CITICHAT 16/2002 - 26 April 2002
Art and the City
“Creativity is no longer an incidental miracle that happens occasionally in exceptionally favoured cities; in a globalised economy where no place can rest on its laurels for long, it is now a central part of the business of being a successful city.” Peter Hall, Professor of Planning at University College London and author of ‘Cities in Civilisation.”
“Planners, who are led in a certain way to admit that the town they are able to build is no longer ‘human sized’ are beginning to realise that artists can help to give to modern urban spaces ‘a taste of humanity’.” (Public Art and its relation to urban planning challenges: elements brought from the French experience)
“The muralist movement has had a major impact on the construction of recent Mexicano communities in the United States. Murals adorn a number of these communities including those in San Francisco and Chicago.” (Murals and the creation of Mexican communities in the US)
“Objective 2.1: Make Arts programmes available to everyone.
Objective 3.2: Integrate culture and the arts into the Albuquerque metro area’s overall strategy for economic development” (Cultural Plan for the City of Albuquerque)
“Four objectives followed by six strategies were identified for advancing the role of arts and culture in the environment of Downtown Washington;
• To publicly support artists, artistic traditions, culture and heritage in the community
• To create concentrated clusters of various arts uses so that they become destinations serving a wide range of audiences
• To stimulate cultural and heritage tourism for economic growth on a metropolitan, national and international level, and
• To create links between the downtown and citywide arts communities”
( The Cultural Development Corporation of the District of Columbia)
“Art creates a sense of place, it reflects a social theory about the place and displays a style that is attributed to the space. Art is often used in public places to give it character to make a place interesting, or to simply beautify it. People remember a place because of the artwork that exists in the space - the art acts as a symbol of the place” (Public Art in the Urban Landscape)
“Art should not dwell only in rarefied halls but in the places where people live and work.” (Tim Hall, “the Landscape of Urban Regeneration: Public Art”
JHB ART CITY
Saul Symanowitz is a 24 year old final year Wits University law student with B.Com and B.Com. (Hons) degrees under his belt. .Last year, as a Property Finance and Investment Tutor at Wits, Saul invited Inner City property investor Gerald Olitzki to speak at a symposium. So switched on by the opportunities that Gerald outlined, Saul turned his entrepreneurial thinking towards the inner city. I was introduced to Saul by Gerald last year when he made a number of interesting suggestions about some of the work the CJP were engaged on in the Inner City.
Towards the end of last year, with an eye to the upcoming World Summit, Saul approached the CJP again with the suggestion that consideration should be given to turning the Inner City into ‘the largest outdoor art gallery in the world’. Although the initiative might not be entirely original, the idea certainly has not been put into practice previously on a large scale in any African cities. And African art is wonderful! We discussed the proposal with senior city council officials who were enthusiastic about including the project with the city’s other World Summit initiatives. In fact the project complements an exciting programme developed by Maishe Maponya’s Arts, Culture and Heritage Department for both the World Summit and the Arts Alive Festival. Who says Joeys got no culture, bro?
The CJP brainstormed the proposal with a variety of relevant parties and a plan was formulated to (a) hold an art competition for South African artists (b) enlarge the winning submissions probably twentyfold or more (c) display them on carefully chosen bare walls of inner city buildings which (d) would promote South African arts and artists and (e) thereby stimulating an interest in local art by the broad community as well as visitors to the City in viewing and in expressing their opinions on the art submitted.
“JHB ART CITY”was born!
JHB ART CITY will turn the Johannesburg Downtown into the BIGGEST outdoor art gallery in the world
JHB ART CITY will feature paintings submitted by South African artists in a national competition PLUS specially chosen works from the country’s top corporate collections.
JHB ART CITY will display giant reproductions of original works of South African artists throughout the inner city showcasing South African art and artists, equal if not better than the best in the world.
JHB ART CITY will span the period between the August/September 2002 World Summit and the March 2003 Cricket World Cup – eight months of exposure to tens of thousands of visitors and hundreds of thousands of city users.
JHB ART CITY will highlight all the inner city regeneration projects currently in progress – an approximate one-and-a-half billion rand investment - by clustering the art around the various project sites – an ‘Art Route’ will connect the projects and paintings.
JHB ART CITY will promote the visual arts as an essential ingredient of the city’s culture.
JHB ART CITY will provide an opportunity for massive public participation in the arts when the public vote for the top JHB ART CITY ARTWORK
JHB ART CITY is a unique project demonstrating support for the arts, the World Summit, the Cricket World Cup, Arts Alive and the inner city revitalisation programme.
JHB ART CITY also provides a unique marketing opportunity for local corporations to be seen as supporting the arts and the city.
JHB ART CITY will complement the many other arts initiatives being planned by the Council over the last half of the year.
JHB ART CITY is supported by Business & Arts South Africa (BASA) and is a public/private collaborative effort between the
• City of Johannesburg
• Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA)
• Central Johannesburg Partnership (CJP) and the
• Johannesburg Inner City Business Coalition (JICBC)
JHB ART CITY is going to be FUN!
