.  Throughout my entire trip in South Africa, I saw merchandise shaped like the animals we saw on the game reserve which I found most alarming in the middle of the cities far from this conservation.  Sun City further profited by incorporating the wilderness into their design by housing baboons on lounge chairs near the pools and building beautiful manmade waterfalls on site.  I had similar sentiments when hiking Table Mountain, one of the New 7 Wonders of Nature, where there was not only a cableway up and down the mountain, but gift shops on either end of the cableway and a café at the top.  It even had its own wifi network!

Giraffe at Game Drive

Rhinos at Game Drive

Lastly, in Cape Town, it was impossible not to consider natural boundaries as a means to maintain the implementation of apartheid systems in this post-apartheid era.  Khalied Jacobs, an architect who spoke to us, explained that during apartheid, urban planners inserted buffer zones like golf courses and highways to separate townships where black and coloured populations were exiled from areas zoned white.  This infrastructure still exists, along with limited transportation from townships into areas where capital is concentrated. The mountain range surrounding Cape Town, as well as the ocean boundary acting from the other side, represents a huge, unmovable natural buffer, sheltering the wealth of the white population in the city, and excluding others from the economic opportunities of Central Business District of Cape Town that would allow them to prosper.

From the top of Table Mountain