”Onwards and ever upwards,” Lael Bethlehem says, flipping through a moleskin notebook and glancing at her watch to find that we are already late for our first appointment.
We’re due at the Franklin, the refurbished Ernst & Young House, perched behind the old JSE building in downtown Johannesburg. Here, a million rand will buy you a luxury eyrie looking west over Fordsburg, the freeway and the mine dumps.
At 39, Bethlehem is the CEO of the Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA) and has the final say on all the agency’s endeavours. Before this, she was the City of Johannesburg’s director of economic development, tourism and marketing, after having been the chief director of forestry at the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry.
The JDA outgrew its old building in 90 Market Street and is now ensconced in a new structure within the cavernous Bus Factory under the shadow of the M1 highway on the edge of Newtown. There is still the smell of drying paint and new carpets, and a fine layer of builders’ dust coats all the surfaces.
Comfortable in the non-corporate atmosphere of the Bus Factory, Bethlehem has acquired a reputation as a fearsome administrator who will get things done with the minimum of fuss and in the nicest possible way.
Sammy Mafu, head of marketing at the JDA, says Bethlehem is ”very strict about performance and intolerant towards incompetence and dishonesty, but she’s very fair in terms of how she rewards good performance … She pays a lot of attention to detail. She has an appetite to be satisfied by facts, clear facts, not theory and anecdotes.”
Paul Arnott-Job, a JDA senior development manager, has known Bethlehem for about three years. ”She likes to have a lot of detail; she analyses things very well … She wants you to be very straight with her, and she is always straight with you. She is also a people’s person.”
These are going to be useful traits in the next few years as the permanent building site that is now Johannesburg remakes itself in the image of a modern, safe city.
Stakeholders face some major challenges. Among them is finding the middle ground between sprucing up the city centre in time for the 2010 World Cup, and providing for the poor and informal occupants who rely on its streets for their livelihoods.
A matter of transport
The city wants to attract a mix of people, and it wants to be a ”24-hour city” that never sleeps — a city that needs a better transport infrastructure.
Bethlehem admits that transport is a serious issue, worsened by rapid urbanisation and an estimated 1Â 000 people moving to Gauteng every day. Park Station, for instance, the city’s main bus and rail depot, lacks the space to accommodate this influx of people, and some individuals have resorted to setting up informal passenger terminals.
”Somebody found a piece of vacant land, so he’s opened up a bus terminus and a private bus service,” Bethlehem says. ”And you get on the bus in, like, Kinshasa and you travelled on the bus for 40 hours, and you arrive in Johannesburg, get off in this dusty piece of land and you say, ‘My goodness, this is Johannesburg.’
”For 2010, people will arrive to some extent by aeroplane, as they do for other World Cups, but a lot of people are going to come … to Johannesburg; they are not going to come by plane, they are going to come by bus and in numbers.
”They are going to get to Park Station and there is going to be nowhere for them even to get off the bus. We have got to fix up things in time for that,” Bethlehem says.
Doing the groundwork
Unlike many city managers, Bethlehem takes the mandate of ”groundwork” literally. When the Mail & Guardian Online proposed a tour through the inner city, it was Bethlehem who opted to ditch the car for a walk-through.
Dressed in a red jacket and black pants, she strides determinedly along the city’s sidewalks, the click of her heels marking our way forward. Petite and unassuming, she packs a powerful punch, especially where it concerns reviving the inner city.
She has enthusiasm for the little things — ”We have built what I like to think of as the world’s most beautiful public toilets … they are just gorgeous,” she enthuses as we pass them on Mary Fitzgerald Square — as well as a vision for the city as a place that includes everyone.
”This I love,” she says animatedly as we pass through an informal trading square near Kerk and Sauer streets that is flanked by banks, buildings and restaurants on all ends. ”There is this cheek-by-jowl thing about the inner city; you’ve got your Anglo-American, you’ve got your new tenants in the old JSE building, you’ve got your Absa coming up here and then you’ve got your little Trust Me tavern.
”So that’s what I think is good about the inner city; it must be a home for everybody … And that’s a challenge, to provide that.”
Although the city is a work in progress, for the 400 or so migrants who arrive each day the streets are still paved with gold.
”[These people] come here because they think it will give them a better life, and I think, generally speaking, they are probably right … even if you are scraping by in the inner city, you are doing better than you would be doing if you were in a rural area,” Bethlehem says over the sound of kwaito music blaring from a nearby radio.
