{"id":11254,"date":"2015-10-19T06:00:08","date_gmt":"2015-10-19T10:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/?p=11254"},"modified":"2015-10-19T02:29:51","modified_gmt":"2015-10-19T06:29:51","slug":"in-it-together","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/2015\/10\/19\/in-it-together\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00a0In It Together"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"20.<\/p>\n

\u201c[A city where] everything comes together . . . subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the trans-disciplinary, everyday life and unending history.<\/i>\u201d\u00a0<\/i>\u2014Edward Soja [1]<\/i><\/p>\n

No other city that I know of piques the imagination quite like The African City<\/i>, wherever in Africa that is. I live in Johannesburg; I grew up in Accra: two African cities that have as little\u2014or as much\u2014in common as Chicago or Shanghai, but whose broad geography binds them together in ways that are both entirely fictitious and entirely real. By their very nature, cities are both generic and astoundingly, endlessly specific.

An inclusive urbanism relies heavily on notions of shared values and a\u00a0shared understanding of the public realm.<\/blockquote><\/figure> The same broad categories of infrastructure, environment, equality and access to amenities apply to all urban centres, almost irrespective of scale. Yet there\u2019s something in\u2014or of\/about\u2014The African City<\/i> that defies easy categorisation. African cities, to paraphrase Soja above, are places where “everything comes together,” in an almost dizzying panoply of contradictory binaries. Black\/white; rich\/poor; chaotic\/controlled; hi-tech\/lo-tech, as though there is no space or appetite for the nuance, the in-between, or the subtleties that make up any urban narrative in which most citizens somehow locate, negotiate and recognise themselves.<\/p>\n

When the invitation to contribute to The\u00a0Just City essays project arrived in my email inbox, I was struck by its timing. It\u2019s probably just over ten years ago that I met Max Bond in Accra, sadly for the last time, as it turned out. He was visiting the Ghanaian architect Joe Osae-Addo, and the three of us had dinner at the Golden Tulip Hotel on Independence Avenue whilst waiting for Accra\u2019s terrible, gridlocked traffic to die down. I no longer recall our exact conversation, just its aura. Africa, the African diaspora, race, identity, architecture\u2026the state (and not just in a physical sense) of African cities. What could African-American architects and urban designers bring to the table? What had Americans learned about race, class and culture that might prove useful to a new generation of African architects, planners, city-makers? Bond was better placed than most to answer the question: Ghana had been his home in the 1960s, in the first heady decade after independence. He\u2019d seen more of the country than many Ghanaians, myself included, and his views were wide-ranging and broadly cosmopolitan, yet at the same time deeply personal and intuitive. We were joined a little later by another African-American architect, Jack Travis, also a close friend of Bond\u2019s. Four architects,\u00a0two continents, one and a half generations between us and many, many questions, though perhaps fewer answers.<\/p>\n

Today, I\u2019m sitting at my desk in Johannesburg with half an eye on the American sociologist Richard Sennett\u2019s recent book, “Together,” a fascinating examination of the cooperative skills people need to sustain everyday life, and half an eye on the television. BBC World News has been screening a series on American cities post-Ferguson, “Summer in the City.” There\u2019s a sense of d\u00e9j\u00e0-vu: race, class, culture and the city. Plus \u00e7a change<\/i>. But the blurb on the back of Sennett\u2019s book suddenly jumps out at me. \u201cLiving with people who differ\u2014racially, ethnically, religiously or economically\u2014is one of the most urgent challenges facing civil society today.\u201d[2] Both the book and the television screen provide a surprisingly neat framework for this essay, In It Together<\/i>, given that so many other things have coalesced around its writing.<\/p>\n

I teach architecture, the science of space, one might call it. More than any other discipline (and perhaps contradictory to its finished product), architecture is fluid<\/i>, concerned with an endless series of translations\u2014from idea to drawing; drawing to building; building to city; city to society; and so on. Every single one of my students at the University of Johannesburg is multilingual, sometimes in as many as four languages. It seems to me that there\u2019s an interesting parallel between these students for whom the fluidity<\/i> of daily life, moving between languages and locales, sometimes even whole worlds, mirrors the essential nature not only of their practices (as budding architects), but the daily reality of the multiple worlds they inhabit, contained uneasily within the city, in the same space and time.<\/p>\n

For African city-dwellers\u2014cityzens<\/i>, we might call ourselves\u2014there\u2019s an added dimension to what it means to live in Kumasi, Kigali or Kinshasa, and it has to do with speed: of change, of movement, quite literally: from the slow-death speed of traffic to the speed of information flows, capital and stock\u2026mineral or<\/i> human, in itself a cruel comparison. For quite some time now, African cities seem perpetually to be described \u2018in transition\u2019, though it\u2019s not always entirely clear where we\u2019ve come from or where we\u2019re heading. In Yorgos Simeoforidis\u2019 1997 essay, \u2018Notes for a Cultural History Between Uncertainty and the Contemporary Urban Condition,<\/i>\u2019[3] he describes \u2018the anxiety of the present,\u2019 a new landscape of urban and architectural discourse that has sprung up in \u2018an attempt to grasp a perpetually shifting reality, to describe and interpret contemporary urban phenomena.\u2019 For anyone who has spent time in any of the continent\u2019s cities, the terms \u2018anxiety,\u2019 \u2018shifting\u2019 and \u2018uncertainty\u2019 seem to accurately sum up their edgy, urban zeitgeist<\/i>. African cities are, quite literally, hard to grasp. In the same essay, Simeoforidis makes another interesting observation that finds resonance today: \u201cthe anxious desire to understand the present shows through the most official manifestations on architectural culture, Cities and the urban condition now constitute the privileged theme of international exhibitions.[4]\n

