---
title: "Street art can’t transform Joburg’s inner city, but it’s a start"
description: "On Johannesburg’s bridges and gateways, street art is shifting how the inner city is seen, crossed and slowly reclaimed by those moving through it daily."
type: "NewsArticle"
publisher: "Daily Maverick"
site: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za"
section: "FIRST IMPRESSIONS"
author: "Ryan Enslin"
author_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/author/ryan-enslin/"
canonical_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2026-08-11-street-art-can-t-transform-joburg-s-inner-city-but-it-s-a-start/"
published: "2026-08-11T22:34:33"
lang: "en-ZA"
word_count: 1086
---

# Street art can’t transform Joburg’s inner city, but it’s a start

> On Johannesburg’s bridges and gateways, street art is shifting how the inner city is seen, crossed and slowly reclaimed by those moving through it daily.

By Ryan Enslin · Published 12 August 2026, 00:34 SAST

## Content

On Johannesburg’s Nelson Mandela Bridge, the change began before anyone could call it renewal. A cleaning crew had passed through. Still, for many pedestrians, the bridge remained something to cross quickly, handbag held close, phone out of sight, eyes fixed on the other side.

Shweshwe patterns began taking shape on the pillars and the bridge started to interrupt its own reputation. People slowed. They asked questions. They took photographs. Within days, young women from Braamfontein were walking alone with phones in hand, pausing long enough to make an image before moving on. Soon after, the bridge was drawing TikTok dancers, students on newly installed benches, and commuters.

That shift sits close to the heart of what urban futurists [Jozi My Jozi](https://www.jozimyjozi.com/) is trying to do with street art. Not decorate Johannesburg. Not disguise its fractures. Rather, use art as a fast way to alter how people feel in places they have been taught to avoid.

![Ryan-Jozi-street](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/JmZRtBjizpCsezop_4LZy_AX2KE=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/CON25Media7edit_433624.jpg)

*Nelson Mandela Bridge crosses Johannesburg’s rail yards at sunset, linking Braamfontein and Newtown above the inner city’s dense urban fabric. (Photo: Ryan Enslin)*

### A city seen again

The idea is not unique to Johannesburg. Philadelphia’s Mural Arts programme has spent four decades using participatory public art to connect artists, neighbourhoods and civic life, creating thousands of artworks across the city.

Miami’s Wynwood Walls turned a neglected warehouse district into one of the world’s most visited street-art destinations, drawing millions of visitors each year. In Rio de Janeiro, Favela Painting worked with local residents to turn walls in favelas into large-scale public artworks, creating pride and work in places too often seen via poverty and violence.

What links these projects is not the paint itself, but what the paint begins to make possible. Public art works best when it is not treated as surface. A mural cannot fix policing, housing or infrastructure. But it can persuade people to look again, to slow down, to see care where they had grown used to neglect. Sometimes repair begins there.

![Ryan-Jozi-street](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/Al3s7QjFWqhVV3rteGkGQWyRSHY=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/JHBSA_5_9Aug26_RyanEnslin_772919.jpg)

*Street art in Johannesburg on 9 August 2026. (Photo: Ryan Enslin)*

![Ryan-Jozi-street](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/e430_8nInSDV5gU9X2Xx77z5U-U=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/CON25Media8_633830.jpg)

*Street art in Johannesburg’s inner city. (Photo: Ryan Enslin)*

### The first welcome

For Jozi My Jozi, a key focus area is the city’s gateways. They are often the first impression of Johannesburg, and too often it has been grime, broken surfaces, bad lighting, fear and neglect.

The Gateway Project responds with a practical sequence: clean, make safer, bring in art, then invite people to inhabit the space differently. It is a way of turning major entry points into cleaner, safer and more welcoming places, with the City of Johannesburg and corporate partners drawn into the work.

Farai Mafurirano of Moja Nation, who has partnered with Jozi My Jozi, is clear that fixing the inner city is a large, expensive task. Art, in this setting, becomes the piece that can move first. On a bridge people once crossed with their phones hidden, even a modest beginning can change the terms of the street.

