Gentrification In Durban

RENEWING JOBURG

Kevin Ritchie

J onathan Liebmann has a dream. A place where everyone can live together; rich and poor, professional and unskilled, believer and non-believer, black and white in a community that is crime-free and works, precisely because it is the opposite of the gated communities of Joburg’s north, because it is open.

It’s a utopian vision. What makes it stand out is that Liebmann is creating exactly this in one of the more derelict and less salubrious parts of Joburg’s inner city, where the stench of fresh urine in doorwells overwhelms the exhaust fumes of the urban commuters.

What makes it doubly different is that Liebmann will turn a profit out of it too, because in his book, making money and making a difference go hand in hand.

The 28-year-old entrepreneur is not your usual property developer. He’s not the normal dreamer either.

Instead he’s a comfortable mix of the two; MBA phrases tripping off his tongue as easily as sociological concepts like gentrification and urban renewal.

Dressed down in jeans, takkies and a hoodie, he’s walking up the stairs past the rubble of the next phase in creating his Maboneng Precinct that starts in the lee of the great Joe Slovo concrete overpass with Arts on Main and extends for almost three blocks with the next developments; Main Street Life, Revolution House, the Artisans’ Residence and Moad, which will showcase African design.

Arts on Main has already made a name for itself. During the week it’s home to William Kentridge, the Goethe Institute, Bailey’s African History Archives and The Goodman Gallery, designers Black Coffee, marketing companies and the Canteen, a trendy eatery. At the weekend, the undercover parking area and grassed commonage are transformed into a Sunday market, selling natural produce, design and dangerous bloody Marys.

It’s all part and parcel of his dream not just to rejuvenate the area, but to create functional and sustainable communities drawing people back into the inner city who once fled it – the middle class professionals themselves.

The extension of Arts on Main was Main Street Life, with its eponymous Bioscope and POPArt on the ground floor next to two restaurants, below five floors of 33m2 studio apartments sold to rent or to occupy at prices that began at R320 000. The building’s penultimate floor is the self catering 12 Decades Art Hotel on the seventh floor, boasting 12 rooms each designed by a different artist, as well as two penthouses, one of which was Liebmann’s until he sold it last month for R1.25 million. On the roof is a bar, that rugby fans are starting to stop over at en route to Ellis Park, and a boxing gym staffed by a Hillbrow boxing champion who brings some of his more promising kids across once or twice a week to give residents who want it, a proper boxing workout.

the gentrification of our movement

For more articles by and about a "living politics" visit Abahlali at www.abahlali.org

Defining ourselves

We are here as elected delegates of Abahlali baseMjondolo, the South African shackdwellers’ movement. We approach each challenge and opportunity from within our own ‘living politics’ which the President of our movement, S’bu Zikode has described as a politics that:

Throughout our struggles, we have found that others want to define us and they want to understand our struggle according their own definitions and projects. It is always necessary to resist this and to insist that we think and speak for ourselves. Without this discipline, our living politics would die .

Clarifying our thought and struggle in relation to ‘gentrification’

We have discussed the issue that this conference will confront in a number of meetings and, last Saturday, in a camp (an all night meeting). We have concluded that the idea of ‘gentrification’ is not one that can really be said to be part of the living politics of Abahlali baseMjondolo. It is not a word that you will hear shackdwellers in South Africa using a lot (or at all really!) to describe their lives or to analyse their situation. This is not surprising since the term was developed in the 1960s by Northern analysts trying to explain certain patterns in the historical development of mostly Northern cities. We know that the word continues to be used, and that it is used quite widely by now. We know that the patterns and issues it deals with are definitely important for all of us who are thinking about cities and who are committed to people’s struggles for justice in cities all over the world. We are very clear that we fully support the struggle of the poor against the rich every where in the world – in Zimbabwe, in Haiti and also in England. But, from the perspective of the living politics of the shackdwellers of South Africa, we want to suggest that it might be more important to clarify some of the ways in which our struggle is not about gentrification – rather than trying to fit our story to match the theories and ideas developed elsewhere by others who do not know our story. This why we can really get to know each other and our struggles that are different in some ways and the same in other ways.

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Sociological abstracts

The challenge of slums, global report on human settlements, 2003