Johannesburg is not your usual world-City insofar as the term is used to describe an organisational principle visible through a hierarchy of monuments. It is first and foremost an urban complex defined by its functionalities, which owe as much to the nature of its creation as to the fractures created by its development. The economic centre of the Gauteng region, one of the three political capitals of the state of South Africa, is a recent city, even for such of a young country. It did not really take off until 1886. Its growth owes as much to the gold industry as to the racial segregation that has accompanied the country's history. In fact, Johannesburg has become a metropolis of four million inhabitants, made up of urban areas born of the same economic causes, but radically divided. The vast plateau of the Witwatersrand, for example, appears to be covered in perfectly tangential urban patches, forming a patchwork both in terms of the identity of its inhabitants and the form of housing. In this sense, the richest city on the African continent exposes complex situations and spatial mutations that affect all of South Africa's urban territories.
Key of the image
This image of the city of Johannesburg, the economic capital of South Africa, was taken by a Sentinel-2 satellite on 25 February 2022. It is a natural colour image with a resolution of 10m.
The high-resolution images presented in this dossier were taken by a Pleiades satellite on 16 October 2019.
Presentation of the overall image
A fragmented human geography, uncertain and changing: Johannesburg, a geography of urban practices
Considered as a whole, this is a very rich image for a vibrant city. This contrasts spectacularly with the very constrained nature of the site where the city is located.
The impact gold fever on a constrained site
From space, we are confronted with an urban environment criss-crossed by communication routes where, to use Michel Foucher's analysis, we can identify clear fault lines drawn by the varying height of the housing and the colour of its materials or its green spaces. On the ground, the flat relief where the city sprawls over several dozen kilometres, make it difficult for anyone to get a sense of direction past the grey concrete and steel, iconic architecture, of Downtown.
The site of the city consists of a high plateau: the Witwatersrand. To the north, it abuts a mountain range: the Magaliesberg. Beyond the Magaliesberg range, South Africa's third capital Pretoria is clearly visible. The city of Johannesburg lays on the northern part of this plateau, while to the south, you can identify the mark left by mining activities: rectangular, light-coloured slag heaps, lined up along the gold-bearing ore belt.
This vein of gold, emerges at ground level and then plunges down several hundred metres. It is the origin of the city, the youngest in South Africa and now the largest. This underpins the shift of the economic heartland from Cape Town to Gauteng.
The image shows a small part of the major infrastructure works that were necessary to supply the city: the dams in the Magaliesberg mountains, such as Hartbeespoort lake, or abandoned quarries to the south. But you have to imagine, beyond the scope of the image, water resources channelled to Johannesburg from as far away as neighbouring Lesotho.
Tangential urban patches separating different worlds
One of the specificities of Johannesburg is that both its social balance and its urban planning are not yet set in stone, and that both have changed considerably over the last century and a half.
First came the tent city and pioneering buildings of the Boer era. They were followed by an initial urban development based on a grid pattern, still visible in the CBD - Central Business District, or Downtown business district. The apartheid regime created segregated neighbourhoods from scratch, most famously Soweto. And it reshaped the urban centre along North American principles. As for the end of the apartheid regime, it led to the decline of the historic centre in favour of the rich, white suburbs in the north of the city.
Today, for example, a distinction is made between townships and the more recent, informal squatter camps. Soweto, once the symbol of apartheid, is becoming a black middle-class neighbourhood, while the more affluent classes are beginning to mix in the residential suburbs and gated communities. Similarly, the former mining town - now the economic capital of South Africa, and more generally of the whole of southern Africa - has developed its industrial and tertiary activities. A sign that it no longer sees its future solely in the exploitation of the soil, but in building an economy connected to the globalisation of trade and services.
The image reveals these successive changes that could be compared to an “urban tectonics”. At the scale of the overall image, several phases of urban development can clearly be identified.
The Central Rand Gold Field at the heart of the extractive phase of development of the city: gold resources, migrant labour and segregation
From the very start, a massive workforce was required to serve the extractive industry…
The Central Rand Gold Field, a seventy-kilometre-long gold belt, is at once an original space, a core, a border and a suture of the metropolitan space. There are two reasons for its original character.
