post/modern: two concepts of organic growth in johannesburg

Emily Appelbaum | Post/Modern: Two concepts of organic growth in Johannesburg 1

Post/Modern:

Two concepts of organic

growth in Johannesburg Visual Depictions are never just innocent illustrations. They are the material representations of ‘fields of

force’ frozen in historical time.

emily appelbaum

Yale University Department of Architecture

April, 2010


The Short of It:

(Abstract) Conceiving of urban growth and urban planning as ‘organic’ can create a striking metaphor

that (like most strong narratives) holds great power to influence policy. But how does such a poetic

imagining change in service to prevailing architectural trends? This paper examines the notion of the

organic and its role in a trajectory of developmentalist thought in post‐colonial Johannesburg by

juxtaposing the work of two urban planners who interpreted the metaphor in complimentary ways:

Maurice Emile Henri Rotival, and Thorsten Deckler.

Neither architect was chosen for the projects he built, but rather, because his primary mode

was the documentation of space. Both Rotival and Deckler spent great deals of time analyzing the

spatial patterns of the city, and each drew upon these analyses for his design ideas. By studying their

work, we gain critical insight into the ways these two figures, as representatives of two specific

moments in history, thought space was and should be created. This paper will draw heavily on

Lefebvre’s theory of the social production of space, which contends that space is produced through a

tripartite interaction of physical form, social practice, and representation.

Rotival and Deckler both exemplify and challenge a larger arc of thought describing the

development of cities in the post‐colonial era. Both will be positioned in relation to the discourses of

modernization and globalization, as well as the friction between wealthy, worldly city‐center and the

vastly poorer settlements that house the majority of Johannesburg’s populations. While it is tempting

to draw easy parallels — Rotival as the harbinger of a highly rationalized and naturalized modernism,

versus Deckler as the champion of spontaneous and fluid informal settlements in a time of

postmodernism and globalization — this paper will strive to dissemble such simple categories, and

look critically at the potentialities presented by each architect’s vision of organic urban design.

The Context:

A (very condensed) History of Planning in the New Urban Age The city is shaped by intangible lines of force; it is social, political and economic

pushes and pulls, rendered visible. The ordering of the city is the ordering of society.

If cities are the physical manifestations of societal forces, then how we grow our cities says

much about who we are. The contemporary aims and influences of urban planning are ever‐shifting, but

scholars agree that they owe much to the Industrial Revolution — a time when the field was catapulted

into prominence by the great upheavals of population, technology and sprawl that characterized turn‐

of‐the‐century Europe1. The bourgeoning populations and changing settlement patterns of newly

industrializing cities were enough to engender a restructuring of the way people saw and occupied

space.

The unfolding of the modern metropolis — centers like London and Paris, accompanied by slums

of urban poor and working class who pushed populations to top one million for the first time — was a

point of departure from the earlier structure of medieval towns, and these newly expansive cityscapes

became the first sites on which a ‘rationalization’ of the land took place on a large scale. Today, as cities

push the limit of not one but ten million (and as many as 22 conurbations have hit that mark),2 city


planners are faced with a whole new set of tasks, the first of which may be simply deciding what even

constitutes their role in these increasingly unrestrained new landscapes.

The metastasizing growth of

European cities during the industrial

revolution reinforced a view of

spontaneous, disorganized settlement as

impure and fundamentally flawed. The

hygienic, social, and political concerns that

accompanied this rapid phase of expansion

lent weight to arguments for the creation

order and legibility from ‘chaos;’ the

classic example of city as diagram of

power, of course, is the infamous set of

boulevards cut by French civic planner

Baron Haussmann in 19th century Paris, laid

in place by carving broad swatches out of

the city fabric.3 These boulevards were no

more highly visible than historic tropes of

urban monumentality (obelisks and grand

axes and triumphal arches) but, by cutting

through poor, dangerous and ‘rebellious’

areas of the city, and by broadening streets once narrow enough to be barricaded by revolutionaries,

Haussmann created the potential for control by eliminating illegibility.4

In the 20th century, the same desire for utopian order begat a less misanthropic brand of urban

design. The standard example of this more idealistic tendency toward rationalization is French‐Swiss

architect Le Corbusier, whose 1922 Ville Contemporaine, The City for Three Million, called for the razing

of central Paris and the insertion of a series of identical skyscrapers at regular intervals corralled within a

flat, rectangular urban park. If Haussmann’s approach to city planning represents the outright assertion

of authority, then the approach of idealistic 20th century modernists* like Le Corbusier represents a

reinforcement of the power structure, thinly veiled. While the idea of the ‘functional city’ may have

reached its apex with Le Corbusier’s 1928 founding of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne

(CIAM), its principles remained entrenched in the discourse among postwar of urban thinkers.

Especially after World War II, as Le Corbusier and his cohort developed new principles of modern

urbanism, their attention frequently turned to the nonwestern world, which was imagined, more often

than not, as a ‘blank slate.’ The Reconstruction of Europe and investment into the development of

* Nowhere in this paper is the term “modernist” capitalized—nor modernism, nor postmodern nor postmodernism nor postmodernist. This was a conscious decision to break to the distinction between a period of architectural Modernism and the larger modern tropes, the theories of modernization, and the modern aspirations that surrounded, informed, and indeed challenged it. By referring to these terms more generally, I seek to create an understanding of the crosspollination of their themes — in keeping with the larger aim of this paper. But, alas, I have capitalized the word Modernism once. Twice, now.

Figure 1 Paris, Quartier des Halles. Haussmann's monumental boulevards.

(Photo Source: Roland Collection.)


newly‐independent former European colonies, particularly in Africa, provided the perfect Petri dish in

which planners could incubate the new international project of High Modernism.

Even as postwar urban theorists came to

challenge Le Corbusier’s urge to formalistically

express power and control, the tenacity of CIAM

principles and the related International Style of

Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus, coupled with new

structures of international finance, helped

preserve the aesthetics, and indeed the power

structures, of prewar modernism.5 Spurred by

shifts in the political, economic and technological

climate following World War II, from the

immediate (the increasing availability of industrial

materials as war‐time manufacturing converted)

to the long‐term (the creation of the Bretton

Woods institutions whose policies would

determine the future of transnational markets

and development), the course of urbanization

was neatly chartered towards a Brave New World:

what Sharon Zukin describes as a “hegemonic

global urbanism.”6

Figure 2 Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine, the City for Three Million. Plan, elevation and perspective.

(Photo Source: Le Corbusier, Willy Boesiger.)

Figure 3.1 and 3.2 Chandigarh, India. Le Corbusier’s master plan for Chandigarh, and the Chandigarh High Court, an example of hi Unitè d’Habitation.

(Photo Source: mediaarchitecture.at; Wikimedia Commons.)


The Question:

New Hegemonies of Global Space

Hegemonic Global Space has been understood as a symptom of economic and political

forces of globalization, but as globalization is increasingly described as a series of flows,

reimagining globalization space becomes about linking past structures to the present.

In the context of high modern architecture, urban planners constructed a view of what the

landscape ‘should’ be, and this view was simply applied to the land; unified idealistic theories shaped

the new forms through which control was exerted. With postwar economic and political policies, this

tendency toward overt ‘application’ of formulae began to change toward a more covert and fluid system

through which landscapes—particularly those in developing world — were shaped. While scholars

agree that cities have always been the product of economic forces,7 the rapid and forced incorporation

of vast swatches of previously subsistence‐driven societies into the world market, and the widespread

urbanization that followed, created the “brutal tectonics of neoliberal globalization.”8 Older impulses

toward rationalizing the land were now accompanied by corresponding economic and political

structures: influences that frequently extended from the West into the less developed world. While a

detailed analysis of these economic and political structures is outside the scope of this booklet, it is

important to note that the changing urban landscape is intimately tied to the world political economy.

Market liberalization and IMF‐sponsored structural adjustment programs have altered the shape of

national trade policies, and thus affected livelihoods, urban‐rural demography and the make‐up of the

urban workforce. Foreign direct investment has influenced everything from income tax rates to

infrastructure projects to — as cities increasingly strive to ‘brand’ themselves — the identity and spatial

characteristics of urban areas.9 Thus, the spatial domination of the world by western forms is truly a

hegemony: accompanied by closely corresponding political and economic structures, insinuating itself

through cultural norms, and maintaining power through some sort of consensus (even if unwitting).10 It

is through these mechanisms, particularly neoliberalism, that the global landscape has been constructed

since the end of the Second World War, and it is worth bearing them in mind as we begin a more formal

spatial analysis.11 Though their mark is highly visible, they remain, for the most part, hidden as the

source of spatial patterns: “the transparency,” notes Fernando Coronil, “demanded by proponents of

the free market does not include making visible and accountable the new commanding heights of global

economic and political power.”12

Today’s new urban paradigms, each as much a socio‐economic construct as a spatial one,

include not only the widely referred‐to sky‐scrapers and business districts surrounded by strip malls and

miles of suburbs, but also (and increasingly) the pervasive urban slum .13 In a UC‐Berkeley‐sponsored

project entitled “New Geographies,” Nezar AlSayyad and Ananya Roy wrote, “If the previous fin‐de‐

siecle was marked by rabid discourses about the chaos of the First World metropolis, then at the turn of

this century, the Third World metropolis has emerged as the trope of social disorganization and

unfathomable crisis.”14 Thus, we’ve arrived, once again, at a landscape that breaks radically with the

past. Scholars are eager to point out that today, the changes are taking place on a scale and at a pace

unlike anything we’ve encountered before, both in the wealthy urban city centers, and most especially

in the daunting dilemma of the urban slum.


How has urban planning shaped these new formations, and how will it continue to respond to

the dual ubiquity of slum and city center — both incarnations of the new global hegemony of space?

Will the modernist ordering principle born to tame 19th century urban chaos once again rise to

prominence — indeed, has it never really disappeared? Or do these ‘radically new’ landscapes require a

different approach — one that successfully rejects the principles of modernism in favor of a new faith in

dynamic plurality?

Certainly, new methodologies have arisen. Alsayyad and Roy characterize the distinction

between responses to this newest crisis and the modernism that arose in response to its historical

counterpart: “If urban planning emerged as a 19th century drive to rationalize the city, then now the

ideology of ‘civil society’ — a celebration of grassroots movements and self‐management by the urban

poor — bears the new millennial promise of taming the urban crisis.”15 At the same time, those older

forms of top‐down management remain widespread. Even in an arguably ‘postmodern’ period of

architecture and urban theory, which champions specificity of place and local solutions, it is easy to find

the spatial logic of high modernism. Scholars argue that the vestiges of high modernism are due to the

persistence of the accompanying social and economic forms. Indeed, numerous scholars have

questioned what exactly is post modern about the postmodern landscape. David Harvey, in The

Condition of Postmodernity, actually refers to postmodernism as an intensification, rather than a

rejection, of the characteristic causes, and thus symptoms, of modernity.16 And yet, already, some

thinkers are beginning to reject the notion of cities as the physical structures of an urbanized economy,

and reimagine urban form as something entirely new: cities in today’s distanciated economies become

the sites, not necessarily as the physical sites of input and output flows, but rather, as the sites of

lubrication for those flows; modern economies can no longer be contained within the fixed boarders of

the city. Rather, cities are structured around “flows of people, images, information and money moving

within and across national borders. . . [generating] a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order of off‐

centeredness, as these multiple flows are chronically combined and recombined across times and

spaces.”17

With such seemingly disparate approaches to understanding the postcolonial city, how might

we begin to deconstruct the formation of urban space in the past and (most importantly) the future?

Does it even make sense to talk about ‘an’ urban landscape? Are there common threads that unite

planning in the developing world and the developed? The central city and the marginalized slum? The

modern and the postmodern? It is tempting to characterize each theoretical paradigm as an isolated

occurrence, a historical event unto itself unto itself. But it is far more productive to look for similarities.

The Overview:

Two Concepts of Organic Growth in Postwar Johannesburg

Johannesburg’s landscapes is carved by dual (hi)stories of power and resistance — a

dialectic that can be understood by reading the dialogues of its architects.

This booklet is concerned with drawing a comparison between urbanization patterns of the past

and present, especially with regard to the notion of spatial hegemony. Taking as its starting point a

landscape — Johannesburg — that has been repeatedly subject to various empires, both real and

metaphorical, it will investigate how manifestations of power and the resistance to these manifestations


have shaped the urban discourse, as well as the land itself. It will focus, in particular, on the notion of

the ‘organic’ as it has arisen to justify or reject these inscriptions of power. To this end, it will treat the

development of postwar Johannesburg primarily through an assessment of the work two urban planners

who have used the ‘organic’ as a principle to locate power in their analysis of, and designs for, the city.

Maurice Emile Henri Rotival and Thorsten Deckler neatly bookend the half‐century between the end of

World War II (and, approximately, independence) to the end of apartheid. Taken together, they

represent Johannesburg as what is perhaps its most fundamental metaphor: a city of dichotomies.

Even as the dichotomies are named, they begin to converge, dissembling sharp distinction. And

yet, through this overlapping analysis, we may yet uncover more about each architect, and the ideas

that he embodies, than we would have through a simple, essentialist reading of each as a product of his

time. The metaphor of the ‘organic’ will serve as a jumping‐off point, not to produce an appraisal of

each architects’ relative merits, but to uncover the links through which they are connected to each

other, and to the larger forces shaping our cities.