That is its strength. The work is physical first, then emotional, then civic; which is why its meaning cannot be separated from the pavements beneath it.

![Ryan-Jozi-street](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/aEsruSc87AV5pLZIT71iznQpSnk=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/InnerCity1_323379.jpg)

*Nelson Mandela Bridge crosses Johannesburg’s rail yards at sunset, linking Braamfontein and Newtown above the inner city’s dense urban fabric. (Photo: Ryan Enslin)*

![Ryan-Jozi-street](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/nxytcdz2ZgAvCQT6Hq8XHCp-LvI=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/JHBSA_7_9Aug26_RyanEnslin_364405.jpg)

*Johannesburg’s inner city on 9 August 2026. (Photo: Ryan Enslin)*

Artist James Delaney, known for his public-space artworks and activations, speaks of street art as something that can lift the ceiling of a place. It gives visitors a sign that someone is caring for the area. It also gives artists a reason to work at scale, in public, where their practice enters ordinary life.

### People on the move

But the gateways of Johannesburg are not being treated as random mural sites. Delaney and Mafurirano speak about a connecting thread: people walking, carrying, commuting, crossing, hustling, arriving. The city is always on foot.

On the Queen Elizabeth Bridge, another point in the Gateways Project, that idea became literal. Behind the dirt and posters, the team found an earlier artwork of cut-out figures embedded into the wall.

Rather than erase it, they cleaned around it, repainted the surface, then added new figures representing people who actually use the bridge. A skater, a Gen Z passer-by, a mother with a child on her back and a parcel on her head, a recycler pushing his load, someone in a wheelchair being helped across. The point is quiet but important. Everyday Joburgers are the subject.

![Ryan-Jozi-street](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/nTi4ekAkl94T-IvTpf-VxaakbcA=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/JHBSA_1_7Aug26_RyanEnslin_146639.jpg)

*Pedestrians pass the renewed Queen Elizabeth Bridge, where painted figures echo the everyday movement of people through Johannesburg’s inner city. (Photo: Ryan Enslin)*

On Nelson Mandela Bridge, the art works differently because the bridge allows pause. The Shweshwe pillars, Mandela quotes and mosaic-detail benches invite brief dwelling. The benches were designed for short stays, not overnight sleeping, a telling example of the tension between welcome and management in a city where public space carries every social question at once.

### Beyond a painted wall

Jozi My Jozi’s use of street art is most convincing when seen as part of a civic choreography, a way to make Johannesburg’s streets feel usable again. The first Main Street Sundays pilot in April drew thousands of people into a car-free inner-city day of walking, cycling, food, music and street life. Art was not the whole story there, but it helped make the streets visible as a place to linger.

![P8 BHB Maboneng](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/hvrSDmCUvELUX8vq6de-anUg3JQ=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/2994/cowartworkintheEnkomeniTaxiRank_412675.jpg)

*Cow artwork at the Enkomeni taxi rank. (Photo: Bridget Hilton-Barber)*

![P8 BHB Maboneng](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/WoawuyPaREz8KBJKAxHG4JmseCo=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/2994/08muralart_549599.jpg)

*Mural art in Maboneng. (Photo: Bridget Hilton-Barber)*

Street art lets Johannesburg practise confidence in small public acts: a phone taken out, a photograph made, a bench used, a bridge crossed more slowly. It allows a bridge to become more than a passage, a wall more than a boundary, a neglected corner more than evidence of abandonment.

The city is not transformed because someone paints it. Johannesburg is too complex, too wounded, too alive for that kind of easy claim. But when people slow down on a bridge they once hurried across, when they sit, look out, take a photograph, recognise themselves in a figure on a wall, something small but real has shifted.

And a street in the city has begun to answer back. **DM**

*Ryan Enslin is a Johannesburg-based writer, photographer and cultural observer whose work explores travel, art, food, culture and the life of cities. His writing looks beyond the visible subject to the histories, behaviours and social forces shaping how people experience place, with a particular focus on Johannesburg, South Africa and the wider African continent.*