The first one is the gold resource that justified the urban settlement in the first place. From the outset, gold mining was organised on the basis of industrial production and the interests of major investors who had already made a fortune in diamond mining, discovered in the 1870s in the Cape Province, at Kimberley. This industrial exploitation explains, as much as the high grade of the vein, the enormous quantities of gold extracted from the subsoil, which in 1913 represented almost 40% of the world's gold output.
The huge slag heaps, the largest of which are over a kilometre square, show the gigantic scale of the mining activity. They also illustrate the huge amount of labour needed to carry out the work, and therefore the need for a rapid urban growth. By the end of the 20th century, the town had reached 100,000 people.
... the source of the first example of urban segregation...
The second reason is mainly linked to the migrant labour system (François-Xavier Fauvelle, 2006) set up to proletarianise African labour. This system was based on the annual migration of thousands of people from their reserves to the extraction centres. This is the original reason for the differentiation of habitats that would later give rise to the creation of townships.
In fact, differentiating between the legal dwelling - the reserve - and the workplace - the compound - aimed not only at preventing any workers’claims but also at limitating the sedentarisation of the black population at a time when the white workers, and the white population in general, had not yet settled. In the same way, it was a question of making black miners bear the brunt of efforts in order to reduce extraction costs. Indeed, despite its richness, the Johannesburg gold deposit contains a small quantity of metal per tonne of ore, which makes it expensive to mine, as do the great depths at which it has to be extracted.
The need for an urban development was thus linked to the segregation of workers. While black miners were confined on the basis of ethnic criteria to compounds just by the extraction sites themselves, white miners were housed in boarding houses a little further north. Downtown was born.
... and two central areas, one urban, the other linked to the extraction sites.
Downtown is organised on a grid pattern, clearly visible in the image and in zoom 2. It rapidly evolved from a tent village to a solid town with boarding houses for miners, residential areas such as Hillbrow, parks such as Joubert Park, and buildings imitating an American city. The result was an increasingly elaborate and functionally diversified centre, a real showcase for South Africa's major mining and industrial companies.
The city was strictly segregated from the very start. The mines in the centre were flanked on either side by the compounds and Downtown which very early on became the only centre.
Beyond the train station and the tracks formed a boundary. The Indian, Malay and black workers' neighbourhoods quickly spilled over from the saturated compounds into other areas such as the Alexandra district. After this original phase, the apartheid regime partly reshaped the city.
Apartheid and the failure of systematic urban segregation policy
When the regime was inaugurated in 1948, the situation was already quite complex: housing was sometimes very mixed (Sophia Town), both segregated and highly connected. The demographic pressure was high. This resulted in a three pronged policy visible on the images: first, the concentration of the black population in the townships; Then, the ‘whitening’ of previously mixed neighbourhoods; and finally, the strict zoning of housing.
The small-scale image shows the townships of Soweto, neatly separated from Downtown by the mining strip. Created in the 1950s to bring together black populations from other parts of the city, Soweto has become, over time and through revolts, the very symbol of South African apartheid.
Differentiation and segregation
Several areas separated from each other by roads or talwegs reveal not only the different stages of the creation of the townships, but also a real difference between neighbourhoods. For example, Pimville (1904) and Orlando (1932) largely predate apartheid, while the most recent townships, such as Emdeni and Senaoane (zoom 2), date from 1958. Likewise, there is a clear difference between Meadowland in the north, a middle-class neighbourhood, and Kiliptown, which is much poorer.
A striking example of the ‘whitening’ of mixed neighbourhoods is Sophia Town, visible on the image to the north of the extractive strip. A mixed neighbourhood, it was known in the early 1950s as the ‘Chicago’ of Johannesburg for its cultural life. Drum magazine, the only written media for the black community in Johannesburg, and its jazz clubs started there. Sophia town faced a strong demographic pressure as it was the only neighbourhood in the city, along with Alexandra, where black people could own their own homes. As such it became a focal point of resistance to apartheid. Its demolition in 1955, as well as the relocation of the black residents to the Meadowland district, turned into a symbol.
Opposition, resistance and relative failure
In Johannesburg, with the exception of the creation of the gigantic township of Soweto, which rose up to four million inhabitants, the attempt to create perfectly homogenous areas failed for two reasons. The first was the resistance of part of the population, for example in the Hilbrow district, which remained a mixed area until the end of apartheid. The second reason was the impossibility of creating a white town to the north of the gold mining area.
