CITIES DIVIDED: THE SPATIAL LEGACY OF APARTHEID

______

A Thesis

Presented to

The Honors Tutorial College

Ohio University

______

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of

Bachelor of Arts in Art History

______

by:

Bryan Stringer

April 26, 2019

This thesis has been approved by:

The Honors Tutorial College and the Department of Art History

______

Dr. Samuel Dodd

Professor, Art History

Thesis Advisor

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Dr. Jeanette Klein

Director of Studies, Art History

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Cary Frith

Interim Dean, Honors Tutorial

College

CITIES DIVIDED: THE SPATIAL LEGACY OF APARTHEID

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction...... 1

Modernist Urbanism...... 7

Modernist Visions of Johannesburg...... 13

Johannesburgs “Modern” Highway System...... 24

The Flat Walls of Johannesburg 27

A Tale of Two Squares...... 32

Cities Divided 44

Transportation Along the Spine of Apartheid...... 46

Bibliography...... 55 INTRODUCTION

Despite the abolition of apartheid in 1994, the architectural and infrastructural legacy of its oppressive policies remain. From highways to shopping centers, the built environment of Johannesburg was constructed under apartheid spatial practices for almost a century. In 1920, the Housing Act was passed in South Africa. Its purpose, like that of so many similar pieces of legislation, was to enforce the discrimination and exclusion of all non-white racial groups. In order to further disenfranchise and control the non-white population the Housing Act ensured that all specified racial groups would be forced to remain in the designated spaces surrounding the various city centers such as

Johannesburg and Cape Town. Known as Townships, these locations were often either government enforced slum districts or dormitory like “hostels” used to house the single male laborers who would have held a “bed card.” Some particularly (in)famous examples of such dormitories are those built for the migrant laborers in Langa, which is about ten miles from the Cape Town city center. Rooms in these buildings were only meant for one bed, and some of the necessities that the user brought with them.

The dormitories worked to exert bodily and spatial control over single and married men through architectural and political means. The separation of families and community members helped to ensure political weakness of non-white peoples.

Following the abolition of Apartheid and the installment of a Democratic government in

South Africa there were still men living in the townships, and those who weren’t single were followed by their families. As previously mentioned these structures and the rooms within them were built to house one bed per person per room, meaning that they are !2 completely unequipped to provide adequate living accommodations to families. As early as 1994 the South African government had adopted policies to renovate and redevelop the single-sex hostels.

The efforts to redevelop the hostels of Langa were begun in 2013 and met with success. The program was designed around providing true family housing through redeveloping the old hostels. Rooms that were originally either no larger than a prison cell or packed with dozens of bunk beds are being completely redesigned. Instead of having to share one room with other families and push the limits of what is considered a safe living environment, families are now able to rent individual units. These units have two bedrooms and ample living space for a family, and the rent scales down to the equivalent of just a few dollars USD per month based on income. Although the program has been marked by extremely slow progress and related protests, the units that have been built are slowly replacing the old hostels. Projects like the one in Langa are examples of efforts to actively change the purpose of a set of apartheid structures. Those buildings no longer hold ties to the inhumane attempts at control enforced by the apartheid government. They are homes.

Now to consider another example. Sandton City is a shopping mall located just north of Johannesburg. It was constructed in the middle of a farming community in 1973 and provided all the sorts of amenities that a typical American or European mega-mall might as well: entertainment, office space, and myriad storefronts as well as restaurants and luxury hotels. There have also been several additions and renovations to Sandton

City during and after Apartheid. This is important because as Jennifer Robinson points !3 out, “The power of apartheid, of the setting apart of racial groups, was therefore rooted in the spatial practices referenced in its very name.”1 If apartheid was carried out through various discriminatory spatial practices, then surely the public structures built during its oppressive tenure are still bound to it in some way or another. What is interesting, however, is that Sandton City has not gone through the same changes as the dormitories in Langa Township.

Unlike the Langa dormitories, Sandton City and the surrounding municipality of

Sandton have undergone very little changes in direct response to the fall of apartheid.

Whereas the dormitories were completely gutted, and renovated — thus giving them a completely new function of providing family housing instead of beds for single males — the nature of changes Sandton City underwent were far more superficial. The Langa

Dormitories combined rooms and completely renovated the buildings to transform them from prison like cell blocks with nothing more to offer than beds. Sandton City’s developers placed a new facade on its tower so that its older aesthetic wouldn’t remain as a reminder of the fallen apartheid regime. The dormitories in Langa no longer house single male migrant laborers, but instead can now be homes for their families. Sandton

City added an Italian piazza, which it then renamed Freedom Square after placing a rather awkward looking statue of Nelson Mandela squarely in the center.2 Like all shopping

1 Jennifer Robinson, The Power of Apartheid: State, Power and Space in South African

Cities. (Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann, 1996), 15.

2 Sarah Nuttall and Joseph-Achille Mbembe, Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis,

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 300 !4 centers Sandton City relies upon the appeal it holds to the consumers it intends to court.

After its various developments, redevelopments, and additions Sandton City’s aesthetic has changed, but not much else. Unlike the dormitories of Langa, Sandton City and the rest of Johannesburg’s built environment have not changed in any considerable ways, because their functions remain the same. Langa’s function was completely rewritten, while Sandton City, and the highway system remain carrying out the same daily functions they had during apartheid.

Whereas the Langa townships have undergone extensive and expensive redevelopment efforts, commercial buildings like Sandton City have not. It’s fair to say that the shopping center has attempted an about-face by proudly offering up Nelson

Mandela Square and a bolstered transportation circle constructed in partnership with the municipal government. Sandton City has remained inaccessible to very similar portions of the population as was the case under apartheid. Whether or not this is the fault of the private developers or the municipality is a separate topic, but until recently Sandton City has managed to implicitly exclude many of the same people that were disenfranchised under apartheid.

Sandton City is also still removed from and therefore inaccessible to the poor, majority black population of Alexandra. Until 2015 there were no plans to allow for greater public access to the mall via municipal transit services, or pedestrian walkways !5 over the M1 highway.3 Largely without the means to purchase automobiles, the inhabitants of Alexandra are left as a pedestrian population, which makes the M1 more of a wall between Sandton City and the outlying slums than a freeway. Additionally, the suburbs surrounding Sandton City have a similar effect acting as obstacles to the movement of pedestrians. Sandton City exemplifies an apartheid era structure that has arguably succeeded at changing its face in tandem with the political system, but has not actively attempted to change the nature of its relationship with the surrounding area and its population. Sandton City still caters to largely the same clientele it had throughout

Apartheid. It is still an upscale, regional shopping center that is legally open to all races and ethnicities without actively opening itself physically or economically.

While it is the job and indeed the purpose of the national and municipal state to lead the political and social transition from apartheid, it is also the purpose of individual developers and owners to make sure their structures are still viable financial assets.

However, by not actively attempting to increase the accessibility of the shopping center to the population of Alexandra, the municipal government of Johannesburg and the owners of Sandton City are only perpetuating the racial and ethnic divisions of apartheid.

It is the purpose of these thesis to examine how the owners and developers Sandton City have relied upon, or even perpetuated, the implicit and explicit exclusion of disenfranchised populations.

