Lindsay Bremner

Reinventing the Johannesburg inner city

After the discovery of the Witwatersrand gold reef in 1886, the city of Johannesburg became, within a very short period of time, the financial and commercial hub of sub-Saharan Africa. It maintained this position throughout the earlier half of the twentieth century in the face of increasing opposition to the apartheid political system. By the late 1980s, however, this had changed. The restructuring of the global economy and increasing political pressure had resulted in a city whose economic base was declining and in which the social and economic exclusion upon which it had been built was no longer sustainable. This resulted in successive attempts by the urban authorities to reinvent a city which could claim a position in the mainstream global economy and become a city all its citizens could feel part of. This paper sketches these attempts, locates them in certain traditions of urban regeneration and exposes their theoretical and practical inadequacies.

Bounded spaces: demographic anxieties in post‐apartheid Johannesburg

This paper attempts to shape a way of thinking about race, crime and the increasing privatisation and enclosure of space in contemporary Johannesburg, through the concept of terror. It examines the ways in which terror fuses with the figure of the criminal to create a city of new, post‐apartheid exclusions and segregations. It argues that the figures of the criminal, the boundary wall and the house are the symbolic objects of the new city, through which its internal and external geographies are being reconfigured.

Post-apartheid urban geography: A case study of Greater Johannesburg's Rapid Land Development Programme

This article addresses the twin issues of urbanisation and the eradication of the socio-spatial patterns of apartheid in South African cities through the presentation of a case study – the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Councils Rapid Land Development Programme (RLDP), initiated in 1995. This has been one of the few housing delivery programmes in the country since 1994 which has attempted to address these two issues simultaneously (the Marconi Beam Development in Cape Town being another). The significance of the RLDP lies not only in its marginal success, but also in its failures. It brought to the surface the intractable ideologies and vested interests behind the patterns of property ownership in South African cities, as well as the lack of policies or procedures to challenge them. As a result, urban development in general, and in Greater Johannesburg in particular has, since 1994, reinforced rather than confronted apartheid geography.

Reframing Township Space: The Kliptown Project

n 1955, the African National Congress (ANC) held its historic Congress of the People to ratify its liberation manifesto, the Freedom Charter. This event took place in Kliptown, on the outskirts of Soweto (fig. 1, above), at a site that came to be called Freedom Square in honor of the occasion. Today Freedom Square is an open, windswept tract of land, lying between a shack settlement, a railway line, and a taxi rank and bounded by the back facades of warehouses and wholesale stores. The trees that once lined its edges, providing shade for local traders and commuters, have mostly died, and the farm that once cultivated the land around it has long been abandoned. Remarkable today only for the tapestry of footpaths marking its surface, tracing the movement of people who traverse it in the course of their daily lives, Freedom Square has an auspicious history. This site in Kliptown was chosen for a meeting of what became known as the

Fluid Ontologies in the Search for MH370

This paper gives an account of the disappearance of Malaysian Airways Flight MH370 into the southern Indian Ocean in March 2014 and analyses the rare glimpses into remote ocean space this incident opened up. It follows the tenuous clues as to where the aeroplane might have come to rest after it disappeared from radar screens – seven satellite pings, hundreds of pieces of floating debris and six underwater sonic recordings – as ways of entering into and thinking about ocean space. The paper pays attention to and analyses this space on three registers – first, as a fluid, more-than-human materiality with particular properties and agencies; second, as a synthetic situation, a composite of informational bits and pieces scopically articulated and augmented; and third, as geopolitics, delineated by the protocols of international search and rescue. On all three registers – as matter, as data and as law – the ocean is shown to be ontologically fluid, a world defined by movement, flow and flux, posing intractable difficulties for human interactions with it.

Towards a minor global architecture at Lamu, Kenya

Major accounts of globalisation from a built environment perspective bring global cities and celebrity architects into focus. In this paper, I resist this and give an account of globalisation from the perspective of one of its minor architectures. A minor architecture is not a minor architectural language, but rather one that a minority constructs within a major language, encoding it differently and subverting its prevailing myths. The paper investigates this proposition by focusing on Lamu, the historic Islamic seaport and World Heritage Site on the northern coast of Kenya where a skirmish between local, national and global interests is currently underway over the construction of a new deep-water port. The port is a building site, not only of one of globalisation’s major architectures – a port, free economic zone and transportation corridor, but also of one of its minor ones, taking shape through the strategies Lamu’s organisations are deploying to object it. Through the analysis of Lamu in the longue durée – its coastal geomorphology and historic spatial protocols, I read these strategies as contemporary deployments of those long put to work at Lamu, through which land- and sea-based logics have been entangled.

Folded ocean: The spatial transformation of the Indian Ocean world

This paper presents experimental research on the Indian Ocean being undertaken within the context of what has been termed architectures contemporary geographic turn. It investigates how oceanic practices and protocols fold into spatial and architectural products on land, figuring both sea- and land-based logics. It frames this ocean through three tropes: as contact zone, with which are associated ideas of creolisation, transnationalism, entanglement, compaction and multi-polarity; as circulator with which are associated ideas of connectivity, passage, lane, route, choke point, network, port, dock and deposit; and as ecology, with which are associated ideas of liquidity, cycle, rhythm and climate change. The paper introduces these tropes and investigates sites brought into focus through them, highlighting the wider global dynamics or processes they reveal. It concludes with provisional thoughts about what these amphibious sites offer for understandings of architecture and urbanism in todays hyper-articulated, globalised world.

Space and the Nation: Three Texts on Aldo Rossi

In this paper the spatial dimensions of political practice and the historical dimensions of architectural practice are examined. The author argues that these two practices intersect when, in the life of a city and a nation, time is transformed into space. The productivity of death in this regard is explored. In developing this argument, reference is made to the works and writings of Regis Debray and Aldo Rossi, as well as events in the recent political history of South Africa.

Thinking Architecture with an Indian Ocean Aquapelago

This article takes up the charge of thinking architecture with one of the Indian Ocean’s central coral atoll formations, the Maldives archipelago. It is undertaken as a critique of the concept of the archipelago as deployed in architecture since the 1970s. Architects have used the archipelago as a metaphoric metageographical concept based on a land–sea binary, to conceive of architecture as autonomous from its environments. This permits the discipline exemption from its contexts and frames its engagement with the diverse mobilities of contemporary globalization. To counter this, the article draws from a broad body of literature familiar to readers of GeoHumanities, namely island studies, urban island studies, political ecology, and thinking with water, to undertake a reading of the Maldives as an oceanic aquapelago, as an alternative metageographical concept for architecture in today’s globalized world.