Watch this space, regards, neil
Friday, April 26, 2002
Friday, April 19, 2002
Homeless Talk Citichat 19 April 2002
CITICHAT 15/2002 19 April 2002
HOMELESS TALK
In early 1994Dr Beyers Naude wrote an editorial for the first ever edition of the street newspaper “Homeless Talk” in which he said "Yet another feature of all the injustices and imbalances in today's South Africa is "homelessness". What a terrible word and what a horrible situation to find oneself in! For most? many? South Africans it is inconceivable to comprehend what it really means not to have a home, no regular income, no place for your personal belongings and nowhere to return to. It means feelings of fear, uncertainty, frustration and aggressiveness and even hatred in our community. The fact that there are people living in streets, railway stations and parks in our city is unforgivable"
Earlier this week I bought the April 2002 issue of “Homeless Talk” and was amazed to see “Eighth Anniversary” headlining the front page. I couldn’t really believe that it was eight years ago that I sat down with two inner city pastors, Diane Wicks, of St George’s United Church and Judy Bassingthwaighte of the Central Methodist Mission to talk about establishing an employment generating project for the homeless community in the inner city. The meeting had been facilitated by a young man on our CJP staff, Tudor Maxwell, who shared a passion with the two pastors for helping the indigent. Tudor left us some years later to do his MBA and, although he is now a lecturer at the Wits Graduate School of Business, has never lost that passion.
If I remember correctly I had just returned from a visit to the USA to investigate the role that their Business Improvement District initiatives were playing relative to urban social issues and homelessness in particular. A day spent with a young man working for the Grand Central Partnership in New York City had greatly excited me. I had no sooner told him what the objective of my visit was when he cut in and suggested that if we were going to make any progress, the first thing I should do was to stop classifying people as ‘homeless’. He objected strongly to what he considered was a negative classification and a stigmatisation of a sector of society. “There is no such thing as homelessness”, he said, “just unemployed people and those suffering from some dependency or mental illness.” ”Put your energies into resolving those issues and you’ll lick the problem you call homelessness!”
We spent the day visiting projects that his organisation had instituted in support of just such an approach. I was shown a housing project where ‘homeless’ people were provided with accommodation whilst they were taught a skill. A “roofgardens in the sky” project where they were taught to grow herbs for sale to the large restaurant population of the city using the roofs of high rise buildings as their gardens. I remember being particularly impressed with a programme that had been established to overcome the reluctance of organisations to employ ‘street people’. The Grand Central Partnership would provide them with training and would advertise their availability on an internal NYC TV channel. The trained person, neatly attired for the occasion would be filmed saying; “My name is XYZ and I have been trained as a waiter, I am ABC old and am particularly looking for employment in a restaurant/hotel/whatever.” The take up rate had been phenomenal! Had they stood before the same camera and said “My name is XYZ and I am homeless and am looking for a job as a waiter” the response would have been zilch!
I shared this approach with the two pastors and it struck a chord of great excitement. Diane Wicks, an American, had been wanting to establish a street newspaper for some time and it fitted this employment generation concept perfectly. And so "Homeless Talk" was born. The CJP carried out a research programme to determine existing skills amongst the homeless communities that existed at that time in the Inner City and from which potential contributors and workers could be identified. We provided accommodation for the newspaper in our Carlton Centre offices and the paper's first employee, discovered through the research project, was Mike Smith. Mike had worked for one of the fast food chains but had been retrenched and found himself living on the streets, sleeping at Park Station. . He was computer literate and so was able to pull the copy together and became the editor. A poem that he wrote, entitled 'The Newcomer' was published in the very first edition and included the following;
"In time he'll appreciate the value of a piece of cardboard and plastic
He'll know that cardboard can be as good
as any slumberland mattress;
he'll know that a rubbish bag can turn
to be an electric blanket
in times of need and distress.
He'll know that a railway trolley can serve
the same purpose as a double bed;
he'll appreciate the comfort and comradeship
offered by bodies packed in sleep like logs
for extra warmth and security."
The first editorial board consisted of Judy and Diane, Tudor, Mike Smith and three other homeless community representatives, Ebrahim Modimokwane, Josias Moloi, and Cassius Plaaitjes. (the April 2002 Eighth Anniversary issue carries a picture on the front page of Mike Smith and Cassius Plaaitjes.) The editorial policy was that 85% of each publication had to emanate from the homeless communities themselves. In the very first copy, simply marked Vol 1, 1994, Diane wrote the opening editorial which included the following; "Homeless Talk provides an opportunity for homeless people to express themselves by writing stories about their experiences, concerns and hopes." We sold the paper to identified homeless persons for 20 cents and they sold it to the public for R1.00. The
10 000 copies of the first edition sold out in a couple of weeks and a reprint of twice that amount followed. R24000-00 had been generated into the hands and pockets of the unemployed!
Nearly two years down the track we felt that it was time for the paper to become independent of us and so the now three full time staff, Mike Smith (Editor), Cassius Plaaitjes (Distribution) and Lance Mosterd (Administrator) moved to Zambezi House and, in 1996, to Longsbank in Bree Street. By now the publication had moved from bi-monthly to monthly.
And now the passage of the street newspaper developed much as a switchback ride through success, fraud, resilience, murder, embezzlement, recovery, disappointments and more successes, a kaleidoscopic storyboard which would do justice to any soap opera! The detailed history is contained in this April’s publication but it is worth recording just some of the highlights over the past few years. A number of professional journalists over the years have run writer's workshops thus acting as midwives to emerging writers from the community; the paper published a collection of poetry by homeless community writers called Pulse; Homeless Talk writers assisted in developing scripts for SABC TV and co-directed a TV documentary "The Streets are Death Row"; in 1999 a group of Homeless Talk writers published a book about life on the streets of Johannesburg entitled “Finding Mr Mandini”; this year Radio 94.7 raised R89000-00 to establish a creche for vendors’ children who can now leave their children under supervision whilst they sell the paper on the streets.
Today Homeless Talk provides a monthly income for more than 400 registered vendors with a monthly circulation of 35000.It has two editors, Harrison Ndlovu and Cascarino Valentine and a Board of nine. The CJP relationship has been maintained through one of our directors, Lillian Mvumvu, serving on the Homeless Talk Board in a non-executive capacity. Against the dark background of homelessness and illegal occupations in the city that I shared last week, Homeless Talk is a beacon of light and proof of just what can be done. Happy anniversary and many, many more!