The idea of an organic approach to city planning has played a large role in forming prevailing

ideas about urbanism in both Rotival’s time, and Deckler’s. The term ‘organic,’ is presently most often

applied to informal settlements, spatial reappropriations, shifting conceptions of the city. This

understanding underscores much of Deckler’s work in Johannesburg today. On the other hand, an older

understanding of the term signifies rationality, order, and a correspondence to the laws of nature. This

meaning most closely describes Rotival’s relationship to postwar modernism, and reveals itself

constantly in his plans and analyses of Johannesburg in the late 1950’s. These two perspectives may

seem unrelated, but they suddenly combine when cast in the theoretical light of space as ‘produced.’

The social production of space, we will see, can serve as common thread in both architects’

interpretations of the organic.

This intersection is striking. Not only does it allow us to compare strategies of urban planning at

two points in time, but it also helps us to reveal the relationship between space and larger societal

forces. The notion of the organic, like all metaphors, is useful because it creates a narrative that wields

power. Who gets the power depends on how the metaphor is used. By talking about space as natural

The highest expression of

authoritarian modernism

The most radical, postmodern,

ground‐up development

The most internationally

pervasive urban forms

The most specific,

locally‐based architecture

The highest form of order

and rationality

The most spontaneous

and fluid growth

The global city center The peripheral, marginalized slum

The

Future.

The landscape of Poverty The landscape of Wealth

The Past


or organic, what is it, exactly, that the architect is ‘naturalizing’? Depending on how the metaphor is

applied, the answer can change. The narrative can be used to reinforce the hegemony, or tear it down.

Centering on the concept of ‘organicness’ provides a sharp critical lens through which to

deconstruct the narratives implicit in each architect’s work, and to dissect the constructs those narrative

seek to justify. We will thus seek to uncover how such a metaphor, used as a planning trope, attempts

to naturalize the social, political, and economic conditions from which it arose, and at the same time,

how it can aspire to tear them down.

The Method:

Space as Socially Produced

The notion of the organic has arisen as part of the new approach to global development,

but the idea of space as produced through spontaneous cultural interaction is not new.

The exhibition Blank___Architecture, Apartheid and After opened in Rotterdam on December

16, 1998—the Day of Reconciliation in South Africa. Considered ‘seminal,’ it was the one of the earliest

attempts to penetrate the immensity of Johannesburg’s unexamined landscapes. A collection of 40

essay, written and photographic, the exhibition and accompanying book began the process of making

Johannesburg readable, accessible, knowable to the outside world, if only in the realm of imagination.

In his Blank___ essay “Globalization and the Identity of African Urban Practices,” AbdouMaliq Simone

writes that it is the perceived impermeability of Johannesburg, “combining the extremes of poverty,

infrastructural decline, economic emptiness and social danger,” that “tends to ward off the outside

world.” He continues, however, to reveal that “these spaces are often also ‘communities,’ characterized

by an intricate interweaving of social organization, economic practice and governance generally seen as

informal or provisional.”18 Informality, understood in this context, can be perceived as a lack of agency,

capacity, or ability to shape, in a lasting and meaningful way, the larger physical and psychological

structures of one’s society. Or, this type of informality can be seen as the very thing that enables

continued ability to affect change. “In even the most depleted spaces, popular ways of organizing social

life intersect with the operations of formal institutions to make visible specific social subjects and

processes.”19

Lefebvre and the Three‐Dimensional Dialectic

This essay takes as its premise the idea that social modes are rendered visible in the physical

structure of a society. This idea was made famous by Henri Lefebvre in his 1974 treatise on the creation

of space and space‐time in society, La Production de l'Espace (The Production of Space). Lefebvre sought

to understand not merely how space is produced, but how it is produced and reproduced and

reproduced again. For Lefebvre, the production of space is a cyclical process, mediated through social

conditions, to create a physical output which, in turn, will influence new social conditions, and thus

receive new revisions to its form.20

Space, according to Lefebvre, is fashioned in an exchange among what he calls spatial practice,

the representation of spaces, and spaces of representation.21 It can only be understood in the context

of a specific society, by analyzing the “social constellations, poor relations, and conflicts”22 relevant in

each situation. The useful contrapositive to this idea is that, because it resides in this three‐part


construction, space can be used to analyze social relations themselves. In addition to requiring analysis

in a larger social context, space‐as‐artifact acts as a key to unlocking an understanding of that context.

Put another way, space is an artifact which both encodes social history, and in which social history is

encoded.

Lefebvre’s work is part of a body of critical engagements with space and society whose authors

sought to deconstruct the physical world into a cultural and social geography. His work became

foundational for thinkers such as David Harvey and Edward Soja, who commented that Lefebvre “has

been more influential than any other scholar in opening up and exploring the limitless dimensions of our

social spatiality.”23 A key figure for fields like cultural geography and political ecology that focus on

deconstructing cultural frameworks, Lefebvre allows for the deconstruction of spatial modes. For him,

the built world can no longer be understood as a‐political or neutral, but rather, as the result of a

specific set of social interactions which will go on to fuel other social interactions. This notion is

especially relevant in a rapidly urbanizing, globalizing world, where a wide variety of actors (NGO’s,

transnational corporations, international developers and investors, as well as local governments and

citizens) have unprecedented power to influence space in new ways.

“At every scale,” writes Christian Schmid, arguing for a Lefebvrian reading of today’s spatial

dynamics, “new geographies have developed. These new space‐time configurations determining our

world call for new concepts of space corresponding to contemporary social conditions.”24

Understanding these processes of power and influence become crucial, not for “the dethroning of all

that is real,” 25 but rather, for an “archeology” (Foucault’s term), or process of discovery.

Reading Johannesburg Today

Urban scholars and historians are quick to agree that in the attempt to shed its abhorrent past

as international pariah, South Africa—along with its nerve center, Johannesburg‐‐ has only succeeded

in building a skewed landscape of unfulfilled expectations, crammed with the hypocritical fragments of a

utopian dream. Today’s post‐apartheid Johannesburg fits neatly into the framework of ‘fortress city’:

gated communities, enclaves for the prosperous, and video surveillance on every corner — a landscape

of corporate cocoons and the decaying, dangerous, yet dynamic urban spaces from which they are

carved.26 “The steady expansion of sequestered sites of fantastic luxury,” writes Martin J Murray, “has

been matched only by proliferation of places of degradation and despair.”27 Patrick Bond describes this

phenomenon of dual city as “cities of gold, townships of coal.”28

We can begin to understand Johannesburg’s skewed landscapes as a record of uneven

development, constructed not just physically, but mentally as well. Posters, architectural renderings

and even buildings, which indeed qualify as representations of space because they are designed to fulfill

a certain spatial role, all codify the social relationships that are first discovered in spatial practice: thus

we begin to understand not only how space is shaped through use (lived space) but how representations

of that space, in the form of drawings and diagrams, planning documents, media images, and more,

further affect the overall landscape.

Architect and scholar Lindsay Bremner writes of Johannesburg’s emerging urban developments,


[They are] laboratories, the works in progress, of contemporary capitalist

urbanization. In their expedient, badly planned, or even unplanned, developer‐driven

landscapes are to be found many of the clues needed to understand the implications

for our post‐apartheid cities of advanced industrial production and links to global

flows of capital, information, commodities and people.29

Bremner makes a crucial point, in setting up Johannesburg’s landscapes as the key to unlocking larger

social, political and economic processes. It is important to note, however, that in embarking on such an

investigation, we must understand that the developing city and the townships it leaves behind are

intimately connected. While historical and current planning treatises address fringe areas in a radically

different manner from the central areas they surround, the fact is that both the ‘cities of gold’ and the

‘townships of coal’ are the landscapes of globalism, and can be read as such—infiltrated, at every level,

by the practices of global culture. Thus, while Murray describes the Johannesburg of poverty and

despair as a blistering epidemic — problematic and in need of treatment, but not very enticing to

examine closely — a Lefebvrian understanding of space contends that lived space is constructed,

incrementally, out of the countless of decisions made by inhabitants every day — physically built from

desire lines. Johannesburg’s informal settlements thus become as much a part of the physical and

mental urban reality as the city center.

One example of this phenomenon is the

automobile tracking has become popular in

Johannesburg: an alarm can be programmed to trigger a

response when the vehicle enters a certain part of the

city where clients are ‘not supposed to be.’

Advertisements representing these products depict

parts of the city as ‘dangerous areas,’ convincing

consumers to buy a product which will keep them safe,

and simultaneously reinforcing a deep spatial divide in

the city’s fabric. Here, an image representing space in

one part of the city affects the perception of space in

another, reinforcing the distinction between central

Johannesburg, as up‐and‐coming world class city, and its

surroundings, as invisible, illegible and dangerous. A

Lefebvrian understanding thus shows how landscapes

are constructed, not only physically, but mentally as

well. Deconstructing these physical spaces, as well as

the images that accompany them, we can begin to

understand the integrated systems at play in the city.

This is true not only in informal settlements

where self‐provided housing forms a sort of physical

record of everyday needs, but also in the central city,

where poor urbanites striving to meet their needs must

constantly fight to dismantle Johannesburg’s spatial

Figure 4 An advertisement from 2002 by Matrix Vehicle Tracking in Business Day, identifying Alexandra Township in Johannesburg as a “NoGo Zone.” An arrow in the foreground is labeled “You are here.” In the background, the skyscrapers of the Sandton central business district are just visible, along with an arrow labeled, “You should be here.”

(Photo Source: Patrick Bond, 2002.)


divides. Here, too, they leave their mark, wearing away at the formal city with the combined efforts of

their actions: selling the traditional roasted mealies on the sidewalk, setting up informal stalls for

vending, queuing up to catch one of the many privately‐operated taxis which, though technically illegal,

provide a majority of the city’s transportation. In this way, the ingenuity and variability of informal

spaces are the response of a marginalized population that doesn’t have the means to participate in the

formal city. These responses are at once the result of new global financial, social and political

hegemonies that have forced people into the spaces of marginality, and also, as anthropologist Arjun

Appadurai would say, a challenge to those hegemonies, whose forms must be constantly navigated and

reappropriated.

Lastly, a Lefebvrian reading would contend that the spatial hegemonies, themselves, are social

constructions, built, as we have seen and will continue to explore, through the global economic and

political processes that interact with local space and society. Thus, a Lefebvrian reading of

Johannesburg yields a ripe opportunity to activate physical, representational, and mental ‘artifacts’

through which we can begin to read the story of conflict in both the city center and the urban fringe, as

a product of global forces.

1 Edward Relph, The Modern Urban Landscape. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Also Allen John Scott and Michael J. Dear, Urbanization and Urban Planning in Capitalist Society. New York: Methuen, 1981. 159‐178 and 502‐534.

2 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums. New York: Verso, 2004. Also Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban. Cambridge: Blackwell, 2002.

3 Amin and Thrift, 2002. 124.

4 James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. 61.

5 John Kaliski, “The Present City and the Practice of City Design,” in Everyday Urbanism, eds. John Chase, Margaret Crawford and John Kaliski. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1999. 90‐91. Also Relph, 1992.

6 Sharon Zukin, “Changing Landscapes of Power: Opulence and the Urge for Authenticity.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33(2), 2009. 544.

7 Saskia Sassen, The Global City. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

8 Davis, 2004. 175.

9 Patrick Bond, “Globalization and the Neoliberal City,” in Cities of Gold, Townships of Coal. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. 2000; and Zukin, 2009. Also Saskia Sassen, “Locating Cities on Global Circuits.” Environment and Urbannization, 14(1), 2002. 13‐30.

10 Sharon Zukin, “A Decade of the New Urban Socialogy,” in Theory and Society, 9(4),1980 575‐601. See also Antonio Gramsci in David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. 133.

11 Harvey, 1990, and also David Harvey, A Brief History of Neolibralism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

12 Fernando Coronil, “ Towards a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on Capitalism’s Nature.” Public Culture, 12(2) 2002. 368.

13 Sassen, 2001. Also Davis, 2004, and Patrick Bond, “Globalization and the Neoliberal City,” in Cities of Gold, Townships of Coal. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. 2000. 23‐46.


14 Nezar AlSayyad and Ananya Roy. “Urban Informality, A Transnational Perspective.” New Geographies, New Pedagogies project at the Institute of International Studies; UC Berkeley. 1999.

15 Alsayyad and Roy, 1999.

16Harvey, 1990. Also David Harvey, “On planning the ideology of planning,” in The Urbanization of Capital. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1985. 165‐184. Also Sharon Zukin, “A Postmodern Debate over Urban Form,” in Designing Cities: Critical Readings in Urban Design. Alexander R Cuthbert, ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. 45‐59. Also Michael Smith, Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

17 Amin and Thrift, 2002, 49‐50.

18AbdouNaliq Simone, “Globalization and the identity of African urban practice,” in Blank____: Architecture, Apartheid and After, catalogue for exhibition by the same name, eds. Hilton Judin and Ivan Vladislavic. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers. 1998.

19 Simone,1998. 174.

20 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Oxford: Routledge, 1991.