3 Mafika, “‘Iconic' Walkway Bridge to Connect Alexandra, Sandton,” Brand South

Africa, July 24, 2016. Accessed March 2019. https://www.brandsouthafrica.com/ investments-immigration/business/economy/development/bridge-050614. !6

The current story of Sandton City and the rest of Johannesburg’s built environment and infrastructure is one of incomplete transformation and continued oppression of those populations originally disenfranchised and targeted by apartheid. This paper will explore the relationship between Sandton City, Alexandra, and Johannesburg area highways and public transit. This paper will demonstrate that Sandton City, along with the surrounding suburbs and highways, continue to perpetrate the exclusionary policies of apartheid. !7

MODERNIST URBANISM

By the 1950s the modernist intellectual approach to architecture and city building had taken root in the academies of Europe and America. Out of the City Beautiful and the

Garden City movements during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a generation of architects were rejecting what they saw as wasteful ornamentation and design.4 Economy of space and material, along with a new focus on the industrial processes consumed Le

Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Walter Gropius. They had established in the West some of the architectural theories and principles that would cement them and their followers as the modernists.5 Le Corbusier’s designs and writings in particular became the scripture that would birth modernist urban planning and design. Called Le Ville

Radieuse (The Radiant City, 1930), his vision of the city of tomorrow would be replicated throughout the following decades and well into the 1970s.6 Of course, no city was built to the same proportions of developed surface area to unbuilt surface area, but key ideas of his found their way into government housing projects and urban redevelopment plans.

The relation of the house to a machine rather than a home, and a disregard for the interconnectedness that is characteristic of all major cities were mainstays throughout this

4 For more, see: Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, ed. P. Morton.

Shand (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1998);

5 See: Gwendolyn Wright, “Electric Modernities” USA: Modern Architecture in History,

(London: Reaktion Books, 2008).

6 Le Corbusier, The Radiant City; Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism To Be Used as the

Basis of our Machine-Age Civilization, (New York: Orion Press, 1967), 205. !8 period. As his plans suggest, the cities of the modern age would be concentrated, linear, and incredibly isolated from the surrounding area.

Le Corbusier’s relevance to the fields of architecture and urban planning was perpetuated by an organization of his co-creation: the Congrés International d’Architecture Moderne. CIAM was an international cohort of architects and future planners that found themselves deeply troubled by the state of Western (European) cities.

The fourth meeting of CIAM in 1933 brought about the beginning of modern urbanism in

Europe, and quickly after, the United States. Corbusier’s “Athens Charter” that came out of the fourth session established what he believed were the most important conclusions regarding the numerous urban studies carried out by the congress. He asserted that the automobile and chaos of design and function were the disease afflicting modern cities.7

Such anxiety about the repercussions of entering the machine age quickly found their way into American architectural and urban design practices as Corbusier’s colleagues

Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, and Mies Van der Rohe made the journey across the

Atlantic.8 Each of these great architects remained deeply aware of the automobile and the highway, but ideas surrounding home, the individual, and his or her spatial relationship to the community as a whole left inter-city traffic planning as secondary to concerns about

7 Congress Internationaux d'Architecture moderne (CIAM), La Charte d'Athenes or The

Athens Charter, 1933. Trans J.Tyrwhitt, The Library of the Graduate School of Design,

Harvard University, 1946.

8 Robert A. M. Stern and Jimmy Stamp, Pedagogy and Place: 100 Years of Architecture

Education at Yale (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). !9 zoning, building design.9 Issues regarding traffic control and planning became the chief concern of many modern city planners, such as Robert Moses, from the 1930s onward.

Given his historical importance, Robert Moses serves as a prime example of the modernist urban planners operating out of the tradition suggested and practiced by the fourth CIAM.10 The exclusionary and authoritarian vocabulary of urban planners during this time was clearly exhibited in the work of Robert Moses.11 With almost complete authority he was able to cut parkways such as the Wantagh and Northern Parkways

(shown in figure 1) through the state and city of New York. His parkways directly controlled traffic and access to parts of the city through monetary and physical means.12

Toll booths imposed an economic form of exclusion upon those unable to pay the toll regularly, while a uniform height limit across the length of his parkways physically and

9 Le Corbusier, The Radiant City, 217

10 CIAM, Athens Charter

11 Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, (Blackwell Publishing, 2002), pg 298. Peter Hall’s Cities of

Tomorrow along with Gwendolyn Wright’s USA form much of the general historical foundation of this paper. Both works, and especially Wright’s landmark text, are architectural history surveys of the period from 1900 to roughly 1980. Hence the prevalence of both texts in the rest of this section, though other works such as Robert

Goodman’s After the Planners were consulted to further understand contemporary criticisms of urban planning.

12 Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, 298. !10

(Fig. 1) An aerial view of the Wantagh Parkway in upstate New York. !11 economically excluded hopeful bus goers from the variousbeaches and middle class areas supposedly opened to the entire public by the new projects.13 Besides his monumental highway projects, Moses’ career and the nature of the offices he held offer up perfect examples of the kind of authority required complete such large projects. Moses was not voted into any of his positions, and the extravagant profits from his parkways provided him with a unique freedom from the purse.14

Such blatant exclusions and heavy handed planning tactics were not unknown to

Moses, and his contemporaries. The grandness of scale and intense focus upon scientific and hygienic reconstruction of the city as demanded in the Athens Charter easily lent themselves to quick adoption by government officials. Robert Moses’ lengthy tenures provide only one example of what would become a national and international practice. In

Los Angeles and Berlin large scale highway projects were hastily being erected to deal with the new traffic related problems presented by the automobile.15 Gwendolyn Wright notes the sudden lurch toward centralized construction projects in the post war United

States in USA.16 As the European continent was struggling just to rebuild and preserve its cities, the modernist project of “urban redevelopment” was making its way from legislation to the cities themselves.17 Beyond isolating and excluding certain classes the

13 Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, 299.

14 Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, 299.

15 Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, 300.

16 Wright. USA: Modern Architecture in History, 151,152.

17 Wright, USA: Modern Architecture in History, 153. !12 city planners of the time found themselves designing the racial dividing lines into the cities themselves.

The men in charge of the public institutions that were overseeing the redevelopment of American cities had vast powers. Able to clear large swaths of land with impunity, they displaced thousands upon thousands of minority dwellings to chop off the cities’ “blighted” appendages.18 African American critics also assailed the urban renewal projects as “Negro removal,” while they were being forced into high density housing “built on cleared land within or adjacent to existing black neighborhoods19.

These projects went by familiar names such as Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis and Cabrini-Green in Chicago. Highways also took a large toll upon the cities as they were used to cut paths through the neighborhoods that were deemed a part of the blight.20 A hygienic, scientific approach to city building fell right into the hands of a few powerful men. These city planners and their engineers took great liberties with the rights they were granted under various pieces of legislation and ideologies regarding proper design of the city.

18 Douglas S. Massey, and Nancy A. Denton. American Aparheid : Segregation and the

Making of the Underclass, (Harvard University Press, 1993), 55.