Migration
In 2006, property company Trafalgar estimated that about 200Â 000 people lived in the inner city; 75% of those who were employed worked in the area around their homes. Bethlehem says many of these are rural South Africans who move to the city and often end up working in the informal sector.
”I think every great city in the world is built on the back of migration. New York was built by waves upon waves of immigrants … the same with London. What we are experiencing in Johannesburg is exactly that. It’s a good thing in the medium term because that’s how cities thrive and that’s how cities are built,” she says.
”But in the short term, it is difficult because you have got to provide services to all those people, particularly if they are poor.”
In the retail precinct, between block-wide department stores and trestle-table vendors, we skirt mounds of sand and bricks on the pavement — the raw materials used to rejuvenate a nearby ageing structure — while vacancy signs advertise brand-new residential housing spaces.
One of these is the Franklin — a high-end hotel and housing complex — on Diagonal Street. With some of the best views in Johannesburg, the apartments are unashamedly upmarket, and most of them have already been sold.
A few blocks away, Castle House on the corner of Jeppe and Eloff offers low- to middle-income residential living. But there’s nothing mediocre about the standards. Up the stairs, through Castle’s bright apple-green foyer, the building houses a ”smart gym” with a fingerprint-access control system. Inside, patrons pump iron using high-tech gym equipment.
Rent starts at R1Â 800 a month and residents have access to the gym, prime living space in the city and a fabulous view.
As we walk out of the Castle, past pavement hairstylists and vendors who try to coerce us into buying fashion sunglasses and belts, Bethlehem says developments like the Franklin are necessary to facilitate regeneration, but the city’s core inhabitants are still those who require more affordable rental space in the urban centre.
Looking east
Interspersed with the progress, pockets of the city still lag behind. After trudging down Jeppe Street, once the posh and thriving base of the JSE, we stand in front of the Johannesburg High Court as Bethlehem talks about the dividing line between the neat and tidy in the west and an eventually decrepit jumble towards the east.
”There is the Carlton Centre, west of here; with exceptions [it] has really taken off. East of here, as you see, we are struggling much more and I think what that means for the JDA is we need to spend more and more of our budget east of Von Weilligh Street.”
But for now, even the high court precinct isn’t up to scratch, Bethlehem says. It looks like just another crummy inner-city district instead of the legislative quarter of the city.
We walk on, heading east. The so-called Fashion District, where new local designers are already being trained and offered store space, still has a way to go before it becomes the home of smart design houses. Walking along the district’s mosaic-lined pavements, the look and feel of the area is one of disrepair.
There are towering slum buildings, and children play on the pavement outside a dark building on Pritchard Street that smells like a sewer.
”As we go on into the Fashion District, that’s the dividing line; it becomes much poorer. You see this kind of thing, kids on the street, which you don’t really see much of in that [western] side of town,” Bethlehem says.
Step by step
Further east, in ”Jewel City” — the country’s premier diamond-manufacturing centre — boom gates and a lack of pavements around the perimeter break the stride of pedestrians. The precinct has none of the characteristics brought to mind by its name — instead, there are abandoned buildings, broken pavements and crumbling facades.
”I couldn’t believe it either when I first saw it,” Bethlehem says.
”Things are pretty bad here and there’s no way forward other than street by street, building by building, step by step,” she adds, explaining the city’s approach to redevelop each precinct at a time. ”And eventually you start stitching [things] together. You do this precinct, you do that precinct; then, eventually, you do the whole city.”
Substantial plans are under way to redevelop the eastern side of the city centre and ”bling” up Jewel City, using mosaic art work and incorporating diamond patterns into the structure of the precinct. A fashion square with an outdoor modelling ramp, planned on Pritchard Street, is set to be completed later this year.
New lighting and an improved pedestrian area are on the cards for the high court precinct.
However, insufficient resources and time remains an obstacle for the city, especially if it wants to be up to scratch by 2010. Bethlehem is realistic about such challenges.
”We won’t help all the people in the inner city, we won’t help every NGO that needs help, we won’t deal with every unemployed person, but one step at a time is the only way we can go.”
She hopes that improvements already taking place will cause ripple effects and bring new developers into the city. ”I think the way that regeneration happens is that somebody has to go first. And if nobody goes first, then the area sinks. We are the guys who say we’ll go first; that’s our job.”
We stop for juice and water at the Cappello Cocktail Bar, on our way back to Newtown. ”You have got to have patience to be in this game,” Bethlehem says — and you also need strong legs to carry you the distance.