Neil Fraser
HOMELESS TALK
In early 1994Dr Beyers Naude wrote an editorial for the first ever edition of the street newspaper “Homeless Talk” in which he said "Yet another feature of all the injustices and imbalances in today's South Africa is "homelessness". What a terrible word and what a horrible situation to find oneself in! For most? many? South Africans it is inconceivable to comprehend what it really means not to have a home, no regular income, no place for your personal belongings and nowhere to return to. It means feelings of fear, uncertainty, frustration and aggressiveness and even hatred in our community. The fact that there are people living in streets, railway stations and parks in our city is unforgivable"
Earlier this week I bought the April 2002 issue of “Homeless Talk” and was amazed to see “Eighth Anniversary” headlining the front page. I couldn’t really believe that it was eight years ago that I sat down with two inner city pastors, Diane Wicks, of St George’s United Church and Judy Bassingthwaighte of the Central Methodist Mission to talk about establishing an employment generating project for the homeless community in the inner city. The meeting had been facilitated by a young man on our CJP staff, Tudor Maxwell, who shared a passion with the two pastors for helping the indigent. Tudor left us some years later to do his MBA and, although he is now a lecturer at the Wits Graduate School of Business, has never lost that passion.
If I remember correctly I had just returned from a visit to the USA to investigate the role that their Business Improvement District initiatives were playing relative to urban social issues and homelessness in particular. A day spent with a young man working for the Grand Central Partnership in New York City had greatly excited me. I had no sooner told him what the objective of my visit was when he cut in and suggested that if we were going to make any progress, the first thing I should do was to stop classifying people as ‘homeless’. He objected strongly to what he considered was a negative classification and a stigmatisation of a sector of society. “There is no such thing as homelessness”, he said, “just unemployed people and those suffering from some dependency or mental illness.” ”Put your energies into resolving those issues and you’ll lick the problem you call homelessness!”
We spent the day visiting projects that his organisation had instituted in support of just such an approach. I was shown a housing project where ‘homeless’ people were provided with accommodation whilst they were taught a skill. A “roofgardens in the sky” project where they were taught to grow herbs for sale to the large restaurant population of the city using the roofs of high rise buildings as their gardens. I remember being particularly impressed with a programme that had been established to overcome the reluctance of organisations to employ ‘street people’. The Grand Central Partnership would provide them with training and would advertise their availability on an internal NYC TV channel. The trained person, neatly attired for the occasion would be filmed saying; “My name is XYZ and I have been trained as a waiter, I am ABC old and am particularly looking for employment in a restaurant/hotel/whatever.” The take up rate had been phenomenal! Had they stood before the same camera and said “My name is XYZ and I am homeless and am looking for a job as a waiter” the response would have been zilch!
I shared this approach with the two pastors and it struck a chord of great excitement. Diane Wicks, an American, had been wanting to establish a street newspaper for some time and it fitted this employment generation concept perfectly. And so "Homeless Talk" was born. The CJP carried out a research programme to determine existing skills amongst the homeless communities that existed at that time in the Inner City and from which potential contributors and workers could be identified. We provided accommodation for the newspaper in our Carlton Centre offices and the paper's first employee, discovered through the research project, was Mike Smith. Mike had worked for one of the fast food chains but had been retrenched and found himself living on the streets, sleeping at Park Station. . He was computer literate and so was able to pull the copy together and became the editor. A poem that he wrote, entitled 'The Newcomer' was published in the very first edition and included the following;
"In time he'll appreciate the value of a piece of cardboard and plastic
He'll know that cardboard can be as good
as any slumberland mattress;
he'll know that a rubbish bag can turn
to be an electric blanket
in times of need and distress.
He'll know that a railway trolley can serve
the same purpose as a double bed;
he'll appreciate the comfort and comradeship
offered by bodies packed in sleep like logs
for extra warmth and security."
The first editorial board consisted of Judy and Diane, Tudor, Mike Smith and three other homeless community representatives, Ebrahim Modimokwane, Josias Moloi, and Cassius Plaaitjes. (the April 2002 Eighth Anniversary issue carries a picture on the front page of Mike Smith and Cassius Plaaitjes.) The editorial policy was that 85% of each publication had to emanate from the homeless communities themselves. In the very first copy, simply marked Vol 1, 1994, Diane wrote the opening editorial which included the following; "Homeless Talk provides an opportunity for homeless people to express themselves by writing stories about their experiences, concerns and hopes." We sold the paper to identified homeless persons for 20 cents and they sold it to the public for R1.00. The
10 000 copies of the first edition sold out in a couple of weeks and a reprint of twice that amount followed. R24000-00 had been generated into the hands and pockets of the unemployed!
Nearly two years down the track we felt that it was time for the paper to become independent of us and so the now three full time staff, Mike Smith (Editor), Cassius Plaaitjes (Distribution) and Lance Mosterd (Administrator) moved to Zambezi House and, in 1996, to Longsbank in Bree Street. By now the publication had moved from bi-monthly to monthly.
And now the passage of the street newspaper developed much as a switchback ride through success, fraud, resilience, murder, embezzlement, recovery, disappointments and more successes, a kaleidoscopic storyboard which would do justice to any soap opera! The detailed history is contained in this April’s publication but it is worth recording just some of the highlights over the past few years. A number of professional journalists over the years have run writer's workshops thus acting as midwives to emerging writers from the community; the paper published a collection of poetry by homeless community writers called Pulse; Homeless Talk writers assisted in developing scripts for SABC TV and co-directed a TV documentary "The Streets are Death Row"; in 1999 a group of Homeless Talk writers published a book about life on the streets of Johannesburg entitled “Finding Mr Mandini”; this year Radio 94.7 raised R89000-00 to establish a creche for vendors’ children who can now leave their children under supervision whilst they sell the paper on the streets.
