Newtown
Some big projects, with big names, are being aired in yet another attempt to resuscitate the Newtown Cultural Precinct in Johannesburg, which first saw the light of day nearly a decade ago, writes Ricky Burnett
Sometime in the early years of this decade Christopher Till, then director of culture for Johannesburg, described a future Newtown Cultural Precinct in these terms: “There will be cultural organisations interacting around buskers, festivals and economic activities where theatre, music, film, art markets, museums, galleries, restaurants, jazz clubs, night clubs, food outlets, artists and craftsmen and women will come together …”
Just two weeks back – in the closing months of the decade – Avril Joffe, consultant to the city on yet another attempt to resuscitate the Newtown area, was quoted in The Sunday Independent as follows: “Our vision is to make it buzzy with people mixing and mingling … showcasing creative people doing their thing.”
Newtown probably holds some kind of world record as a ruthless destroyer of good intentions like these.
The “buzzy” buzzed off a long while ago. If Till didn’t get his “interactions” – and he surely didn’t – by what alchemy can Joffe expect to get her “mixing and mingling”?
The history of the past 10 years demonstrates clearly that the “buzz” is not the product of a wish list, nor does it follow from the fact of big empty spaces, nor again will it be achieved by heavy- handed local government control.
It has also been demonstrated that whatever buzz may be, it cannot be engendered by big and heavily funded special event strategies like biennales and Arts Alive.
It needs something that lives on in between these periodic events – and until such time as the more basic problems have been solved, such occasional events need once and for all to be banished as development projects.
They may have other virtues; they may be quite fun at the time, they may be educative, enlightening and entertaining, but there is little to suggest that they bring with them any meaningful development benefits – beyond a minor increase in hamburger sales in the area over the period of the festival.
It is clear that different, more organic – and more sustainable – solutions need to be found. But circumstances do appear to have changed, and maybe there is something new on the table 10 years later.
Certainly the right noises are being made: the talk these days is of “mixed use” and “high-density” development – ideas that, however jargonised, nevertheless put people back into the picture on a full-time basis. There are also some big projects with big names being aired – Mandela Bridge, Anglo Gold, the Guggenheim.
We also find ourselves in a new political climate. There are new structures of governance in place that could make it easier to effect fundamental change.
And there is a new band of people in charge.
City manager Ketso Gordhan has apparently adopted the revitalisation of Newtown as a high-priority project.
In line with President Thabo Mbeki’s partnership strategies, Gordhan has enlisted the support of the Department of Trade and Industry, the Department of Transport, where he formerly served as director general, as well as the Department of Arts and Culture.
This larger political/public service involvement has the potential to broaden the arena of vested interest and to bring some political beef into the scrum for capital and influence.
One of the first manifestations of this larger political/public service alliance lies in the proposal for a “Mandela Bridge”, a grandiose skyway over the railway lines to link Bertha Street in Braamfontein to West Street on the edge of Newtown.
The problem of access to Newtown has often been blamed as an impediment to growth in the area. I, for one, have never been convinced that this gets to the heart of the problem.
There is nothing particularly difficult about crossing into the city via the Queen Elizabeth Bridge, or coming off the motorway into Braamfontein and slipping into Newtown via Fordsburg – if you really want to, that is.
But bridges can be hugely symbolic things and socially inventive spaces, and if it is to be more than a cold mechanical conduit for cars, Mandela Bridge might well prove a provocative catalyst for change. For now, it has the significant function of upping the ante – if you build a bridge you have to make Newtown work or the ghost-of-white- elephants-past will haunt many a professional life for years to come.
But how to make it work? Johannesburg’s inner city manager, Graham Reid, believes the answer lies in public/private partnerships. The idea of partnerships has proved pivotal in the regeneration of other cities, especially in Europe and the United States, and is an expression of an important if frequently overlooked idea – that complex and interesting human habitats are the product of complex and varied interests.
The challenge to Reid’s creativity is negotiating the notion of partnerships within the framework of an umbrella Newtown development agency. Just who is identified as partners and what will be their powers of influence are issues of crucial importance. More particularly, Reid has to guard against allowing big landowners and other vested interests to pursue their own predetermined plans.
The task of the agency must be to shift the balance of power from those who “own-and- control” to those who “make-work”, and to engender a landscape of economic viability wherein the smaller player has a bigger role – away from the mono-culturalism of the old towards a poly-culturalism of the new.
On the western edge of Newtown stands a low building popularly known as the Bag Factory Studios. It was bought in 1991 by a British art patron and made over as artists’ studios. Just the sort of individual enterprise and commitment you want when developing a cultural precinct. Or so you would think, for not long after its inception the city upped the rateable value of the property by a whopping and, as it has proved, punitive 250%.
The then managers of the Newtown Cultural Precinct had no answers to this, and if truth be told they probably had little sympathy.
Through years of negotiation no resolution to the problem has been found and, though encouraging gestures have been made by the Northern Metropolitan Local Council, as recently as last week summons was issued against the project, threatening closure.
This challenge of creative structural detailing is precisely the sort of issue the Newtown development agency will need to meet.
On the eastern edge of Newtown stands the magnificent ruin of Turbine Hall and the Boiler Houses.