21 Lefebvre, 1991. 33.

22 Christian Schmid, “Space, Difference, Everyday Life,” in Space, Difference and Everday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre. New York: Routledge, 2008. 27.

23 Edward Soja, Thidspace:Journeys to Los Angeles and other Real‐and‐Imagined Places. Oxford:Blackwell, 1996. 6. Also Mike Savage and Alan Warde, Urban Sociology, Capitalism and Modernity. London: Macmillan Press, 1993. 129.

24 Schmid, 2008. 27.

25 The terminology of political ecologist Paul Robbins, Political Ecology, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. 110.

26 Lindsay Bremner, Johannesburg: One City, Colliding Worlds, Johannesburg: STE Publishers, 2004. 57‐59.

27 Martin J Murray, Taming the Disorderly City: The Spatial Landscape of Johannesburg after Apartheid. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. 4.

28 Bond, 2000.

29 Bremner, 2004. 30‐31.


The Men:

Maurice Rotival

Urban Planner, Architect, and Globe Trotter in the 1950’s and 60’s

Johannesburg: Modernism (Mis)Equated with Modernization

When Dutch voortrekkers left the South African Cape to settle inland in the 1830’s, they

encountered an arid plain that had been sparsely farmed by Bantu hunters and herders for centuries.

There is considerable speculation over the provenance of the name Johannesburg, but what is clear

enough is the fact that the dusty little frontier town would have been nothing, if not for the fortuitous

unearthing of a mining industry.1 In 1886, gold wasn’t ‘discovered’ by Europeans (the Sotho‐Tswana

communities had smelted a variety of minerals, and their furnaces were scattered across the region),

but a rush nonetheless ensued, creating a hamlet that was “expected to become a ghost town when the

gold reefs were exhausted.”2 When the first census was taken, a decade later, half of Johannesburg’s

80,000 inhabitants were European,3 and for the next fifty years, even before the formal application of

apartheid policies, the population would shake down and separate into black‐and‐white divisions as

grim as a chess‐board. Ironically for colonial South Africa, it wasn’t until the approach of sovereign

nationhood that the ideology of apartheid began to take hold—only solidifying as policy post‐WWII. This

was the landscape in newly independent postwar Johannesburg that would meet the advent of

architectural modernism; it was the raw material onto which the image of modernity could be

impressed.

The urban landscape in postwar South Africa did not simply arise from a fully conceived project

of authoritarian high modernism, broadly washed across the nation. Instead, it percolated up through a

pre‐existing foundation of powerful ideologies which, when combined, reacted forcefully and

crystallized to produce a cityscape in which scholars now recognize certain patterns of authority and

oppression. These patterns of authority encode more than merely race relations, and did not end with

apartheid. Architectural modernism can be positioned, architects and academics agree, in relation to an

accompanying set of processes that characterize modernity more broadly: increased industrialization,

imperialism, racial exclusion, societal ordering and colonialism, whether extant or merely dormant in the

political and economic legacies of former colonial rule. 4

Johannesburg, having spent the last decades of the 19th century as a dusty mine‐pocked frontier

town, and the first decades of the 20th century mired in stifling Edwardian neo‐classicism, was ripe for an

overhaul, and in the interbellum period, the newly emerging International Style was ready to offer,

according to Clive Chipkin, “an alternative view not only of architecture but of civilization itself.”5 Ideas

imported overseas from avant garde European modernists, particularly Le Corbusier, would prove a

fashionable means of reinventing Johannesburg, all the while asserting a new sense of belonging in the

international community. Le Corbusier’s civilization machiniste— the urban machine scaled for millions,

with its towering skyscrapers and wide green swatches and raised freeways for whizzing cars – provided

the perfect ideal to which a city as wealthy as Johannesburg could aspire.

As such, modernism in the South African context may be understood in relation to those

metropolitan centers in the West where it originated in the culture of a specific form of post‐industrial

urban life. As Alan Mabin, head of the University of the Witwatersrand School of Architecture and

Planning points out, “The South African experience of reconstruction and the uses of urban planning has


its own special, sometimes intriguing, and often nasty features. But it is hardly unique. Indeed, at

almost every stage in South African’s urban past, it is precisely from foreign models that the outlines

have been drawn.”6 It will also be important to note that, as a major world producer of gold, metals,

and other industrial material, this culture of industry and accumulation served not only as the

provenance of design, but also as the culture to which Johannesburg’s landscape was in service.

This architectural mooring, appropriated from abroad, is classically understood as a built

document testifying to the cultural values of its creators. For Lewis Mumford, in his foundational

Culture of the City, “The city is a form and symbol of an integrated social relation,” which functions as

the “point maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community.” 7 Read as an example of

Mumford’s influential and pervasive urban theory of the modern city as reflection of the cultural values

of its creators, 8 the rash of large‐scale urban interventions, proposed master plans, and monumentally

scaled building projects directed toward a Johannesburg newly freed from colonial rule were the

grandiose visions of city officials and developers eager to assert and display a nationalistic independence

and cement their newfound position as ‘equal’ on the world stage. The irony here, of course, is the

deeply rooted belief that a practice of urban planning imported from abroad would be able to resolve

the ills left behind by colonialism. The search for a visionary reinterpretation of the city coexisted with

the continued construction of a landscape that was fully dedicated to the exploitation of people and

land in the search for international wealth. At first glance, French urbanist Maurice Emile Henri Rotival,

an internationally active city planner who held a professorship at Yale University for over 20 years,

seems just such a visionary. While Rotival’s body of work has been seldom treated as a whole, it

occasionally appears in histories and analyses of particular cities’ urban growth, where it is said to form

a cogent example of the international principles of urban planning in the modernist period of the first

half of the 20th century.9

Rotival as Modernist Planner

Rotival’s projects certainly incorporated many of the expected elements of modernist urban

thinking: “a multidisciplinary, functional approach; strong concern with infrastructure; the incorporation

of statistics and analysis; combined with an insistence on distinctive monumental design.”10 At a time

when there was great call for the development of non‐European cites which could act as hubs and

linkages to the western core, Rotival was able to transplant the modernist principles which were

sweeping across the United States and Europe and apply them on a world scale. An example of his early

efforts was a master plan for Caracas, Venezuela, which he envisioned as the new trading hub of the

pacific. In 1939, Rotival, along with his mentor Henri Prost, delivered the Plan Monumental. 11 According

to scholar of European urbanism Carola Hein, Rotival’s Caracas plan followed in line with what

anthropologist Paul Rabinow would describe as a tradition of “planning export” — the contemporary

French design that France foisted upon her colonies. Hein writes,

Concluding his book French Modern, Norms and Forms of the Social Environment,

Rabinow quotes from Rotival’s 1935 article ‘Les grandes ensembles,’ to describe a

social environment that has been stripped of history and locale as sources of

legitimacy and solidarity and become ‘middling modernist’, orientated towards

effciency, science, progress and welfare.12


In the words of the plan, Caracas was to be a “great City, with its lovely boulevards, parks,

theatres, clubs, etc. The outskirts, with the beautiful garden‐cities and their sports clubs linked to the

city through comfortable and beautiful arteries for rapid circulation.”13 Rotival’s plan for Caracas

maintained a strong visual similarity with the order and axiality typical of French planning schemes. The

monumental plan for Caracas, laid over the existing colonial grid, was an attempt to revamp a dull and

inscrutable landscape, and foused, primarily on an urban boulevard modeled after the Parisian Champs‐

Elysèes.14

Figure 5.1 and 5.2 Young Maurice Rotival in Military Dress, c. WWI, and the monumental plan for Caracas, 1939

(Source: Maurice Emile Henri Rotival Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives)

Rotival’s work in Caracas could be compared to Le Corbusier’s plan for the French colonial city of

Algiers. Here, likewise, was a convenient incubator for modernism and the International Style—a fellow

19th century colonial city, with a small population of European Elites essentially fortressing themselves

against growing populations of migrant ‘natives’: it is hardly surprising that the European planners

sought to impart a clear sense of order, if only in the spatial sense.

In the years following World War II, Rotival traveled to India, Guiana, Costa Rica, Algiers, Beirut, and

various parts of the Sahara, even serving, at one point, as special consultant to the United Nations.15 As

he drew plan after plan to ‘apply order’ to the landscape, Rotival did not merely act the part of librarian

to the developing world, he embodied it.

By the time Rotival arrived in Johannesburg in 1955, he and his associates were well used to

cavorting around the globe. He and his cohort exchanged letters referring to many‐month‐long

expeditions, bouncing from Morocco to Madagascar to everywhere in between — trusted by foreign

governments as the international expert. As he had in Caracas, Rotival made plans to transform

monotonous colonial grids in countries just shedding the cloak of colonialism. And yet, as Rotival

costumed each city in a set of new attire, it can be argued, he was merely altering the landscape of

imperialism, not erasing the underlying philosophy.16


Rotival’s education and early work were heavily impacted by the technological advances that

had accompanied European industrialization and the First World War. As the war had approached,

Rotival was called away from the Ecole Centrale, where he was enrolled as an engineering student, to be

trained as a pilot.17 Thus, the growing culture of mass production, automobile dependency and air‐

travel which so captivated contemporaries like Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier became a concrete

influences for Rotival, whose job was to make aerial sketches of enemy positions. In later planning

projects, he continued to take surveys from the air, relying on the newly available technology for aerial

photography to provide a God’s‐eye‐view — a “miniaturization,” James Scott would say, that “resolved

what might have seemed ground‐level confusion into an apparently vaster order and symmetry.”18 Hein

points out that military terminology — words like reconnaissance — continued to appear in Rotival’s

writing throughout his career, and that the widespread devastation that followed in the wake of both

World Wars — and the subsequent need to reconstruct Europe — influenced Rotival’s tendency toward

strong, comprehensive urban schemas which included the familiar tropes of hygiene, ‘urban surgery,’

and zoning.19

. . . I am therefore writing you this letter to your different addresses to try to catch you before you go in the hope that you may be stopping off in Paris (or London?) before you go to South Africa. I would willingly go anywhere in Europe to meet you before you leave if that were possible: perhaps you will let me know. It occurs to me that you may be going on to Madagascar and returning from there via Johannesburg before leaving again for Europe and the States . . .

“

Figure 6 Letters and postcards between Rotival and associates. He and his cohort traveled widely — particularly notable considering the newness of passenger air travel in the 1950’s. Rotival made a number of trips to Johannesburg, stopping elsewhere in sub‐Saharan African, as well as Morocco, Madagascar, and Venezuela. He also continued to travel to Europe at this time, assisting on several designs with his former colleagues in Paris, and publishing a number of works in the French planning magazines L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui and Urbanisme. He was truly an international figure.

(Source: Maurice Emile Henri Rotival Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives. Also, Hein, 2002a.)


Rotival and the Birth of the Organic

Rotival arrived in Johannesburg at the very beginning of the ‘apartheid building boom’ of the

1960’s, a time when Johannesburg would put itself on the international map with a series of projects

designed as symbols of a prosperous future: Carlton Centre, designed by New York‐based firm Skidmore

Owings and Merrill, at 200 meters, was the highest reinforced‐concrete building in the world, while

Standard Bank, the work of German architect Helmut Hentrich, featured daring cantilevers.20 Rotival’s

work in Johannesburg lasted from 1955 until at least 1961. During this time, one of his most complete

treatises on city planning was developed over a number of visits, from 1955 and 1958. The report,

entitled “The Sector from Johannesburg to the Vaal,” was prepared for the South City Development

Association by Rotival Planning, in cooperation with a number of collaborators, most notably Wilfred

Mallows who, in 1956, became a lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand School of Architecture,

and, in 1964, became the first to chair the new Department of Town and Regional Planning.*21 The

report bears a similarity to contemporaneous master‐planners and architects of urban renewal, such as

Robert Moses, for whom the blighted city center or slum was a cancer in need of resection and removal.

Rotival writes in the introduction:22

When the doctor sees in his patient the sure signs of disorder, he calls upon medicine, or surgery, or both, to restore the organism to health. Similarly for a city, if medicine is applied in time, and if progressive treatment can cope with the illness, there is no need for the knife, but in many cases one must open up, bridge and span, bulldoze and fill — that is, one must operate.

At first glance, the search for efficiency and large‐scale demolition resembles the Corbusian obsession

with aesthetic spatial order. However, unlike Le Corbusier, who recommended, in his Plan Voisin, the

removal of a large swath of central Paris without batting an eye, Rotival was committed to assessing the

functioning of the city in concrete terms, before seeking to address a formal problem. For Rotival,

‘surgery’ really did entail treating the city as an organism. Much of his analysis, then, centered on

determining how the body functioned: where lay the blood, the heart, the brain.

* Rotival and Mallows partnered on a number of projects in Johahannesburg. This paper will draw on material held in the unprocessed papers of Maurice Rotival held by Yale Manuscripts and Archives, and will focus primarily on three projects on which the two collaborated: Traffic Plan of Johannesburg drawn for the city of Johannesburg in association with the American traffic consultant Lloyd Reid, report to the South City Development Association, and Park Central development proposal in association with Robert Findlay.

“


Figure 7 Le Corbusier's Plan Voisin, replacing central paris with highrise towers set into green landscaping.

