Urban Strategy Lab

Cities, decision-making and strategy

The fall and rise of the heart of Johannesburg

Johnnesburg’s CBD

Up until the early 1990s Johannesburg’s CBD used to be in the place best suited for it: in the centre of the metropolitan area that had grown around it. Densely filled with high-spec commercial buildings housing most corporate head offices — all within easy walking distance — it was well connected by road and public transport and served by modern utilities infrastructure and nearby industrial areas. High density apartment living was found a short walk or bus ride away directly to the north in Hillbrow (then the most densely populated square mile in Africa), Berea and to some extent, Braamfontein.

Illustration: Johannesburg CBD looking north towards Hillbrow

For decades under apartheid the CBD was the heart of Johannesburg’s — and South Africa’s — economy.

Policing and city planning: tools of apartheid

South African town planning was a fundamental apartheid tool to shape cities. The image below illustrates how different ethnic groups were segregated in Johannesburg.

Group Areas in Johannesburg
Illustration: Group Areas in Johannesburg (from Parnell and Pirie, Homes Apart: South Africa’s Segregated Cities)

Policing was an apartheid tool enforcing ethnic segregation and in part harassing non-white citizens going about their daily business in whites-only areas. Crime, so often fuelled by economic hardship, happened mostly in townships (areas designated for non-white people) and was thus of no interest to a police force tasked with oppression rather than protecting all citizens and serving justice. Apartheid made it easy to secure white areas against poverty-driven crime.

Weaknesses in city government, policing and city planning – further exposed after apartheid

The dismantling of apartheid began in the late 1980s. The rapidly changing socioeconomic environment required from city leaders and planners rapid proactive decision-making, policy transformation and strategy-setting at a scale that required vast amounts of skill, agility and funding. As all of this was in short supply, its absence became a key contributor to the subsequent downfall of the CBD and extreme suburban sprawl.

‘Grey’ Neighbourhoods. In Johannesburg, the ‘greying’ of the previously whites-only inner-city mixed retail/residential areas around the CBD — such as Hillbrow and Berea mentioned earlier — resulted during the 1970s in vibrant, cosmopolitan neighbourhoods. From the late 1980s, when it was judged that the Group Areas Act was no longer enforceable (it was eventually repealed in 1991), poor economic migrants from the nearby townships and also the rest of South Africa and its neighbours were attracted to the opportunities here, this dense, exciting multicultural mixing pot.

Failure of city government and planning. There was little evidence of any policies, strategies and plans to support and shape this urban transformation in the ‘grey’ areas, by, e.g. providing adequate infrastructure, schools, healthcare, employment programmes, policing and social workers to stabilise the effect of this influx. The vibrant mix soon became soured by escalating levels of poverty and crime, exacerbated by the rise of organised criminal gangs. The city’s government and police found themselves without the will and the proper skills to secure these neighbourhoods and the adjacent CBD which also began to suffer from escalating levels of crime. Hastily formed private security companies were mobilised by businesses to protect their staff and premises, but these had neither the expertise nor the resources to properly address the crime or the fear of crime.

Failure of the CBD. White flight from the CBD and dense inner city residential areas ensued. Just prior to the country’s first fair elections in 1994 many government resources were likely to have been diverted to the political power transition process, and the deteriorating security situation in the CBD appears to not have been high on the agenda – there was no successful plan to stem the exodus from the CBD, nor was there one to contain the centrifugal forces of relocation via a coherent spatial strategy in the suburbs. Instead, the private sector enacted its own hastily assembled plans to replicate from the city’s economic heart in the CBD to the wealthy formerly whites-only northern suburbs, including Sandton and Rosebank. This migration of an entire piece of city wasn’t part of any urban plan — it was a chaotic market-led scramble for safety.

Johannesburg urban centres 1980
he changing economic centres of Johannesburg – a result of private sector decisions rather than integrated public sector policies and planning.
Illustrations: The changing economic centres of Johannesburg – a result of private sector decisions rather than integrated public sector policies and planning.

Abandonment and decay. In the CBD, world-class hotels such as the Carlton and the Johannesburg Sun lost so much business due to customers giving the CBD a wide berth that they were forced to close, their valuable premises mothballed and heavily fortified against squatters and building hijackers. Similar fates befell many corporate head office complexes, such as ABSA towers. Where owners were unable to secure their vacant properties, these became liable to being hijacked by gangsters who exploit the desperately poor by extracting extortionate rents in exchange for severely run-down accommodation. The level of decay is evident in the fire brigade’s recent assertion that 60% of buildings in the inner city are fire death traps.

Illustration: The mothballed Carlton Hotel
Illustration: The mothballed Carlton Hotel

Sprawl. The disappearance of the CBD, and what appeared to be a lack of a formally planned integrated city-wide spatial growth strategy for channelling development, seemed to result in an outward explosion of suburban sprawl. Many of those economic migrants who didn’t settle in the slums in and around the CBD ended up in the city’s periphery, in low cost housing or squatter camps.

