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| GENERAL CONTEXT Johannesburg is the largest City in the Gauteng Province which is one of nine provinces in South Africa. It was founded in 1886 after the discovery of gold and has for over a century been the centre of South Africa’s gold-mining industry. It is one of the youngest major cities in the world and has the status of the country’s chief industrial and financial metropolis. The Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan area forms the largest urban complex in South Africa and one of the largest on the African continent comprising a total of 2.5 million people of which 400 000 are in informal settlements. Johannesburg is situated on the Highveld, the broad, grassy plateau that sweeps across the South African interior. The city swaddles the Witwatersrand, or Rand, a string of low, rocky ridges that constitutes the watershed between the subcontinental drainage divide into the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. The city’s elevation ranges from 1 500 m to 1 800 m. Johannesburg is a unique metropolis in that it is the only one which is not located on a navigative river, estuary or has a seaport. It also obtains most of its water from an adjoining region in Gauteng, via the Vaal River. The city owes its location to the presence of an even more precious resource, gold. Most of the gold mines in the city ceased operation in the 1970s, but in its day the Witwatersrand gold industry accounted for more than 40 percent of the world’s annual gold production. Remnants of the industry-rusting headgear, towering yellow-white mine and slimes dumps, copses of dusty Australian bluegum trees imported for underground timbering are still common and unique to Johannesburg’s landscape. Johannesburg has a high temperate climate. The city enjoys about eights hours of sunlight per day in both winter and summer. Rainfall averages about 710 mm per annum, but the total varies considerably from year to year. Droughts are common. What rain the city receives falls mostly in the summer months, often in spectacular late-afternoon electrical storms. Johannesburg is governed by the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council an elected body created under the country’s new Constitution (1993-94). The Council has representatives from across the metropolitan area of Greater Johannesburg, which extends approximately 1384 square km and includes more than 720 suburbs and townships. There are four seperate counsils, in the north, south, west and east. Physically Johannesburg reflects nearly a century of racially driven social engineering that reached a climax under apartheid (literally "apartness"), which is a system of forced racial segregation that was in operation in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. The result is a city of extraordinary contrasts, of glass and steel skyscrapers versus fetid informal settlements, of internationally recognised universities versus widespread illiteracy, of glittering abundance versus desperate poverty. It is the responsibility of the current government to begin to reduce and ultimately eradicate these discrepancies and major contrasts through ensuring the increase in the standard of living for all its citizens, to an acceptable level. These challenges are further broken down in the next section. ISSUES, ACHIEVEMENT AND CHALLENGES ECONOMIC ISSUES, ACHIEVEMENTS AND CHALLENGES Johannesburg is known as the economic hub of South and Southern Africa in that is both the centre of mining administation and service, manufacturing, and finance of the country. It further generates 12% of the countries GDP and 38% of the Gauteng Province’s GDP. All the mining houses headquarters are located in the city, as is the Chamber of Mines, which regulates the industry. Local factories in Johannesburg and on the East Rand produce a great variety of goods ranging from textiles to specialty steels. A substantial engineering sector services the needs of the mining industry. Virtually all the country’s banks, insurance companies, and building societies have their head offices in the Inner City of Johannesburg, which houses over 2.2 million mē of offices. This constitutes the largest accumulation of office space in Africa. The Johannesburg Stock Exchange, founded in 1887 to raise capital for deep-level mining and which lists more than 600 companies is also located in the inner city. The Inner City of Johannesburg also has over one million square metres of retail space, which not only services the city and the province but many portions of Sub-Saharan Africa. Greater Johannesburg will also be home to the new Constitutional Court of South Africa, which is the highest court in the country. This construction will stimulate further development and investment into the socio-cultural dynamics of our country. THE PEOPLE : ISSUES, ACHIEVEMENTS AND CHALLENGES About 70 percent of Johannesburg’s citizens are African; about 25 percent are white and the remainder Coloured or Indian. Such figures, however, scarcely do justice to the city’s polyglot population. There are 11 official languages in South Africa of which four are predominantly used in Greater Johannesburg, namely English, Afrikaans, Sotho and Zulu. The city also has other small ethnic groupings including Portuguese, Greek, Italian, Russian, Polish and Lebanese communities. All the worlds major religions are also represented, in this diverse agglomeration of urban citizens, with the majority of the people, both white and black being Christians. The most significant churches, in terms of numbers, are Catholics and Anglican, the "Zionist" churches - small, independent African sects that blend Pentecostal Christianity and indigenous ritual beliefs. Currently the focus of Greater Johannesburg from a social point of view is on the homeless population and on addressing the needs of our children, a large and important sector of the population. This is a mayoral project. URBAN STRUCTURE : ISSUES, ACHIEVEMENTS AND CHALLENGES
