Many people will never visit Johannesburg’s inner city. For them, the viral clips will continue to stand in for reality. But if you choose to look again – if you walk this precinct, feel the paving underfoot, hear the water, see students moving between buildings, glimpse a soccer game in progress – another city comes into focus.
A few days later, in the icy waters of the Saunders Rock tidal pool in Cape Town, where chitchat with strangers acts as a life preserver while you try to distract yourself from the sharp needles of cold pricking your legs, someone asked me what I do. I replied that I publish a guide to Joburg. He had seen the video.
He laughed and said next I should definitely share a map with my audience of how to get to Cape Town. Thousands of people saw and will continue to see that clip, but only a few blocks away from Hillbrow, something much quieter – and far more explosive – is taking root. The changes in the city over the past two years do not announce themselves loudly.
Read Full Article on Daily Maverick
[paywall]
They arrive as a series of moments that, to the untrained eye, can seem random – a building repurposed here, a campus expanding there, a field of grass appearing where there was once an empty parking lot. They are part of a repatterning of the city: a growing web of quietly reshaping the future of Joburg as “education town”. Walk the precinct around 44 Main Street, formerly the headquarters of Anglo-American and now the HQ of Jozi My Jozi, who are leading many partnership initiatives, and the first sensation is one of joyful disorientation.
The paving’s pristine. Unexpectedly lush and carefully tended gardens soften the edges of buildings. Water moves through the fountain with its famous Impala Stampede sculpture by Herman Wald.
Within close walking distance of what most would regard as an unlikely pocket of the city, the Field of Dreams was launched at the end of November – a sporting precinct built for students of the Maharishi Invincibility Institute. Grass, courts, lines painted on the ground – space to run, to play, and to breathe. The field is only one strand in a much larger vision.
Joburg was never designed as a residential city. Its highways and ring roads were engineered to funnel labour in, labour out. And yet, the future being imagined here depends on people learning, staying and living in the city.
Education is the anchor. The Maharishi Invincibility Institute has become a cornerstone of this idea, offering degrees and programmes in disciplines such as cybersecurity, finance, analytics and consulting-oriented thinking – skills that translate directly into employment. It is a pay-it-forward model, funded in a way that removes many of the barriers that keep young South Africans from a tertiary education.
It is also an education model built on outcomes, not abstraction. Crucially, the institute recognises that students arriving from deeply impoverished communities often carry trauma that must be addressed alongside academic learning. The institute’s newly founded Security Academy extends the thinking outwards, with students contributing directly to safety in the surrounding precinct.
On any day, you’ll see a phalanx of uniformed students performing drills in the 44 Main piazza. Education here isn’t sealed inside lecture halls; it radiates into the city.
[/paywall]