19 Massey, and Denton, American Apartheid, 56.

20 Robert Goodman, After the Planners, (Touchstone, 1971), 68 !13

MODERNIST VISIONS OF JOHANNESBURG

Modernist architecture and design principles were largely a product of architectural thought in Europe and then the United States. If that is the case then how exactly does modernism’s past connect to Johannesburg’s present? Isolation, separation, and exclusion easily made their way into the modernist’s toolbox as architects, engineers, and planners found themselves trying to solve the same problem: the city. Redevelopment plans, and massive highway projects became mainstays of Western urbanism. Cities such as Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles began the construction of massive city highway networks and traffic plans previously unheard of in American cities. Eisenhower’s interstate system, conceived by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, revolutionized transportation in American cities.21 When looking at other cities in the Global North and indeed the entire world it is clear that notions about the necessity of the construction interstates, outer-belt highways, and freeways are not just western in origin. What is most interesting about Johannesburg, however is the nature of its deep, colonial ties to Western

Europe and more specifically the fallen English and Dutch empires.

Jane Jacobs worked diligently to describe the problems inherent to the massive highway construction and rehabilitation projects that were plaguing cities across the

United States. Her critiques were continually acerbic. She referred to the planning officials behind redevelopment programs as participating in the “pseudo science of city

21 Raymond A. Mohl, “Ike and the Interstates: Creeping Towards Comprehensive

Planning” Journal of Planning History, Vol. 2 No. 3, August (2003): 238. !14 rebuilding.”22 Jacobs’ main criticism regarding the officials is that they were searching for a way to solve the city as if it were a problem, and that rampant traffic congestion was far more easily dealt with than the decay of urban centers.23 Yet, according to her, they were not helping relieve the traffic problem so much as worsen the blight gripping inner cities as they became further isolated, asserting that “traffic arteries, along with parking lots gas stations, and drive-ins, are powerful and insistent instruments of city destruction.”24 Living in the newer, safer suburbs became cheaper and more practical as highways allowed a greater and more efficient reach into the downtown area. Urban sprawl, decentralization of business districts, and the suburbanization of the middle and upper class were not unique to American cities.

Jane Jacobs was not the only contemporary critic of modernist planning practices.

Robert Goodman and David Harvey have criticized the ways in which planners were tearing apart cities in the name of progress and redevelopment. Goodman was perhaps the most outspoken in his writing. With chapter and section titles such as “The Architecture of Repression,” and “The Highway Gravy Train,” he attacked the ways in which the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill circumvented the Baltimore community groups that didn’t want their highways, and then picked up yet another highway design contract in the same city.25 Goodman, as did Jacobs, realized that the state and its

22 Jacobs, The Life and Death of Great American Cities, 13.

23 Jacobs, The Life and Death of Great American Cities, 19.

24 Jacobs, The Life and Death of Great American Cities, 338.

25 Goodman, After the Planners, 82. !15 engineers had taken the reins of city planning from local populations, and created a form of redevelopment that was extremely potent and susceptible to abuse when completely centralized and conducted in a vacuum.

Johannesburg was transformed under the direction of its city council and engineers to reflect modernist city planning. Western modernist design had found its way into fabric of the city. Buildings such as the Trust Bank Building (1970), the Carlton

Center (1973), and the Ponte City Apartments (1975), the IBM Tower (1976), were either clad in glass or imposing monuments to concrete construction. In the the case of the IBM tower this type of glass construction is known as a curtain wall, portrayed in figure 2, meaning that the wall offers no structural support. The curtain wall as well as the use of concrete to provide structure and form are both hallmarks of modernist building design.

This “new brutalism” as Reyner Banham named it, was a form of modernism concerned with the creation of an “affecting” image, and that a trueness to material does not create a pleasing image, but an affecting one.26 The massive concrete, brick, and glass structures popping up may not have been beautiful, but the viewer can still feel the weight, and the imposition of the structure. Famous examples of brutalist concrete construction include

Le Corbusier’s Colline Notre Dame du Haut, and Unité d’Habitation, while examples of

26 Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism,” October, 136 (2011): 19, 22, 28. http:// www.jstor.org.proxy.library.ohio.edu/stable/23014862. Banham’s article in October was a landmark piece of scholarship that first established what the New Brutalism was. For a concise summary of Brutalism see: “The Incredible Hulks: Johnathan Meades’ A-Z of

Brutalism” The Guardian, Johnathan Meades. !16

(Fig. 2) An aerial view of the IBM tower in Johannesburg. The structural walls of the building appear to be made out of glass, but it is only a barrier from the exterior environment. Behind the glass is a concrete frame. !17 curtain wall construction include Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building (1958) and One Charles Center (1962). Modernists had adopted the new brutalism and

Johannesburgs developers had adopted modernism. More importantly, besides an adoption of American and European design practices, the buildings listed previously were all designed by firms from the United States or the United Kingdom.27 The presence of a large number of structures built in a traditionally Western style would be of less significance if they were not designed by American or Europeans as well. The ties between western design and the Johannesburg built environment are exemplified by these buildings, not only aesthetically, but by virtue of the western design and architecture firms involved in their construction. The deep involvement of Western architectural firms in Johannesburg help transfer the city’s architectural environment into the scope of

Western architectural practices, thereby allowing a partial analysis of its built environment through a Western lens. The most interesting of these buildings designed by

27 Emporis GMBH. "IBM Building." Emporis, 2019. Accessed April 10, 2019. https://www.emporis.com/buildings/103543/ibm-building-johannesburg-south-africa;

Emporis GMBH. "Ponte City Apartments." Emporis, 2019. Accessed April 10, 2019. https://www.emporis.com/buildings/103534/ponte-city-apartments-johannesburg-south- africa; Emporis GMBH. "Trust Bank Building." Emporis, 2019. Accessed April 10, 2019. https://www.emporis.com/buildings/103536/trust-bank-building-johannesburg-south- africa; Emporis GMBH. "Carlton Centre." Emporis, 2019. Accessed April 10, 2019. https://www.emporis.com/buildings/103533/carlton-centre-office-tower-johannesburg- south-africa !18 international firms is the Carlton Center.

With its heavy, austere concrete form, which is displayed in figure 3, the Carlton

Center was a massive commercial project not unlike the regional mega-malls cropping up around Johannesburg at the same time. Construction began in 1971 and its opening and completion in 1973 and 1974 respectively had it finished just in time to enter the scene concurrently with Sandton City.28 The Carlton Center was designed and built in the modernist traditions of the West. Like housing projects such as Pruitt-Igoe in Saint Louis, or the traditional shopping center design seen in the post-war United States, the Carlton

Center was completely self contained. Its plaza limited public access to a handful of entrances and exits, and the entire structure is reminiscent of a castle or fortress.

Furthermore, the Carlton Center was built on the commercial frontier of Johannesburg, one block east of the Central Business District boundary, and even further from the retail districts.29 Without any related businesses upon whose consumer base the Carlton Centre could rely on, it had to be a self contained outer core of the CBD, thus forcing its designers to draw upon modernist themes of separation and exclusion. The placement of the Carlton Centre and its subsequent design present one way in which American and

European design concepts were being adapted by developers and planners of

28 K. Beavon, "Nearer My Mall to Thee: The Decline of the Johannesburg Central

Business District and the Emergence of the Neo-apartheid City." Wits Institutional

Repository Environment on DSpace, (October 1998): 4, Accessed April 2019. http:// wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/8421.

