دانلود مقاله ISI انگلیسی شماره 254
ترجمه فارسی عنوان مقاله

بازسازی شهر درونی ژوهانسبورگ

عنوان انگلیسی
Reinventing the Johannesburg inner city
کد مقاله سال انتشار تعداد صفحات مقاله انگلیسی
254 2000 9 صفحه PDF
منبع

Publisher : Elsevier - Science Direct (الزویر - ساینس دایرکت)

Journal : Cities, Volume 17, Issue 3, June 2000, Pages 185–193

ترجمه کلمات کلیدی
آفریقای جنوبی - توسعه اقتصادی - جهانی شدن - تصاویر شهری - مدیریت و بازاریابی
کلمات کلیدی انگلیسی
پیش نمایش مقاله
پیش نمایش مقاله  بازسازی شهر درونی ژوهانسبورگ

چکیده انگلیسی

After the discovery of the Witwatersrand gold reef in 1886, the city of Johannesburg became, within a very short period of time, the financial and commercial hub of sub-Saharan Africa. It maintained this position throughout the earlier half of the twentieth century in the face of increasing opposition to the apartheid political system. By the late 1980s, however, this had changed. The restructuring of the global economy and increasing political pressure had resulted in a city whose economic base was declining and in which the social and economic exclusion upon which it had been built was no longer sustainable. This resulted in successive attempts by the urban authorities to reinvent a city which could claim a position in the mainstream global economy and become a city all its citizens could feel part of. This paper sketches these attempts, locates them in certain traditions of urban regeneration and exposes their theoretical and practical inadequacies.

مقدمه انگلیسی

Since 1990, Johannesburg's local authority has spearheaded two local economic development initiatives to reinvent, re-image and reformulate its inner city landscape. These have been driven by the twin objectives of positioning the city advantageously in the global economy and averting the urban economic decline experienced from the 1970s onwards. To do this, images have been constructed of the city's future, around which investment, public opinion and social accord have been mobilized. This paper begins by outlining the changing character of the Johannesburg inner city, in particular from the 1970s onwards, as a background for examining these local economic development initiatives and the images invented to shape them. It then presents the successive approaches to urban revitalization in Johannesburg and traces the threads of commonality and difference between them, in particular their quest for “world city” status and their changing, but continually ambivalent, relation to Africa. Having explored the conceptual inadequacies of this official policy making, I conclude by locating Johannesburg's future within a theoretical understanding of the complexity, interdependence and unevenness of current global restructuring and of Africa's likely place within it.

