Drive to regenerate decaying heart of Jo'burg

For more than 25 years, Kippies jazz club was the heart of South Africa's dynamic music scene. During apartheid, multiracial audiences defied calls for segregation and packed the dimly lit club in Johannesburg's inner city Newtown neighbourhood. Offering a platform for both established greats and up-and-coming artists, Kippies became a stalwart of South African culture, hosting acts such as jazz trumpeter and musician Hugh Masekela, and vocalists Miriam Makeba and Thandiswa Mazwai. Performers who made it to Kippies had a tradition of signing a backstage wall, famously covered in the graffiti of the nation's best musicians. "If you performed at Kippies, your worth as a musician was made," said Sipho 'Hotstix' Mabuse, a Soweto-based musician who has owned the club for the past 12 years. Kippies was "uniquely South African," he said. While nightclubs throughout the world often displayed images of jazz frontrunners from the Americas and Europe, Kippies made a point of adorning its smoky interior only with photographs of South African musicians. "It gave identity to South African music," Mabuse said. But that identity may be threatened. Kippies closed on 31 December 2004, the result of a multibillion-rand urban renewal project in Johannesburg. After a city-sponsored study found it structurally unsafe, the Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA) ordered the building demolished. The closure of Kippies tells a larger story of urban regeneration and gentrification in Africa's wealthiest urban region. It is also a microcosm of the challenges of urban renewal across the continent, as local residents and developers often differ on what "development" really means in the modern African metropolis. "In a sense, it comes down to what the city fathers aspire to for their city," said Andre Leroux, an independent cultural consultant based in Johannesburg. "Do they want it to be an African city, or do they want it to be a sanitised version of a European city in Africa?" Newtown's Cultural History Located next to Johannesburg's downtown business district, Newtown is the city's self-proclaimed "cultural precinct", and the target of a massive redevelopment project headed by the JDA and Blue IQ, a consulting firm for the surrounding Gauteng province. According to city planners, the idea is to make Newtown "a safe and attractive place to work, live and visit" by promoting the neighbourhood's rich cultural history. In the late nineteenth century, Newtown - in a clay-rich region characterised by kilns - was known as Brickfields. During the early days of the gold-rush city, the commercial district rapidly became a thriving centre of trade and industry, where multiracial crowds gathered to buy and sell goods in what soon became Johannesburg's cultural crossroads. Over time, Newtown suffered as apartheid restricted movement of most of the city's residents, many of whom moved from the inner cities to the suburbs, and urban sprawl drained commerce from the city centre. Now, more than a decade after apartheid, that trend is reversing, and Newtown is touted by Johannesburg as a model of inner-city regeneration. It is home to a range of cultural outlets, including the Newtown Music Hall, the Dance Factory, and Museum Africa. Dust and din from the construction of a new science museum resonates across Ella Fitzgerald Square - the vast plaza that marks the centre of the neighbourhood. A few blocks away, housing developments with more than 2,000 mixed-income homes are being built on land where slums once stood. It's an impressive undertaking, but not everyone is happy. Locals in Newtown grumble that while the neighbourhood has drawn a few more tourists and customers, thanks to a safer image, the high-profile upgrade has been poorly implemented. "Newtown is losing its originality and it's becoming a brand," said Elisabet Nel, an owner of the Couch & Coffee café in Newtown's commercial centre. Nel said renewal in the neighbourhood had largely been isolated to cosmetic upgrades, such as the installation of sculptures and artistic lighting, while maintenance of basic infrastructure had been ignored. Burst pipes, poor road drainage and broken streetlights were just some of the regular services ignored in Newtown, she said, adding that it was hard to draw customers in when the electricity regularly went out. "The JDA is here for a short period of time, and they think they're doing a whole lot, but then they leave and we're left with the mess," Nel said. Many residents criticised the neighbourhood's increasing commercialisation and bemoaned the local opening of Nando's, a popular fast-food restaurant. Others slammed an upscale restaurant chain located at the Market Theatre, a venue that was a hotbed of political satire and comedy during the apartheid years. Critics said the chain, called Moyo, was just one of a number of businesses who now catered to the wealthy elite, instead of average citizens. "No one who lives or works in Newtown can afford a R25 [US $4] coffee," Nel commented. Some residents and tenants wondered whether urban redevelopment was actually stifling cultural and economic opportunities instead of creating them. Thabo Mamiane, a co-owner of Couch & Coffee, said many small-business owners, including craft vendors, had been pushed out of the popular thoroughfare outside the Market Theatre. He said local tenants were getting increasingly frustrated because the JDA and other city agencies didn't make their development plans known to small business owners, nor did they seek their input. "We tenants call the JDA the 'Johannesburg Destruction Agency,' not 'Development Agency'," he