The government and the public are focused on the problems facing many of Gauteng’s central business districts (CBDs). Most of our CBDs are low-quality, inefficient, environmentally harmful and fail to serve diverse communities equitably.
Addressing our CBDs’ issues forces urban planners and architects to think of innovative approaches to fixing rundown urban spaces and CBDs. Models such as “X-minute cities”, co-operative urbanism and slow cities all share a vision for creating human-centred urban and public spaces. This vision prioritises quality of life, inclusivity and social connection over rapid growth and economic expansion.
However, unless carefully planned and implemented, revitalisation visions can become captured by profit-driven interests, often resulting in the displacement of poorer communities through race and class-based change (known as gentrification).
What is wrong with Gauteng’s CBDs?
In Gauteng, CBDs were once thriving hubs of economic, employment and urban activity. But since the end of apartheid Johannesburg’s inner city, Boksburg, Krugersdorp, Germiston and Vereeniging (to name but a few) have experienced a deterioration in their spatial, economic and social structures.
These spaces are now characterised by poor socioeconomic relations and insufficient access to resources. These conditions mirror international trends where thriving city centres have fallen into disrepair because of suburbanisation, capital flight, white flight to edge cities and growing urban sprawl since 2010.
The promise of revitalisation
Research from the Gauteng City-Region Observatory underscores the potential for integrated residential, commercial and community urban spaces to improve the quality of life of their residents. Therefore, as part of the ongoing urban revitalisation discourse we should seek to create inclusive and economically vibrant spaces that reconnect people to their neighbourhoods.
Revitalisation, regeneration or renewal is critical to this, offering the promise of imparting new life into a neighbourhood to restore productive economic activity and improve the quality of the environment. There have been some attempts to engage in the revitalisation of the main nodes of urban and economic activity in Gauteng.
Examples include top-down efforts such as Johannesburg’s inner city regeneration projects in Maboneng and Newtown; urban renewal efforts in Soweto, Ekurhuleni and Sedibeng; and city improvement districts (CIDs) in Parktown, Rosebank, Randburg and Sandton.
However, these have produced vastly different outcomes that speak to the fundamental roles of contextual factors in influencing the scope and scale of revitalisation efforts.
Who is driving revitalisation?
Sharing similar characteristics to those government managed programmes, there are examples of bottom-up, participatory and community-driven CID initiatives such as the eKhaya Neighbourhood Improvement Programme in Hillbrow. This project and others such as it demonstrate the critical role of social cohesion — particularly social capital — in fostering an inclusive vision of revitalisation and renewal.
However, achieving socially cohesive urban spaces — while a broad social ideal — is a difficult undertaking fraught with countervailing constraints, ideologies, ambitions, and objectives. Therefore, the success of urban revitalisation hinges on harmonising bottom-up and top-down objectives and ambitions in the face of different ideologies and constraints.
Challenges and limitations of revitalisation
While well-designed, community-driven, safe and green urban spaces have been shown to enhance quality of life for people across all income levels, they are not without limitations. These include scaling issues across larger networks of regions, potential strain on essential services and infrastructure, increased congestion and incompatibility with existing urban layouts.
Another challenge is overcoming the complex legacy of apartheid in Gauteng’s urban and industrial spatial organisation, history and political economy. This legacy has hampered previous CBD regeneration efforts in Johannesburg and CIDs in less affluent areas, such as small towns and townships (see Alexandra).
Therefore, if these challenges and limitations are not addressed properly we run the risk of revitalisation efforts worsening existing spatial inequalities and social exclusion within Gauteng. This can already be seen across Gauteng where developments such as, for example, Waterfall City and Steyn City, represent a perpetuation of the classlike spatial arrangements of the past. Similarly, prohibitive rents in eKhaya are hampering the speed of revitalisation efforts.
If these constraints and issues are allowed to persist revitalised CBDs and CIDs risk only becoming playgrounds for the rich at the expense of the people now residing in these areas.
The spectre of gentrification
Revitalisation is a slippery slope that if not managed and designed with the right goals in mind can quickly devolve into gentrification. Very often the goal in these circumstances focuses on replacing existing urbanism by a new wave of urbanism.
In this context the objective becomes more about bringing about a return to the city than improving the lives of those residing in marginalised areas. Crucially, as American urban geographer and social theorist Neil Smith argues, gentrification is not about where new inhabitants come from but on how much productive capital returns to the area from the suburbs.
Samuel Stein’s Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State highlights the state’s complicity in gentrification, arguing that it facilitates the influence of organised capitalists and real estate interests, enabling discriminatory practices that result in the displacement of some racial groups while improving the living conditions of others.
Where to from here?
Fixing Gauteng’s CBDs requires that we radically rethink how we approach urban revitalisation and who will benefit. This compels us to consider bigger picture issues of economic, social and environmental value, social design and informal urban and economic activities when designing policies and projects to address issues in CBDs. In doing so, new urban renewal projects must prioritise working with existing communities, and view buildings, streets and infrastructure collectively as public spaces.
Moreover, supporting new economic and entrepreneurial activities of the residents within these areas can create sustainable and co-operative urbanism, improving infrastructure and safety, and attracting investment without displacement — thereby creating alignment between spatial and social contingencies and facilitating sprawl repair. In addition, we need to learn from pragmatic — albeit informal — solutions to problems hindering inclusionary community-based revitalisation efforts such as those taking place in Hillbrow.
Similarly, we should take a page out of the book of residents of the eKhaya Neighborhood project in creating a sense of collective ownership and responsibility in our urban and economic spaces. This will allow us to breathe new life into our urban spaces and cities and help us meet the needs of the majority of the population now living in deprived urban spaces and CBDs, by prioritising people and the environment over profits.
• Bell is a Gauteng City-Region Observatory researcher. This article was written with input from colleagues Rashid Seedat, Graeme Gotz, Lebogang Lechuba, Ngaka Mosiane and Thembani Mkhize.
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