Anglo Gold has declared an interest in developing corporate headquarters there, though whether current traumas in the gold market will allow for this only time will tell. But their interest in Newtown is important.
Most everyone can see they will add significantly to the area – through the “expression-of-confidence” factor; through the rehabilitation of a significant city landmark, through the reintroduction of numbers of workers into what is now a forsaken landscape.
There is also the significant shift toward what is called “mixed use” in Newtown.
Mixed use – the idea of opening up a single neighbourhood to accommodate residential, commercial, industrial and cultural uses – may well, if properly managed, prove the device that will expand and enrich our idea of culture.
If it is not properly managed it may, however, be yet another expression of a type of Thatcherite Victorian Darwinism where the fittest, and not the most interesting, survive.
And while Newtown needs investment, it would be dangerous and naive to see all intentions to spend as “investment”.
When, in 1991 and 1992, the city spent millions on trees, paving, new roads and the renovation of the Electric Workshop, the real returns of these “investments” were less than nothing.
A climate of confidence will not flow from money alone. An old icon of power relocated remains an old icon of power.
Perhaps the challenge for Anglo Gold is to set new paradigms for the functioning of the body corporate, both socially and physically, in the larger body of the city.
No one would class Anglo Gold as a cultural organisation, but the right application of cultural thinking to its move to Newtown could well harness its power and prestige to some catalytic good.
The Newtown development agency will surely have to understand how each of the components contributes to the totality, that mixed use can be governed by an urge to originality and, above all, it will have to manage and nurture radical shifts of scale – how the big and the little, the grandly possessed and the struggling dispossessed can function within a common framework. The notion of mixed use does not have to banish the notion of culture, only the notion of mono-culturalism.
The highly respected urban designer Erky Wood has a tough problem. The temptation to build one’s way out of difficulty is strong. Any one of us, looking down on schematics of the city, could colour in the blocks one way or another; for every square metre of space some sort of human activity can be envisaged – crafters here, hawkers there, singers to the back and jugglers to the front – that sort of thing.
Three-dimensional lived reality is, however, quite another matter, and the challenge must be to err on the side of newness and originality. What will make Newtown stand apart from other regeneration schemes? How will it expose and exemplify new ideas about the design of the modern African city?
A 1983 analysis put the total annual contribution of the arts in New York at $5,6-billion – $2-billion in personal income which sustains/creates 17 000 jobs. It services 64-million people annually, including 13-million visitors who spent $1,6-billion, and this in turn generates some $150-million in income and sales tax.
Everyone knows tourism is the world’s fastest growth industry but not everyone knows that “cultural industries” are rated, by some, as the second fastest. The link is no simple coincidence.
The right combination of factors might well make Johannesburg a competitive player in this market. To be competitive we will need to foreground qualities unique to this city. What do we have that no other city has?
This may mean finding ways to convert liabilities – those difficult, awkward, intractable givens – into assets. For its per capita size, Johannesburg is uniquely rich in cultural resources and likely to be even richer in time to come as the cultures of Africa continue to take root here.
The focus of urban designer Joffe has been on analysing cultural industries in Johannesburg in the light of the concept of the “creative city”.
On the back of her research, the city has made the opening moves to lure the Guggenheim to Newtown, a gesture which, for good pragmatic reasons as well as for its quixotic fancy, is enormously appealing.
There is no question that the global stage lacks a great iconic statement about the visual arts in Africa. And the Guggenheim’s recent expansionist policy, as expressed in the new Guggenheim in Bilboa, might well be a good vehicle for this to happen in Johannesburg. We are after all a great African city. It is also worth noting that the Guggenheim’s Spanish initiative was specifically conceived and deployed as an urban regeneration strategy.
But while we have the cultural resources to make a great museum, a Guggenheim- affiliated project which is symbolic only of Americanism will surely fail. We must be tough enough to use the Guggenheim and not be used by them.
The great African museum must be an African invention, not an American one. It must seek to exemplify a local intelligence.
If we are to employ a cultural industries strategy to the development of Newtown then we need also to develop and protect our branding. What is unique about our city? What unique products can be developed? What unique landmarks can we make? What unique opportunities can we offer the global spender?
All sorts of big and little ideas can find a place in Newtown. Filling space is easy; making it live is quite another.
This brings us to Joffe’s “buzzy”.
Perhaps by buzz she means that elusive added extra something-or-other that we find so hard to talk about but which from time to time arrests our attention, alerts the soul.
Buzz might be what all artists are after – a sense of the authentic, the vital and the vibrant, even the numinous – and all artists worth their salt know that it doesn’t come easy. Tact, skill, luck, a degree of alchemical faith and, above all, imagination are all necessary ingredients.
The reanimation of the city, the application of cultural values and cultural thinking to our urban landscape, might well be the starting point for the exploration of whole new frontiers of urban experience. A new and truly local avant-garde.
Buzz also comes from a commitment to cherished values. The city is, in the words of Richard Sennett, the place where strangers are most likely to meet.
An animated city-scape is an evocative and complex statement of the human collectivity. A city is the heart of a democratic culture.
The challenge of Newtown is as big as this.
ENDS