Alexandra Township is a textbook example. When created in 1913, it was too remote to be a white neighbourhood and, like Sophia Town, it remained a small black landowners community. But unlike Sophia town, as it was not part of the municipality of Johannesburg. Alexandra township became a de facto autonomous community managed by its own residents. Its isolation proved to be a blessing in disguise. During the 1970s and 1980s, attempts by the South African authorities to transform the district, which was now part of the city's white, middle-class suburbs, faced fierce resistance from a population whose heart beat in unison with the revolts in Soweto Township.
Neighbourhoods in the north are still very much divided: Standton, Alexandra and Coronation Park
It may come as a surprise to see in this image the major fault lines created by Apartheid, thirty years after its end. This raises the question of whether urban segregation, whatever its cause, is not a systemic part of the way South African society operates.
Since 1990, the focus, both political and urban has been on healing the scars of the city and open up areas that had been closed off for as long as the city itself. But changes in housing and the expansion of the city have followed a logic that, in some cases, anticipated the end of apartheid and continued afterwards.
One example of this evolution is the development of the city's northern suburbs, which resemble a new urban creation within the city, with its own locations, symbols and dynamism. The example of Sandton and its suburbs is particularly symbolic of the transition from racial and spatial segregation to socio-spatial segregation, two forms of exclusion that very often overlap today.
Sandton, from a rural suburb to new urban centres
Sandton was founded in the 1870s, and until the late 1960s was nothing more than a 30 000 inhabitants rural suburb on the outskirts of Johannesburg. During the 1970s-1980s, it benefited from a dual process. The first was the deterioration in living conditions in certain parts of Downtown, such as Hillbrow, which went from being a mixed neighbourhood to becoming a ghetto. The second was the soaring property prices in the suburbs closest to the city centre.
Under this double pressure, the white population, mainly families with children, moved further out in search of space, peace, security, social and racial homogeneity. With the end of apartheid, the movement continued and Sandton, absorbed into the municipality of Johannesburg in 1995, benefited from the decline in Downtown's economic activity.
The Sandton district is now a modern duplicate of the original centre. Its features, typical of the core of a major city are clearly visible in the image: the Leonardo, Africa's tallest skyscraper, the large convention centre that hosted the Earth Summit in 2002, the vast bunkerised Monte Casino shopping centre and Nelson Mandela Square.
Sandton's rise to prominence as a place of economic power and a meeting place for the white minority has resulted, on the one hand, in growing contrasts with the adjacent neighbourhoods and on the other hand, in the emergence of white camp squatters. Two examples are particularly striking, one because of its age, the other because it is relatively new.
Alexandra, a township in transition
The first example is Alexandra. This township of 180,000 inhabitants may be less well known than Soweto, but it is a very useful place to visit for someone wishing to understand the brutal contrasts in the South African city. Separated from the residential areas of Sandton by the M1 motorway and luxury shopping centres, Alexandra was for a long time a symbol of poverty within the large ring road that defines the heart of the city.
Today, it’s a neighbourhood in transition, where former shantytowns are juxtaposed with new areas rebuilt for the middle classes, with their shops and social amenities. The same situation can be found in Tembisa Township, further east. The township undergoing regeneration is just separated by a single street from the semi-rural residential area of Glen Austin.
Coronation Park: the extreme poverty of some Afrikaner populations
The second example is the squatter camp of Coronation Park and its extension of Munsieville in the western suburbs of Johannesburg. It is set against the residential areas of Sandton, exactly opposite Alexandra. It has the recently become a white squatter camp, thus reflecting another reality of the post-apartheid era. As they lost their racial privileges and with the introduction of employment quotas for black and coloured people, the most vulnerable Afrikaners - just under 10% of the white population - have plunged into extreme poverty.
Between urban regeneration, connection to the world and gentrification: Soweto and its suburbs face the challenge of heterogeneity
Soweto: a geosymbol of the anti-Apartheid struggle
Apartheid aimed at making racially segregated communities socially diverse. The southern districts however were both socially and racially uniform as the vas majority of workers were assigned the same jobs and therefore the same wages. This was particularly true of Soweto.
As a product of segregation, Soweto has yet to be part of the metropolitan area. The challenges are manyfold. One of them is symbolic. Soweto epitomizes protest against apartheid and as such must retain a strong identity as it becomes a part of the metropolitan are. The economic development of the area, the very idea of its gentrification and its promotion as a tourist destination are powerful issues that go far beyond urban policy.
