No+still+life+in+teeming+Joubert+Park,+Jacob+Dlamini,+B+Day+Weekender

Business Day Weekender, 17 June 2006
=No still life in teeming Joubert Park=


 * JACOB DLAMINI**

A FEW weeks ago I took two American friends to the Johannesburg Art Gallery to see William Kentridge’s stunning and thought-provoking exhibition, Black Box/ Chambre Noire.

We approached the gallery from the Carlton Centre side, meaning we had to drive up Twist Street, turn left into Wolmarans and left again into King George before driving into the gallery’s parking lot. It was a mission.

We had to negotiate our way through a sea of minibus taxis and masses of people and, once we had driven into the gallery’s parking lot, had to walk past a group of glue- and benzene-sniffing street children basking in the midday sun. The outside walls reeked of excrement and stale urine and there was litter everywhere. The gallery and Kentridge’s exhibition seemed to exist in spite of their surroundings.

Then I read Jane Jacobs’s masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

The book, published in 1961, is a passionate but well-argued indictment of conventional urban planning and the way most of us tend to look at cities.

Jacobs, who passed away two months ago, said her book was about “how cities work in real life". She said cities are by definition complex, intense and, to put it crudely, messy places: “A city cannot be a work of art."

Jacobs said successful cities are diverse places; they welcome and thrive on the presence of strangers and view people, not money, as their greatest asset. Her definition of diversity extends beyond the standard presence of people from different social, class and cultural backgrounds. It also concerns the promotion of mixed uses of city neighbourhoods — allowing such institutions as streets, corner cafes, churches, funeral homes, parks, manufacturing businesses and such-like to exist side-by-side and feed off one another.

The book challenged the way I viewed and related to downtown and inner-city Johannesburg and I decided, after reading it, to revisit the city’s art gallery this week and also to take in the neighbouring Joubert Park this time around.

What I remembered of the park from my previous visit was that it was teeming with people and that there were bodies everywhere. Thanks to Jacobs, I felt like I had a new pair of eyes during this week’s visit to the gallery. I saw things I had missed before.

For a start, there were people everywhere at the park. Only they were not a teeming and indistinguishable mass.

I saw three old women on a bench sharing a plate of pap and vleis, couples messing about innocently, street photographers displaying their wares, men playing chess, school children playing draughts, street kids napping on the lawns, Hillbrow residents with plastic bags full of groceries taking a short cut through the park, and a guy rolling a zol.

Jacobs said conventional urban planning views parks as “boons conferred on the deprived populations of cities". She wanted us to “turn this thought around and consider city parks deprived places that need the boon of life and appreciation conferred on them. This is more nearly in accord with reality, for people do confer use on parks and make them successes — or else withhold use and doom parks to rejection and failure."

One only has to think of busy Joubert Park and then contrast it with that green wasteland along the M1 in Sandton called Innes Free Park. Jacobs said “people do not use city open space just because it is there and because city planners or designers wish they would"; that it is “science-fiction nonsense that parks are the ‘lungs of the city’ … the oceans of air circulating about us, not parks, keep cities from suffocating", and that cities do not automatically alter their neighbourhoods but are “drastically affected by the way the neighbourhood acts upon them".

With Jacobs’s observations in mind, I began to see Joubert Park, the gallery and Kentridge’s exhibition as an organic whole, with each part playing on the others in a dynamic but creatively messy relationship. No longer was the gallery and its collections a ship sailing in hostile waters. I appreciated Black Box/Chambre Noire anew without any anxieties about faceless teeming masses outside.

I also began to understand Jacobs’s argument that, far from being a threat, the collection of individuals in and around the park — each going about his or her business — makes the Johannesburg Art Gallery and its surrounds one of the safest public places in the city. But I can’t, unfortunately, say Jacobs’s views are accepted by all.

As I was leaving the gallery this week, a man who looked like he might be a gallery official was busy shooing a group of street children away from the premises.

The official seemed more concerned with who was there than with drawing new patrons into the gallery. What a pity!


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/weekender.aspx?ID=BD4A217196**

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