Taming the Disorderly City by Martin J. Murray

Author:Martin J. Murray [Murray, Martin J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, Urban, History, Africa, South, Republic of South Africa, Architecture, Urban & Land Use Planning
ISBN: 9781501716997
Google: 1XMzDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2017-08-31T03:30:11+00:00

The Perverse Logic of the Slumlord Economy: The Temporal and Spatial Rhythms of the Building Cycle

[Building hijacking] is the quickest and easiest way of making millions of rands. [Building hijackers] are making the city ungovernable.

Property Consultant Who asked to remain anonymous

Conventional theories of urban transformation typically portray the metamorphosis of cities through the juxtaposition of a series of time-lapse photographs, the then-and-now comparisons or before-and-after contrasts, depicting the urban landscape as something akin to a living organism moving forward over time in accordance with a natural cycle of growth and development.4 Despite the elegance and parsimony of this formulation, this simple, linear narrative of organic growth and development tends to ignore, overlook, or obscure the convulsive (two steps forward, one step back) cycles of creative destruction and intentional rebuilding of the cityscape. Urban transformation is a contradictory and uneven process in which the alternating dynamics of growth and stagnation, development and decline, and expansion and contraction operate in tandem. Rather than looking on the disorder and chaos that accompany the growth and development of cities as the accidental effects or dysfunctional byproducts of urban transformation, it is much more fruitful to understand these debilitating traits, or “frictions of space” (Scobey 2002, 134–135), as integral components of city-building processes. Put in another way, contraction, stagnation, and decay are as central to the dynamics of real estate capitalism as growth, development, and expansion. Each reinforces the other. This mutual dependence of apparent opposite impulses lies at the heart of the city-building process (Scobey 2002, 143–146; Page 1999, 23–35). The city can be, at one and the same time, orderly and disorderly, stable and unstable, vibrant and moribund, or, as Rem Koolhaas (1994, 20) has put it in describing Manhattan, “a metropolis of rigid chaos.”

The Johannesburg inner city includes the central business district; the dense concentration of office blocks in Braamfontein at the northern edge; the high-density residential neighborhoods of Berea, Joubert Park, and Hillbrow; the lower-density eastern residential neighborhoods of Yeoville, Bertrams, Lorentzville, Troyeville, Judith’s Paarl, Doornfontein, and New Doornfontein; City Deep to the south; and the western areas of Newtown, Fordsburg, Pageview, Mayfair, Mayfair West, and Vrededorp. Residential properties vary from freestanding, owner-occupied homes to medium-density blocks of flats and high-rise apartment complexes. Ownership of residential property in the Johannesburg inner city is divided along a broad continuum, ranging from large-scale real estate holding companies with extensive holdings in apartment blocks with multiple rental units—like Trafalgar Properties and the thirty (or so) other large-scale property-owning groups organizationally linked under the auspices of the South African Property Owners Association (SAPOA)—to small-scale individual entrepreneurs, like retirees or pensioners, who rent a house or a building to a few tenants in order to supplement their incomes.5

The residential heartland consists of the eight neighborhoods that are collectively referred to as Zone 4: Hillbrow, Berea, Yeoville, Lorentzville, Troyeville, Judith’s Paarl, Bertrams, and Doornfontein. Over the past two decades, Zone 4 has experienced a downward spiral of neglect, abandonment, and decline. As white middle-class residents have abandoned

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