(Source: mediaarchitecture.at.)

Rotival’s ‘organic’ notion of the urban relies on a reading of the city as biological. In a “Plan of

Enquiry,” prepared in anticipation of his report to South City, Rotival stated his intent to examine not

only the spatial aspects of the growing metropolitan region, but the constitutional, administrative and

financial problems of local governments arising from Johannesburg’s rapid growth. These, he treated as

different organ systems in a body. The whole city, he reasoned, could be broken down into units —

everything rationalized under one overarching set of principles that allowed the city to compound, like

cells into tissues, and tissues into living creatures.

Rotival’s city comprised the “basic component” (population and housing), the “social

component” (education, social behavior and leisure organization), the “productive component”

(extractive industries such as oil, gas, mining and quarrying as well as forestry, agriculture, herding, etc.),

the “service component” (transportation, energy, water, and other infrastructure), and the

“administrative component.” The synthesis of these components, he hoped, 23

will therefore be an interpretation in time of the region as a whole with detailed emphasis on the metropolitan zone at its heart, as a unit finding its place in the living organism and making optimum use of all its resources, natural and human for the ‘equilibrium.’

As his notion solidified, he pitched the plan as a comprehensive document incorporating all facets of the

city, which would be capable of guiding Johannesburg’s development from 1955 to 2030 in an

integrated manner. It is interesting to note that even his timescale is biological: 75 years, the life of a

man, whose organs reliably predict a system for living until they simply wear out.

“


Rotival’s ‘organs,’ and the equilibrium theory he developed concerning their health, relied not

on any formal qualities, but rather, on the social, political and economic factors to which they were in

service. While this new focus on physical frameworks that would support social, rather than formal,

goals may not have been unique to Rotival in the 1950’s, his commitment to ‘organicness’ still

represented a radically new way of lending primacy to function. Rotival looked to pre‐existing patterns,

to changes which were already underway in the city, in order to determine ‘what should happen next.’

Here, then, he enters into a polemical debate with ideas of modernism that had held

precedence mere decades earlier. For Le Corbusier, a city ‘shaped around modern life’ was shaped

around an ideal of modern life. Le Corbusier envisioned a frictionless modern urbanism fully in service

to paternalistic notions of what would be healthiest, most beautiful, most functional — best. He never

broke with the architectural vision of ‘building as object.’ Rotival’s designs, on the other hand, mostly

illustrate urban concepts on a city‐wide scale. They are based on technological and financial implications

rather than aesthetic ones.

Rotival assiduously charted graphs calculating the flow of every ‘unit’ in his urban system,

documenting the population by racial demographic and income, industry of employment and daily

transportation. He looked at larger migratory patterns and graphed production, in tons, of all of

Johannesburg’s extractive industries. For him, these figures became stats not unlike heart rate and

. . . The Equilibrium specific to an organism can be measured in terms of quantity and quality: space required for maintaining life; . . . financial balances of export-import; balances of payments, etc. The combination of these various balances constitutes the Equilibrium, whether it applies to the Region, or to any other unit of aggregation . . .

Figure 8 Rotival’s equilibrium and units of aggregation.

(Source: Maurice Emile Henri Rotival Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives.)

“


blood‐pressure: a way to chart the organism’s health, and predict what should be done in order to

medicate.

As Rotival sketched his plans for the city, he used graphs and charts to determine how each part

of the city would function like an organ, and how each organ would be supplied with circulation. He

looked at which direction the settlements of the city’s poor mine workers were beginning to spread, and

from there, determined the future shape of the city. He stressed the difference between the

metropolitan region (Johannesburg proper) of social and economic “contact and movement” and the

Southern Transvaal (now Gauteng Province) as the locus of “human use,” ultimately viewing the city as

the superimposition of all of its regions. Thus, he developed a notion of Johannesburg that relied on

understanding the flow of people, goods, and money throughout.24

. . .indeed, almost every part of the Reef Zone will be able to draw its labor supply from them. . .

. . .the natives would have the impression of freedom, of new life, where they could. . . in general develop themselves.

Thus we can foresee the development of several very large townships . . . which could be grouped around agricultural and forest reserve in the heart of the mountains, where natural scenery could give the rural background to which the natives are accustomed. . .

. . . two areas are left for Native settlements . . . the concentration of native living quarters in these areas will keep them reasonably close to future industrial developments, without producing the otherwise inevitable clogging of service lines. . .

Such will be the organism as it can be foreseen in its static form. In order to function, however, it will require a dynamic system of services designed for the smooth and efficient operation of every component and every part. . .

Figure 9 Rotival’s studies for the ‘organic whole’ of Johannesburg, focusing and breaking the city up into appropriate regions for each sector of the population.


“


Rotival’s published documents reveal an insistence on planning for the equilibrium of the

biological whole, and it is interesting to note that this obsession pervades his personal correspondence,

as well. Rotival was concerned with an integrated understanding of the city, and he was constantly

butting heads with other ‘pragmatists’ who nonetheless refused to look holistically and urban systems.

This clash became most evident in Rotival’s correspondence with Lou Reid, an American traffic specialist

who was a collaborator. A letter between two of Rotival’s associates, Mallows and John Maiatty, makes

clear the difference between Reid’s rather limited outlook, and Rotival’s commitment to describing the

city as a whole:

Figure 10 Rotival’s graphs and charts documented all of the demographic and industrial aspects of Johannesburg’s development. His reports included numerous studies of population growth and per‐capita production, especially in the extractive industries. He charted average amounts of Johannesburg’s different minerals — gold, diamonds, coal, and more — by race, formulated the likely growth of different settlements of mineworkers by demographic class. All of these charts and graphs contributed to Rotival’s theory of the city as an organic system, made up of components. Urban residents were merely tiny pieces of the larger organism: units like cells or molecules.



All [Reid] wants to talk about in the Planning Report is strictly growth as related to traffic: he wants no discussion on Natives, Industries, Commercial Centers, so on and so forth. He will cut short anyone who brings up questions that are beyond the scope of the contract . . . Reid’s answer to Maurice is always that of an engineer, that the conception [of an integrated whole] is merely a dream, nothing to back it up.

Rotival’s willingness to expand the field of

inquiry was indefatigable. In his “Sector from

Johannesburg to the Vaal,” he even includes a

study of predicted nutritional requirements in the

growing mine‐worker’s settlements: “Non-

Europeans, like natives the world over, will tend toward that of the white races [in their eating habits] which will alter the pattern of demand considerably

and increase the agricultural production.” Like

modernists before him, he conceives of the city

broadly as a phenomenon of advancing

technology. He writes frequently about the

importance of changing industrial processes

(which “will be considerably modified, especially by

automation, towards decrease in quantity, and

increase in quality, of labour”). And not unlike Le

Corbusier and his ilk, one of Rotival’s biggest pet

topics was transportation. 25 However, while

earlier modernists romanticized new modes of transportation, Rotival neither embraced nor despised

them; he simply factored them into his ‘organism,’ seeing the ‘problem of traffic’ as part of a larger,

integrated social and economic system:

The traffic is of course only a symptom of many other disorders more deeply ingrained within the organism. The long queues of workers waiting for public transportation to their job and the criss-crossing of the cities by those who live and work on opposite sides, are traffic problems of course, but their solution lies, not alone in bigger and better roads and more and more trains, but in a more logical organization of the living components of the urban organism, so that every community is adequately and efficiently provided with its necessary services, every working center, whether business, commercial, industrial, agricultural, mining or any other, is accessible to its workers without encroachment on residential neighborhoods, and every social group can find the kind of community within the organic whole where its members can order their lives according to their own

desires and traditions. 26

Figure 11 Rotival’s traffic plan for the Rand Zone included more than mere counts of automobiles; it provided a thesis that described the functioning of the city as a set of organs.


“

“


Here, Rotival unabashedly unites all of the driving forces of change, from the very socio‐cultural

(food) to the very economic and technological, into the same language of analysis. He sees all of the

driving factors of development as inexorable processes pushing forward; each field of inquiry is merely a

small characteristic contributing to the whole organism.

Figure 12.1 and 11.2 Rotival’s plan for the development of the Reef relied on an understanding of Johannesburg as service center and “heart” of the region, with arteries reaching north and south to link up with supporting towns —Pretoria, the administrative district, and Vereeniging, a center for industry — that could act as the body’s other organs, performing different functions in support of the whole.

(Source: “The Sector from Johannesburg to the Vaal,” Maurice Emile Henri Rotival Papers, Yale Unniversity Manuscripts and

Archives.)

Rotival and the Production of Hegemonic Space

For Rotival, the social and economic interactions of the city were the basis of design. Simply

because Rotival analyzed the city this way, however, did not mean he was committed to creating a

‘better’ social environment. His organic ideal was one of stability, not equality, and as new as his

interpretation may have been, architecturally, there was certainly no radical impulse to change the

status quo, socially. For him, the concept of ‘equilibrium’ trumped all. Equilibrium meant a healthy


body — a healthy city. Even the creation of something like low‐cost housing played into the doctor’s

doctrine, for in maintaining political stability, he was maintaining one of the body’s systems. His

ministrations, quite simply, worked to “heighten the morale of the working population of the big cities

and hinder the inhabitants from becoming revolutionaries.” Indeed, Rotival had no qualms about

framing his work as an architecture of exploitation. Much of his time was spent studying the problem of

housing Johannesburg’s mine workers, so that they could most effectively serve the mining

corporations. 27

One of the great cities of the World, Johannesburg, stands as the Capital of the solitary South African Empire which commands the Austral seas. From the ring of its fantastic yellow mountains of sand and slime already higher than skyscrapers, the Captains of Gold can measure the toil of their hundreds of thousands of men and the wealth of metal scraped from the bowels of the earth, just as well as the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt would measure their power by the height of their pyramids.

“So a city acquires slowly a soul of its own, to the measure of the ingenuity and courage of its inhabitants. Its body, fashioned by the land, the hills and the sun, throbs under the pulse of the blood circulating in its arteries. Sometimes in Johannesburg, a deep rumble in the earth marks the sliding of thousands of tons of rock in the underlying galleries of the mines.

“In the atmosphere of conquest and wars, of trail blazing and of hard work, Johannesburg has grown alongside the ridge of gold, accumulating wealth without burdening itself with worries about its future. From an impressive mining camp, it has grown into a metropolis so suddenly that it has had no time to weather its new buildings emerging so queerly from its small old fashioned blocks. Compressed between the ridge and the gold mines, the city first extended itself east and west, then overflowed the two ridges to the north, and is now pushing across the river of mines toward and expanding industrial complex the south.

“Johannesburg and the Witwatersrand constitute a booming urban organism, with the unlimited opportunities of such an environment. But on the other hand, the rapidity of this expansion, which will continue to increase in the years ahead, creates many serious problems which may well prevent the whole organism from ever attaining the king of equilibrium which is essential to its life: problems of depreciation and slums, of cultures, long distances between related components without adequate facilities for circulation, etc., etc. These are the normal problems of a growing modern city, perhaps, but unless they are solved or corrected before it is too late, they become a permanent load on the organism which it may never be able to shake off.”

— Rotival, “Sector from Johannesburg to the Vaal”

Rotival’s work in Johannesburg in the 1950’s and 60’s not only catered to old global structures of

power and oppression, but relied on, and enabled, emerging ones. His involvement in Johannesburg

was wholly predicated on the emerging international business operations that have underwritten the

global landscapes of today. He and his associates were able to take advantage of a veritable buffet of

international opportunities — indeed, a theme that arose more than once in his correspondence was

that of travel. In one letter, he complained that the work of a partner had been sub‐par.

“


When are you coming back? Hurry Up, Damn It! Maurice, do you know or can you make contact with ‘Andre Coyne’ or the International bank? This Kariba scheme — the biggest dam in the world — twice the size of Boulder — should provide the opportunity of a really big ‘regional plan.’ From the Rand Daily Mail, Wednesday March 2, 1955: Federation to go ahead with Kariba Power Scheme International bank invited to Finance Project “It is vital that we have this cheap power so that we an industrialize and emply our rapidly increasing African population. Fiddling about with bits of land is no answer to this problem. The available land is limited but the African population is not. A permanent solution can only be found by industrialization, the basis of cheap power.”

Well, Wilfred Mallows had more

or less reasoned in a letter back, I’m not

surprised. He has very little interest in

continuing the project. He just wanted to

see Madagascar.

It was a unique political and

economic climate that allowed such an

easy infiltration, not only of western

planning tropes and western architects

who wanted to see lions, but also, of

western capital. In Venezuela, Rotival

had anticipated the rise of the global city by

presenting Caracas as an economic junction

— a node uniting the Caribbean Sea. He

kept sight of the redevelopment “as a

function of economic, rather than social or strictly physical, forces.” Ultimately, he and his associates

summed up their work by ending the report “with a perspective of the project for a market.” 28 Rotival’s

business partners in Johannesburg were no less prescient, but far more forceful, in their demands that

he pay attention to emerging global economic patterns. Rotival collaborated with Robert Findlay, of

Findlay Developers, on a proposal for the Park Central Development Scheme in Central Johannesburg.