29 Beavon, “Nearer My Mall to Thee,” 5. !19

(Fig. 3) The taller building on the left is the Carlton Centre’s flagship office building, while the structure on the left is the Carlton Hotel. !20

Johannesburg. It is even more interesting once one does a bit of research into the firm responsible for the architecture of the Carlton Center.

The Carlton Centre was one of just a few listed buildings designed by firms from the United States or United Kingdom. The Centre was designed by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (SOM), an American architecture firm that is especially notable not only because of its extensive portfolio, but also the intense debate around it in the seventies.

Since its founding in Chicago in the 1930s, SOM began to churn out projects across the world, until it started to achieve international prominence by the 1980s.30 Along with establishing itself on the international scene, the architectural firm, which was based in the midwest U.S., came to be synonymous with the modernist movement.31 This synonymity was even accepted by SOM’s contemporaries during the 1970s and 1980s, particularly by a large group of young architects and architectural students that founded

The Architect’s Resistance. This group took great offense to firms such as SOM, because they were the practitioners of modernist architecture, and in the eyes of The Architects’

30 Beau Peregoy, "12 Massive Projects by Legendary Architecture Firm SOM."

Architectural Digest. July 07, 2016. Accessed April 16, 2019.

31 See: Gwendolyn Wright’s USA, “Challenging Orthodoxies,” and Organization and

Abstraction: The Architecture of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill from 1936 to 1956 for more on SOM’s role in the propagation of modernist design practices. !21

Resistance, SOM was either ignorant of or apathetic towards their complicity with oppressive systems such as apartheid.32

Johannesburg’s developers were closely tied to the new aesthetics appearing within the fields of architecture and urban planning in the West. Additionally, the nature of Apartheid reinforced ties to Europe and the adoption of European thought and theory regarding city planning and design. Ideas regarding monumentality of design, and modernist approaches to city planning and redevelopment were immediately applicable to the construction of highways and the redevelopment of entire city blocks. Le Corbusier’s polemical plans for the razing and restructuring of Paris in La Ville Radieuse, presented in figure 4, found their way into many of the most well known (and failed) government housing projects of the 1950s and 60s, such as the Pruitt-Igoe projects in Saint Louis, and

Cabrini-Green in Chicago. The projects were large-scale high density housing designed similar to the towering skyscrapers seen in Ville Radieuse and both were built upon entire blocks of recently cleared housing. Pruitt-Igoe did not survive more than twenty years and demolition of Cabrini-Green was begun in 1995. Though it was not a simple formula for success, Le Corbusier’s prescription became part and parcel, if not dogma, to the modernists planners, and some of their most important ideologies spread to

Johannesburg. Specifically, the urban planning theories embodied by the high-rise towers such as the stratification and compartmentalization of the city and its functions were ever present in Johannesburg. These plans came in the designation and isolation townships

32 The Architects’ Resistance. "Architecture and Racism: Position Paper No. 1." News release, 1969. !22

(Fig. 4) The above is a model for Le Corbusier’s unrealized, yet controversial plans for the redevelopment of the city of Paris. The high rises are residential areas that he believed must be kept separate from all the other functions of the city. !23 followed by the construction of dormitories such as those in Langa to permanently house and confine the population. The popularity and prevalence of Western architectural practices in Johannesburg outline some amount of aesthetic influence that existed upon the private and commercial developers of Johannesburg. Many of the design and urban theory principles of modernism also found their way into the official planning process of

Johannesburg’s city council and its engineers. Given prevalence of modernist designs and spatial practices—especially in the public sphere—the planners and engineers must have been under academic, and not just cultural influences. !24

JOHANNESBURG’S “MODERN” HIGHWAY SYSTEM

The M1 highway is a thoroughfare connecting Johannesburg South with the CBD and Sandton. Construction on the highway began in 1962, however the roots of exclusionary city planning began much earlier. The Johannesburg City Council began talks in 1948 that were centered around overhauling the city’s infrastructure in the age of the automobile.33 As the talks progressed the city council engaged in a practice typical of most state run committees, which was to bring the modern era’s experts in to hear their thoughts. The most notable of these experts was Lloyd B. Reid.34 “Dutch,” as he was known by his colleagues, had worked in the Michigan Department of Transportation from

1933-43 and as Detroit’s Traffic Engineer in the 40s.35 He ended his government career as

New York City’s first traffic commissioner working alongside “The Master Builder,”

Robert Moses. Reid spent most of the remainder of his professional career as a traffic planner and consultant, and it is during that time that the Johannesburg City Council decided to call upon him to help them solve their traffic problem.

While the construction of the M1 itself was overseen by the city’s municipal government, its design was not a sole product of the city’s experts. Engaging in one of the more common errors of modernist city planning, Johannesburg officials made use of an expert, Reid, that had no experience in the social or political environment which he was

33 John R. Shorten, The Johannesburg Saga, (Johannesburg: John R. Shorten, 1970), 577.

34 “MDOT: History and Culture,” MDOT - Reid, Lloyd B, (1901-1980), Accessed April

25, 2019. https://www.michigan.gov/mdot/0,4616,7-151-9623_11154-126411--,00.html.

35 Michigan DoT, “MDOT: History and Culture.” !25 planning. Modernist city planners were infamous for relying upon experts when embarking on a project, but this reliance on experts often saw the ignorance of other worthwhile points of view.36 The insistence upon using only engineers and “highway men,” when constructing the interstate system in the U.S. is an excellent example of this.

Since the opinions of sociologists and other conduits of public opinion were ignored, it was not until they wrote scathing and popular rebukes of popular buildings practices

(Jacobs and Goodman) that they were heard. Contracting an outside expert such as Lloyd

B. Reid was in line with practices of the time, and as it happened, he was from country that would be harshly criticized for its racist spatial practices as well.

As integral as he might have been to the planning process, Reid was not the only source of American influence on the design of the highway. Engineers assigned to the project were sent to Yale, Ohio State University, and Northwestern University to be educated further on the fundamentals of highway and traffic planning. Whether or not life or experience in a segregated country was a strong influencing factor in the decisions and instruction of these men, they were undoubtedly swayed by the strict adherence to analysis and control underlying the field of western urban planning at the time. By the time Johannesburg’s architect’s and engineers were studying in North America, city planning was a firmly established academic field. Johannesburg’s engineers would have been immersed into a world full of theory, that had finally shifted from “comprehensive land-use planning” to an academic study of methods, systems, and models upon which

36 Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, 360. !26 plans could be drawn, analyzed, and implemented. In American and Britain, planners were now being trained to design cities, not enforce codes.37

The methods followed by Johannesburg’s planners closely resembled those of their Western counterparts. Prior to the 1960s the field of city planning found itself recognized in the academy with the process: survey, analyze, and implement.38 The rapid popularization of systems oriented thinking throughout the 1950s and 1960s only furthered the idea that there was a specific process to be followed in the planning of a city.39 One quick look at the process followed by the Johannesburg officials shows the structure applied to that three step blueprint. The officials conducted a survey in 1948 of

Johannesburg, another in Europe and America, invited Lloyd B. Reid to analyze it in

1954, and began implementing their joint plan in 1962.40 Although it was not constructed in Europe or the United States, the influences came from European and American city planners. The prevalence of Western architectural and planning practices during the designing of the M1 and much of the municipal highway system brought them into the world as truly modernist creations.

