Central Johannesburg has had the life sucked out of it by surrogate central business districts – the shopping malls David Le Page In the 1970s Johannesburg residents used to talk about “going to town”, the central business district, without contemplating the hire of an armoured vehicle. In fact, for any serious business or shopping, there was no choice – one simply had to go to town. The largest, best and most specialised shops were all there. Now, the central business district (CBD) is a commercial periphery that just happens to be at the centre of things. It is simultaneously a dream problem and an apparently unbudging nightmare for town planners, property owners and local politicians. But what happened to this once-thriving metropolis? It is the contention of Jonathan Noble of the Wits University architecture department – author of The Metropolis and the Mall, a paper presented at the Urban Futures 2000 conference – that to some extent, central Johannesburg has had the life sucked out of it by surrogate CBDs, the canned high streets we call the shopping mall. In the case of Johannesburg, the developments that marked the beginning of the end for the CBD were those of the Killarney Mall and Sandton City. Until the late 20th century, towns, cities and marketplaces were always inextricably interlinked, each supporting the other. The mall, how- ever, has extracted the market from its traditional urban place and pulled it to the periphery of cities, leaving a vacuum at the centre. Within itself, though, the mall attempts to simulate the market experience and turns the market itself into a commodity. In other words, the mall is a place to be marketed and sold, not just as a place to shop but as an experience. Basically, the commoditisation of the market is a canny method for those with capital to accumulate yet more of it. Interestingly, Noble traces the development of the mall to the merging of two other architectures: the department store and the enclosed arcade. Reflecting this heritage, malls usually have “anchor tenants”, large shops that define its poles, in-between which smaller retailers are located. What’s more, the anchor tenants usually pay a fraction of the rent of the smaller shops (R30 compared to R200 a square metre), the theory being that this is justified by the comparative success of the larger stores. The arcade itself was a development of 19th century Paris, where it was the domain of the wealthy and those who could afford to take time to be seen. But the first properly dislocated mall, removed from the town centre, was the County Club Plaza in Kansas City, built in 1922. Of course, the mall doesn’t accurately reflect the high street it has killed. Those small shops which do not match the mall-makers’ money formulas are excluded. In Johannesburg, it is not only white shoppers who have fled the CBD. Noble quotes Professor Richard Tomlinson: “[In a new shift based not on race but on class] African shopping is spreading out of the central city … there is a distinct shift of African middle-income consumers to other malls.”
But, it appears, the consumers to which we have been reduced miss the metropolitan experience and mall developers are rushing in with ever more consuming simulacra. The Mall of America in Minnesota is themed in place to reproduce New York’s Fifth Avenue and Times Square, and offers mobile-home hook-ups for those who wish to spend two or three days shopping. Here in South Africa malls are increasingly becoming not just places to shop, but places to seek entertainment, company and ambience – through cinemas, pubs, restaurants and entertainment complexes. Increasingly, urban life is concentrated on the mall – and through the use of our cars, we try to eliminate the threatening spaces in-between them and our own residences. As Noble says: “The mall exists for many as the only city of contemporary experience.”
He goes on to invoke Massimo Cacciari, professor of aesthetics at the University of Venice, to elaborate on the relationship between the mall and the metropolis. Cacciari distinguishes between the city and the metropolis – the city is the urban environment as it was in the past, working principally to satisfy the needs of people. The metropolis, on the other hand, exists in large part to serve the needs of capital, or business. One of the crucial functions of the metropolis, in Cacciari’s view, is to make conflict function through managing disruption and conflict. In a sense, the alienation of the CBD marks a shift in the nature of greater Johannesburg from city to metropolis. Cacciari considers the city and the metropolis to be mutually exclusive environments – they do not overlap. Because the metropolis exists to serve the needs of capital rather than social needs, that conflict – represented by social disorders such as crime and poverty – becomes almost inescapable. The city suffers because its vital conduits – streets, pavements and public spaces – are not investments for anyone, as are new office and shopping developments. And so these spaces become leftovers, “devalued and fractured”. At the level of design and aesthetics, market imperatives also rule the metropolis. Little value is placed on human design for public spaces. Modern aesthetics and, in part, contemporary art are a response to the nature and conflicts of this new metropolitan life. But because there is little interest for individual developers in investing in the metropolis, the place of uncontained conflict and chaos, design and style in these spaces suffer. Because of the forces that drive the metropolis, genuine artistic style or personal expression becomes truly possible within only interior spaces; as Cacciari puts it: “Dwelling assembles the objects and voices of memory in the space of the interior.” Thus in the modern city, the metropolis, true style or personal expression has become impossible. It was possible in the non-metropolitan city, but just as public values are replaced in the metropolis by conflict, so too style is replaced by pure ornamentation.
The mall then becomes a commercial attempt to re-synthesise the city, a crude attempt to satisfy the nostalgia for past values – of community, of street life, of the evening promenade – and shut out the chaos of the metropolis. In a sense, the mall ignores the metropolis and the problems of the metropolis, usually literally turning a blank face, a closed and uninviting wall to the larger city. The malls of Johannesburg, in which windows on the outside world are few and far between, exemplify this trend. Noble asks whether the withdrawal of the metropolis from the CBD into the confines of the mall presents an opportunity for the “life of a city to return to the streets of metropolitan Johannesburg”. Unfortunately, cities, unlike metropolises, are grown and not built. The city fathers (and mothers) may hope that the CBD will regain something of the qualities of a thriving and healthy city, but such developments can only be encouraged; their nature is probably not such that they can be ever be designed.
ENDS