Ending the year in elation and despair

Written by Neil Fraser Thursday, 26 November 2009 11:56

On the last Saturday of October, I took a 6 hour stroll through the Johannesburg inner city basically from Newtown to Ellis Park.Wow! The progress overall has been quite startling. If you want to really see a city, by foot is always best. At ground level you always get such a better perspective. (Back in 1992 my favourite view of the inner city was in a passing plane from 3 000 metres up in the sky!) How that has changed in 17 years - you can now walk with confidence and pride through a pulsating, living, bustling city and see something new happening on just about every corner. Sure, the sinkholes have got more familiar and many of our citizens (and city officials) don’t seem to care, but the overall metamorphosis has been extraordinary and both public and private sectors can take a bow.

I went along a specific route which is the one that developed for taking folks to see what is really happening in the inner city. This time, on my own, I had time for lots of side forays, and took a couple of hundred pics along the way. I reckon one could quite comfortably double or triple that number if one criss-crossed the inner city but I wanted to record a specific route. The reason was to finalise a “Manual for Teaching Tour Guides” which Urban Inc was appointed to do for the JDA. Amongst other things, it records regeneration that has taken place along the route over the past ten something years. A decade ago the tour was quite short consisting of me saying to skeptical groups “this is what we are going to do!” and getting the “Ja, right!” kind of look on many disbelieving faces. By contrast, tours over the past two to three years have been three-and-a-half to four hours and it is now a case of what to leave out rather than what to include in the time!

But now is a good time for others to take over the fun and exhilaration of sharing with groups of people the achievements of so many over the past decade, the believers, the appassionato, the community workers, the investors with vision beyond this year’s balance sheet, the providers of accommodation and the providers of homes and communities and, of course, the Council.

As part of the Tour Guide Training Manual my colleagues have also catalogued all the public art in the inner city, now some 54 pieces with an estimated installation cost of R18 million.  Another sign that we’re on the up!

So everything in the garden is rosy?

No way, we still have some serious, serious problems!

The first is how quickly the newly upgraded public environment is being allowed to deteriorate. Some of the beautifully restored footways with inset mosaic artworks look drek. One would think that restored sections of the public environment would be targeted for special treatment but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Just the normal once a week, once a month, once a year or never programme (unless we’re having a blitz!)! Sure, a great effort will be put on for 2010 – I actually saw people scraping billposters off poles on my walk-about, reminded me of pre-World Summit preparations in the early 2000s! My friend, Pule, sent me some pics of what has happened to parts of Hillbrow since the R140 million public environment revamp last year. Looks like nothing happened at all, still as shambolic as ever before! The City still relies on special “operations” and “task forces” to “blitz” an area and move on whilst the area slumps to its old form quicker than the blitz that attempted to put it right. I’d love to be privy to the costings of some departments who consistently follow this approach. I’m sure it would be more economical to do it right first time around and then have a consistent follow through. Inter-department strife and competition that duplicates expenditure seems to be the order of the day and then we hear that the city is ‘financially stretched’!

On the Saturday of my jaunt around the city, in the early morning, I came across a traffic light that had been flattened, really flattened like a beer can crushed by a Bafana fan after one of their recent losses – plus lots of glass and a large pool of blood. Obviously an awful accident had taken place. I was in the city again on Monday morning – the glass was gone and the blood had dried up but the pole was still flattened. A world class city would have had the traffic light up and running by the next day, Sunday or not, and the pavement spotless. The ‘new’ refuse bins in some areas in the city have been mangled beyond recognition whilst other have been used as braai bins! Littering remains such a problem – around the Constitutional Court building, in fact around the actual Court section itself, foam plastic fast-food containers and wrappings – imagine taking a group of tourists there and having to talk with pride about this truly great building and what it stands for amongst such detritus. Yet officialdom was quick to stop me wandering into Number Four for five minutes to take a few pictures because I wasn’t prepared to pay for a full tour.