The leaders of Johannesburg’s Works and Traffic Committee, the City Engineer, the Chief Land Surveyor, and Town Planner were sent on “a study tour of Europe and

America to observe, at first-hand, urban renewal schemes.”41. Western theories on urban

37 Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, 353.

38 Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, 354.

39 Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, 359.

40 Shorten, Johannesburg Saga 577, 581, 582.

41 Shorten, Johannesburg Saga, 581. !27 planning, and architecture were actively consumed by Johannesburg’s planners and architects. This is significant given the vast amount of criticism urban renewal schemes began to attract from the larger community just a few short years after they began to reshape the urban landscape of the United States. Accusations of exclusion along racial and class lines, as well as intense criticism of blind admiration for monumental building projects instead of locally inspired redevelopment and renovation projects were common themes in critiques by the modernists’ contemporaries such as Edward Soja, Jane Jacobs, and Richard Goodman.

The Flat Walls of Johannesburg

Shortly after the National Party assumed political control of South Africa in 1948,

Johannesburg’s municipal government had already begun studying the surrounding area to prepare formal plans and proposals for a new highway system by the late 1950s. The ways in which modernist planning practices lent themselves to policies of control, racial segregation, exclusion, and isolation have already been laid out with Moses’ parkways serving as the prime example. Additionally, knowing that the planners and engineers of

Johannesburg studied and referenced the practices of their contemporaries in the United

States and Europe, there is ample ground to suggest an analysis of the M1 through the lens of western planning practices.

Jane Jacobs and sociologist Robert Goodman have argued that highways were monumental tools that had the power not only to provide greater access to the city and its hinterlands, but to cut and divide the urban environment as well. In the case of Alexandra township, such a charge seems strikingly accurate. Highways such as the M1, and N3, as !28 well as three city streets keep the oldest and poorest housing area of Alexandra consigned to small rectangular space pressed up against the Jukskei Rivier to the East. Illustrated in figure 5 is a modified satellite view of Alexandra. The surrounding highways are marked in blue, the aforementioned city streets are marked in yellow, the Jukskei is marked in green, and the legal boundaries of the township are outlined in red.

Alexandra began its history as a peri-urban settlement in the early 20th century, and by midcentury it was an established, if somewhat unofficial, settlement for black

Africans and other disenfranchised groups.42 Though it never quite became a true township in the sense that its full conversion to a high-density housing site was mostly prevented by the settlement’s inhabitants, it was still designated as one.43 Townships were not meant to provide living areas for the working population they held, but were instead strictly dormitory structures where the only access documentation was referred to as a bed card. Townships by nature were meant to contain and in many ways the surrounding infrastructure clearly portrays and preserves that purpose. Another look at the satellite map shows how Alexandra continues to be cordoned off by a primary layer of city streets and a secondary layer of municipal and national highways. Potential routes of ingress and egress to the main neighborhood are severely limited, especially along the eastern

42 “Peri-urban” is a phrase typically used when discussing cities on the African continent to describe the spatial environment immediately adjacent to the defined urban zone. It is synonymous with suburb.

43 Philip Bonner, and Noor Nieftagodien, Alexandra: A History, (Johannesburg: Wits

University Press, 2008), 14. !29

(Fig. 5) A Google Earth map of Alexandra (right in red), Sandton (left) and the main highways built around Alexandra. The small green boxes mark other minor highways. !30 boundary on the Jukskei river lies. Alexandra is completely isolated from the surrounding town and commercial areas. Considering the wide array of powers wielded by the apartheid government it is hard to argue that the township’s separation from the surrounding area was simply a side effect of natural processes in the urban area. The township site was legally designated, and the roads and highways around it were planned around—not through—those legal boundaries. The Jukskei river also coincides with the western boundary of the township, thus creating another obstacle that restricts the number of ingress and egress points.

The highways surrounding Alexandra appear to fall right into what was the established urban planning practice of the 1950s and 1960s. Running along three sides of the township, the highways act not so much as avenues of trade and transportation but as highly dangerous and insurmountable fortifications built to contain the economically disenfranchised inhabitants. From its inception the highway system was not meant to service the black South African population. The path it cut along the landscape of

Johannesburg and the rest of the country was one that formed shipping routes for cargo and avenues of safe passage for white car-owners.

When Johannesburg highways are analyzed in terms of the design practices and beliefs of Western professionals at the time it becomes clear that the infrastructural additions to Johannesburg and across the country were part of the transportation backbone of apartheid, not just a spatial one.44 Recognizing the city’s highway system as a sort of spine to apartheid is incredibly important for any analysis of it relative to its

44 Alan Mabin, Apartheid Ctiy, 16. !31 surroundings. Highways are the arterial routes upon which trade and commerce rely, and they supposedly allow the free movement of the population, but when they are constructed under a system such as apartheid, these highways become obstacles. When only the smallest fraction of the citizenry are free to use roads and freeways, they start to impede the movement of the rest. When bus travel is locked in to specific routes at specific times, and pedestrians are left without any foot bridges or crosswalks, the highways begin to form walls that cut and divide the city. When this quality of the highway is considered relative to Sandton City, the shopping center’s spatial relationships come into question, as does its commercial relationship to apartheid planning practices. !32

A TALE OF TWO SQUARES

Sandton municipality, originally a farm town, was incorporated in 1969.

According to its former town planner, “at that time there were about 30,000 whites in the town and 15,000 horses.”45 The aerial photo of Sandton City provided in Figure 6 shows just how suburban the surrounding area was at the time of the mall’s completion. From the beginning, Sandton City was a space for whites and it was constructed as such. The nearest settlement for black Africans was Alexandra township, which was a 6 mile walk from central Sandton. It was in this rural Johannesburg suburb that a site was for a new, upscale shopping center was designated.

Where most malls have so-called anchor retailers, this new 22 story shopping center was built as the anchor for an entire metropolitan business district. The Afrikaaner developers, Rapp and Meister, had carefully chosen the site of their new shopping center.