The changing legacy of a district intimately linked to mining
The geography of Soweto is complex as the image demonstrates. It is a miners’ community with a better connexion to the mining site than to the rest of the city. Besides it is isolated from the rest of the city: the toxic waste from the mines and the instability of the ground caused by the abandoned and poorly maintained tunnels make it impossible to mend the urban fabric. (see zoom 2). Finally, home to half the population of the metropolitan area, Soweto is still subject to intense demographic pressure, making it difficult to redevelop it. These issues need to be resolved both internally and externally.
From an internal perspective, Soweto has been a laboratory for the regeneration of South African townships since the 1990s. The tarmacking of the streets, the connection of all the houses to the grid and the installation of a water supply systems all helped transform the district and the way in which the residents themselves perceived their environment.
Protea Glen, Snake Park and Bram Fischer are new districts that give an idea of what Soweto might become when the real estate market is consolidated. Family homes spring up, creating a new urban landscape and replace the old four rooms matchboxes. A new Soweto is being built over the old one thus reinforcing its own identity. Before the Covid pandemic, property prices in Soweto were rising faster than in the rest of the metropolitan area. A good indicator of the rapid changes, both social and urban.
Identities and symbolic places, tourism and museums
The identity of Soweto is reinforced by places symbolic of everyday life in South Africa and of its history. Vilakzi street on the other hand becomes a tourist attraction: around the houses of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, a new festive centre develops with bars and shops for tourists and wealthy residents. Nelson Mandela’s former home has been transformed into a museum and is now an important place of commemoration.
The street and the district as a whole are part of a much larger movement of globalisation of iconic places. Online platform (such as Air BnB) have already transformed it. Will the memorial to Hector Pieterson put a stop to this hype or expand it? It is no surprise that after the global pandemic, these areas, as the symbol of the country’s economic fractures, were at the centre of the 2020 riots. This reveals the precarious nature of the former townships.
Another question arises: the future of the spaces between Soweto and the nearby neighbourhoods. As the mining area from a border the only possibility is to mend the scar between Soweto and downtown. The solution found is a double symbol. The first one is Gold Reef city: a park and a museum that pays tribute to the mining industry in the city. The second one is the apartheid museum, part of the tourist district of Gold Reef City. It focuses on the pivotal role of indigenous people. Their low wages helped make this complex of mines a profitable and lasting business.
The challenges of regenerating Down Town: economic, urban and symbolic issues
As a marker of the major changes that have affected the city and the country as a whole, the regeneration of Downtown since the 1990s has been a social issue not only for Johannesburg but also for South Africa's urban identity. As in any city, this marks the degree of integration to globalisation, the presence of a strong particularism that sets it apart, and its symbolic power. But in Johannesburg, in addition to these already considerable challenges, remains the question of the relevance of a centrality for these tangential urban areas, which are certainly increasingly porous, but which also function very independently of each other.
To begin with, we can wonder what it is that creates this sense of unity, which can sometimes be translated as the idea of an “urban pulse”. The overall image provides an answer with the highly centralised nature of the communication routes that all lead to Downtown. Johannesburg attracts many commuters. Traffic jams come with them. It’s also a city of contrasts with its concrete and steel décor and very dense suburbs. It is often called an African Manhattan. But unlike New York, this centrality seems to be the place where the nature of the new urban mutation is being questioned.
Downtown is marred with a very negative image of insecurity. In certain neighbourhoods, you will find a population of-migrant who bring with them a culture different from that of the country. True to its pioneering origin, downtown reinvents its symbolic role. This reinvention has three layers. The first, clearly visible in the image and in zoom 3, is that of the colonial city with its grid pattern ending in Joubert Park to the north. The second is the creation of a vast CBD in the south that emulates the canons of western, globalised financial power. The third is the repurposed peripheral industrial estates such as Braamfontein and Newtown.
Deserted by a large proportion of its white inhabitants in the 1980s in favour of the northern suburbs, the pioneering city has become divided into blocks comprising ethnic minorities that are often poorer than in the rest of the metropolis and have long been left to fend for themselves. This has sparked a discussion on the insecurity of the centre and has led to the recreation of public spaces such as Joubert Park and cultural infrastructures such as the Johannesburg Art Gallery.