Findlay urged Rotival to make connections with international financiers. Frequently, Findlay would keep

Rotival appraised of market opportunities by sending newspaper clippings. He greets Rotival:

“

Figure 13 Postcard received by Rotival from Wilfred Mallows, sent from Kruger Lion Park, Johannesburg.

(Source: Maurice Emile Henri Rotival Collection, Yale university Manuscripts and Archives.)

Figure 14 Newspaper clipping sent to Rotival by Findlay, encouraging Rotival to solicit work on internationally financed power project.

(Source: Maurice Emile Henri Rotival Papers, Yale Manuscripts and Archives.)


Here, Findlay doesn’t bother to disguise his impatient; this letter would prove typical of the impulse that

Rotival’s cohort exhibited toward applying their planning principles on a large scale, with the help of

international finance.

Likewise, his Wilfred Mallows pushed Rotival toward development projects that aligned with the

goals of a new, international corporate architecture. According to Clive Chipkin, while Mallows was

appointed by the University of the Witwatersrand, he was also serving as an architectural consultant to

the city of Johannesburg. At this time, he saw a “major opportunity area for development” outside the

Johannesburg Central Business District.29 This proclamation coincides with Wilfred Mallows 1955

correspondence with Rotival and Findlay, regarding the design of the Park Central development, a plan

for a complex of hotel, housing, recreation, retail, and enormous traffic interchanges which would

crown the flat‐topped Raurgh Hilll left over from the excavation of Johannesburg’s Ferriera Deep Gold

Mine. Not unlike a Corbusian fantasy of the city, Rotival’s plan included all the latest toys — from

helicopter landing pads to movie theaters to multi‐lane highways30 — and central Johannesburg, literally

built on a hill of gold, provided what was perhaps the perfect playpen. Fattened on fifty years’ worth of

yellow metal, the city could afford to indulge fantasies that included “all the typological elements of the

modern metropolis in perfect clockwork order.”31

Figure 15 Letter from Robert Findlay to Rotival on Park Central Stationary, urging him to make contact with American film companies to court their business for the new Park Central development, a joint effort. Findlay, Rotival and others kept an eye out for wise investments in the areas they were developing — they may have been architects, but they were business men, too! (Source: Maurice Emile Henri Rotival Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives)

. . . Park-Central:

The New Business Center, just down Loveday Street!

. . .As a result of the anti-monopoly’s bill being passed through South African Parliament now, and which was primarily aimed we believe at breaking the Schlessinger/African Theatres grip on the distribution of American and British Film in South Africa, 20th Century Fox, the American Film Company is buying-up the whole Shareholding of African Theatres . . .

. . .This should mean that all of the other American big Film companies should immediately be able to be interested in Theare or Cinema sites near the centre of Johannesburg, and it is our oopportunity to offer them sites in Parkcentral, whre it has been felt for a very long time by various Film people that it would be an ideal position for Theatres, Cinemans, Music Halls, etc., rather along the lines of your original plan. . .

“


While Findlay Development eventually went bankrupt and Park

Center, as envisioned by Rotival and Mallows, never came to pass,

Mallows’ ‘opportunity for development’ was seized in the creation of

the aforementioned Carlton Centre, which echoed Rotival’s Park

Central designs for hotel, towers, and transport in nearly every

regard — right down to the prominent American designer firm,

SOM.32

Figure 17 (Above) Though Park Central was never built, it is easy to see the proposed development as the natural conclusion of the international economy of extraction out of which Johannesburg had grown. Instantly, we can recognize Rotival’s design as one of Martin J Murray’s “sites of fantastic luxury.”


The influx of foreign capital and design principles that inspired Park Central and eventually

enabled Carlton Centre was not, strange as it might seem, at odds with Rotival’s concept of organic

growth. Rather than disdaining such a pragmatic relationship to the corporate sphere, Rotival ascribed

Figure 16 (Left) Plan view of hotel atop Raurgh Hill, part of Rotival’s Park Central development. Hotel includes swimming pool, tennis courts, squash courts, badminton courts, helicopter landing pad, roof terrace and gardens. The hotel was to overlook the entire development from its height; Rotival’s monumentally‐scaled architecture was situated on top of the former sites of industrial gold mining. In his Park Central design, the old Ferriera Deep Gold Mine ‘slime dump,’ the hills of gold tailings, became a rare geographical feature in a landscape otherwise devoid of topography. The dump, was the foundation, literally and metaphorically, for a new, highly visible, internationally recognizable architectural form.



to a wholesale partnership between design and corporate interests; indeed, for him, organic design was

design that served these interests, thus meeting a practical (natural) need. During the time Rotival was

active in Johannesburg, his correspondence was characterized by aggressive courtship of various

corporate interests, from the National Resources Development Council to the representatives from a

number of mining groups, to developers of that newly ubiquitous and magical building form, the

enclosed shopping mall.33 His designs are riddled with the signs of a speedily changing culture of

modernity, reinforcing his view that “the rate of technological change, which will be the basis of all

development, is all‐important.”

Figure 18 Design for hotel atop Raurgh Hill, as part of Park Central development.


As Arturo Marte points out, it’s easy to see the familiar ‘demands’ of the modern city being

championed.34 And yet, Rotival’s was a subtly different modernism. Rotival’s work clearly

demonstrates changes in the doctrine from aesthetic and monumental design to functional concepts.

He favored functionalist elements such as “economy, hygiene, tourism, lighting, transport and safety,” 35

and treated the need for each of these as arising from society: that is, his idea of an “organic” urban

equilibrium is one driven by the city’s users. He recognized the need for design drawing on all aspects of

daily life including economic activities. In a sense, this approach placed Rotival squarely in the service of

an exploitative global urban framework — the beginnings of Zukin’s global spatial hegemony. Because

his idea of an ‘organic’ city was based on the social, economic and political circumstances of

Johannesburg at the time, he legitimized contemporary patterns, and, indeed, inscribed them upon the

land. For Rotival, people become units in an economic system instead of being idealized as equals, as

they are in Le Corbusier’s vision. Furthermore, these units were not only the building blocks of a city‐


wide system of ‘units of agglomeration,’ but rather, a transnational one, already entangled in a global

market not only of money and minerals, but of ideas as well. By referring to the city as an ‘organic’

whole, Rotival naturalized an entire set realities: ‘Natives’ dig in the mines, ‘Europeans’ live in the city

center, and hotels belong on top of mountains built literally and figuratively out of gold. These

conceptions did not stop at the city limits, but rather, became part of an international culture of

accumulation and exploitation.

Figure 19 ‘US Traffic Experts’ Rotival, Lou Reid (pictured left) and others felt comfortable telling Johannesburg residents and policymakers “This is your problem,” and asserting their own “Traffic ‘know how’” despite media and cartoons that were not always supportive of international experts rushing in to the rescue. Nonetheless, Rotival and his associates successfully introduced international formations of urban planning, painting the Johannesburg landscape in an internationally recognizable shade of concrete.



Rotival and Representations of Space

Here, we must return to Louis Mumford’s idea of the city as a built document testifying to the

cultural values of its creators.36 In their book Urban Socilogy, Capitalism and Modernity, Mike Savage

and Alan Warde astutely contrast this notion with Lefebvre’s production of space. Drawing out the

difference in these two theories might at first seem counter‐intuitive, as each entails a reading of the

built landscape to reveal cultural values. However, as Savage and Warde explain, Lefebvrian meaning is

constructed, not through a particular concept of architecture, but rather, through the social uses of

space, independent of physical form. Fundamentally, Lefebvre’s space is no longer defined in terms of

its geographical and physical attributes, but is increasingly the product of economic forces: Lefebvre’s

starting point, they argue, is that “in capitalist society, space is used instrumentally, as a commodity.”37

Clearly, the use of space as a commodity was implicit in Rotival’s notion of the organic city, and

the distinction between Lefebvre and Mumford becomes clear when we examine each theory in light of

Rotival’s work in Johannesburg. Rotival did not diagram or build a cityscape that he envisioned based on

his own values, but rather, presented one based on what he thought he already saw occurring. Rotival’s

obsessive documentation of political, social and economic trends reveal this explicitly, while his

keenness, and that of his associates, to keep up with international trends in building and investing in the

‘developing’ world, reveal it implicitly. The frequency with which Rotival and his associates

communicated by exchanging newspaper clipping referring to building and investment projects in other

countries (Morocco, Tanzania, and others) show that their efforts were not only part of a trend, but

directly courting the trend. His work is, indeed, the perfect example of a Lefebvrian production of space

— one that relies not only on the way space is lived, but how that lived space becomes coded in

representations of space. For Rotival, urban design was an image‐making exercise at its very core. From

his countless studies and diagrams capturing the spatial practice of the city, to his large‐scale urban

designs which encoded, fundamentally, his understanding of the capitalist mode of using space.

This essay contends that the principles of urban planning that Rotival developed in his

international work feed neatly into the global development paradigms in today’s neoliberal climate.

Specifically, postmodern urban trends are seldom enough to combat the global hegemonies that

continue to dictate urban form in today’s architecture, and, indeed, these trends often feed the very

homogenization of space which they purport to combat. In creating a concept of an ‘organic’ urbanism,

Rotival subtly changed a prevailing vision of modernism, to one of use, rather than aesthetic value. His

notion of the ‘organic’ lent validity to the understanding of space as instrumental, and therefore, his

ideas were frequently in service to the trends of ‘developmentalist’ thought which continue to define

First World‐Third World relationships today. His use of metaphor was thus crucial in formulating

distinct, powerful, seductive ways of diagramming, and translating into physical forms of built space, the

economic and political corollaries to what today’s urban theorists describe as global hegemonies of

space .

Perhaps the only context in which Rotival will be permanently remembered is that of New

Haven’s midcentury urban renewal; a number of academics have credited much of New Haven mayor

Richard Lee’s work to Rotival. In this context, he is said to have “spun off ideas as a pin wheel throws off

sparks. And, like sparks, his ideas often vanished into the darkness.”38 And yet, it when he is placed in

the context of a trajectory of global developmentalist thought, his ideas seem far, far more enduring.


Figure 20 Maurice Rotival in the field in Johannesburg, c. 1958.


1 Keith Bevon, Johannesburg: The Making and Shaping of the City. Pretoria: The University of South Africa Press, 2004. 24.

2 Nigel Many, A City Divided: Johannesburg and Soweto. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1984. 3.

3 Many, 1984. 13.

4 Noeleen Murray, “Remaking Modernism,” in Desire Lines, eds. Noeleen Murray, Nick Shepherd and Martin Hall. New York: Routledge, 2007. 45‐6.

5 Clive Chipkin, Johannesburg Style: Architecture and Society, 1880’s‐1960. Cape Town: D Philip Publishers, 1993. 89.

6 Alan Mabin, “Reconstruction and the making of urban planning in 20th century South Africa” in Blank____: Architecture, Apartheid and After, catalogue for exhibition by the same name, eds. Hilton Judin and Ivan Vladislavic. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers. 1998. 269.

7 Lewis Mumford, The Culture of the City. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938. Cited in Mike Savage and Alan Warde, Urban Sociology, Capitalism and Modernity. London: Macmillan Press, 1993. 124.

8 Mumford, in Savage and Warde, 1993. 124.

9Carola Hein, “Maurice Rotival: French Planning on a World‐Scale (part I)” in Planning Perspectives, 17(3), 2002. 247‐265.; and Carola Hein, “Maurice Rotival: French Planning on a World‐Scale (part II)” in Planning Perspectives,17(4), 2002. 325‐344.

10 Hein, 2002a. 253.


11 Arturo Almandoz Marte, Planning Latin America’s Capital Cities, 1850‐1950. London: Routledge, 2002. 234

12 Hein, 2002a. 250.

13 Marte, 2002. 234.

14 Maurice Rotival and Associates, Maurice Emile Henri Rotival Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives. Documents and drawings for Caracas, Venezuela, Box 179‐181.

15 Various Authors. Maurice Emile Henri Rotival Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives. Box 178.

16 Marte, 2002. 128

17 Hein, 2002a. 249.

18 Scott, 1998, 58.

19 Hein, 2002a. 251‐52

20 Bremner, 2004, 81. Also Clive Chipkin, 1993, and Clive Chipkin, Johannesburg Transition: Architecture and Society from 1950. Johannesburg: STE Publishers, 2008.

21 Maurice Rotival, Wilfred Mallows and others, documents and personal correspondence. Maurice Emile Henri Rotival Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives. Box 130.

22 Maurice Rotival and Associates, “The Sector from Johannesburg to the Vaal,” report presented to South City Development Corporation. Maurice Emile Henri Rotival Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives. Box 130. 2.

23 Rotival, “The Sector from Johannesburg to the Vaal.” Maurice Emile Henri Rotival Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives.

24 Rotival and others, Maurice Emile Henri Rotival Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives. Various.

25 Rotival, “The Sector from Johannesburg to the Vaal.” Maurice Emile Henri Rotival Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives. 6, 45.

26 Rotival, “The Sector from Johannesburg to the Vaal.” Maurice Emile Henri Rotival Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives. 15.

27 Rotival, “Reef Plan.” Maurice Emile Henri Rotival Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives, Box 130. 2.

28 Marte, 2002. 234.

29 Chipkin, 1993, 89.

30 Rotival and Associates, Maurice Various plans and drawings, Emile Henri Rotival Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives. Box 262‐266.