Today Homeless Talk provides a monthly income for more than 400 registered vendors with a monthly circulation of 35000.It has two editors, Harrison Ndlovu and Cascarino Valentine and a Board of nine. The CJP relationship has been maintained through one of our directors, Lillian Mvumvu, serving on the Homeless Talk Board in a non-executive capacity. Against the dark background of homelessness and illegal occupations in the city that I shared last week, Homeless Talk is a beacon of light and proof of just what can be done. Happy anniversary and many, many more!
Neil Fraser
Friday, April 12, 2002
Drill Hall Citichat 12 April 2002
CITICHAT 14/2002 12th April 2002
Drill Hall
Johannesburg’s Drill Hall - a building that encapsulates the full range of the city’s chequered history. Built in 1904 as the headquarters for the Transvaal Volunteers during the city’s colonial period, it remained in military hands from Union in 1910 right through to 1985. The building featured prominently during the strikes in 1922 when it headquartered the troops used to quell the riots. It was identified with the apartheid regime due to its use in 1957 at the start of the Treason Trial which was later relocated to Pretoria ‘for security reasons’. In “Long Walk to Freedom”, Nelson Mandela records; “It was a great barn of a building, with a corrugated iron roof, and considered the only public building large enough to support a trial of so many accused.” Gerard-Mark van der Waal in his book, “From Mining Camp to Metropolis” describes the building design as somewhat “removed from the Beaux Arts mode”!
I wrote the following about the Drill Hall just last year (Citichat 41 of 19 October 2001) – “The building is owned by the State which has neglected it to the stage that it is totally overrun by squatters, a haven for gangs and a centre of criminal activity. It is a cess-pit which constitutes a major potential health hazard, a number of fires have resulted in damage and it has been condemned as structurally unsound. Yet the State does nothing!”
A fire had taken place earlier last year, in June, in which nine people had died and the Council committed itself to relocate the largely homeless inhabitants and seal the building off against further invasion. It didn’t happen.
The wise words from one of the great American city practitioners, the late Dan Sweat of Atlanta, came to mind as I looked at the ruins of Drill Hall earlier this week, now substantially destroyed by another fire in which another five people died. “If the city does not deal constructively with the urban poor, the urban poor will deal destructively with the city”. Whilst the loss of a valuable city heritage asset paled into insignificance in relation to the death of five of the city’s citizens, one has to ask oneself why there is no plan to deal with the urban poor.
After last year’s fire the State continued to do nothing. The City Council’s intention to demolish the building two years ago due to an engineer’s report on its lack of structural integrity was challenged by the SA Heritage Resource Agency (SAHRA) and the buck appears to have been generously passed around between all the parties ever since. But the squatters stayed and five more died in the blaze on Monday. Last evening’s TV news showed the start of the demolition of the fire damaged structures, only to be halted again by SAHRA. Squatters were claiming the right to move back into the ruins and the Executive Mayor was shown vowing that no-one would move back into the building. (It hasn’t been a good week for our Mayor. Over the weekend his home was attacked by a mob each of whom had had their electricity cut off by the Council due to extended non-payment. They claimed that the provision of free electricity was a right.)
Back to the Drill Hall – so who’s the guilty party? In my mind, firstly, all levels of government for the plight of the homeless appears to not merely be a low priority but is actually off the screen completely. Secondly, the bureaucracy that puts protocols and processes before the lives of people. . Certainly the State’s recalcitrance has been matched by the City’s paralysis and lack of will to rehouse the illegal squatters whilst Provincial Government seem nowhere to be found. Our Justice system appears unable or unwilling to deal with issues that affect the life and death of the poor. “If the city does not deal constructively with the urban poor, the urban poor will deal destructively with the city”
My concern is that Drill Hall is not an isolated example. There are at least ten to twelve other buildings in the inner city that have already been identified as being illegally occupied and a hazard to the city and the occupants. Most have been abandoned long since by their owners and some have become centres for drugs and crime, often occupied by street children high on petrol ‘sniffing’, unbelievably unhygienic, no electricity or water or sewage services. Deathtraps waiting for tragedy to happen. Others, such as one I visited last week, whilst having probably one hundred illegal occupiers and no services, was a model of order and cleanliness. But the people should not be there. Orderly or disorderly, illegal occupation of privately owned buildings whether the owner has fled or not, are not in the interests of the city and decidedly not in the interests of the occupiers in terms of their health and mortality! Some years ago in Philadelphia, Penn., a civil rights movement challenged the right of the authorities to prohibit the city’s pavements being used as homes for the homeless when other alternatives were available. Research produced in the case showed that street people could anticipate a pronounced reduction in life expectancy in comparison to those persons who enjoy shelter. Protecting the rights of people to live on the streets was merely guaranteeing them an early death. By doing nothing about our illegal squatters our authorities are doing virtually the same. What’s the plan? What’s the strategy? Do we have a Joburg 2030 for the urban poor? I know many councillors have a passion for resolving the issues of the poor and who do great work individually against huge odds of indifference and disinterest often handcuffed by bureaucracy. Those that have the heart to provide solutions such as the Johannesburg Homeless Trust, battle for many months and years to receive official support for their efforts. What is it about our world that makes inhumane regimes efficient and democratic government inefficient and unfeeling?
