[LINK] "$3B Rail line strengthens social fabric of Johannesburg"

[rfmcdonald]

South African-born journalist Richard Poplak has a wonderful essay examining how GauTrain, the Johannesburg metropolitan area's new mass transit system built in time for the World Cup, will help to overcome apartheid by building up a unified city. Literally.

Welcome to the GauTrain, arguably the most important, certainly the most expensive, but not the only piece of massive transportation infrastructure the World Cup Finals preparations have bequeathed South Africa. Nowhere on the continent is there anything close to this — Cairo has a superb subway and train system, but nothing on this scale. But let’s leave Africa out of it: There isn’t a city in Canada that can boast of such a transit project — the GauTrain leaves even Vancouver’s Skytrain in the dust. This is a world class, high-speed commuter train, built and currently operated by (irony of ironies) Canada’s pride, Bombardier, at a cost to South Africans of about $3-billion. Sandton to the airport is the first part of the line to go operational. It will eventually connect the north of the city to the south, which, to anyone who knows Johannesburg, is as much a sociopolitical revolution as it is a transportation one.

No one walks in Johannesburg; public transit has always been for the poor. It is difficult for those who live in a walking, transit-based city to comprehend just how devastating dead sidewalks are to a sense of collective self. An important theme in South African novelist Nadine Gordimer’s work is that the street is where history occurs. It’s a utopian space — as the academic Rita Barnard puts it — “of bodily contact and chance encounter and of the unpredictable polyglot sociopolitical life apartheid’s white suburban homes were designed to seal off.” The old regime’s builders had a streak of dark genius; they understood the elements involved in making vital, democratic cities — and engineered the precise opposite.

The philosopher Michel de Certeau, who wrote the classic The Practice of Everyday Life, recognized the revolutionary sensibilities of the flaneur — the casual walker who subverts the ordered structure of the city simply by ambling through it at will — no less than apartheid-era builders did. Yet South African cities presented a unique wrinkle to this theory: walkers have almost always been uniformly black. In other words, their subversion was negated because they were performing exactly as their warders hoped they would. The white flaneur, on the other hand, was indeed a revolutionary. Black subversion was restricted to the townships, where it was easily controlled (at least for a time) and easily ignored. Segregation ruled to the last.

It has been virtually impossible to untangle this legacy. For one thing, the threat of racial violence that the old regime once held as a Sword of Damocles over the heads of the white citizenry has not disappeared, but has been dimmed by the spectre of insanely high crime rates. That’s kept people off the streets. What’s more, Johannesburg was built for the car, so much so that a Robert Moses-like planner — we’re referring here to the man who almost single-handedly killed swathes of New York City by building bridges over the Bronx and Brooklyn — would be entirely superfluous.

Like most South African cities, Johannesburg has a history of razing urban black settlements and moving them to the fringes of the city. Workers would have to find their way into town and make their way back, because the Group Areas Act made it illegal for them to live in white areas, and the Pass Laws highly restricted their freedom of movement. Cities were thus fluid panopticons, where blacks were always watched: Without the proper paperwork, they couldn’t be there; with it, they were easily traced. Johannesburg was a de facto work camp.

This is what makes the GauTrain such a revelation. By 2012 it will link the ritzy northern suburbs with Soweto. It has bus hook-ups with other parts of the city, and critically introduces public transit to Johannesburg’s upper classes, as well as its visitors. No longer are they cloistered, shuttled around by car from fortified mall to fortified housing compound; the entire complexion of the city changes. By integrating the city’s elites into the fabric of urban life, Johannesburg becomes a better city.