Between gentrification and attempts at reconquest: a pioneering Downtown?
A CBD in crisis between congestion, demographic decline and competition
This reflection has also affected the CBD, which has suffered from congestion, demographic decline and competition from the emerging new centre of Sandton. The failure of Western-style pedestrianisation, has led to a further exodus of residents while reinforcing the isolation of the centre from the suburbs. It has also prompted the authorities to rethink the urban model.
The first challenge is that of inhabiting it, since the CBD is home to three million daytime workers but less than a million inhabitants at night. A rundown district of old-fashioned skyscrapers, sometimes squatted, and ghettoised housing estates, it now cultivates a complex image by reinventing the codes of the financial powers. It is now a place of renewed sociability, open to expressions of South African artists who see it as the embryo of a new type of city, less “Western” and more African.
It still offers the chaotic reality of an urban environment undergoing reconstruction, where the “roof top bars” of the Carlton Center district stand alongside artists' squats and dilapidated buildings for migrants, alongside rehabilitated head offices or luxury hotels. An illustration of a rapidly changing urban identity.
Rehabilitation, gentrification, museification
Overwhelmed by the task of rehabilitating downtown, the metropolitan institutions, as well as the South African government, have chosen a peripheral approach to restructuring neighbourhoods, using private investors as leverage.
The Braamfontein district was the first to be affected by a process of gentrification initiated by young students. With its organic cafés and designer boutiques, it is a stage for the transformation of the Downtown area through a permanent process of reallocation. The emphasis here is on the ever-transient nature of activities and trends that perpetuate the myth of the pioneering city.
In comparison, Newtown is a very different story. This large industrial area was created at the beginning of the 20th century. Its iconic centre is the large power station. It’s now the city's museum district, whose mission is to reach out to the continent through the African Museum. It showcases the country's development, and it’s an educational tool for the city’s metropolitan population. A good example of how art can be used to recreate public space.
A third example illustrates the very strong desire from residents of affluent suburbs to reclaim the inner city in a truly pioneering spirit. An enclave of gated communities in the poor neighbourhood of “city and suburban” is visible in zoom 2. A private developer built it in 2009 in an area made up of abandoned warehouses and garages. Armed guards control access into the enclave. This is an example of urban redevelopment exclusively for the creative classes who want to experience the adventure of reclaiming space in a city that would otherwise be rebuilt without them. In this district, residential blocks can be transformed into large lofts, third places or trendy boutiques.
Conclusion
Johannesburg is multifaceted city. A city for our times, assembling its successive incarnations, exposing its social fractures and the scars left by history. Johannesburg is first and foremost a frontier city in the North American sense of the term, whose symbols and centrality are constituted by the past and present traces of mining.
Whatever its successive transformations, it is still defined by its geography, its organisation and the mental framework of its diverse inhabitants. In this sense, its original character help us understand both what holds together the disparate pieces of this gigantic urban jigsaw, and the idea that the city reinvents itself permanently as if nothing could really last, apart from the immutable slag heaps that dominate the city with their mass.
These heaps are not only a physical and symbolic representation of the wealth created by the people of Gauteng, but also a memorial to the pioneer spirit of its people that is still alive and well.
In this sense Johannesburg is full of contradictions: an identity that is both very powerful and at the same time peculiar. It is an attractive city for migrants from sub-Saharan Africa who come here to seek their fortune. But it is also a city where layers of poverty move according to the trends and fears of a wealthier population that tends to regroup in gated communities and reclaim lost territories. It is also one of the two most violent cities in the world.
Seen from above, it looks like a crater: a fast-developing African society, undergoing permanent social reorganisation based on an assertive liberalism, and still in the shadow of the slag heaps.
Zooms d’étude
Balancing between its prior segregation and the contemporary desire to erase these differences…
Around fifty kilometres north of Downtown lies the city of Pretoria, itself part of an urbanised area known as Tshwane since the early 2000s. Situated in a valley carved out by the Apies River and surrounded by hills in the eastern part of the Magaliesberg, Pretoria's particular geography and humid subtropical climate make it a separate entity within the metropolitan area of Johannesburg.