The situation is being further exploited by slum lords. They take advantage of the low prices of the older inner city office buildings and cram as many people as they can into structures not designed for residential occupation without submitting plans or altering the buildings to comply with regulations. For R650.00 per month you share a room with half a dozen others and use communal toilet facilities where one or two toilet cubicles are converted into showers. One such building, already occupied for over a year, does not comply with rational fire design requirements. Nothing is done. Council officials tell me that the process to deal with this situation through the courts will take two to three years! We have no adequate zoning laws. A year ago the Johannesburg Inner City Business Coalition, recognising the gravity of the situation, offered to pay for fast tracking the development of appropriate new legislation and by-laws. Council says it doesn’t need help, and a year down the track I still haven’t seen a draft nor can I find out when the new bylaws will emerge. A property owner offers to take over derelict buildings in his immediate vicinity and re-instate them at his cost if the council will relocate the inhabitants yet can get no reaction from the authorities. In the meantime the buildings drag down the environment, depreciate the efforts and investments of people who are genuinely working to upgrade the city and the lives of the inhabitants are put at risk.
The end of a heavy week so let’s lighten up as we go from one extreme to the other which is after all what a city is all about! The buck are back in town! Remember the leaping sprinbok artwork that graced the fountain in Oppenheimer Park? About a year ago they were vandalised and Anglo removed them for repair. Well, the restoration is complete and they have been re-erected in Anglo’s Main Street pedestrianised precinct. They look great in their new setting and are worth a visit.
Cheers, neil
Drill Hall
Johannesburg’s Drill Hall - a building that encapsulates the full range of the city’s chequered history. Built in 1904 as the headquarters for the Transvaal Volunteers during the city’s colonial period, it remained in military hands from Union in 1910 right through to 1985. The building featured prominently during the strikes in 1922 when it headquartered the troops used to quell the riots. It was identified with the apartheid regime due to its use in 1957 at the start of the Treason Trial which was later relocated to Pretoria ‘for security reasons’. In “Long Walk to Freedom”, Nelson Mandela records; “It was a great barn of a building, with a corrugated iron roof, and considered the only public building large enough to support a trial of so many accused.” Gerard-Mark van der Waal in his book, “From Mining Camp to Metropolis” describes the building design as somewhat “removed from the Beaux Arts mode”!
I wrote the following about the Drill Hall just last year (Citichat 41 of 19 October 2001) – “The building is owned by the State which has neglected it to the stage that it is totally overrun by squatters, a haven for gangs and a centre of criminal activity. It is a cess-pit which constitutes a major potential health hazard, a number of fires have resulted in damage and it has been condemned as structurally unsound. Yet the State does nothing!”
A fire had taken place earlier last year, in June, in which nine people had died and the Council committed itself to relocate the largely homeless inhabitants and seal the building off against further invasion. It didn’t happen.
The wise words from one of the great American city practitioners, the late Dan Sweat of Atlanta, came to mind as I looked at the ruins of Drill Hall earlier this week, now substantially destroyed by another fire in which another five people died. “If the city does not deal constructively with the urban poor, the urban poor will deal destructively with the city”. Whilst the loss of a valuable city heritage asset paled into insignificance in relation to the death of five of the city’s citizens, one has to ask oneself why there is no plan to deal with the urban poor.
After last year’s fire the State continued to do nothing. The City Council’s intention to demolish the building two years ago due to an engineer’s report on its lack of structural integrity was challenged by the SA Heritage Resource Agency (SAHRA) and the buck appears to have been generously passed around between all the parties ever since. But the squatters stayed and five more died in the blaze on Monday. Last evening’s TV news showed the start of the demolition of the fire damaged structures, only to be halted again by SAHRA. Squatters were claiming the right to move back into the ruins and the Executive Mayor was shown vowing that no-one would move back into the building. (It hasn’t been a good week for our Mayor. Over the weekend his home was attacked by a mob each of whom had had their electricity cut off by the Council due to extended non-payment. They claimed that the provision of free electricity was a right.)
Back to the Drill Hall – so who’s the guilty party? In my mind, firstly, all levels of government for the plight of the homeless appears to not merely be a low priority but is actually off the screen completely. Secondly, the bureaucracy that puts protocols and processes before the lives of people. . Certainly the State’s recalcitrance has been matched by the City’s paralysis and lack of will to rehouse the illegal squatters whilst Provincial Government seem nowhere to be found. Our Justice system appears unable or unwilling to deal with issues that affect the life and death of the poor. “If the city does not deal constructively with the urban poor, the urban poor will deal destructively with the city”
My concern is that Drill Hall is not an isolated example. There are at least ten to twelve other buildings in the inner city that have already been identified as being illegally occupied and a hazard to the city and the occupants. Most have been abandoned long since by their owners and some have become centres for drugs and crime, often occupied by street children high on petrol ‘sniffing’, unbelievably unhygienic, no electricity or water or sewage services. Deathtraps waiting for tragedy to happen. Others, such as one I visited last week, whilst having probably one hundred illegal occupiers and no services, was a model of order and cleanliness. But the people should not be there. Orderly or disorderly, illegal occupation of privately owned buildings whether the owner has fled or not, are not in the interests of the city and decidedly not in the interests of the occupiers in terms of their health and mortality! Some years ago in Philadelphia, Penn., a civil rights movement challenged the right of the authorities to prohibit the city’s pavements being used as homes for the homeless when other alternatives were available. Research produced in the case showed that street people could anticipate a pronounced reduction in life expectancy in comparison to those persons who enjoy shelter. Protecting the rights of people to live on the streets was merely guaranteeing them an early death. By doing nothing about our illegal squatters our authorities are doing virtually the same. What’s the plan? What’s the strategy? Do we have a Joburg 2030 for the urban poor? I know many councillors have a passion for resolving the issues of the poor and who do great work individually against huge odds of indifference and disinterest often handcuffed by bureaucracy. Those that have the heart to provide solutions such as the Johannesburg Homeless Trust, battle for many months and years to receive official support for their efforts. What is it about our world that makes inhumane regimes efficient and democratic government inefficient and unfeeling?