31 Chipkin, 1993, 89.

32 Ibid., 148‐150.

33 Rotival, Various correspondence, Maurice Emile Henri Rotival Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives. Box 130.

34 Arturo Almandoz Marte, Planning Latin America’s Capital Cities, 1850‐1950. p. 234

35 Ibid.

36 Savage and Warde, 124.

37 Ibid., 129.

38 Robert Dahl, Who Governs? New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961.


Furthering the Organic This one ritual, multiplied a hundred thousand times over, is the everyday city. –John Kaliski

Rotival’s ‘organicism’ grew out of the high modernist ideal, and in many ways, it still

represented modernism in its rationality. Rotival understood the city, first and foremost, as a biological

being — it was alive and organic in the same way that a bird or tree might be, and was therefore subject

to the same strict rules. Rotival was not the only theorist to twist modernism into a functional science.

Christopher Alexander, who likewise formed his most enduring ideas by reevaluating the tenets of

postwar high modernism, also reserved an overall diagrammatic understanding of the city, while

allowing conceptual room for the urban landscape to grow, change, and respond to social practices.

Like Rotival, Alexander made use of a scientific background, seeking a complete theoretical

concept that could explain urban structure as a totality. In Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Christopher

Alexander argued for the necessity of a new design methodology that could describe both order and

complexity, like natural laws.1 Like Rotival’s hierarchical units of agglomeration, Alexander intended his

principle to remain meaningful at all scales, suggesting that in the same way that a leaf is to a tree, a

house is to a city, and indeed, a room is to a house. Despite the fact that Alexander’s language borrows

heavily from engineering, cybernetics and the developing field of computer science, his interest in

growing systems iteratively betrays the idea of the biological, not qualitatively, but as an intuitive

underlying principle.2

Alexander sought to emulate the natural process of evolving design in ‘primitive cultures’ (the

‘unselfconscious’ culture), in a ‘self conscious,’ (rational), design methodology.3 He contends that the

mental images through which self conscious designers represent the contexts of design problems are

incomplete and incorrect, whereas “in the unselfconscious process there is no possibility of

misconstruing the situation: nobody makes a picture of the context, so the picture cannot be wrong.”4

Thus, one of the most important aspects of Alexander’s new paradigm of urban planning is the

acknowledgement that users are the best interpreters of their own needs, and are therefore in the most

effectively position to determine how those needs should be met. By distinguishing the mental

representation of a design problem from the actual physical space in which it is resolved , Alexander, like

Rotival, presents a ripe opportunity for a Lefebvrian reading. But here, unlike Rotival, Alexander gives

weight not to representations of space, but to lived space itself. He removes design from the mental

sphere, and repositions it in the physical, giving preference to spatial practice: self‐provided solutions as

the germ for urban structure.

In A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, Alexander positioned these users of

space as the producers of a “generative grammar,” a seed from which a design method could be grown.

He writes, “Patterns dealing with towns can only be implemented gradually, by grass roots action;

patterns for a building can be built up in your mind, and marked on the ground.”5 Here, then, Alexander

makes the crucial distinction between mentally constructing design as a whole (as Rotival did — a

representation of space) and allowing it to take shape in the real world. He understood the city as a

biological being that could be iteratively generated from a scientific principle. Indeed, though

Alexander’s work predated Lefebvre’s Production of Space, he would tidally anticipate the central tenet:

that space is created through a continuous process that brings lived space into conversation with

representations of space. For Alexander, space could not be produced in the head of a designer (like


the early modernists) as an aesthetic totality, nor can it be fully conceived of as a scientific certainty

that only treats users as ‘inputs’ or units (as in Rotival’s case). While, for Rotival, the image, the

diagram, the conceptual representation held primacy, for Alexander, it is spatial practice from which

good design arises. Alexander sees order and complexity growing from culture and tradition:

Although there are no formulated rules (or perhaps indeed . . . just because there are

none), the unspoken rules are of great complexity, and are rigidly maintained. There

is a way to do things, a way not to do them. There is a firmly set tradition, accepted

beyond question by all builders of form.6

Alexander’s and Rotival’s theories differ, then, in the provenance of their initial logic. Rotival sought to

divine it himself through his own analysis and observation, whereas Alexander argued that it must be

supplied by the users of space, themselves.

Thorsten Deckler

Architect, Scholar, Drawer of Details at the turn of the 21st century

In Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Alexander positions self‐provided solutions at the starting

point for generating design. This notion will prove instrumental in Thorsten Deckler’s idea of the

organic. As we have seen, any lived space is built incrementally out of the countless of decisions made

by inhabitants every day. Thorsten Deckler makes this metaphor concrete. Working as a member of a

team of young architects, SharpCITY, to curate an exhibition investigating South Africa’s contemporary

architecture, Thorsten Deckler examines the potential of dispensing with standard building models that

rely on a theoretical foundation for the creation of static physical forms. Instead, he favors a model in

which a vibrant interplay between needs and solutions creates a constantly evolving city: South Africa shares the global challenges of massive and rapid urbanization and horizontally extending generic cities. At the same time, it is at the edge of mainstream global culture. As architects, we are keenly aware that we are not at the centre. It is exactly this awareness and the tangible need for architectural skills that make us question the academic abstraction and obsessive search novelty and technical perfection that dominate contemporary architecture elsewhere in the world. Perhaps a way to measure the relevance of the South African architectural output is to look at how architects here are finding beauty in necessity and necessity in beauty.7

Unlike earlier architects whose work in the ‘margins’ attempted to repeat mainstream

forms as an indication of progress, Deckler resists the hegemony of the ‘generic,’ both in

the city center, and in the growth at the urban fringe, where architects, both professional

and informal, have wrought creative and beautiful solutions from need.

The Problem of Housing in post‐apartheid South Africa

The 1994 demise of apartheid meant the possibility of change, and the promise of a new image

for South Africa, and Johannesburg, in particular. Eager to construct a new (internationally acceptable)

social and political atmosphere, the country quickly began to repaint itself, and its urban housing, as an

ideal canvas for reform, became a key starting point. 8

“


The challenge of housing a low‐income population, at the time residing in both informal

settlements and degraded remnants of apartheid‐style townships, became one of the government’s

major focuses, and one of the most highly visible ways to address a history of race‐based inequalities

inscribed on the land. Intensifying the problems left behind by apartheid were crumbling and

inadequate service provision, devastating environmental impacts wrought by inadequate infrastructure,

and most importantly, a rapidly expanding urban demographic affected by both an overall rise in

population and a city‐ward migration spurred by economic destabilization in rural areas due to changing

global markets9. The African National Congress put together the Reconstruction and Development

Programme which immediately sought to address these problems. One of the explicit goals of the RPD

was the provision of acceptable and affordable social housing. Initially, the RDP presented its

commitment to low cost housing in the 1994 White Paper on Housing, which promised, as its primary

goal, to deliver 1 million homes in one year. Two years later, the South African Constitution appeared,

reinforcing this goal.10

While some reviews of the

program boast impressive statistics,

critics of the RDP and other

‘bureaucrat‐driven’11 settlements

blame the continuing crisis of housing

on poor implementation, poor quality

construction, and lack of will to meet

original goals. More importantly, critics

note that the new housing schemes

suffered from a lack of understanding

regarding the actual needs of the

population it sought to provide for.

Rather than paying attention to the

patterns arising spontaneously in the

city’s newly urbanizing areas, planners

relied on highly‐ingrained, conventional

modes of providing housing and

infrastructure. The troubled,

unappealing layouts that resulted suffered from a lack of originality and humanity, to the extent that

they often strongly resemble the politicized building programs of the mid‐century apartheid.12 Layout

schemes appearing at this time conformed very closely the apartheid‐style high modernist ideal: an

internationally accepted ‘minimum standard’ underwrote fully planned townships with completely

serviced buildings, which encouraged, and even necessitated, the consumption of costly utilities that

residents could ill‐afford. The decision to build this type of ‘complete package’ housing — not unlike any

suburb the world over — far from central areas, on urban peripheries, was described by critics as a relic

of the modernist impulse to create an internationally legible architecture.13

The problems of these emanated from a number of separate but interrelated issues. The

concentration of low cost housing meant that new village areas were still mostly segregated, and mostly

poor, thereby instantly ghetto‐izing their residents. This racialized geography was exacerbated by

Figure 221 Incomplete houses, part of a stalled Reconstruction and Development Programme housing project. Lady Grey, Eastern Cape, 2006.

(Source: David Goldblatt)


location: the urban periphery lent itself to unsound development, far from employment opportunities

and resources. However, land in city centers was expensive, and as the globalizing city courted

transnational investors, there was little interest in shelling out money for subsidized infill housing.14 The

imperative of saving money, furthermore, encouraged poor quality infrastructure that rapidly began to

underservice even those residents in fully provided‐for areas15 Most important, however, was the fact

that residents simply disliked the housing model. Repeating the turn‐of‐the‐century response of urban

planners to the vast, illegible landscapes of ‘slum’ settlements, designers and policy‐makers were once

again attempting to inscribe an order that was out of synch with the way people lived their lives.

Whether out of preference for their existing self‐provided housing, or the hope of eventually finding

something better than what the government was providing, inhabitants of Johannesburg’s informal

settlements responded to RDP housing initiative by either remaining in their existing homes, or moving

back after selling their government‐issued housing to someone who could afford it, thus ensuring that

the poorest residents remained in the slums.16

If the desire to create a Johannesburg of formalized, legible communities grew out of a state

agenda of suppression and segregation, where does the reimagining of these communities stand in

relationship to the larger power structures of today’s post‐apartheid South Africa? Where urban

residents have taken possession of the landscape—by reclaiming former townships sites, constructing

new villages organically, or a combination of the two—their homes are threatened by continued interest

in ‘developing’ these less developed areas. Representing many spheres (corporate, government, not‐

for‐profit) on many levels (local, state, international), there is no dearth of actors interested in

addressing The Challenge of the Slums. In such a context, even the most well‐intentioned actors can

radically misinterpret the systems at play in the slum—a term which, itself, is subject to question.17 In

short, a simplistic understanding of slums as undesirable, broken places often results in policies—not

the least of which is clearance and resettlement — that create even more radically fragmented lives and

landscapes. 18

Deckler and New Directions

Thorsten Deckler’s notion of the organic is a direct response to the continued presence of

rational modernism in Johannesburg’s architecture. His is one of a new wave of alternative strategies

that have arisen, in the wake of the perceived failure of the South African Government’s Reconstruction

and Development Programme, seeking to reconsider the necessity of providing fully planned, fully

equipped housing for the urban poor.

Deckler, who graduated as an architect from the University of the Witswaterand in 1997, is co‐

founder of the Johannesburg‐based 26’10 South Architects and the aforementioned SharpCITY , both of

which he characterizes as think‐tanks concerned with the South African urban context. In partnership

with the Geothe‐Institut of South Africa, Deckler and 26’10 South prepared a report on the potentialities

hidden within Johannesburg’s informal settlements. He wrote,

It is becoming abundantly clear that solutions do not lie in eradicating the informal

city, but in acknowledging the fact that ordinary people find their own solutions,

however inadequate they may seem, with minimal intervention from the state. This “


type of self‐delivery or popular urbanism is largely disregarded and outlawed. Its

potential remains hidden19

Deckler, in this report, takes as his starting point the powerful notion that culture determines spatial

organization: organic growth is caused by the hundreds of small movements made by people as they act

out the physical movements of their daily lives. Not unlike Alexander, for Deckler it is this constant

organization and reorganization of space that creates order and complexity, fractal iteration, to appear.

These are the patterns we recognize as urban culture. As needs organically arise and are met, certain

solutions form and repeat themselves: a threshold, a meeting space, a courtyard. Like Kevin Lynch,

whose The Image of the City built a spatial toolkit of paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks,20

Deckler ‘s various elements combined to build a city that users understand in predictable ways. But

unlike Lynch’s system, which describes a familiar type of city — capitol buildings in the center, a central

business district and a number of distinct residential areas, main boulevards, public parks, etc. —

Deckler system seeks to formalize the solutions that have arisen organically, rather than those that

comprise ‘conventional’ city planning. His careful observations of informal urban spaces give

unprecedented weight to even the smallest and most insubstantial‐seeming elements of urban design.

Figure 222.1 (Above) Deckler begins his investigation of Diepsloot township, located on the outskirts of Johannesburg, by juxtaposing a view of the bustling street with a carefully drawn map of the settlement, which begins to reveal an urban fabric, organized around streets and courtyards — what Deckler calls a ‘carpet’ of dwellings.

Figure 22.2 (Left) Deckler focuses his lens on various building typologies, beginning to deconstruct the uses encoded in the informally constructed space. Here, he concludes that the typology offers a “highly flexible housing model with the yard functioning as a defensible semi‐private space. . . the scale seems to encourage a communal ‘looking after’ each other’s children and property.’

(Source: Thorsten Deckler, Informal Architecture.)


Figure 223 Here, Deckler zooms in further, noticing the particular elements of each business or dwelling: the use of threshold, shade, decoration and signage, which, he asserts, “create human scale, shelter and identity with minimal means.”