However, as the global image clearly demonstrates, this is not the case. At first glance, it may appear to be a natural extension of the metropolis, which has already absorbed a good number of outlying urban nuclei. This zoom shows a more nuanced reality. It's not for us to decide whether it is an integral part of the metropolitan area or a different geographical entity.
We will focus both on the enduring differentiation between the two geographical areas and on the attempts to erase the very strong differentiation between these two areas. They have both opposing and complementary dynamics. If we focus on the differentiations, we can only observe that Pretoria is not part of the process on constant reinvention of the city of Johannesburg. It is and remains an administrative city surrounded by clearly identified residential suburbs and townships.
Pretoria: all the divisions of South Africa in one place...
Its organisation is clearly visible on the image. It runs from west to east along a main axis - Church Street - which in itself seems to sum up South Africa's divisions. Starting in the west with the very poor township of Atteridgeville, it crosses the middle-class district of Danville before entering the heart of the Afrikaner city, skirting the business and government district of Arcadia. To the north and south, in the hills, the neighbourhoods are staggered, with a clear centre-periphery social segregation.
Since 2007, debates about new urban symbols have focused on Pretoria - Tshwane, and specifically on changing the name of the city and its streets. This is not only because of the city's status as a capital, but also because of the difficulty of converting a city whose essence is first and foremost one of memory. ‘Uni-memorial’ would be more accurate as Pretoria was, before its integration into British South Africa, the capital of the Transvaal republic, the cradle of Afrikaner identity.
... which raises the question of the coexistence of memories and identities.
The image clearly shows the importance of the places that structure public space. Coming from Johannesburg on Route 14, also known as the Pretoria main road, after passing the two air bases, visitors are greeted by the monument to the Afrikaner settlers of the ‘Great Trek’ who left the Cape in 1835-1838 to found the Republic of Transvaal and the Orange Free State. This highly visible 41-metre-high monument has a strong symbolic value: as the longest marble frieze in the world, it presents the epic story of a people - the Afrikaners - in search of land. It is located within a memorial park comprising Fort Schanskop, built in 1896 to protect the city from a British coup, and an amphitheatre that is now a venue for events and social gatherings. The whole complex was listed in 2012.
A little further north, the futuristic Freedom Park, is situated at the top of a hill. It presents an inclusive version of the history of South Africa and pays tribute to the fallen of all of South Africa's wars as well as to the victims of apartheid. Geographically, there is no interface between these two monuments. They have not found a memorial link. This example of juxtaposition is not unique, and it shows that Pretoria-Tshwane is neither a simple summary nor an extrapolation of the metropolitan reality of Johannesburg, but rather a kind of inverted mirror.
As the capital, first of a people, then of a segregated state, and finally of the rainbow nation, it is at the same time subject to change and assigned a mission of permanence. While Johannesburg unashamedly cultivates the idea that nothing is truly sustainable and that the essence of the city lies in its constant reinvention , Pretoria - as a centre of Afrikaner pride and a symbol of resilience - takes the opposite direction: a sense of permanence. It piles up contradictions and builds its own compromises. In this way, the interlocking and sometimes painful symbols reflect the existing forces at play and the need to integrate all histories.
A symbol that is both seminal and divisive...
If there is a centrality to Johannesburg that reveals its organisation, it is to be found in this extractive strip that divides the city into two unequal parts from west to east. But beyond the visible divide, it is above all a very powerful symbol that unifies the city around its painful mining past and its present. This area is still mined at great depth - at 3,900 m in the Tau Tona mining complex - and intensively: 41,000 tons of gold in 2018 out of the 190,000 produced annually nationwide. Lastly, it poses a challenge for the future: it is the world's largest extractive zone in the heart of a major city.
The Central Rand Gold Field poses two major challenges that are clearly visible in the image. The first is symbolic. Visible from Soweto as well as from Downtown and its more affluent suburbs, its meaning for one or the other is very different. How can the opposed symbolic meanings of this unique central location be merged? The decision to build the Apartheid Museum there is both meaningful and problematic. The museum reminds us that the profitability of the mines was linked to the low wages paid to black workers; and that the pioneer myth is based primarily on exploitation. On the other hand, this choice implies that the symbolic centrality is based on a divisive element that speaks volumes about the divisions that continue to exist within the city.
... adapted to the psyche of South Africa...