Simeoforidis\u2019 essay was penned almost twenty years ago. Between 2013 and 2016, no less than eight major global exhibitions have featured the \u2018African City\u2019 as a major theme, most taking place in locations as diverse (and un-African) as Denmark, Chicago, New York and Munich, to name a few. In each, the notion of \u2018justice\u2019, although usually writ large, is often a subliminal, only partially articulated desire: beneath the statistics (woeful); the chaos (bewildering); the infrastructural under-development (paralysing) or the resilience-in-the-face-of-it (heartwarming) that the inhabitants invariably display, there is a genuine desire to create a more just, equitable, inclusive, resilient city, mirroring the larger-scale society in which such a city might stand. But it\u2019s a complex, difficult and at times seemingly impossible task. The \u201cThe Sound of Music\u201d suddenly springs to mind: \u201chow do you catch a cloud and pin it down?\u201d[4]\n

Contemporary architectural and urban discourses over the past decade have been profoundly influenced by events that introduce a new level of questioning. The terminology now centres around a new spatiocultural politics [of] \u2018rights to the city,\u2019 civil rights\u2019 and \u2018spatial justice,\u2019 which theorists (like Edward Soja, quoted at the top here) believe will ultimately transform architecture and urbanism.<\/p>\n

So what exactly is a \u2018just\u2019 city? Is it the same as a \u2018city of justice\u2019? How would we recognise and assess it? How might one go about creating it and are there rules governing its framework? The American urban theorist and architect Michael Stanton writes of the way \u201ca city divides into forms and attitudes . . . into grand narratives and great collective generalisations. Cities are collaborative works . . . conceived passionately, formed imperfectly, understood and misread by a continually transforming and distracted collective.\u201d If cities really are<\/i> \u201ccollaborative works,\u201d places where people of differing racial, linguistic, religious and economic backgrounds and persuasions come together to enact some form of public (and private) life, then it stands to reason that one place where we might begin the difficult task of building a \u2018just\u2019 city is with our definitions of \u2018collaborative\u2019, of \u2018cooperation\u2019 and \u2018collective.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"InIf I said earlier that no city piques the imagination quite like the African city, then I should also add that no city destabilises the idea of the \u2018collective\u2019 quite like Johannesburg. It is at once a city of anti<\/i>-collectives and hyper<\/i>-collectives; endless satellites of tightly-knit, tightly-policed enclaves that sit uneasily together, bound by a network of freeways, roads, taxi-routes and railway lines. For the most part, the enclaves remain intact, policed along class- rather than race-lines, although there are three or four pockets of genuinely mixed occupation (and here I invoke race not class) that have sprung up in the past decade. Within these enclaves, an exaggerated sense of community persists; an \u2018us vs. them<\/i>\u2019 attitude where the terms are interchangeable\u2014one man\u2019s \u2018us\u2019 is another\u2019s \u2018them\u2019, and so on. As a Jo\u2019burger, the temptation to wallow in the city\u2019s dystopian self-image is all too tempting. Disconnected, segregated, dysfunctional, dangerous . . . these are readily accessible, perniciously familiar tropes. Yet, thumbing through Sennett, it\u2019s comforting (if that\u2019s the right word) to recognise another truth: it was ever thus<\/i>.<\/p>\n

The French philosopher, Henri Lefebvre, whose work has influenced architects and urbanists for half a century, famously offered three definitions of spatial practice \u2014 space as it is perceived, represented and lived. These differences find easy resonance across this continent. Most African cities are perceived<\/i> (by outsiders, at least) to be chaotic and maddeningly unpredictable. They are often represented<\/i> as such, from Neill Blomkamp\u2019s dystopic District 9 <\/i>and Chappie<\/i> to Mad Max 4: The Road to Fury<\/i>, shot on location in Namibia. However, there\u2019s another side to the question of perception and representation, where the lived<\/i> experience makes it past the outsider\u2019s disapproving gaze and bursts onto the screen. Nollywood, the $US 5billion industry that originated in the 1960s in Nigeria, is the second-largest film industry in the world, behind the United States and ahead of India. With thousands of films released every year, a quick Google search reveals an interesting glimpse into the way the city, in the African imaginary, is portrayed. Burning City, Who Owns the City?, King of the City, City of War, City of Sin, City of Dragons<\/i>. Without pressing play, a paradigm emerges of the city as a contested space, at once feared and admired. \u201cAn African City\u201d, the new, much-hyped web series conceived, created and directed by a young Ghanaian, Nicole Amarteifio, is billed as \u201cAfrica\u2019s \u2018answer\u2019 to Sex & the City.\u201d Executive Producer Millie Monyo embraces the connection to Carrie Bradshaw. \u201cIt was absolutely an inspiration, and we welcome the comparison. Why can\u2019t we have [that] on our continent?\u201d<\/p>\n

