Megaprojects and urban visions: Johannesburg's Corridors of Freedom and Modderfontein

Ballard, Richard; Dittgen, Romain; Harrison, Philip G.; Todes, Alison

doi:10.1353/trn.2017.0024

Cited by 32 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Key features of the regeneration process are commitments to seeing the development of social and affordable housing and increased densification of the city. These goals are vital given the severe levels of spatial fragmentation and segregation which define Johannesburg (Gotz and Todes, 2014;SERI, 2016), the critical shortages of affordable, welllocated housing (Ballard et al, 2017), as well as the inner-city's symbolic stature as an emerging centre of black urban life. The inner-city is one of the few places where apartheid planning has been reversed (although white flight has meant that a different form of segregation has become embedded) and lower-income households are drawn to the area as it is close to employment opportunities, transport links and social amenities.…”

Section: Urban Regeneration In Inner-city Johannesburgmentioning

confidence: 99%

Habitus, spatial capital and making place: Housing developers and the spatial praxis of Johannesburg’s inner-city regeneration

Mosselson

2019

Environ Plan A

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This paper presents a sociology of housing developers, stressing the contingent, socially and spatially embedded nature of their practices. It complicates prevailing views of developers and demonstrates how urban development is, in fact, a spatial praxis requiring adaptability and capacities to adjust dispositions and practices to suit the particular environments in which it takes place. A growing body of work tries to understand the motivations and practices of property developers. While this has contributed to understandings of developers’ networks, the ways they understand their roles and the ways different national or regional contexts shape approaches, it largely lacks a spatial perspective, and does not account for the contingency, fluidity and adaptability of developers’ actions. Most importantly, it does not theorize how experiences in space shape practices. Developers are still largely presented as powerful actors who are able to exercise domination over space in relatively straight-forward, linear ways. In contrast, in this paper I demonstrate that developers are influenced by competing dynamics and agendas, and actively adapt their strategies and activities in accordance with the demands and realities of particular places. Building on the work of Centner (2008) and Marom (2014), the paper further develops the concepts ‘spatial capital’ and ‘spatial habitus’ and attempts to use them to make sense of the practices of property developers and affordable housing providers working in inner-city Johannesburg

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Section: Urban Regeneration In Inner-city Johannesburgmentioning

confidence: 99%

Habitus, spatial capital and making place: Housing developers and the spatial praxis of Johannesburg’s inner-city regeneration

Mosselson

2019

Environ Plan A

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“…Since the adoption of the NDP, SPLUMA and the IUDF, the South African state has embarked on mega-human settlements projects that contradict the agreed spatial vision of urban compaction (Ballard, Dittgen, Harrison & Todes, 2017;Ballard & Rubin, 2017). If urban land reform is framed as the creation of new towns or megacities, or largescale rapid land release, low-density sprawl may be increased, since it is generally only on the periphery that sufficient land is available for large-scale development.…”

Section: Redistribution In An Urban Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban land reform in South Africa: Pointers for urban policy and planning

Huchzermeyer

Harrison

Charlton

et al. 2019

TRP

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Urban and reform is a relatively under-researched and-considered element of the broader land-reform debate. This article reviews some of the key positions that have been explicated in the current urban land-reform debate, and seeks to extend existing contributions, fine-tune them and push the debate further. It does so by distinguishing the features of urban land, and considers these and their implications for the meaning of land reform. It also reviews the recently achieved, national policy consensus on urban development and planning, and concludes with suggestions on how to proceed with urban land reform.

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“…Moreover, in some places, such as India, they receive disproportionate amounts of investment (Shaw 2012), since they are part of 'world class city dreams' (Schindler and Kishore 2015), warranting further analysis of their consequences. However, while large scale developments, and specifically edge city developments, are being built throughout the world (Adama 2018;Ballard et al 2017;Carmody and Owusu 2016;Das 2015;Grant 2015;Shatkin 2008), their development in African contexts has raised a particular set of questions about the consequences of such an elite-led approach to urban growth, especially in terms of equitable development and environmental impacts. There are two seminal papers which address, through broad overviews, the geography of this problem: Vanessa Watson's 2014 paper on urban fantasies and more recently Femke van Noorloos and Marjan Kloosterboer's 2018 paper on the contested future of Africa's cities.…”

Section: Project-based Development: Edge Cities In An African Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Johannesburg has a long history of urban development through project-based schemes (Beall et al 2002); however, in more recent times, this has manifested in a very distinct spatial form: the development of large-scale projects on the periphery (Herbert and Murray 2015;Ballard et al 2017). The most successful and well known of these projects is Waterfall, a large scale privately run almost-city which lies near Midrand in the Johannesburg-Pretoria growth corridor, an area known for being innovative in its urban governance and economic policy trajectories (Rogerson 2003).…”

Section: Project-based Development: Edge Cities In An African Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Led by Mr. Dai Zhikang, Zendai wanted to build a new piece of city with gleaming skyscrapers of high-end, luxury housing and offices catering to the service sector economy. Operating under the framework of a 'new urban district' (Zendai 2013) and enmeshed in narratives of smart/ sustainable urbanisation, the project would consist of 55,000 housing units, 1,468,000 square meters of office space and all of the necessary amenities for urban life (Ballard et al 2017). However, in the three years after acquisition, they achieved very little, unsuccessfully navigating the local political context (Brill 2018) and failing to get planning permission.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Failed Fantasies in a South African Context: the Case of Modderfontein, Johannesburg

Brill

Reboredo

2018

Urban Forum

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The (proposed) development of private sector-led, large-scale urban projects on the periphery of many African cities has drawn increased attention to the geographical breadth and potential consequences of the phenomena in recent years. This work demonstrates the speculative nature of many of these projects and their 'world-class city' aspirations, but also how such plans will exacerbate existing problems, including spatial inequality and environmental degradation. This paper, drawing on 50 interviews and extensive fieldwork, examines one such project in northeast Johannesburg, the Modderfontein New City. The paper responds to existing research and their calls for more grounded studies, and argues that given their distinct logics and developmental mechanisms, large-scale masterplanned edge cities can only truly be understood within the context of their place-specific urban landscapes, and that contrary to the prevailing arguments on this type of project, they do not always exist outside of ordinary governance structures. Supporting the (speculative) conclusions in earlier research, we demonstrate how the plans and early building looked to worsen spatial inequality and environmental problems. However, in highlighting how Modderfontein's failure is partly the product of a strong local state unwilling to compromise on their own agenda in the face of elite-driven edge city developments, we argue such large scale projects in Johannesburg face hitherto under-researched disciplining processes that can disrupt or even derail projects.

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Megaprojects and urban visions: Johannesburg's Corridors of Freedom and Modderfontein

Cited by 32 publications

References 20 publications

Habitus, spatial capital and making place: Housing developers and the spatial praxis of Johannesburg’s inner-city regeneration

Habitus, spatial capital and making place: Housing developers and the spatial praxis of Johannesburg’s inner-city regeneration

Urban land reform in South Africa: Pointers for urban policy and planning

Failed Fantasies in a South African Context: the Case of Modderfontein, Johannesburg

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