We need, however, to take a step back. This museum itself is part of an amusement park, Gold Reef city, which carries other symbols. The first is that of a very liberal society based on individual freedom and the pursuit of happiness. The amusement park is coupled with a casino. Its gilded “art nouveau” style is a reference to the mining heritage. All around it, the start-up district and the residential areas, are a reminder that we are in an emerging country, integrated to the globalisation of services and high tech… the “mines” of tomorrow. To the west, a large convention centre is located between two mining areas. One has been redeveloped as a park, a more socially inclusive amenity. This contrasts with the new socio-spatial segregation in the different districts of the city that reinforce the old hierarchies. So what might have seemed like an artificial attempt to mend things actually mirrors what an ideal South African society could be.
... The future of water: the challenges of sustainable development
The second challenge is about combining today’s development with tomorrow’s environment. It is impossible to build above mine shafts due to the hollowing out of the rock and the numerous risks of mine collapse. Besides, the question of mining waste is particularly sensitive.
This waste is rich in pyrite ore and releases sulphuric acid when in contact with rainwater. This badly damages concrete. The mine drainage also pollutes groundwater with heavy metals such as cadmium, mercury and zinc. This region is subject to frequent droughts and water is a major issue. As a consequence, this pollution threatens the health of the most vulnerable inhabitants and could be the source of new tensions.
Two neighbourhoods in decline...
The Hillbrow and Berea districts are a concentration of problems linked to the evolution of urban functions over the last fifty years. Formerly residential areas, these two neighbourhoods are among the poorest and most dangerous in the city. These two districts were a white only area under the Reserved Areas Act of 1950. With the resistance of their residents, they became a very attractive “grey” area because of the comparatively lower rents. Gradually, in the late 1970s and 1980s, they lost their middle-class residents and became a ghetto.
Since the 2000s, sub-Saharan Africa migrants have settled there. They are victims of gangs who take possession of the buildings and exploit them. The Hijacked buildings abound in these two districts, forming vertical shanty towns. One iconic example is the Ponte Tower in Borea, which became a major centre of drug crime in the late 2000s. Despite the criminalisation of these practices, the proactive action of some residents who are driving out drug dealers, as in Ponte Tower, and the buyout of buildings by the local council, Hillbrow and Borea is a sub-“squatter camp”, with the notable difference that the residents do not have the same cultural practices as those in the rest of the city.
... Subjects to a proactive urban policy.
As you can see on the image, these two districts belong to the core of the metropolitan area, which is the focus of a regeneration policy from the city council. What's more, these areas have real assets. They have a strong symbolic value - Hillbrow Tower is the emblem of the city - and the buildings have a great realty potential. This could become an affluent district as a process of gentrification has started (see City and Suburban or Fashion District).
The limit to the south is quite clear: the railway line forms a major urban discontinuity. To the east, the University of Johannesburg and the large sports complex form a boundary. To the west, the central station and above all Joubert Park form offer a pedestrian interface between this district and the rest of Downtown. In reality, these boundaries are an urban front: the poor areas are nibbled away, block by block, as a younger and more affluent population moves in.
Joubert Park: a powerful symbolic point of contention
Joubert Park is the most powerful symbolic point of contention in this policy. This was the first park created in the city at the beginning of the 20th century. It was intended for the white bourgeoisie but now tourists are strongly advised to keep away from the park by daytime. And a stroll at night is out of the question. Just a stone's throw from the station, where every social category in the city rub shoulders, it has nonetheless the potential to be a central feature of Downtown.
Reclaiming Joubert park started with the installation of the Johannesburg Art Gallery. It not only brings people together, but also provides a tourist attraction. Opening up the site, in the symbolic sense of the term, has, since the early 2010s, led to the public reclaiming the park during daytime. Joubert park is now de facto divided into relatively safe zones, as a prelude to its reintegration into urban space.
Le Central Business District, le Fashion District et le parc Joubert
Rivonia, Randburg and Sandton are home to the city's largest shopping centres. Montecasino is often cited as a model of a consumer society that ignores social inequalities in a highly protected urban world. But there are many others, some of them larger than Montecasino, such as Hoogland and Kya Sand, which are clearly visible in the image. The business parks, which also attract housing, are also of a different nature. Linked to service, automotive or high-tech activities, they employ a highly skilled workforce who live nearby.