Sandton was outside any of the areas in which black Africans, or any individuals labeled as “colored,” could secure any form of land tenure. The suburban answer to

Johannesburg’s CBD would be an area where the native population would have little-to- no access—therefore maintaining apartheid spatial controls of the suburb—while the white population would not have to travel into the CBD. Perhaps surprisingly, the white suburban population was still not entirely welcoming to the shopping center. Sandton

45 Africa Property News, "An Edgy History of Africa's Richest Square Mile Has

Become," Africa Property News, (June 12, 2016), Accessed April 20, 2018. http:// www.africapropertynews.com/southern-africa/3294-an-edgy-history-of-africa-richest- square-mile-has-become.html. !33

(Fig. 6) An aerial view of Sandton City and its flagship tower taken before 1983 when it still had only 2500 parking bays as opposed to 10,000 by the new millennium. !34 held on to its history as a (white) farming community, and outrage quickly mounted when the residents learned of the impressive new skyscraper that would be built in the middle of their community. The developers had the legal upper hand, though, and the plans had already been approved.46 Sandton City was finished by 1973 and opened for trade in

1974. It had, once and for all, established the future of Sandton as a commercial and retail hub.

Sandton was now a predominantly white, upper class area, but the developers of

Sandton City were building a massive shopping center far larger than any similar structure in South Africa.47 In order to remain successful, the mall had to be accessible to the largest swath of consumers similar to those in Sandton that it possibly could. This meant it had to be built near highways to provide easy access to as many “middle class” and presumably white car owners as it possibly could. Much like the shopping centers cropping up all over the U.S. during the prior 30 years, Sandton City was a product of the automobile and the highway. It is evident by the existence of such massive parking lots that the developers were catering to and relying upon those people with the means to afford their own cars and use Johannesburg's expanding highway system. The placement of the mall on the landscape of South Africa is a callback to its roots in the power structure created under apartheid. With the black African population of Johannesburg

46 Denise Mhlanga, "Sandton City - A Property’s History," Property24, (January 25,

2012), Accessed April 20, 2018. https://www.property24.com/articles/sandton-city-a- propertys-history/14670.

47 Africa Property News, “An Edgy History.” !35 forced to rely upon a segregated and underwhelming bus system for its transportation needs, it is clear that the shopping center’s placement near the highway and its inclusion of 2500 parking bays was catering to a white consumer base.

Sandton City was physically cut off from Alexandra. Another, more recent arial photo Figure 8 of Alexandra and Sandton’s border, shows just how separated from its surroundings Sandton City was (and is). It is still separated by blocks of subdivisions and a fairly new highway known as the M1 that had no major thoroughfares for the heavy amounts of pedestrian traffic from Alexandra to Sandton. Any foot travelers were forced to dodge traffic if they wished to cross the divide into Sandton. Before 1994, there was no way for non-white people to live anywhere near the mall or own any property around it.

Every storefront and every business would also have been owned by a white individual due to the Group Areas Act of 1950 and the various pass laws acts from 1923 through

1952. Even the original brutalist architectural style of the tower has been referred to as

“apartheid architecture.”48

Sandton City was surrounded by almost entirely white neighborhoods during its construction. While non-whites were not allowed to own land in the city, many of them still had to work in it. Townships were constructed in order to maintain segregation while still allowing some degree of mobility. These spaces had almost no regulations as far as sewage, construction, and infrastructure were concerned. If the people living there were doing so legally, then they were always tenants. The closest township to Sandton City was Alexandra, one of the poorest areas in South Africa. The Sandton City of apartheid

48 Africa Property News, “An Edgy History.” !36

(Fig. 7) an aerial phot of the M1 highway between Alexandra (right) and Sandton (left). !37

South Africa did not need to offer, or even feign to offer, any semblance of cross-racial appeal or accessibility. The vast majority of the population could not remain in any urban area for more than 72 hours and had to keep a passbook with them at all times. There was almost no economic incentive for Sandton City to make itself accessible to the larger population because they hardly possessed the legal rights to be there.

Three years before the repeal of pass laws in 1983, Sandton City had undergone its first of several additions. The number of parking bays was increased from 2,500 to

8,000 while the number of stores jumped from 120 to 250.49 In the same time period of

Sandton City’s growth, 1973-1983, the white population had only increased marginally

(about 10 percent).50 Meanwhile, the indigenous African population had increased by approximately 50 percent.51 Sandton City had not undergone any major refurbishments.

The additions were added in ways that built upon the already existing architecture instead of changing it. It was not until 1991 that Sandton underwent its first large scale redevelopment, and it had done little to rebrand itself for most of the decade following

1983. The developers had very little reason to, because the shopping center continued to grow. It never had to be changed in terms of its social or economic functions, nor did it

49 Billy Becker and Fidel Mufudza, "History Of The Centre," Sandton City, (2016), accessed May 03, 2018, https://www.sandtoncity.com/history-of-the-centre.htm.

50 Owen Crankshaw and Susan Parnell, “Johannesburg: Race, Inequality, and

Urbanization,” World Cities Beyond the West: Globalization, Development and Inequality

(2004): 354.

51 Crankshaw and Parnell, “Johannesburg: Race, Inequality and Urbanization,” 354. !38 have to present itself as anything other than an upscale shopping center for the white middle class. Even with the abolition of the pass laws, South Africa was still an apartheid state and the shopping center did not need to prepare for any sort of massive paradigm shift. Only affluent whites had access to the mall, not for infrastructural, or geographic reasons, but because of politics.

The repeal of pass laws undoubtedly had a dramatic effect upon the entire landscape of Johannesburg. This demographic dot map (Figure8) shows that what would have been a completely white CBD underwent an incredible demographic change. The suburbs, including Sandton and Sandown, also found themselves with a more even, yet relatively disproportionate, distribution of black Africans. Sandton City and its outlying suburb represent a perfect example of an old spatial strata with a new political order plastered over it. Sandton City was built in a town that was only available to white citizens of Johannesburg. It was spatially, economically, and politically removed front the majority of the population, and only the political barrier has been completely removed.

The website for the Sun International (a casino and hotel owned by the developers) goes so far as to call the original Afrikaaner developers “brave risk takers” in their construction of Sandton City.52 It is clear that the mall still unabashedly touts its spatial history as something to be proud of, which is problematic given the fact that its construction was reliant on spatial politics that reserved the vast majority of land for use

52 "The History of Africa's Richest Square Mile - Sandton City." Sun International.

October 26, 2014. Accessed April 20, 2018. https://www.suninternational.com/maslow/ stories/travel/masl-the-history-of-africas-richest-square-mile/. !39

(Fig. 8) A demographic map of Johannesburg using 2001 census data. Dead center is the CBD, and the small dark red square above it is Alexandra. !40 and development by the white minority population. Perhaps Sandton City’s developers were not so tone deaf, however.

An interesting correlation between dates happens to involve the second large scale project undertaken at Sandton City. Just as apartheid was abolished in 1994, the newest addition, a retail area known as Sandton Square, opened. Three years prior to the opening, however, a report was written by one Sandton City’s developers saying its owners at the time understood, “ ... that the political arena would change the face of

South Africa forever into the future.”53 For that reason an entire series of renovations and additions were added, not least among them a brand new “Italian style piazza.” These piazzas are synonymous with and nearly identical to modern day town squares or business plazas. For it to fall under the Italian styling, Sandton Square is built as a quadrilateral with an open space acting as the center. Around the space are two stories of shopping stalls, storefronts, and restaurants covered by a small colonnade. Italian piazzas are typically very open and completely public spaces near a town’s center. The massive addition not only added to the overall retail space of the center again, but provided a new public area that seemingly serviced the local population.54 The open square has plenty of seating and fresh air, and is modeled much like a traditional town square. More specifically, the square is modeled after an Italian piazza, even though it is squarely in the

53 Slabe Goldberg, The Factors That Influence the Performance of a Regional Shopping

Center, Master's thesis, University of Witwatersrand, 1998 (Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand, 1998): 14.