In Deckler’s beautifully drawn, careful observations, he practices a

whole different type of image making from Rotival. While Rotival,

too, compiled documentation almost obsessively, his primary

mode of recording information was the diagram — a form that

necessarily required Rotival to filter his observations, re‐

configuring them in his own mental space. Thus, while Rotival

really produces representations of space, Deckler comes much

closer to capturing lived space.

At the same time, any image‐making technique

automatically encodes some sort of mental framework, revealing

the attitude of the maker‐of‐images. For Rotival, we implicitly

understand his image‐making as an act of domination; he, as ‘the

expert,’ has the ability to come in and clarify the processes at play.

Deckler, to, uses image‐making as a power exercise, but it can be

said that he is imparting power to those whose space he

documents: by paying careful attention to the informal solutions

he observes, he lends them legitimacy. From a tire that sits atop a

roof, holding down the corrugated iron, to the ragged edge of the iron itself, Deckler represents

‘spontaneous’ solutions in a formal architectural language, as though he is drawing a highly complex and

precise façade or meticulous plan. By drawing a tire in its ‘correct’ position atop a roof, Deckler

transforms the tire from something haphazard — thrown up there on a windy day — to something with

as much formal purpose as a chimney or roof vent. Deckler’s lines betray a respect and attention to

detail that architects will recognize from traditional plans, sections and elevations, even though the

subject of these drawings may be unfamiliar. 21

Deckler accompanies his

study with detailed photographs.

Some of them create an index of

building practices, again elevating

‘found’ solutions to the level of

standard practice. Others simply

humanize the space the space they

portray, showing them to be the

familiar constructions of daily life.

Figure 224 Bottle‐cap washers are used widely in informal housing in lieu of bought hardware. Here, Deckler documents the practice, lending it a level of legitimacy.


Figure 225 Deckler photographs the small porch of the house documented above. In this seemingly simple photograph, he has shown all the elements common to a standard front porch: house number, chair, potted plant that must be watered . . . even the shoes that have been taken off on the front mat and left outside before entering. Though small, the front porch has been tiled, effectively creating a threshold between private space and the public courtyard.



In his work, Deckler incorporates this informal architectural vocabulary into his own. By

documenting these types of building solutions, Deckler creates an ‘index’ of strategies that can then be

reapplied to future planning efforts, in much the way that Christopher Alexander described: the

unselfconscious mind creates the ‘germ’ which the self conscious designer can ‘grow’ into an entire

landscape.

Figure 226 A portion of the presentation board for Deckler’s Diep Soak and Curl project. Aimed at creating a series of bathhouses to provide basic services in the underserviced Diepsloot Township, the Diep Soak and Curl seeks to learn from the informal building strategies that Deckler and 26’10 have documented in their Informal Architecture booklet. Here, building typology (highlighted in green in the left column) appears keyed into the bathhouse design, showing how the need for defensible space, retail space, public space, thresholds, etc, has been met. The Diep Curl units, which come in three sizes, are to be distributed across the township.

(Source: Thorsten Deckler, “Diep Soak and Curl,” personal communication)


Deckler, who works primarily as a theorist,

critic, and academic, has made use his

analyses in designing new projects. In the

Diepsloot Diep Soak and Curl proposal,

Deckler’s design incorporates a series of

elements drawn from the studies which

resulted in his Informal Architecture

pamphlet. He presents his analyses of the

formation of urban space by pairing

physical form (bench, awning, covered area)

with social action (selling candy and

cigarettes, braiding hair, napping or

socializing with friends). In so doing, he

clearly illustrates Lefebvre’s notion of

socially produced space.22 He goes on to

show how each of these produced spaces

can be formalized into a new design that

borrows from their various forms. In his

Diep Soak and Curl proposal, Deckler keys

each form into the new design, arranging

components to form a new building, which

will, in turn, go on to shape urban space.

Figure 227 Diep Soak and Curl units.


Figure 228.1 and 28.2 Ultimately, Deckler’s proposal seeks to sweep up an existing social and cultural mode of spatial production and reapply that same logic across the landscape. Here, at left, are the initial buildings from which Deckler drew his analyses, and at right, those buildings, ‘re‐mixed’ and spread across Diepsloot in a new infrastructural matrix.



Deckler and the Formalization of the Informal

For Deckler, the processes by which informal production of space can be formalized also occur

on a larger scale, reshaping entire cities. The contemporary architecture of Johannesburg comprises

imported spaces of an increasingly ‘non‐local’ Johannesburg — one that is dominated by connections

not between the central business district and its regional surroundings, but rather, between the CBD

and the international cities it is linked to by trade. This is a classic feature of the ‘world city,’ and, in

Johannesburg, remains pronounced: though central spaces in urban Johannesburg rely on labor and

support drawn from surrounding townships, the division between who may actually inhabit these

spaces is as complete, some scholars argue, as it was during apartheid.23 Though it is easy to read

Johannesburg as two landscapes — one of the

formal, global, corporate city, and of bustling,

local character — the truth is that these two are

in constant conversation. Here, we recall Arjun

Appadurai’s notion of the –Scape, the idea that a

Lefebvrian dialectical process is, at its core, a

challenge to the global hegemonies of space that

have arisen with globalization. 24 In his

SharpCITY monograph on the architecture of

South Africa, he shows a number of different

instances in which a spontaneous use of space

not only affects its surroundings immediately,

but also becomes swept up and reinterpreted

into a designed space — a representation of

space.

One new form that has become a ubiquitous example of the formalization of informal spatial

appropriation is the transport interchange coupled with a trader’s market. Deckler documents a

number of these projects, noting that the form has become the “agora of the newly democratic state,

the place of maximum commercial exchange and social integration.”25 City officials, he notes, are

attempting to integrate the informal economy that has sprung up in transport interchanges by seeking

to create infrastructure that caters to informal venders, and also meets the needs of the minibus taxi

industry, which supplies much of the transportation for commuters traveling between townships and

their places of work in the affluent city center. The Metro Mall, one such building project, is designed to

provide rank for 25 buses, 2,000 taxis, and 800 trading stalls for retail vendors.26 Traders, who would

otherwise have found interstitial spaces in the city to spread out their wares, no crowd into rows and

rows of stalls, in a complex occupying nearly 6½ acres. The Metro Mall, according to Deckler, caters to a

variety of trader needs, providing spaces that vary from small floor‐space stalls with concrete counters

to large cubicles with rolling shutters or garage doors that lock. This is a perfect example of local needs

reforming public space. And yet, is the vibrancy of street‐style vending lost when it is rehoused in a

concrete cage with formalized stalls? And does the legitimization of informal vending in this one space

further de‐legitimize it elsewhere? Could the Metro Mall serve as simply another example of the

attempt to rationalize the spontaneous?

Figure 229 A woman Braaing mealies on the street; as an example of the distinctly local culture, she provides a challenge to the homogenization of Johannesburg.

(Source: Linsay Bremner, Johannesburg: One City, Colliding Worlds)


A second example of the transport interchange building coupled with vending space is the

Baragwanath Public transport Interchange and Traders Market. This project takes a linear, rather than

centralized format, stretching nearly a mile along a major access route between Johannesburg and

Soweto, a former apartheid township southwest of the city. While the linear form helps increase

infiltration and alleviates the overwhelmingly grid‐like nature of the Metro Mall, the formalized space,

cast from concrete, still exhibits something of a monolithic nature, and forms an in‐crossable edge along

the street. Meant as a “public catalyst for the development of new urban spaces and fabric in once

underdeveloped and marginalized environments,” the interchange attempts to exhibit a kind of random

dynamism. The concrete is “sculpted to avoid monotony, given the length and scale of the building.”

However, monotony is the exact affect it achieves, and the ‘randomness’ of form only serves as a static

and ironic pastiche of the original intent: cast entirely from concrete with no additional materials or

landscaping, the structure can only recall a utilitarian sort of apparatus, merely formulated to enable the

greatest degree of interchange. Inexplicably, it is pictured almost entirely devoid of life, with none of

the bustling commerce is seeks to enable. And yet, even if the interchange was shown full of venders, it

is hard to imagine that the monolithic concrete form would truly recapture the vibrancy of street

vending in authentic, ‘found’ spaces.

Figure 30 Metro Mall Tansport Facility and Traders Market, Gauteng Province, Johannesburg. Designed by Urban Solutions Architects. Photos and floor plan, left.

(Source: Thorsten Deckler, Contemporary South African Architecture.)


Figure 31.1 (Above) Baragwanath Public Transport Interchange and Traders Market, Soweto, Gauteng Province, Johannesburg. Designed by Urban Solutions Architects. Architect’s rendering.

Figure 32.2 (Below) Plan.


A third similar project pictured in Deckler’s book is the Faraday Market and Transport

Interchange. Likewise admirable in its attempt to “formalize and provide improved, cleaner and safer

facilities for the local trade,” the project still subjects the vibrancy of informal trade to a monolithic

form, replacing the ‘found’ spaces of vendors with a centralized atrium. This project emphases that the

spaces found in cities for informal trade are often the interstices, left over after the formal areas of the

city have had first dibs.

Figure 33.1 (Right) Faraday Market and Transport Interchange. Johannesburg, Gauteng Province. Albonica and Sack Architects.

Figures 33.2 and 33.3 (Next Page) Plan and Architect’s rendering.



The area seems devoid of any safe, walkable links to the surrounding urban fabric. With such ‘helpful’

attempts to promote informal vending, it is hard to imagine what a purposely deleterious plan would

look like. Indeed, though each of these plans, in theory, exhibits the optimistic challenge to the global

spatial hegemony which Appadurai and others promote, it seems as though the process really works

well only when these projects remain in the hands of the users of space, as vibrant, dynamic, ever‐

changing forces of spatial organization.

Another architectural impulse

implicit in the creation of an organic urban

architecture is the attempt to emulate the

look of informal architecture. Incorporating

corrugated iron, small, blocky forms, and

breaking long facades into short segments

scaled similarly to the surrounding huts is

an attempt to emulate the fabric of the

surrounding settlement. It can be argued,

though, that this practice further

marginalizes these areas by at once

‘labeling’ them as part of a certain urban

setting that cannot be departed from, and

also naturalizing a type of architecture that

is not chosen by, so much as forced upon, a population with means for little else. Large projects are

built out of newly purchased material that emulates those found or bought second hand in informal

settlements, despite the fact that, because materials are being purchased new, and building are being

designed , other materials or forms could be just as easily used. If this practice is not seen as explicitly

perpetuating urban inequality, then at the very least, it reeks of inauthenticity and pastiche. Siting

projects in informal settlements is an admirable enough practice; emulating them in form and material

seems to be a hollow nod to social justice, more than a possibility for creating it.

Here, the ruptures inflicted on Johannesburg by enforced division — between township and

central city, between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ commerce, between formal and informal

transportation, between social groups and the spaces they are ‘permitted’ to occupy — have begun to

Figure 34 Vibrant Streetscape: Informal vending without the benefit of infrastructure.

(Source: Lindsay Bremner, Johannesburg: One City, Colliding Worlds.)


be stitched together, in some cases, quite literally. As the global economy continues to paint over

Johannesburg with the internationally recognizable forms of political and economic ‘development’ —

skyscrapers and multilane boulevards and intraversable highways and fort‐like enclaves of impenetrable

corporate centers — the true city continues to rumple the asphalt and sprout up through the cracks.

These lumps and tears in the international cityscape (what Appadurai calls the “global flow of people

and things,”) are what continue to frustrate the processes of homogenization, and reabsorb hegemonic

global space into locally produced space. And yet, as we have seen, attempts to foster and legitimize

informality may not always be successful. At the very least, they rely on a codification, the creation of a

simulacrum of the truly spontaneous.

While we have already seen, in Deckler’s beautiful, careful documentation of informal

housing solutions, a great deal of respect for the agency of the user, we have nonetheless encountered

a sort of ‘gaze’: an exoticizing tendency that capitalizes on the the notion of cultural difference that

justifies marked disparities of privilege and power. If Rotival’s method of image‐making represented a

justification of his urban forms through the reliance on the organic as a ‘scientific’ and therefore

‘natural’ principle, which therefore implied that any spatial arrangement that could be read in terms of

this organic language was acceptable, then Deckler’s image‐making romanticizes the organic to the

point where the existence of such blatant inequalities of urban dwelling seem, once again, natural.

Indeed, the romance of the informal becomes the inspiration for his designs, perhaps nowhere more

than in the Sans Souci Cinema.

