The Johannesburg Inner City Partnership is transforming the downtown area into a ‘walkable city’ with solar lighting, clean streets and vibrant public spaces. ‘You want vibrance. You want people walking around, going to the shops, going to school,’ says CEO David van Niekerk.
My favourite Johannesburg city reporting story (and I do quite a few) starts outside the Rand Club with David van Niekerk, the CEO of Johannesburg Inner City Partnership. Months before, we met to talk about his plans for making Joburg a “walkable city”, and I thought: “Well, nice idea, but I mean really!” In my job as a city reporter, you always meet urbanists brimming with ideas that often don’t chime with real life. Van Niekerk comes out of the club where the partnership – Johannesburg Inner City Partnership (JICP) – is based.
We start walking and Van Niekerk points upward to show the solar lighting – a first step in making a city safe and walkable. Across the inner city, for more than 12 blocks these lights are up, tapping the daylight sun to light up the city from dusk to dawn. It’s the outcome of an interlocking partnership of organisations, including the inner-city partnership and Jozi my Jozi, the citizen-run, business-funded project to regenerate Johannesburg.
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The lights are fitted with anti-tampering mechanisms linked to the network of CCTV cameras in the city. You want people walking around, going to the shops, going to school. A 24/7 city needs lights and spaces to linger,” says Van Niekerk.
We’re on Main Street and it looks amazing – the boulevards have been broadened and the pavements are in good nick. Cafés are open so you can linger on the street, and the pavements are broad enough to walk safely. In time, you want to either fully or largely pedestrianise a city to make it properly walkable.
(This is different because across the rest of the city exposed manholes are lethal, and pavements are either cracked and broken, or so overgrown with weeds that they are impassable.) There is “street furniture” – lingo for built-in blocks to sit or places to linger for people on the streets, and hawker stands for an essential informal sector. In the next three to four months there will be “pocket plazas”, says Van Niekerk – spots where food can be grown or where there is public art and places to buy food. I’ve seen it in Hong Kong and Beijing recently, and they are also common in Istanbul, New York and Indian cities.
Then on to Gandhi Square, a transport terminus that is exactly what a big city public transport hub should be. It’s clean, bustling with commuters, and safe. Imagine if all our taxi ranks could look like this.
Businesses and the City work together to keep the square that way. The Mahatma would be smiling, I think.
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