54 Goldberg, The Factors that Influence, 17. !41 middle of South Africa. However, a town square is usually accessible to the larger public:

Sandton City still remains cut off from the vast majority of Johannesburg’s population.

As previously noted, the development adjacent to it is completely walled, and therefore a monolithic obstacle to any sort of foot traffic. It is an obstacle which turns an already unreasonable six mile walk into a twelve mile trek to “the golden square-mile.”

Even after a massive attempt to “brighten” Sandton City and to “bring it in line with international trends at the time,” the center remains closed off from the neglected parts of the city.55 Although Fred Devries argues that the mall is no longer a “white” shopping mall, it still appears to be a vestige of the past.56 Sandton City Tower was given a complete facelift and built it a new curtain-wall facade to remove the last memory of apartheid: the brutalist architectural style that became its symbol.57 Yet, the tower still overlooks all of Sandton, including the shanty town in Alexandra. Devries even cites the editor of a shopping magazine who notes that the whiteness of the mall is only perceived now, but the image is very much real.58

By 2001, the previously “updated” look of Sandton City already needed to shift again just as the population of the city had done over the previous 7 years. Returning to

Figure (n9), the “ring road” can be discerned with a little work and the deep red square

55 Becker and Mufudza, "History Of The Centre."

56 Devries, “Megamalls,” Elusive Metropolis, 305.

57 Goldberg, The Factors That Influence 5.

58 Devries, “Megamalls,” Elusive Metropolis, 305. !42 that is almost dead center is Alexandra, six miles west of Sandton City.59 This map shows exactly what the Sandton City developers were likely blindsided by: a massive demographic shift directly following the abolition of apartheid. Just seven years after apartheid laws were retroactively repealed, the center of Johannesburg is nearing an even split between whites and blacks that would not have been remotely possible during apartheid. Figures 9 and 10 are photographs of the interior of Sandton City’s shopping center. Its interior is far different from that of the black-and-red granite and heavy earth tones used during the first two-and-half decades of the mall’s existence.60 The new designs are whimsical, surreal, and even futuristic. It is impossible to label the mall with any specific style besides what is usually expected of a commercial structure today.

White, vinyl floor tiles, large amounts of plate glass windows, high levels of light, peculiar center-piece decorations, and all around nondescript yet bright and shiny details cover the mall from top to bottom. The new aesthetics don’t dwell on the past or the present which makes them almost completely apolitical and removed from their historical roots. In 2004, a decade after the construction of Sandton Square and the abolition of apartheid in South Africa, the former was renamed Nelson Mandela Square. His slightly disproportionate, 6 meter tall statue remains as the only person or object actively welcoming all peoples into the mall.

59 Bill Rankin, "Map of South Africa: Racial Divides," DataLens, 2012, accessed May 03,

2018, http://datalens.org/search/Johannesburg map.

60 Goldberg, The Factors that Influence, 17. !43

(Fig. 10) The interior of Sandton City in the 1980s.

(Fig. 11) The interior of Sandton City in 2005.

!44

Sandton City has been described as part of the post-apartheid social structure in

South Africa, but it is not.61 Clever rebranding, restructuring, and refurbishing has allowed the shopping center to remain relevant within the current social climate. Sandton

City has never offered something new to the surrounding environment. It is not an agent of change because its purpose is for economic gain. There is no incentive for a shopping center to attempt to change a system that already benefits it, but there is an immense incentive for shopping center to change with a system in which it wishes to remain viable.

Sandton City, or really any other similar contemporaneous structure, cannot be deemed part of a post-apartheid urbanism. Sandton City is still just as separated from the outlying townships while the walled, white-majority neighborhoods still surround it. Only those who own cars or can afford to use public transportation can get to the shopping center still. Sandton City is legally accessible since the abolition of Apartheid, but the placement within Sandton, along with its history, prevent the shopping center from being part of any post-apartheid order.

Cities Divided

Sandton City, its square, and Alexandra have gone through a great many changes over the course of their existence. In the case of Sandton, many of these changes have been aesthetic, and attempts at keeping the mall commercially viable despite the political tumult it has managed to survive. Alexandra’s changes have been meaningful effects of the political changes in South Africa and Johannesburg over the years it has existed.

Alexandra has seen its designation as a township under the Group Areas Act, the

61 Devries, “Megamalls,” Elusive Metropolis, 306. !45 attempted imposition and construction of single male dormitories, the repeated clearing and rebuilding of informal settlements within its confines, and attempts at providing family centered housing to its current residents. What has not changed until very recently, however has been the spatial relationship between Alexandra and Sandton.

Alexandra does have its own commercial area that runs along the length of the

M11, but it is not far enough from Sandton to warrant its being noticeably separated from it. Just a cursory glance at the map shows the disparities in green space between

Alexandra and the surroundings towns such as Sandton. It’s rather easy to accept the highway system of Johannesburg as a remnant of apartheid as opposed to something presumably more benign such as a shopping center, subdivision, or neighborhood.

Perhaps that shouldn’t be the case. A highway system is easier to single out as a political and spatial actor, especially because of the complicated and at times confusing role played by the state in its design, construction, and maintenance. Unlike the highways, the majority white suburbs of Johannesburg such as Sandton were symptoms of apartheid spatial politics that in turn crystallized those spatial practices. A highway can be turned into an agent of change, because it is controlled by just one entity. The suburbs are large conglomerations of independent property owners, and the same goes for their increasingly dense commercial districts. !46

TRANSPORTATION ALONG THE SPINE OF APARTHEID

The M1 might not have been constructed with the express purpose of explicitly enforcing and entrenching apartheid policy, but there are no indicators that the needs of those disenfranchised under them would have been acknowledged. One important criticism of midcentury urban planning regards the ways in which it moved, excluded, and isolated various populations through the use of large scale building and redevelopment projects. How then has the legacy of 1950s urban planning and apartheid lived on through the M1?

Not only is the infrastructure upon which the city’s transportation system relies not just a barrier, but Johannesburg’s network of highways, railways, and bus routes are spatial ties holding in place those populations that might seek to move elsewhere. Busses are the only realistic and economical means of transportation for those that make up the poorest of a specific population. According to a study entitled “Transport and Urban

Development: Two Studies from Johannesburg,” it is often the densest and poorest sections of Johannesburg that rely upon the public transportation system.62

If bus routes are most demanded by and most traveled by the poorer, non car owning population of the greater Johannesburg metropolitan area it would seem counterintuitive to claim that the city’s public transportation system would promote the exclusion of black Africans and other apartheid era racial groups. However, these are populations that were forced to the city’s extremities through the introduction of pass

62 “Transport and Urban Development: Two Studies of Johannesburg,” 1. !47 laws and townships. Largely too poor to own cars and removed from spatial relevance in the city proper, the apartheid municipality required public transportation as a means to move its workforce into the CBD. Public busses into central Johannesburg were just as much a necessity to the viability of the apartheid economy and power structure as they were to those that used them to earn a wage.