Finally, in a city that is often short of water and that boasts multiple plans to ensure equal access to the resource, the presence of six large golf courses speaks volumes both about the importance of the infrastructure and the standard of living of a population sheltered from the major metropolitan issues.
This impression is illustrated by the Sandton CBD. It has become the main centre for business in the city following the relocation of the Johannesburg stock exchange and of the head offices of numerous companies such as Hewlett Packard and IBM. Sandton radiates across Africa's Southern Cone. It’s also connected to global flows, as the Sandton stock exchange has been linked to the London Stock Exchange since 2001. It is one of the city's focal points for a new kind of “mining” activity.
As a result of the period preceding the end of apartheid and the idealisation of a way of life, Sandton today is good example of the transformation of segregation. The predominantly English-speaking inhabitants have created a space that is very different from both the pioneer town and Pretoria, the Afrikaner city. On the other hand, the rise of the black middle and upper classes have brought colour to the district, where the white population is no longer a majority, even if it remains dominant compared with the rest of the metropolitan area (around 48%).
Additional images
South Johannesburg: the new suburban housing estates and gates communities.
Sources et bibliographie
CNES GeoImage website :
François Saulnier : Afrique du Sud - Le Cap : une métropole post-apartheid en profondes mutations sociales et urbaines
References and additionnal information:
- Paul Coquerel, L’Afrique du Sud : Une histoire séparée, une nation à réinventer
Gallimard, 2010 - Fabrice Folio, Dark Tourism ou tourisme mémoriel symbolique ? Les ressorts d’un succès en terre arc-en-ciel
- Sylvain Guyot et Myriam Houssay, La nature, l'autre frontière : Fronts écologiques au Sud (Afrique du Sud, Argentine, Chili), Ed. PIE Peter Lang, 2017
- Marie-Annick Lamy-Giner, (Université de la Réunion), Les ports commerciaux d’Afrique du Sud
- Bernard Luga Ces français qui ont fait l'Afrique du Sud, Ed. Bartillat, 1999
- François-Xavier Fauvelle Histoire de l'Afrique du Sud, Ed. Points, 2016
- Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch, Mythologies territoriales en Afrique du Sud Ed. CNRS éditions, 2000
- Michel Foucher, fronts et frontières, Un tour du monde géopolitique, Fayard 1991
- Nicolas Lemas, « Pour une épistémologie de l’histoire urbaine française des époques modernes et contemporaines comme histoire-problème », Histoire@Politique. Politique, culture, société, N°9, septembre-décembre 2009
- Johannesburg : équité et eau, une étude géographique (Publié le 07/06/2003)
Auteur(s) : David Blanchon - AMN - Université de Paris 10 Nanterre - Laboratoire Géotropiques - Bénit C. - Johannesburg : déségrégation raciale, ségrégation sociale ? In : Dureau, F., Dupond, V. (et al.) - Métropoles en mouvement, une comparaison internationale - Anthropos et IRD.
- La marche urbaine : un outil pour appréhender les émotions à Johannesburg ?
Chrystel Oloukoi - À l’intérieur des « camps de squatters blancs » post-apartheid en Afrique du Sud, | Daily Mail en ligne
- Afrique du Sud: des townships mixtes mais pas mélangés (rfi.fr)
AFRIQUE DU SUD. Plongée au cœur de la pauvreté blanche (courrierinternational.com) - Ville d'apartheid, ville de ségrégation : Johannesburg - Bulletin n°28 (cndp.fr)
- Johannesburg, les fractures post-Apartheid | | CLES : Notes d'Analyse Géopolitique (notes-geopolitiques.com)
- Story of cities #19: Johannesburg's apartheid purge of vibrant Sophiatown | Cities | The Guardian
- La gentrification de Soweto cache les cicatrices de sa cruelle histoire d’apartheid | Niq Mhlongo | Le Gardien (theguardian.com)
- Downtown Johannesburg 1 : histoire d’une renaissance urbaine - Si loin si proche (rfi.fr) Downtown Johannesburg 2 : Arty City - Si loin si proche (rfi.fr)
Auteur
François Saulnier, agrégé, professeur en géographie du tourisme, lycée Charles de Gaulle de Compiègne, Sorbonne Université.
Translator
Translated by Nicolas Bounet, professeur agrégé de géographie, lycée Théophile Gautier, Tarbes