Muff Andersson I had to fight for the picture above of former president Nelson Mandela, Johannesburg mayor Isaac Mogase and Professor Lindsay Bremner of the University of the Witwatersrand. Madiba’s protocol person told me to get lost. He will not do it, she said, exiting the council venue that had been hosting her boss. But Madiba obviously didn’t have a problem standing with the partners of the Urban Futures 2000 conference. The little contest for the right to take the image illustrates a theme that emerged this week at the conference: urban space is contested terrain. The discourse, and it emerges this is universal, is about developmental partnerships, creative use of space and resources and participatory planning. The whole world is rapidly becoming urbanised and elites are fleeing the inner city. Because there is a tendency for businesses to pack up with the elites, there is a need to think carefully about development to avoid a dysfunctional trail 20 years hence. Development needs to be centrally planned but not imposed. If developers don’t want to develop the inner city, for example, you can’t stop them developing elsewhere. But you can intervene to stop a city being just a construct of developers and big business. As a city planner, it is necessary to introduce the concept of development to those who call themselves developers. Throughout the week we witnessed the contradictions of the spoken-about and lived-in city. The most engaging speakers on stage turned out to be the most remote off it. Academics got arty trying to explain the spiritual, anarchic texture they foresaw for future urban zones. The art, over in Newtown, spoke more persuasively of these contested spaces; but most eloquent of all were the street kids in the parking lot of MuseuMAfricA gleefully beating drums and imitating the figures in an animated open-air William Kentridge shadow movie. Johannesburg brought progressive and world experts on cities to the Electric Workshop and they declared it freezing and pointed out that there was no soap in the bathrooms.
When a small anti-iGoli troop disrupted a creative cities session, many of the delegates were delighted. They thought it was more of the urban theatre they’d seen the night before. But all the delegates said thank you for a fantastic conference, even the prima donnas, says Bremner. “My sense is that after the remembrance of discomfort fades, delegates will remember a unique event. The conference has become more than a conference. It’s become a set of loosely managed events, some planned, some spontaneous,” Bremner says. “I observed Newtown. It came together as a picture of urban life. It is chaotic, it cannot be clearly managed, but it is creative …” >From north, south, east, west, academics, artists and city planners descended on Newtown. Pretoria types and embassy people rubbed shoulders with busloads of kids from Alexandria and Soweto. Madiba even found the time to make it to one event where he called on leadership to “sing more deeply than the people we serve”. For me, that’s glamour. Muff Andersson is from the Urban Futures media committee and the city manager’s communications desk