Central Johannesburg, the commercial and financial heart of South Africa, is laid out in a rectangular grid pattern that is unchanged from the first city survey in 1886. Streets are narrow and cast into shadow by high-rise concrete blocks, creating an almost tunnel-like effect. This Inner City, in terms of its diversity in architecture and interrelated formal and informal sector reflects its African contexts with an American/European flavour in terms of the tall skyscrapers and glass buildings. The urban form is also varied across the metropolitan area, in many cases reflecting the apartheid system especially in areas such as Soweto and Alexandra with the "matchbox" houses. Services and houses are now being upgraded in the disadvantaged areas to enable a unified, integrated metropolitan area. Although the Group Areas Act was repealed in 1991, which was the cornerstone of apartheid policy, Johannesburg still retains a high degree of racial segregation, due to urban form being difficult to transform. Africans can be found throughout the city, but the majority still live in "townships" on the urban periphery, which were essentially dormitory cities for blacks working in the city. Alexandra township, a 20 square-block enclave carved out of Johannesburg’s white northern suburbs, houses a population of nearly half a million. At least three times that number live in Soweto (South-West Townships), a sprawling urban complex 16 kilometres southwest of the city. Johannesburg’s small Coloured population (people of mixed race) clusters in townships west of the city, while the bulk of its Indian population lives in Lenasia, a special "Asiatic" township built in the 1950s to accommodate Indians forcibly removed from the city centre. The focus of current local government policy programmes and project initiatives is focused on social, economic, physical and environmental integration of the city to ensure that the atrocities of the part are addressed and that the urban system becomes efficient and sustainable.
Local bus service, fire-fighting, and sanitation remain the responsibility of local government, and now other responsibilities - such as the provision of housing which used to be a provincial function has been devolved, to ensure a comprehensive development strategy. Electricity is provided through the Electricity Supply Commission (ESKOM), a national parastatal institution on the whole although Johannesburg still generates some of its own electricity. Drinking water is supplied by the Rand Water Board. Municipal police oversee traffic control; other policing is provided by the South African Police Services. The focus is on good urban governance and government close to the people.
Air pollution poses a significant problem in Greater Johannesburg, especially in the dry autumn and winter months, when thermal inversions impede the westward flow of air and there is a resultant gold mine dust problem blowing off the mine dumps. Pollution is most severe in the densely settled African townships on the city’s periphery, where many residents still rely on coal for fuel. This is exacerbated due to these areas being ringed by the mine dump. Local, provincial and national government is collectively addressing these environmental and health problems.
Johannesburg is a hub for local and international, commercial and industrial travel. Railroads and multi-lane freeways crisscross the metropolitan area, carrying hundreds of thousands of daily commuters to and from outlying areas. A municipal bus system operates within the city. The inadequacies of the bus system have fostered a burgeoning local private taxi industry which is now being managed and regulated. Johannesburg International Airport, 22 kilometres northeast of the city centre, offers regularly scheduled service between Johannesburg and most cities in Southern Africa, as well as direct flights to Europe, North and South America, Australia and Asia. GREATER JOHANNESBURG IN THE FUTURE The focus in the Greater Johannesburg is on addressing its diversity and developing practical solutions that would enable its economic status to be able to positively rub off on addressing the problems of poverty, homelessness and segregation. The focus of the Metropolitan Council is therefore to attract local, national and international investment through a partnership approach that achieves the socio-economic goals identified. As our motto says :
REFERENCES DEAT 1998: Business plan for the CSoER. |
