Beyond potholes, Joburg needs permission to dream bigger

I have become increasingly obsessed with Joburg’s streets. Not for their artistic texture, potholes or uneven grading, but because sometimes the distance between feeling welcome and feeling unwelcome in a neighbourhood is just one block.

I was thinking about this at Main Street Sundays in early August, an Open Streets activation with Jozi My Jozi and Young Urbanists, with whom we partner in downtown Joburg.

There was music, food, children playing, people walking. And then, at one point, a Metro cop picked up a drum and joined the band.

He was good. Really good. For a few minutes, the uniform seemed to disappear. So did the line between authority and citizen. He was simply another person in the street, inspired to make music with everyone else.

It was a tiny moment, but it made me think about who gets to feel that a city belongs to them.

We talk about access as though it means simply being able to get somewhere. It is about whether the street feels safe, and you can walk it. It feels like a real luxury to suggest this – but it’s also about whether there is somewhere to sit. Whether there is shade. Or, in a city of speeding taxis and chance-taking drivers, whether you can cross the road without taking your life in your hands. But it is also much more than that. 

The best expression of access is about whether you feel entitled to be there. Whether the city says: you belong here.

These are not new ideas. In Cape Town a series of street experiments by Young Urbanists has opened the possibility to imagine a different city. Crashing back down to our reality, a badly maintained pavement is a barrier. So is a dark street, and a road designed entirely around cars.

At the recent Jozi My Jozi 702 Walk The Talk, I joined 25,000 people to walk through the city. For 8km, I kept wondering: where were the people who live along that route? Why don’t they feel as if they have the right to be on these streets? 

If we want a city that belongs to its people, participation can’t be something we stage occasionally. It must be built into the way we think.

Permission to experiment

I visited Colombia last year and was struck by the way cities such as Bogotá and Medellín have used transport and street interventions as tools for social inclusion. Coming out of an era of drug cartels and intense violence, they have fought their way back by making it a goal to connect isolated, low-income neighbourhoods to urban centres, reclaiming public space for pedestrians and consciously bridging historical social divides.

Medellín's Metrocable reaches some of the city’s most isolated hillside communities with an aerial cable car system that is included in the price of a metro fare. In one nightlife district we watched as roads were shut down to cars at sunset and streets opened to pedestrians only. Each week Bogotá’s Sunday Ciclovía closes more than 100km of roads to cars.

These aren’t simply transport projects. They change who gets to move through the city, and how.

The people who will get my vote this year are the people brave enough to experiment with our streets. I keep hearing myself talk about local government elections and bringing it down to: “can they fix a pothole?”

It’s too unambitious.

Can they create a city where people feel socially included? Where there are opportunities to occupy the same space? Where there is an active push to experiment with streets and change the experience of safety? Even if it’s just one block for one evening. And offer to do it without the years of bureaucratic red tape and enormous costs.

Let people occupy a street differently. Cities need permission to experiment. In an interview with Michele Ciani, the new owner of the Barbican building in the city, he spoke about “dreamers and doers”.

Cities need both. After years of dysfunction, we have become so accustomed to reacting to Johannesburg that we have almost forgotten how to imagine it. Every election cycle, the conversation begins with what is broken: potholes, power, water, crime, traffic lights, corruption. These things all matter. We should demand better. That’s a given.

But a city cannot live entirely inside a list of failures, because eventually we start confusing survival with ambition.

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Limited desires, curtailed dreams

Johannesburg has extraordinary artists, architects, designers, entrepreneurs and makers. People are constantly creating new things, restoring buildings, opening businesses, transforming neighbourhoods and imagining alternatives. The city has no shortage of people who can do.

What we need is more permission to dream.

Dreamers aren’t frivolous. They are often the people who see possibilities before everyone else can.

At Keyes Art Night in August, we worked with Keyes Art Mile and Open Window to give people the opportunity to make tiny artworks for an imagined art museum: The People’s Gallery.

Every month in that space on the first Thursday, we co-host the Makers Table and create a place for people to gather and make. Art matters not because it decorates a city but because it can change the way we think about it.

Cities aren’t finished products. They are drafts. And Johannesburg’s greatest problem may not be that we have stopped fixing things. It may be that we have limited our desires and curtailed our dreams.

So yes, fix the potholes, the traffic lights, the water supply. But give me something else too. Give me more reasons to believe. Tables around which strangers can gather and make things. Safe streets that entice me to explore and linger. Give me many ways of freely encountering the people of this city. Give me space and encouragement to participate.

Don’t just ask for my vote so you can give me a better-functioning version of the same city. Give me a city I can imagine myself being part of. A city that makes me want to belong. And don’t do it for only me. DM