The situation is being further exploited by slum lords. They take advantage of the low prices of the older inner city office buildings and cram as many people as they can into structures not designed for residential occupation without submitting plans or altering the buildings to comply with regulations. For R650.00 per month you share a room with half a dozen others and use communal toilet facilities where one or two toilet cubicles are converted into showers. One such building, already occupied for over a year, does not comply with rational fire design requirements. Nothing is done. Council officials tell me that the process to deal with this situation through the courts will take two to three years! We have no adequate zoning laws. A year ago the Johannesburg Inner City Business Coalition, recognising the gravity of the situation, offered to pay for fast tracking the development of appropriate new legislation and by-laws. Council says it doesn’t need help, and a year down the track I still haven’t seen a draft nor can I find out when the new bylaws will emerge. A property owner offers to take over derelict buildings in his immediate vicinity and re-instate them at his cost if the council will relocate the inhabitants yet can get no reaction from the authorities. In the meantime the buildings drag down the environment, depreciate the efforts and investments of people who are genuinely working to upgrade the city and the lives of the inhabitants are put at risk.
The end of a heavy week so let’s lighten up as we go from one extreme to the other which is after all what a city is all about! The buck are back in town! Remember the leaping sprinbok artwork that graced the fountain in Oppenheimer Park? About a year ago they were vandalised and Anglo removed them for repair. Well, the restoration is complete and they have been re-erected in Anglo’s Main Street pedestrianised precinct. They look great in their new setting and are worth a visit.
Cheers, neil
Friday, April 5, 2002
Inner City Regional Office
CITICHAT 13/2002 - 5 April 2002
Inner City Regional Office
Another Bureaucracy or a much needed thrust?
Yakoob M Makda, JP, is the Regional Director of the Johannesburg Central Region. The Central Region (otherwise known as Region 8) is basically the area that I always refer to as the ‘Inner City’ stretching from Pageview/Fordsburg in the west to Judith’s Paarl in the East and from the M2 in the South to the other side of the Braamfontein ridge in the North. Although his higher education was in electrical engineering back in 1977, he was a Member of Parliament from 1989 to 1993 and Chief Whip in the House of Delegates then Deputy minister 1993/94 – firstly of Local Government and later of Housing and Welfare. From 1995 to 2000 he was a Johannesburg Councillor serving at Executive level and from last year the Regional Director of the Central region. A man of great political understanding balanced with practical education and business experience.
On Tuesday, at the monthly Inner City Committee, attended by representatives of business, community, labour, councillors and council officials, Yakoob Makda revealed his plan for the Council’s Inner City Regeneration Programme, consisting of a short term “Jozi Upgrade Task Force” which will operate over the next eighteen months within the longer term – thirty six months - “Jozi Upgrade Programme”.
The Regeneration Programme was adopted by Council in December last year and flows from the Executive Mayor’s recognition of the Inner City as one of the priorities during his term of office. Driving the Programme will be a Regional Manager (interviews currently underway) who will report to Mr Makda and who will co-ordinate the following; Unsafe Buildings Demolition Programme; the Better Buildings Programme; the Precinct Upgrade Programme; the Informal Trading Markets Programme; Taxi Ranks Programme and Peripheral Regeneration Programme. The first five programmes work from the centre towards the periphery and the last from the edges of the region, inwards. These are not new programmes, but in truth, have desperately needed co-ordination and direction. The programmes will be supported by four units, those of Law Enforcement, Building Control/Land Use; Environmental Clean Up and Infrastructure.
OK, what have we here? The creation of a new bureaucracy or a genuine attempt to come to grips on a practical basis with the issues that negatively impact on the daily lives of city users. Certainly there is some of the former present but the saving grace could be that Yakoob Makda is actually stepping into what I have perceived to be a major problem, the vacuum created by the closure of the Inner City Office last year. The background is a long and complex one, but when was anything associated with the inner city of Johannesburg not?
The past seven years has seen the Council changing both its structure and personality as it has come to grips with democratic local government for the first time in the country’s history. Prior to 1995, Johannesburg was a city-wide municipality in direct competition with numerous other smaller, less wealthy municipalities and large disadvantaged areas that surrounded it. My perception of Council in the years just prior to this time was one of self-enforced political paralysis. We had a non-representative group of mostly white councillors elected by white ratepayers and a bureaucracy staffed predominantly by white officials. The white politicians were very aware of the massive impending changes, and, my own perception again, seemed to take the attitude of doing as little as possible in the Inner City so as not to upset the ‘new’ electorate. The city suffered. The changes brought about following the 1995 elections were prodigious. Brand new councillors started dismantling the local authority apartheid structures and implementing new. The new proved to be an interim approach but included absorbing the peripheral independent councils and disadvantaged areas into a Metropolitan structure which was then gerrymandered into four interim sub-structures each with their own council under a Metropolitan authority - but the inner city remained neglected. In fact three of the four sub-structures trisected the inner city making accountability, service delivery and communication non-existent – despite protestations to the contrary! In 1996 the business sector convinced the authorities to undertake an exercise which brought business, community, local and provincial government around a table to craft a vision for the inner city. (Because of the historic suspicions and mistrust between sectors, four independent sectoral visions were first developed, we never do things by halves!) When the final vision emerged in 1997, .the question in business’ mind related to who or what would be responsible for implementing action to achieve the vision and monitoring progress along the way. Business recommended that a focused unit be established within Council to develop the necessary implementation policies/strategies and also to co-ordinate the disparate efforts of the sub-councils. This resulted in the establishment of the Inner City Office under the direction of an Inner City Manager. Major responsibilities were the development of strategies that would lead to the achievement of the vision, associated policy formulation, resultant project implementation and service delivery co-ordination. An Inner City Committee was established to monitor progress.