The Sans Souci project, a collaboration between Deckler’s firm, 26’10 South, and Lindsay

Bremner, sits in Kliptown in Gauteng Province, on the site of a cinema that burnt down in 1995. The

building had previously been a dancehall and a barn, and for many years during the apartheid era, was

the only cinema where black people could watch films. Eventually, the building fell into disrepair and

was disassembled by people constructing informal housing. But the building, according to Deckler and

Bremner, “occupied a powerful place in the memory of many,” and became the site of a community

development project which would be built incrementally, allowing visitors and residents to actively

participate in “remembering/recreating/imagining the history of Kliptown.27 What is most interesting

about the project is the spectacle it created. Because few funds were available to build a community

center (which would feature the building’s ruins) on the cinema’s site, part of the project became not

only about designing, but funding as well. The architects sponsored a series of performances, dance

workshops, and festivals to bring the ‘ruin’ to life, and attract economic support.28

An innovative approach that engaged the surrounding community, the project nonetheless

relied on a type of image‐making that could be seen as exploiting authentic social interaction with lived

space. Though the shell of the Sans Souci was still frequented as a ‘hang‐out’, and often featured

prominently is music videos, the project sought to formalize spontaneous actions with the site’s

“dramatic shell,” turning the “beautiful ruin” into a project that would capitalize on its iconic position in

the Kliptown landscape. Despite the unique incremental approach proposed for developing the

project, by the last phase of construction, the ruin is almost completely swallowed up by a large, fairly

standard looking corrugated metal community center, whose style and proportions have little to do with

the ruin they purport to celebrate. Nonetheless, it is the romantic image of the building that was rolled

out to secure funding. A partial collapse of the building halted the project in 2009.29


As projects of image‐making, Deckler’s work on the Sans Souci and the Geothe‐Insitut report

that underwrote his Diep Soak and Curl project were great successes: they rendered in stunning detail

the complexities of lived space in informal settlements, showing great respect for the agency, creativity,

and beauty that these spaces ultimately produce. However, as actual projects, Deckler’s designs seem

to fall prey to the same problems with the formalization of the informal that beleaguer the series of

market/traffic interchanges that his SharpCity monograph documents: it is extremely difficult to do just

justice to urban informality by rendering it formal. The necessary cooperation with a whole series of

overarching political and economic structures, from compliance with city codes to the securing of

funding, force requirements on the informal that ultimately fail to fully preserve its ephemeral qualities.

However, Deckler’s work ultimately remains important for the study and appropriate design of cities like

Johannesburg. While urban informality can never be designed, per se, Deckler’s understanding of the

creation of informal space serves as a crucial point of reference, and can stand in opposition to other

theories of the informal that hold a far less nuanced view of how the organic can play a role in the

design of developing cities.

In many ways, urban planners today have much to learn from Thorsten Deckler’s theory that

lived space can inform urban design. Rather than justifying the continued existence of informal

settlements as a ‘best practice’ that allows people to provide for themselves, Deckler attempts to learn

from the logic of self‐provided housing, in the same way that Christopher Alexander sought to uncover

the logic of the city within its smallest components. Put another way: for Rotival, an organic

Figure 35 Photos of the Sans Souci Cinema, a ‘dramatic ruin’ that still plays an active part in community life.

(Source: All photos 26’10 South Architects and 26’10 South Architects via Johannesburg News Company)


development of the city meant one that proceeded strictly, precisely, according to a predictable set of

rules. For Alexander, organic meant that a self‐same logic was applied at all levels of the city. For

Deckler, it is not the idea that successful urban form can arise, unaided, from urban informality, but

rather, that because informal settlements are a way of organizing the daily problems of space and time,

they will necessarily contain solutions which can be applied in the formal city.

Figure 3 The Sans Souci as a powerful image‐making opportunity, which celebrates, even glorifies Johannesburg's urban degradation.

(Source: 26’10 South Architects.)

Figure 37 Thorsten Deckler.

(Source: architectafrica.com; designmind.com)


The Conclusion:

Organic Informality — The Answer? Both Maurice Rotival and Thorsten Deckler’s organic formulations of urban space hold power as

seductive metaphorical narratives. Furthermore, each provides a tempting model that eases the burden

on urban planners working in post‐colonial landscapes, who must deal with the clash of economic

liberalization, expanding and quickening networks of trade, the loosening of ties between city centers

and their surrounding regions, and bourgeoning urban populations due to changing demographic

patterns of birth and migration — that is, the entire set of circumstances which are widely

acknowledged to comprise the phenomenon of globalization in modern cities, which we have here seen

to be rooted in the earlier postcolonial political, social and economic conditions. Thus, both Rotival and

Deckler must be held up alongside the models they produce, with an acknowledgement that the very

real shortcomings of these models can potentially be overshadowed by their alluring qualities: in

Rotival’s case, the illusion of order, predictability, and rationality, and for Deckler, a faith in adaptability,

flexibility and innovation. Indeed, both architects were able to construct strongly appealing ‘poetries’ of

their spatial theories; through the use of representations of space, each risks naturalizing a set of social,

economic and political conditions that cause the urban symptoms which they seek to analyze.

We have seen a number of projects that take inspiration from the movements that arise

spontaneously every day in the informal city. In many cases, we have seen the attempt to formalize

those movements into a concrete practice of urban design. Here, we must recall that Alsayyad and Roy

have identified an ideology of ‘civil society’ as a widespread approach to the ‘social disorganization’ and

‘unfathomable crisis’ of the Third World metropolis, and it is not entirely without mistrust. Despite the

fact that self‐management has emerged on the urban fringe largely out of a lack of alternatives, the cult

of self‐management has become a prominent tool in the kit of those attempting to address rapidly

urbanizing Third World cities. Some of these new approaches profess to support informality, while

continuing to rely on the ‘crisis’ rhetoric originated by turn‐of‐the‐century urban planners addressing

early 20th century European slum settlements, justifying the application of ‘order’ to otherwise

‘irrational’ urban areas. Others risk accepting or even glorifying self‐provided housing, naturalizing and

perpetuating the larger political and economic structures that necessitate it. The continuation of top‐

down management schemes, and the acceptance of bottom‐up solutions both, in a sense, contribute to

the continuation of the spatial hegemonic order that defines cities like Johannesburg.

Roy and Alsayyad have pointed out that the new logic of urban informality is becoming

pervasive, and is even being celebrated by those institutions which have traditionally been understood

as the protectorate of private economic interests and the drivers of underdevelopment. They note,

“from the World Bank agenda of ‘enabling’ informal urban development to the newfound enthusiasm

for self‐help strategies of the urban poor, there is a growing consensus on the benefits of harnessing the

efficiencies of urban informality.”30

Misapplications of the promise of self‐provided solutions include the World Bank‐inspired Sites‐

and‐Services methodology, as well as a more specifically self‐help oriented incremental approach to

upgrading and consolidating informal settlements. In 1995, a report was produced by the Department

of Housing’s ‘National Business Initiative’ validating the informal growth already underway in

settlements. In a scathing analysis of this document, its committee, and the neoliberal, big‐business


oriented government it was supposed to have served, Patrick Bond writes that Incremental Housing was

a “deft phrase adopted. . . to justify breaking RDP promises of ‘affordable housing for all’ while instead

marginally expanding upon existing late‐apartheid programs that themselves originated at the World

Bank during the 1970.”31

And yet, the conversation remains an important one. Ananya Roy makes the case for a

rethinking of the geographies that lay at the heart of contemporary urban theory, contending that it is

high time for the city forms of the global South to inform theoretical metropolitan analysis.32 She writes,

“The cities of the global South, when visible in urban theory, are usually assembled under the sign of

underdevelopment, that last and compulsory chapter on ‘Third World Urbanization’ in the urban studies

text‐book.” 33 In such a context, they are characterized as the dire spaces of despair, the endless sea of

‘surplus humanity’34 that Mike Davis describes in Planet of Slums. These authors, then, are ready to

reposition the spatial modes that take place in developing cities at the center of an urban discourse.

The struggle to do so, Roy notes, has been characterized by the attempt to overthrow an existing

conception of ‘First World’ cities (global cities) as models generating theory and policy, and ‘Third

World’ cities (megacities and cities with large informal settlements) as problems requiring diagnosis and

reform.35 Roy characterizes the hegemony of Euroamerican urban theory as a “failure of imagination

and epistemology,” and calls for an investigation of “how new territorial forms are constructed

politically and reproduced through everyday acts and struggles around consumption and social

reproduction.” 36 Thus, Johannesburg proves to be a particularly ripe site for analysis, as it is the unique

coexistence of global city and informal settlement, clashing together in one place, which has shaped the

landscape and informed urban modalities.

Organic Informality — The Question! In his vision of a new world shaped by emerging –Scapes, Arjun Appadurai created a rich,

tumbling, multicolored model of global political and cultural economies, in his own words, a “globally

variable synesthesia,”37 in which the forms adopted from one moment in cultural consciousness can

begin to confuse and inform another. In this way, the culture of informal settlements can become

representative of a new class of cities emerging all over as the world: peripheral communities that are

not merely the physical margins of the city, but rather, that begin to filter into the city both physically

and socially, institutionalizing a “constant state of flux”38 by their continued, insistent presence. Thus,

the city is kept fluid by the constant influx of residents from the informal city: a solvent that is

constantly washing over, eroding the structures that exist, and shaping the space into new forms.

Despite the problems associated with trying to consciously construct an organic urban theory,

the idea of the organic nonetheless inheres in the production of space. In looking at the forms of space

that have emerged in post‐colonial Johannesburg — the twin landscapes of slum and global city — we

have attempted to find not only how the application of the ‘organic’ metaphor has helped construct and

justify spatial hegemonies, but more importantly, how it might be instrumental in tearing them down.

Though we have seen the shortcoming of using the notion of the organic as a panacea of urban

planning, by keeping in mind the idea that space might be organically produced (a Lefebvrian reading),

we can continue to question old spatial frameworks (and the political and economic frameworks from

which they arise) and pave the way for new ones.


1 Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964.

2 Philip Steadman. The Evolution of Designs: Biological Analogy in Architecture and the Applied Arts. New York: Routledge, 2008. 163.

3 Alexander, 1964, 46.

4 Steadman, 176.

5 Christopher Alexander et al., A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. xxxix.

6 Alexander, 1964, 46. My emphasis.

7 Thorsten Deckler, Anne Graupner, and Henning Rasmuss, Contemporary South African Architecture in a Landscapeof Transition. CapeTown: Juta & Co., 2006. Introduction.

8 Patrick Bond. Unsustainable South Africa: Environment, Development and Social Protest. Scottsville: University of Natal Press, 2002. 1‐7.

9 Murray, 2008. Also David M. Smith, ed. The Apartheid City and Beyond: Urbanization and Social Change in South Africa. New York: Routledge, 2001.

10 Republic of South Africa (1994). “The white paper on reconstruction and development.” 1994. http://www.info.gov.za/gazette/whitepaper/1994/16085.pdfS. Also Jenkins, P. “Difficulties encountered in community involvement in delivery under the new South African housing policy.” Habitat International, 23(4) 1999., 431–446.

11 Lindsay Bremner, Johannesburg: One City, Colliding Worlds, Johannesburg: STE Publishers, 2004. 36.

12 Bremner, 2004. Also Allison Goebel, “Sustainable Urban Development? Low‐cost Housing Challenges in South Africa.” Habitat International 31, 2007. 291‐302.

13 Bond, 2002. 189‐243. Also Goebel, 291‐302. Also Chipkin, 206‐211.

14 Bond,2000., Bond 2002. Also J Seekings, “Introduction: Urban studies in South Africa after apartheid.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 24(4) 2000, 832–840.

15 Marie Huchzermeyer, “Housing for the poor? Negotiated housing policy in South Africa.” Habitat International, 25,2001. 303–331..

16 Huchzermeyer, 2001, p. 306);

17 Davis, 2006. 21‐23.

18 Jeb Brugmann, Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How Cities are Changing the World. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009. 201‐213. Also Roger Zeter and Georgia Butina Watson, eds. Designing Sustainable Cities in the Developing World. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 2006. 121‐134; 197‐206. Also ACHR (Asian Coalition for Housing Rights), “Negotiating the right to stay in the city.” Environment and Urbanization 16 (1), 2004. 9‐25. Also Diana Mitlin and David Satterthwaite, Empowering Squatter Citizen. London: Earthscan. 2004. 245‐277. Also Sheela Patel, Celine d’Cruz and Sundar Burra “Beyond evictions in a global city: people‐managed resettlement in Mumbai.” Environment and Urbanization 14(1), 2002. 159‐172.

19 Thorsten Deckler et al., Informal Architecture: Drawings (from) the Informal City. Johannesburg: Goethe Institut and 26’10 South Architects, 2009. 42.

20 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1960.

21 Deckler, 2009, 25‐40.

22 Lefebvre, 1991.


23Bremner, 2004, 57‐58. Also David McDonald, World City Sydrome: Neoliberalism and Inequality in Cape Town. New York: Routledge, 2009.

24 Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference,” in The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader. Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, eds. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1996. 50.

25 Deckler et al., 2006. 59.

26 Ibid., 61.

27 Ibid., 53.

28 Lucille Davie, “Kliptown’s Cinema Project Waits for Funding,” Johannesburg News Agency, August 24, 2006. Accessed online at http://www.joburgnews.co.za/2006/aug/aug24_sanssouci.stm, April, 2010.

29 “Sans Souci Cinema” entry in Spatial Agency database, Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider, and Jeremy Till, compilers. Accessed at http://www.spatialagency.net/database/sans.souci.cinema, April, 2010.

30 Ananya Roy and Nezar AlSayyad, Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004. 2.

31 Bond 2000, p. 259‐93.

32 Ananya Roy, “The 21st Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory,” in Regional Studies, 43(6), 2009. 819‐830.

33 Roy, 2009. 820.

34 Davis, 2004. 13.

35 Roy, 2009. 820

36 Ibid.

37 Appadurai, 53.

38 Simone, 1998. 174.


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