said, adding that tenants might organise to air their grievances. Modern Johannesburg Developed Under Oppression Urban development in Johannesburg reflected the history of apartheid and racial oppression in South Africa; a legacy that developed infrastructure for the white, wealthy minority, while restricting the housing options of the working majority, most of whom were required to live in designated areas outside the city centre. "What happens in Johannesburg is, in a sense, what happens in the rest of South Africa, and is a reflection of the process of transformation," said Graeme Reid, chief executive officer of the Johannesburg Development Agency. Johannesburg is the wealthiest urban centre in South Africa. While reliable income data is hard to come by, a 2004 report by a nationwide municipal initiative, called the Cities Network, noted that employed residents earned a mean average of R6,409 (about $1,068) a month - almost R1,200 ($200) more than the average in the nation's nine largest municipal regions. Yet Johannesburg parallels other South African cities, with about a fifth of all residents reporting no income whatsoever in the most recent census (2001), according to Graeme Gotz, author of the Cities Network report. The city has also experienced a massive influx of residents in recent years. After 1990 there was a rapid demographic shift in the city centre as thousands of rural South Africans, as well as asylum seekers and economic migrants from outside South Africa, moved in. The sheer numbers of new residents strained the existing city infrastructure and services. "From 1991 to 1996, the residential population in the inner city of Johannesburg increased by 25 percent, without any increase in housing stock," Reid said. Johannesburg continued to grow by more than 4 percent between 1996 and 2001, according to the Cities Network report. Because of the rapid population growth in the urban centre, crime rates also soared, said Tombolo Masilela, spokeswoman for the Johannesburg Housing Company. As a result, corporations started 'red-lining' parts of the city, considering it too risky to develop. "It's imperative to bring people back into the city, because businesses have left and we need capital to survive," said Masilela, whose organisation has redeveloped 8 percent of inner-city housing - or about 2,000 units - in the past decade. Jill Strelitz, executive director of operations at the National Urban Reconstruction and Housing Agency, a financing company that funds construction of low- and middle-income housing, added that urban renewal must go beyond physical upgrades. "Urban regeneration - in many senses - is a physical endeavour. And real regeneration is about social processes, because you're dealing with people ... and poverty," Strelitz said. "I don't think you're going to solve that by giving a face-lift to a building." Inner-City Poor Sidelined, Critics Say Since 2001, public and private investment in the inner city of Johannesburg has exceeded R1.5 billion (about $254 million), said JDA's Reid, adding that even this estimate was "very conservative" and didn't account for all private investment. In the midst of this wealth, inner-city property values are skyrocketing. "Five years ago, no one wanted to buy apartments in downtown Johannesburg - now inner-city flats are selling for R1 million (about $170,000) or more," said cultural consultant Leroux. "There's a schism between rich and poor, and it's going to be really sad if the city becomes, again, only for the rich." Others are concerned that the city's efforts to modernise will mean ignoring the needs of its poorest residents. "Johannesburg stands to be an emblem within the African region as the African metropolis," said Nellie Agingu, executive director of PlanAct, a community development agency in Gauteng province. "We would hope that the new developments seek much more economic integration." Agingu said overcrowding and lack of services still persisted in much of downtown Johannesburg. In one case, she said, two high-rises have not had water or electricity since September 2004, and residents had to carry water up to their flats, some to the 20th floor. Yet, in the midst of structural improvements, the poorest inner-city residents are often relocated to housing projects on the city's fringes, which Agingu said was not a fair solution. "The urban poor have a right to be in the inner city. They have a right to enjoy the cultural, social, and economic amenities that a city provides." Reid responded by pointing out that the JDA wants all residents, including the poor, to benefit from economic successes of urban renewal. "We have to find ways ... [of] consciously working with people to make sure they continue to be part of the upturn," said Reid. "We want people to get richer and to live in better environments. While there will be some displacements, they will be as small as possible and ... the consequences will be as minimal as possible." Meanwhile, those who live and work in the Newtown neighbourhood continue to express frustration with city officials, who don't consult them about how to maintain cultural integrity and economic diversity in the area's redevelopment. If such trends continue, they say, there will be long-standing implications for Johannesburg's future. "For a city to grow, there is a need for economic vibrancy, but there is also a very strong need for cultural vibrancy, and you cannot separate the two," said owner of Kippies jazz club Mabuse. "Five years from now, you'll probably be looking at a city where all of us will be either very proud or very disappointed." See Special Report on Southern African cities in transition