Gordon Pirie notes in “Traveling Under Apartheid” that, “[Black South Africans’] everyday encounter with one of the most palpable creatures of apartheid is part and parcel of the experience of urbanization in contemporary South Africa.”63 Published two years before the fall of apartheid, he is writing of the “intense” and “resentful” experience of black South Africans and their encounters with apartheid policies when attempting to use the public transit system. Pirie recognized the opening of the public transportation system as a positive and hopeful step in the direction of a functioning post apartheid metropolis.

Indeed, the desegregation of public busses no doubt improved the quality of life and everyday commute of the affected social classes under apartheid, but might such ready access to and reliance upon an apartheid highway system be an obstacle to present day efforts at a post apartheid urbanization?

By continually expanding low cost public transit options specifically to the city center, the national and municipal governments and their planners may in fact be accidentally enforcing apartheid policies of exclusion and isolation. For this

63 Gordon H. Pirie, “Traveling Under Apartheid,” in The Apartheid City and Beyond:

Urbanization and Social Change in South Africa, Edited by D. M. Smith, (London:

Routledge, 1992), 172. !48 understandably counter-intuitive claim to be true, there are five aspects of apartheid that must also hold true. (1) The Apartheid power structure relied upon the removal of black

South Africans among other racial/ethnic groups to the spatial and economic extremities of the city. (2) The Central Business District of Johannesburg as well as that of other business districts in South Africa relied/rely upon the low-wage labor of those populations pushed to the urban extremities. (3) In order remedy the mutual-exclusivity of the above two reliances the apartheid government had to provide efficient, reliable, and economical transportation for those expected to commute to their respective job sites without being able to afford a car. (4) To allow for the efficient transportation of those disenfranchised peoples under apartheid, the government would then have to provide for the construction of a highway system prepared to meet that specific transportation need.

(5) The provision of effective mass transit and the necessary infrastructure to support it prevented the locations of townships and slums from being far enough from the CBD so as to make them unrealistic living spaces for commuters. Therefore, the constant addition of new bus routes will prevent any potential changes to the shape of Johannesburg.

Neither the CBD or Sandton Central will have to grapple with the fact that they continue to be spaces of disproportionately white control if the majority of the population continues to simply commute into the city.

The recent additions of bus routes in and around Sandton City, Johannesburg, and throughout the greater metropolitan area are not veiled attempts to contain various !49 populations or demographic groups.64 By virtue, busses allow for those who are unable to afford or consistently use automobiles to achieve a greater degree of mobility within and without their city, but in a metropolitan area such as Johannesburg even the public transport system existed as an arm of apartheid and not simply for the health and welfare of the population. If the very design of such an apparatus was a product of apartheid then its continued use without drastic change must be continuing to carry out its originally intended purpose.

Today, according to Statistics South Africa the majority of car owners in South

Africa are black African, but this is misleading when presented with the fact that approximately 95% of the white population owns a car in working condition while closer to 20% of the black African population does as well.65 According to Central Intelligence

Agency figures, whites make up only 7.8% of the population of South Africa, while black

Africans make up 80.9% of the country’s population.66 In terms of private transportation the infrastructure of South Africa and Johannesburg, specifically its highways, caters disproportionately to whites, leaving the vast majority of the population to rely on public transportation. Though the number of non white car owners is no longer restricted under

64 BizCommunity, “Sandton Public Transport Loop up and Running,” Bizcommunity.com

- Daily Logistics & Transport News, Accessed April 25, 2019. https:// www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/709/169436.html.

65 “General Household Survey,” Statistics South Africa, 2017, 50,51.

66 “The World Factbook: South Africa,” Library. February, 2018, Accessed January 25,

2019. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sf.html. !50 apartheid, the massive relative disparities in car ownership portray the highway as something that continues to serve its citizens unequally.

Apartheid was series of spatial policies and controls. While it is true that it also relied upon certain political structures and restrictions such as exclusion from general elections and the larger national state, apartheid was “inextricably bound up with urbanization” since the National Party assumed power in 1948.67 Aptly named the Central

Business District, the CBD has remained the urban and commercial core of the city of

Johannesburg. The central government’s seat of power (the town hall building) and the

Johannesburg Stock Exchange were both in the heart of the city.68 In 1952, pass laws were implemented through The Natives Act in order to maintain the whiteness of

Johannesburg’s metropolitan areas, which also happened to be the centers of political and economic power in the South Africa. Under these laws black South African’s as well as other minority racial groups that fell under the category of “colored” were forced to carry pass books with them while in white areas such as Johannesburg’s CBD and parts of other cities such as Cape Town. By the 1970s efforts were in full swing to completely remove all formal settlements in non-reserve farms and to forcibly relocate as much of

67 Smith, “Introduction,” in The Apartheid City, 1.

68 Beavon, “Nearer My Mall to Thee,” 8. !51 the black African population as possible with numbers of evicted reaching into the millions.69

Whites were the only group legally allowed to own property in most of the country, with the vast majority of the population left to small reserves or townships.

Figures 11 and 12 help portray the legacy apartheid spatial distributions of various demographic groups. Though the maps use 2001 and 2011 census data respectively, they help show the distribution of the various demographic groups delineated under apartheid.

Informal settlements became a mainstay of the built environment of urban South Africa with families being forced to send members to participate in the urban economy.70

Inherent in the spatial order created under apartheid was an enforced decentralization of the urban built and commercial environments. Black Africans were continually forced out of and kept from the metropolitan cores of South Africa, especially in Johannesburg. The townships into which they were forced by the apartheid government were separated from the Central Business District and excluded from participating in the urban economy as more than a labor force. In this way the population of Johannesburg was deliberately spread out with whites maintaining strict control of the city center and even most suburban areas. The Northern Suburbs such as Braamfontein or Sandown, which are

69 Mabin, “Dispossession, exploitation and struggle: an historical overview of South

African urbanization,” in Apartheid City pg. 16; Alexandra: A History also provides an illuminating account of the various efforts to conduct removals and redevelopments of black African settlements.

70 Mabin, “Dispossession, exploitation and struggle,” Apartheid City pg. 16. !52

(Fig. 11) Map of Johannesburg using 2001 census data. !53

(Fig. 12) Map of Johannesburg using 2011 census data. !54 present in Figures 11 and 12 were just as closed off to the black African population as the rest of the urban area.

As K. Beavon argues in “nearer my mall to thee,” the decentralization of

Johannesburg is most clearly exemplified in the amount of office and retail space that has become available to the North and West of Johannesburg since the 1980s and 1990s.71

Today, as under apartheid, black Africans and other previously disenfranchised racial groups continue to rely upon public transportation to effectively reach anywhere in the city. When eight out of every ten individuals out of the majority group of a population cannot afford a car, providing additional bus routes seems to be the obvious way to create a more mobile population. In doing so, people can participate in the urban economy more freely thus creating a more diverse and economically stronger metropolis. As long as the same level of mobility is not offered to all citizens at the metropolitan scale, much of

Johannesburg’s built environment will continue to block, and exclude those who continue to be denied the means to travel.

71 Beavon, “Nearer my Mall to Thee” 17. !55

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