Neil Fraser
September 19, 2003
THE last of my three major concerns in relation to the city's revitalization is the issue of public space. The others were the issues of enforcement and 'civility'.
Actually, I shouldn't have said 'three' in that I have also previously expressed my concern at the issue of the lack of any real plan in regard to the urban poor, which stimulated a workshop but no other progress. But, back to public space!
It appears that the condition and management of public space has been an issue in Johannesburg almost from day one. In a column entitled "Local Chit-chat" in the 21st January 1888 edition of The Standard and Transvaal Mining Chronicle, the correspondent - no, I don't think it was me even given the name of the column - wrote "Go where one will, be it in the Main Street, in Commissioner Street, in the minor narrow lanes branching off from these, or in the outskirts of the town, and mud, ankle-deep, yes, and even deeper, has to be waded through by the unfortunate pedestrian. Surely, this is a crying shame for a place like Johannesburg! …It is high time the Johannesburgers should move in the matter by agitating for an elected Town Council to superintend things in general connected with improvement to the town… "
Strictly speaking it took another 107 years to get a democratically elected council in place so with only eight years behind us since then (1995) maybe it's a bit early to expect the council to "superintend things"!
On the one hand, there has been a remarkable improvement this year in the appearance and management of many of our parks, but on the other, our pavements are still generally an unmitigated disaster. If you read my comments two weeks ago in regard to zero tolerance, if I was the city council, the very first thing I would have tackled would have been the city's public environment.
It is the most visible and most used aspect of the city so that any improvement would have been a major quick victory! Instead, the city pavements are generally filthy, with missing paving slabs and drain covers and a plethora of signs and drunken poles leaning at all angles.
Many pavements are simply impassable as they are jammed with informal traders and the detritus they produce. Some places are worse than others, walked around St Mary's Cathedral lately?
A recent report in the UK "Living Places: Cleaner, Safer, Greener" contains this statement from none other than the UK Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott; "Improving our public space is not about creating a sanitized sterile, shrink-wrapped world. It is about creating living, sustainable and inclusive communities - communities where people feel they have a stake in their future."
And this isn't typical 'politician speak' - the Deputy Prime Minister has been given a budget to invest in public spaces and neighbourhood renewal of about R20-billion!
An agency established earlier this year, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), has set up a division, CABE Space, to focus specifically on the upgrading of parks and public spaces. Its mission is "to ensure that every person in England has easy access to well designed and well looked after public space." Wow, someone cares!
Another senior British Minister says the following about London streets; "The character of the capital is defined by its streets. However, all to often these streets let us down because of poor presentation and management. I have seen too many streets that are a chaotic jumble of clutter with traffic signals, signage and advertising vying for space. I have walked down too many pavements made from inappropriate materials which destroy established character… London's streets are falling short of the standards expected of a world-class city. What is more, the state of the streets is demoralizing local communities and standing as a barrier to urban renaissance." If he came here he would probably excuse our situation as being decidedly African!
But a guide to the management of London's streets adds that the appearance of its streets and public space is fundamental to its success as a world city and that the presentation and management of its streets and public space has a direct economic cost and a major impact on its image and status as a world city. We need to note in our striving to become a world-class city just how important streets and public space are perceived!
South African cities are not slow to throw money at public space upgrading. Whether these are well designed is debatable, but whether they are well looked after is not. Our historic public sector financing systems appear to make capital provision easy but ongoing expenditure for maintenance and management impossible.
Examples? Church Street in Pretoria, Kerk Street and the Library Gardens (now Beyers Naude Square) in Johannesburg and St George's Mall in Cape Town. All major public spaces and all recipient of millions of rand in upgrading investment, all left to deteriorate and rot. St George's Mall has been saved through the Cape Town Partnership Improvement District efforts, I believe the same is happening or will happen in Pretoria through a CID.
I think we've lost an understanding of what public space means. A lovely essay by Roger Scruton on "Why Lamposts and Phone Booths Matter" reminded me of the richness that public space is supposed to bring to the urban fabric - that public spaces collectively are the public face of a city.
- It is through its streets that a city impresses its character on those who live in it and vindicates the society that it exists to sustain.
- The design of a city street was never, in the great epochs of civilization left to chance. Objects placed on the street for the benefit of passersby expressed and confirmed the sense of a common, legitimate and public way of life.
- The buildings that fronted onto streets conveyed messages without words, you were drawn to entrances through good design - the use and meaning of a building were laid before the public in a series of visual cues that both expressed and endorsed the common understanding of the purpose of civic life. (Today, bad architecture fronting onto our streets is exacerbated by dozens of signs, both legal and illegal the latter usually misspelled but all screaming for our attention - my addition)
- Street furniture has become subservient to function
- Street lighting is a gauge of security, a sign that the city has eyes. Modern street lighting is totalitarian, Orwellian; everything below it is pallid and impersonal.
Some years ago I had the privilege at an IDA cities conference in the US of hearing a lady by the name of Penny Coombes do a brilliant presentation of her research findings on tourism and convention centre conference attendance in Australia. Penny is from that country and from an organisation called "The People for Places and Spaces". A visit to their website recently provided me with the following identification of the eight most significant factors to the quality of life of citizens living in cities - following a worldwide review of 141 published papers. They are:
- Safety and security
- Economic vitality
- Access to a good quality stock of housing
- The importance of the community's networks and organizational capacity - in creating a livable and safe place with a sense of community
- A sense of place, identity and a strong public realm
- Cultural activities that allow places to be celebrated and enjoyed
- A sustainable environment
- Ease of access to amenities and facilities and health education, sporting shopping and community organisations
All of these relate in one way or another to public space!
Roger Scruton, referred to earlier, ends his essay with these words; "I cannot help feeling that the growing disorder of the modern city stems at least in part from the fact that it has lost its air of permanence. The city has become as temporary and disposable to the eye as the discarded junk that drifts through its streets and alleyways"
Paris is one of the few cities that recognizes the underlying payoff in focusing on the condition of public space - in fact it feels so strongly that public cleanliness is a statement of civic health that 10% of its annual budget is spent on 'sanitation'. This gives rise to the observation of a New Yorker now living in Paris; "The fact that Paris is clean gives Parisians a sense that things are not falling apart, that society is not doomed, that there is order in the universe and in municipal government"