Whilst the Inner City Office proved to be highly successful in its work, the interim structure of four Metropolitan sub-councils was disastrous. In 2000 new elections were held on the basis of a ‘unicity’ model, Metropolitan boundaries were extended but the whole caboodle now fell under one Metro Council and an Executive Mayor. The area covered by the Metro was huge, some 2 300 square kilometres which makes it physical size-wise equivalent to Los Angeles and larger than Sydney, New York or even London! The planners considered the area too large for efficient service delivery and so it was again sub-divided into some 11 ‘regions’ - this time the sub-division wasn’t to accommodate political needs but practical considerations. The Inner City, as delineated through the visioning process, became one of these regions, Region 8. Apart from co-ordinating and ensuring that they receive services via various service agencies, the Regions would each be responsible for Social Services; Libraries; Health; Sport and Recreation and Housing. The all important functions of Policy, Planning, Finance, Project Implementation, etc would be centralised. The Inner City Office in this new scenario would largely become superfluous.
Business now became concerned that the impetus that had been built up in the inner city would falter without the Inner City Office leadership as the stage had been reached where project implementation was the immediate need. The projects identified and ready for implementation would now stand in line with projects throughout the Metro. Business therefore supported a move to convert the Inner City Office into a development agency whose initial focus would be project implementation in the inner city area but ultimately would function over the whole metro area on a broader basis than just implementation.. So the Johannesburg Development Agency came into being.
In practice, the disappearance of the Inner City Office as the focal point for all issues of inner city regeneration, set our efforts back. Whilst the JDA took over the project implementation responsibility, which has therefore continued to be driven effectively, and the Region took over service delivery oversight, the other functions of the Inner City Office were absorbed back into the normal departmental functions of the Metro and disappeared into the bureaucratic pit. In my opinion, during the past six months we actually lost some of the ground we had built up over the past few years.
So, whilst some might see Yakoob Makda’s initiative as just another bureaucracy, I don’t believe that it has to be that - it is critical for the achievement of our goals and setting the foundations for Joburg 2030.– a great deal will now depend on the support he gets within Council. Certainly, he will have the Business sector’s support. The ‘size’ of one of his problems was highlighted in this snippet entitled “dirty old town”in the Economist earlier this year!
“Efforts to spruce up the central business district of downtown Johannesburg haven’t produced many results, at least according to one newspaper’s survey. Although the Council – and Pikitup, a company hired to clear the grime – spends 48 million rand a year picking up rubbish in the inner city, the area has been named the dirtiest of all the business districts in Gauteng province by South Africa’s Sunday Times. Sandton, the far flashier business district in northern Johannesburg, where the stock exchange and many big companies have offices, was picked as the most sparkling. That was, perhaps, because nobody walks there and few hawkers ply a trade, whereas downtown Jo’burg remains far more popular than sterile Sandton – at least for litter bugs. Combine all the districts around Johannesburg, such as downtown Sandton, Germiston, Boksburg, Kempton Park, and over 550 tonnes of refuse and litter are scooped up each day. Phew.”
In typical inaccurate media fashion, Germiston, Boksburg and Kempton Park are not even in the Joburg Metro, but the facts provided by the City’s web page (why do we advertise such issues coupled with such useful information that our altitude at 2000 metres means that the air is thinner and eggs take an extra minute to boil?????) is that the city collects 1 416 500 tons of garbage each year of which 244 200 is in the form of illegal dumping. Phew. Good luck, Yakoob.
Regards, neil
Inner City Regional Office
Another Bureaucracy or a much needed thrust?
Yakoob M Makda, JP, is the Regional Director of the Johannesburg Central Region. The Central Region (otherwise known as Region 8) is basically the area that I always refer to as the ‘Inner City’ stretching from Pageview/Fordsburg in the west to Judith’s Paarl in the East and from the M2 in the South to the other side of the Braamfontein ridge in the North. Although his higher education was in electrical engineering back in 1977, he was a Member of Parliament from 1989 to 1993 and Chief Whip in the House of Delegates then Deputy minister 1993/94 – firstly of Local Government and later of Housing and Welfare. From 1995 to 2000 he was a Johannesburg Councillor serving at Executive level and from last year the Regional Director of the Central region. A man of great political understanding balanced with practical education and business experience.
On Tuesday, at the monthly Inner City Committee, attended by representatives of business, community, labour, councillors and council officials, Yakoob Makda revealed his plan for the Council’s Inner City Regeneration Programme, consisting of a short term “Jozi Upgrade Task Force” which will operate over the next eighteen months within the longer term – thirty six months - “Jozi Upgrade Programme”.
The Regeneration Programme was adopted by Council in December last year and flows from the Executive Mayor’s recognition of the Inner City as one of the priorities during his term of office. Driving the Programme will be a Regional Manager (interviews currently underway) who will report to Mr Makda and who will co-ordinate the following; Unsafe Buildings Demolition Programme; the Better Buildings Programme; the Precinct Upgrade Programme; the Informal Trading Markets Programme; Taxi Ranks Programme and Peripheral Regeneration Programme. The first five programmes work from the centre towards the periphery and the last from the edges of the region, inwards. These are not new programmes, but in truth, have desperately needed co-ordination and direction. The programmes will be supported by four units, those of Law Enforcement, Building Control/Land Use; Environmental Clean Up and Infrastructure.