نتیجه گیری انگلیسی

This recent and ongoing history of development in the Johannesburg inner city tells of the transformation, reformulation and re-imagining of an urban landscape. The decline of its industrial base, loss of relative strength in the national economy, the flight of corporate capital, changing racial demography of its residential suburbs and burgeoning informal sector transformed a business district which could rightfully claim its position as the financial and commercial hub of sub-Saharan Africa into one which, in the latest formulations of the city authorities, is identified as a Priority Intervention Zone (PIZ) (Greater Johannesburg, 1999b). This paper has traced the responses of the city authorities to this transformation by examining the two local economic development initiatives formulated since 1990, one before and one after the democratic elections. The first was expansionist and buoyant. It relied on an aesthetic, property-led development programme to regenerate a declining economy, re-image a city tarnished by its oppressive, racist past and position Johannesburg as a “world city” as it entered the global economy. The second was more cautious and less speculative, advocating an environmentally-led programme of stabilization and neighborhood development to address immediate problems of inner city decay, as a precursor to growth. This is in line with most discussions of the future of cities post-1980 (Davies and Champion, 1983; Williams and Smith, 1986), which argue that the world economic crisis of 1973 and the subsequent restructuring of the global economy have rendered speculative extrapolation impossible and linked national and local economies into complex, integrated, interdependent unpredictable networks (Williams and Smith, 1986; Castells, 1996). However, it is this complexity and interdependency, and the substantive forces involved, which are not yet fully acknowledged or embraced in Johannesburg (Tomlinson, 1998). City authorities are still fixated on the image of Johannesburg as a “world class, globally competitive city” (Greater Johannesburg, 1999b: 10). This mantra has justified political and economic programs of urban restructuring (the most recent being the iGoli 2002 plan (Greater Johannesburg, 1999b) in the interests of corporate capital. Amongst other things, these are characterized by somewhat naive understandings of the wider processes of global restructuring taking place and of Johannesburg's position within them. Integration of regions and cities into the world economy is uneven and contingent upon multiple contradictory tendencies. Castells (1996: 135) ominously predicts the “structural irrelevance” of most of Africa in the newest international division of labor.5 However, within the internal differentiation of Africa, South Africa is most likely to attract certain of the productive and managerial functions of the global economy. In doing so, it will also become a depository of large segments of the population around it who have been marginalized and who perceive the opportunities it offers as their only chance of survival. The large cities of South Africa – Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town – are the places where this marginality will most likely make itself visible. This is what has been witnessed recently in the inner city of Johannesburg. Capital disinvestment has created a space for those excluded from formal economic activity to gain a foothold in the urban system. Micro-enterprise, survivalist trade, illicit economic activity (Jennings et al, 1995a and Jennings et al, 1995b; Rogerson, 1995; Tomlinson et al, 1995) and, more particularly, migratory economic activity, cross-border trade and the presence in the city of immigrant entrepreneurs (Crush, 1997; Simone, 1998; Reitzes et al, 1997; Rogerson, 1997 and Rogerson, 1998), are becoming significant and possibly structural features of the inner city economy as in other parts of the world (Castells and Portes, 1989). In addition, the increasing occupancy by small African enterprises of the lower grade office space in the inner city has changed the complexion of inner city commerce (Tomlinson et al, 1995). These new presences are, however, largely absent from official policy making (Haffajee, 1998a and Haffajee, 1998b). These new residents have been well-used by the popular media to construct new urban imagery of the inner city as diseased, crime riddled, dangerous and disordered (City Press, 1997; Warren, 1996; Robertson, 1997). They are less than social; they are part of the physical environment to be sanitized, relocated and rendered invisible (Ramothata, 1996). Reactionary protectionism against foreigners demands their restriction into enclaves of exclusion or repatriation (Simone, 1998; Paton, 1999; Masunda, 1999). Frontier imagery, reminiscent of that in American literature and popular media (Smith, 1986), portrays the inner city as the new “meeting point between savagery and civilization” (Turner, 1958, in Smith, 1986: 15). Images of nature (“Hillbrow tenants conquering their own Everest”, Prabhakaran, 1997: 6) and conquest (“Send task force to save Hillbrow”, Madondo, 1997: 26) connote a place beyond the limits of civilization. It is black, threatening, untamed and barbaric. Urban regeneration has, to date, aimed at its conquest and re-incorporation into the civilized white world of corporate respectability. Until this image of the future is superceded by one which incorporates the multitude of contradictory presences and dynamics at play in the new global city, Johannesburg's present will continue to be defined along modernist lines as defective, degenerative and decayed. While new efforts to consolidate an African identity and position in the global economy through the image of an African Renaissance are currently emerging (Mangcu, 1998), these have only provisionally touched upon the issue of a contemporary African spatiality. Simone (1998)suggests the recovery of the original function of most African cities as points of crossing – entry, exit, crossroads, railheads, etc – as a means of making sense of current translocations, while Tomlinson (1998)premises a vision for the future on the principles of economic and social inclusion. This means finding appropriate institutions to manage the co-existence of transience and stasis, of global and local, corporate and provisional, in any political or economic programme of urban restructuring. It requires adopting critical relations to current institutions, urbanism and practice and defining new ways of working, thinking and representing the city. Here the “blank___” exhibition (Judin and Vladislavic, 1998), and certain contributors to its catalogue, are significant in redefining the terrain. Students in my department have been engaged in work which grapples with issues of urban transformation, seeking to interpret the found, modernist landscape according to its new dynamics (Place et al, 1999). They are currently involved in a programme to track social change through the making of things, in this case, for hair stylists and street gamblers, with a view towards designing an emporium of such activities in a disused parking garage. Instead of seeing the inner city as lost or abandoned, this work sees it as something being remade according to new presences, occupations and programs, in whose logics and intersections the future lies. Making such presences visible will give them a chance to shape a new, fragmentary, provisional image of the future.