The United States has its own history of
institutionalized racial segregation, but it never saw a system as complex and
deliberately executed as apartheid in South Africa. A country that was torn
apart by the separation of arbitrary racial categories is still grappling with
the aftereffects of a regime that ended less than 30 years ago. As apartheid
was coming to an end, politicians, planners, and architects in South Africa
began to think about how to build enough housing for millions of people who had
been displaced. Questions about where to put houses, what the standard of
housing should be, and who should be responsible for their construction were
all aspects that had to be considered as the government engaged in this massive
undertaking.
Within our first week in Johannesburg, we
visited some of the spaces that were constructed after 1991 with the intention
of accommodating those who had been forcibly removed from cities. Cosmo City, a
housing project that was launched and completed within a decade, is a
neighborhood which contains houses that are being subsidized in varying amounts by the government. This was intended to be a place where residents of multiple
income levels could be integrated, but each type of housing is still
separated by economic class within the community’s borders. It is situated
rather far from Johannesburg proper, making it feel isolated and alienated from
the rest of the city. But what struck me most about Cosmo City as I stood on a
sort of public courtyard overlooking the rows and rows of houses was how artificial
it all felt.
When the Reconstruction and Development
Programme (RDP) builds houses, they all look the same. If you multiply that by
several thousand, you end up with something that looks calculated and forced. This
was quite obviously not an area that grew organically and over time; rather, it
was easy to see how a team of architects could have sat down and planned
everything out meticulously, down to the street names which all share a common
theme. The schools, playgrounds, green space, roads, churches—everything, was
premeditated.
Cosmo City wouldn’t be the first time we
visited a location that felt completely contrived to me. Within the next week, we
were standing in a place called Melrose Arch, a suburban gated community that
was built to act as a city without the dangers associated with being in the
actual city. This was even more difficult for me to conceptualize as a real
place. Whereas Cosmo City seemed to project an image of a lower- to
middle-class haven in my eyes, Melrose Arch appeared to be an extremely wealthy
utopia with an exclusively elite population. The level of control here bordered
on complete sterility: the streets were cleaner than any I had seen in Johannesburg, and
the insides of buildings were immaculate. Huge TV screens set up outside were
showing rugby games to no audience, and security cameras watched over most
street corners as people rushed by toward their destinations. The warmth that radiated
from residents in the townships we had visited was nowhere to be found here; this
was much more reminiscent of the cold attitudes that you would find in any
American city.
One of the central themes of our Dialogue
is the impact of physical space on the people who inhabit it, and Cosmo City
and Melrose Arch offered a lot to think about in that regard. Artificially
created space in Johannesburg is an experiment, as are new solutions for housing shortages and unemployment. This is a
fascinating time to be studying what works and what doesn’t in South African
cities as the country settles in to its newfound democracy and wrestles with how
to effectively provide housing for all its citizens.
Caroline Panchelli
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