OK, what have we here? The creation of a new bureaucracy or a genuine attempt to come to grips on a practical basis with the issues that negatively impact on the daily lives of city users. Certainly there is some of the former present but the saving grace could be that Yakoob Makda is actually stepping into what I have perceived to be a major problem, the vacuum created by the closure of the Inner City Office last year. The background is a long and complex one, but when was anything associated with the inner city of Johannesburg not?
The past seven years has seen the Council changing both its structure and personality as it has come to grips with democratic local government for the first time in the country’s history. Prior to 1995, Johannesburg was a city-wide municipality in direct competition with numerous other smaller, less wealthy municipalities and large disadvantaged areas that surrounded it. My perception of Council in the years just prior to this time was one of self-enforced political paralysis. We had a non-representative group of mostly white councillors elected by white ratepayers and a bureaucracy staffed predominantly by white officials. The white politicians were very aware of the massive impending changes, and, my own perception again, seemed to take the attitude of doing as little as possible in the Inner City so as not to upset the ‘new’ electorate. The city suffered. The changes brought about following the 1995 elections were prodigious. Brand new councillors started dismantling the local authority apartheid structures and implementing new. The new proved to be an interim approach but included absorbing the peripheral independent councils and disadvantaged areas into a Metropolitan structure which was then gerrymandered into four interim sub-structures each with their own council under a Metropolitan authority - but the inner city remained neglected. In fact three of the four sub-structures trisected the inner city making accountability, service delivery and communication non-existent – despite protestations to the contrary! In 1996 the business sector convinced the authorities to undertake an exercise which brought business, community, local and provincial government around a table to craft a vision for the inner city. (Because of the historic suspicions and mistrust between sectors, four independent sectoral visions were first developed, we never do things by halves!) When the final vision emerged in 1997, .the question in business’ mind related to who or what would be responsible for implementing action to achieve the vision and monitoring progress along the way. Business recommended that a focused unit be established within Council to develop the necessary implementation policies/strategies and also to co-ordinate the disparate efforts of the sub-councils. This resulted in the establishment of the Inner City Office under the direction of an Inner City Manager. Major responsibilities were the development of strategies that would lead to the achievement of the vision, associated policy formulation, resultant project implementation and service delivery co-ordination. An Inner City Committee was established to monitor progress.
Whilst the Inner City Office proved to be highly successful in its work, the interim structure of four Metropolitan sub-councils was disastrous. In 2000 new elections were held on the basis of a ‘unicity’ model, Metropolitan boundaries were extended but the whole caboodle now fell under one Metro Council and an Executive Mayor. The area covered by the Metro was huge, some 2 300 square kilometres which makes it physical size-wise equivalent to Los Angeles and larger than Sydney, New York or even London! The planners considered the area too large for efficient service delivery and so it was again sub-divided into some 11 ‘regions’ - this time the sub-division wasn’t to accommodate political needs but practical considerations. The Inner City, as delineated through the visioning process, became one of these regions, Region 8. Apart from co-ordinating and ensuring that they receive services via various service agencies, the Regions would each be responsible for Social Services; Libraries; Health; Sport and Recreation and Housing. The all important functions of Policy, Planning, Finance, Project Implementation, etc would be centralised. The Inner City Office in this new scenario would largely become superfluous.
Business now became concerned that the impetus that had been built up in the inner city would falter without the Inner City Office leadership as the stage had been reached where project implementation was the immediate need. The projects identified and ready for implementation would now stand in line with projects throughout the Metro. Business therefore supported a move to convert the Inner City Office into a development agency whose initial focus would be project implementation in the inner city area but ultimately would function over the whole metro area on a broader basis than just implementation.. So the Johannesburg Development Agency came into being.
In practice, the disappearance of the Inner City Office as the focal point for all issues of inner city regeneration, set our efforts back. Whilst the JDA took over the project implementation responsibility, which has therefore continued to be driven effectively, and the Region took over service delivery oversight, the other functions of the Inner City Office were absorbed back into the normal departmental functions of the Metro and disappeared into the bureaucratic pit. In my opinion, during the past six months we actually lost some of the ground we had built up over the past few years.
So, whilst some might see Yakoob Makda’s initiative as just another bureaucracy, I don’t believe that it has to be that - it is critical for the achievement of our goals and setting the foundations for Joburg 2030.– a great deal will now depend on the support he gets within Council. Certainly, he will have the Business sector’s support. The ‘size’ of one of his problems was highlighted in this snippet entitled “dirty old town”in the Economist earlier this year!
“Efforts to spruce up the central business district of downtown Johannesburg haven’t produced many results, at least according to one newspaper’s survey. Although the Council – and Pikitup, a company hired to clear the grime – spends 48 million rand a year picking up rubbish in the inner city, the area has been named the dirtiest of all the business districts in Gauteng province by South Africa’s Sunday Times. Sandton, the far flashier business district in northern Johannesburg, where the stock exchange and many big companies have offices, was picked as the most sparkling. That was, perhaps, because nobody walks there and few hawkers ply a trade, whereas downtown Jo’burg remains far more popular than sterile Sandton – at least for litter bugs. Combine all the districts around Johannesburg, such as downtown Sandton, Germiston, Boksburg, Kempton Park, and over 550 tonnes of refuse and litter are scooped up each day. Phew.”
In typical inaccurate media fashion, Germiston, Boksburg and Kempton Park are not even in the Joburg Metro, but the facts provided by the City’s web page (why do we advertise such issues coupled with such useful information that our altitude at 2000 metres means that the air is thinner and eggs take an extra minute to boil?????) is that the city collects 1 416 500 tons of garbage each year of which 244 200 is in the form of illegal dumping. Phew. Good luck, Yakoob.
Regards, neil
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