[LINK] "Ecologies of Gold"

[rfmcdonald]

I found Dorothy Tang and Andrew Watkins' photoessay Ecologies of Gold: The Past and Future Mining Landscapes of Johannesburg" thanks to Landscape and Urbanism's linkage. The South African metropolis of Johannesburg was built by the late 19th century gold rush; Zulu name eGoli means "place of gold." Tang and Watkins illustrate how urban settlement in Johannesburg has been shaped by the gold mines, especially as the informal settlements created in the post-apartheid urbanization run up against the gold mines.

Over the past century a range of factors — fluctuating international gold prices, changing demands for mining labor, the construction of infrastructure and the need to dispose of mining waste — has shaped the development of what is now the most urbanized province in South Africa. In particular, the 80-kilometer mining belt between the two cities is riddled by deep-shaft mines, where companies built an extensive network of underground tunnels and moved large amounts of earth to the surface. These operations have weakened geological strata, disrupted natural drainage patterns and altered ecological habitat. The original semi-arid grasslands ecology is now converted to an urban forest, and sediment from mining waste has blocked natural waterways, unexpectedly creating wetlands with rich bird habitat. Massive mine dumps, many upwards of 30 meters tall, have become landmarks of Johannesburg — or eGoli, “the place of gold,” in Zulu.

In the 1970s the gold mines moved from Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni to the rural areas of the Witwatersrand, and informal settlements began to occupy the vacant mining lands in the heart of the city. The end of apartheid, in 1994, brought a large influx of rural residents — mostly blacks or foreign Africans — seeking opportunities in Johannesburg and joining family and friends in existing informal settlements along the mining belt. Currently 25 percent of the population in Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni live in informal settlements, and approximately a quarter of them — 400,000 people — are in the mining belt. The settlements range from 100 to 40,000 people, with the largest communities in Ekurhuleni, where the mining companies have expended fewer resources to police the land.

Not surprisingly, the settlements face myriad obstacles. Local zoning laws prevent them from receiving municipal services such as water, electricity and sanitation. Having no secure right to the land, the settlers construct homes from scrap metal and found wood; and despite such resourcefulness, they've encountered degraded environmental conditions that seriously hampered efforts to improve living standards and achieve formal municipal status.

Changing ownership structures and bankruptcies in the mining industries have made it difficult to determine who is responsible for the environmental remediation of the old mining land (despite strict environmental regulations). Shallowly undermined land — caused by underground mines close to the ground surface — makes it technically difficult to construct permanent buildings and basic infrastructure, while the fine dust from neighboring mine dumps poses health risks such as respiratory disease and cancer. To complicate the situation, new extraction technologies and rising gold prices are enabling the recovery of gold from mine dumps. Massive topographical and hydrological operations have been set in motion once again; the old mine dumps are disappearing, gold slurry and water are piped throughout the region and waste has been transferred to new “super dumps” on the periphery. Newly freed land is being redeveloped for light industry and recreation; yet the population of greater Johannesburg is projected to double over the next 20 years, creating a significant housing shortage. This has created tension over land; but it's also led to unexpected partnerships between the mining companies and informal settlements.

Sometimes, they run up quite dramatically against each other.



Originally found here for display on this page.

As the first settlers arrived during the gold rush in 1886, Johannesburg and many smaller mining communities grew along a linear mining belt at the northern edge of the Witwatersrand Basin. Over the past century, gold mines and associated facilities, such as mine dumps, have occupied prime real estate in central areas of Johannesburg and its sister city, Ekurhuleni, setting the stage for current land use tensions along the mining belt. The Top Star mine dump, shown here, was constructed from 1899 to 1939, reaching a height of 50 meters and containing 5.1 million metric tons of chemically processed mine waste. In the early 1960s, Top Star was converted into a drive-in movie theater, which showed movies until 2006, when it was shut down by DRD Gold to extract latent gold in the mine waste. The mine dump’s dramatic height within Johannesburg’s urban core offered spectacular views of the Central Business District.

Go, read and see.