Privatised city. Affluent city dwellers were also attracted to outlying areas, most notably to a unique new component of the city emerging from the suburban building frenzy – the private suburb. The 2,200 hectare Waterfall Estate is one such entity – here private investors have carried out town planning and provided utilities, schools, hospitals, roads, policing, waste collection, housing and retail premises, entirely outside the jurisdiction of public authorities. (See also Claire Herbert and Martin Murray’s Building from Scratch: New Cities, Privatized Urbanism and the Spatial Restructuring of Johannesburg after Apartheid.) Waterfall Estate represents the market’s solution to problems such as the public’s continued concern about safety and security and a lack of city planning capacity. It is a shame that here the market has squandered its financing power and problem solving expertise and creative enterprise on such developments, exacerbating inequality and the problems associated with urban sprawl

Clearly Johannesburg leaders and city planners have not been able to appropriately pre-empt the urban fallout from the tremendous socioeconomic transformations taking place in the post-apartheid vacuum. Part of this fallout, the extreme privatisation of Johannesburg, substitutes economic segregation for racial segregation and frustrates strategic city planning. Johannesburg’s current accidental polycentricity is primarily the result of the uncontrolled abandonment of large tracts of urban fabric of great potential economic, strategic and infrastructural value.

The way forward

In Johannesburg, a substantial part of the dysfunctional urban transformation I have described has been market-driven, and this market’s actions are directed by a fear of crime. The primary cause of crime has been economic injustice, which a government can address using two strategic urban tools: policing to improve safety, and strategic city planning to help create economic growth which benefits all.

Policing

Crime is a symptom of economic injustice. Although neither the police force nor private security armies have managed to significantly improve safety, the private security firms which are corruptible, unaccountable and serve only those able to pay them can only be rendered irrelevant if government decides to make profound changes to the funding, operation and training of its police force that must serve all of its citizens.

Crime in Johannesburg has recently improved relative to other South African metropolitan areas: in 2016 it was below the average South African murder rate, well below the cities of Cape Town, Durban and Port Elizabeth. Nevertheless, crime levels in Johannesburg remain unacceptably high for many overseas investors: at 29 per 100,000 in 2016 the murder rate was about 30 times that of London’s, at 1 per 100,000.

Perceptions of relative crime levels in different parts of Johannesburg do not always reflect reality. Sandton, the new business district, is not necessarily much safer than central Johannesburg, yet it remains the place of choice for living and working. The fact that crime follows the wealth is a strong factor at play here.

The successful new cultural, retail and residential community precint of Maboneng is a block-by-block regeneration of a run-down piece of city directly to the east of the CBD. Maboneng has demonstrated that private development is able to revitalise the inner city without building the high walls of Waterfall Estate. Although, because of its reliance on a potent private security force, it stands accused of being less inclusive than is often made out. Gentrification prices long-term residents and workers out of their neighbourhood unless restorative measures are taken to improve e.g. their earnings potential, thus giving them the ability to stay in their homes, businesses and jobs. Despite some of its shortcomings, Maboneng is effectively challenging the perception that all inner city areas are unsafe.

Strategic city planning for the future

As markets become less fearful of crime they will release their controlling grip over shaping the city, which is when the second key urban tool, strategic city planning, can more effectively address the causes of economic injustice.

Traditional planning with a narrow ambition to contain transformation, growth and socioeconomic improvement within each former township — e.g. Soweto, Alexandria, Katlehong — simply perpetuates apartheid-sponsored segregation and must be avoided. Required instead is a focus on (re)connecting the scattered pieces of Johannesburg, both physically and economically. A revived CBD — the heart that is missing from present-day Johannesburg — would be the prime generator of new (and old) connections. Johannesburg’s Spatial Development Framework 2040 carries this idea at the core of its strategic plan.

Downtown Johannesburg has abundant vacant premises to accommodate the projected continued growth in the creative, service, retail, education, communication, finance and property development sectors, all of which contain players operating across Africa. Access to these jobs for the nearby Soweto region will be improved by the transit network upgrades already underway. Economic activity in the CBD will infuse further growth into every new station/hub along this route, becoming a development corridor for housing, commerce and industry. In fact, the opportunities for mixed-use development on brownfield land on the city fringes are plentiful. Such core densification, in conjunction with improved public transport, will help ease congestion on Johannesburg’s notoriously busy motorways.

Johannesburg development Soweto Corridor
Illustration: Development corridor towards Soweto

A modern underground train line now connects Park Station in the CBD with the city’s financial centre in Sandton. This important infrastructural link is perhaps the first of the multiple strategic and practical links that must be forged between the two urban centres so that the resources of the latter can be deployed to help support the development of the CBD. Their relationship could mirror the successful synergistic bond between London’s West End – London’s centre of retail, creative and tech industries, higher education, culture and nightlife – and the City/Canary Wharf – a global centre of international finance.

To date, the Johannesburg Development Agency has been a key entity working to restore the CBD and surrounds, and green shoots are starting to appear. Johannesburg’s city council has recently launched initiatives with incentives for developers to redevelop council and private properties in the city centre. Maboneng not only continues to expand, but is attracting others to invest in urban renewal nearby: Jewel City is a recently announced £100m mixed-use residential redevelopment of six city blocks directly west of Maboneng.

Johannesburg’s CBD served as the economic engine of South Africa’s apartheid economy. Once apartheid officially ended, South Africa’s poorly addressed economic legacy caused the CBD to fall to ruin. Now, bold planning, policy-making, politics and governance, combined with skilled private investment, can re-engage the CBD as a central weapon against apartheid’s economic legacy in Johannesburg.