But have what, exactly?<\/p>\n

\"Lokko
Still taken from \u201cAn African City\u201d \u00a9 Nicole Amarteifio, 2015.[5]<\/figcaption><\/figure>I asked the question of Parks Tau, the current mayor of Johannesburg: is Johannesburg a \u2018just\u2019 city<\/i>? How would he<\/i> define it? His answer was emphatic: no, Johannesburg isn\u2019t \u2018just\u2019. It\u2019s a city whose very fabric has been constructed around an un-just paradigm of segregation and inequality. But it is<\/i> engaged in the serious task of trying to undo its past and build a very different future. \u201cIn many ways, I think of Johannesburg as Africa\u2019s most cosmopolitan city,\u201d he said. \u201cWe always refer to it as a \u2018melting pot\u2019 and it\u2019s the one African city where you have the highest concentration of migrants, peoples, cultures . . . people who bring vibrancy to the city, but also the challenges that come with it. Unfortunately, we inherited a city that was unequal by design<\/i> and our task is to undo that history by creating a new form of inclusive urbanism, one that will hopefully repair the past. We\u2019re in it together.\u201d[6]\n

Tau\u2019s use of the word together, spoken as an aside halfway through the conversation, took me straight back to Sennett. In the introduction to Together [7]<\/i>, he lays bare the reason behind his decision to write a trio of books about \u201cthe skills people need to sustain everyday life.\u201d The Craftsman<\/i>, the first in the trilogy, examines craftsmanship, the quest \u201cto make physical things well.\u201d Together<\/i>, his second book, is an examination of our responsiveness to others, to \u201cthe practical application of responsiveness at work, or in the community.\u201d In his last book, as yet unwritten, he turns his attention to cities, to the \u201ctask or skill of making cities,\u201d which, in his opinion, we don\u2019t \u201c[do] very well.\u201d In his own words, his task \u201cis to relate how people shape personal effort, social relations and the built environment.\u201d Although Together<\/i> wasn\u2019t written specifically with cities or urban environments in mind, Tau\u2019s description of an inclusive urbanism relies heavily on the same notions of shared values, understandings and\u2014perhaps most importantly\u2014a shared understanding of the public realm which allows and encourages us to appreciate our common values and at the same time, to tolerate \u2018difference,\u2019 however it is expressed.<\/p>\n

This notion of an \u2018inclusive\u2019 form of urbanity is appealing for all sorts of reasons, but the question of what that might be, how one might construct both a curriculum and a disciplinary framework around such a notion is unclear. In a city like Johannesburg, where the very idea of the collective, collaborative<\/i> citizen remains a lofty aspiration rather than a daily fact, Sennett\u2019s task seems improbable, even impossible. But somewhere between Tau\u2019s comment and Sennett\u2019s astute observations on the term \u2018rehearsal\u2019 lies a glimmer of hope. Sennett talks of rehearsals \u201cof the professional sort, the kind necessary in the performing arts. There is a basic distinction between practising and rehearsing; the one is a solitary experience, the other is collective.\u201d The same distinction can be made between those of us for whom \u2018the city\u2019 is both a professional and personal endeavour. We practice<\/i> our craft: designing, shaping, building our built environments. We also inhabit<\/i> the results of our endeavour: as citizens, city-dwellers, whether as newly-arrived migrants or natives-of-this-patch. In coming together, we rehearse a collective script that\u2019s been around for centuries: the script of the city, the \u2018play\u2019 of urban life.<\/p>\n

Is Johannesburg a \u2018just\u2019 city?<\/p>\n

We\u2019re trying to be. I believe it\u2019s the first time I\u2019ve ever said \u201cwe.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

Lesley Lokko<\/strong>
\nJohannesburg<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Just City Essays<\/span> is a joint project of\u00a0The J. Max Bond Center, Next City and The\u00a0Nature of Cities. \u00a9 2015 All rights are reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Notes:<\/b><\/p>\n[1] Soja, E. \u2018Lessons in Spatial Justice\u2019, in Thirdspace\u2013Journeys to Los Angeles & Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996
\n[2] Taken from the jacket of Together, Sennett, R., Penguin: London, 2012
\nSimeoforidis, Y. \u2018Notes for a Cultural History Between Uncertainty and the Contemporary Urban Condition\u2019, in Koolhaas, R. et al., Mutations, Barcelona: ACTAR, 1999
\n[3] ibid., p.415
\n[4] “Maria,” from the motion picture The Sound of Music<\/em>, lyrics by O. Hammerstein and R. Rodgers
\n[5] Retrieved<\/a> 6 August 2015. Image: Emmanuel Bobbie\/Bob Pixel Studios
\n[6] From a conversation between the author and the Executive Mayor of the City of Johannesburg, at Civic Centre, Braamfontein, Johannesburg on 4 September 2015
\n[7] Sennett, R., Together, Penguin: London, 2012<\/p>\n

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