Joburg gets "Seattled"

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>From: Anna Weekes <samwu at WN.APC.ORG>
>Organization: SAMWU
>Subject:      Story: Joburg gets "Seattled"
>To: LABOR-L at YORKU.CA
>
>Business Day    13/7/00
>
>Jo'burg gets Seattled'
>
>HOLDING up an unexploded orange water balloon like a trophy, water and
>forestry director-general Mike Muller beamed with relief.
>
>He and a gathering of water privatisation advocates had survived a vigorous
>toyi-toyi by a few dozen workers, students and residents, which shut down
>the Urban Futures conference in Johannesburg for half an hour on Tuesday.
>
>The purposefully rude protesters had lobbed balloons at the suits, but
>missed. Muller, municipal bureaucrats Roland Hunter and Antony Stills of
>Johannesburg, and Archer Davis of Water and Sanitation SA, could get on with
>the workshop's business. Annoyed conference-goers sighed "we respect their
>right to protest".
>
>Yes, but as Gil Scott Heron said of "free speech" in the US, you get that
>right "only so long as you don't say too much".
>
>For the balance of power in the workshop was evident: the suits winked and
>nodded at the interruption, but went on developing plans to trump workers
>now facing retrenchments and pay cuts; township communities suffering
>unprecedented levels of water cutoffs; and students under threat of
>exclusion when unaffordable Wits bills reach their mailbox.
>
>The previous day's conference addresses by two gurus of the global city,
>Manuel Castells and Saskia Sassen, had warned us of precisely these trends.
>
>Castells, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has the
>ear of President Thabo Mbeki, Brazilian President Fernando Cardoso and other
>forwardlooking politicians. He told the conference of a new class war, waged
>partly in the property markets over who gets access to urban space.
>
>"The segregated city is different than the segmented city. When the elites
>quit the city the pattern of communication breaks down. It leads to
>ecological devastation such as deterioration of agricultural land and
>increases in epidemics. The problem is not overpopulation but intense
>concentration of poor people in megacities," he said.
>
>Though urban class-apartheid is indisputably a global problem, Johannesburg
>is here (if nowhere else) a truly world-class city.
>
>In addition to joking about SA's comparative advantage in export of electric
>fences to other fortress cities, Castells could have referenced another
>blight on Johannesburg's landscape: the embarrassing mass of empty
>upper-storey central business district space (CBD), where two-thirds of
>low-grade offices became vacant when whiterun financial and service-sector
>firms fled north over the past decade. At the same time, hawkers and
>homeless people who simultaneously penetrated the street-level space can
>despair of ever achieving the buying power required to take up the slack
>capacity.
>
>Under conditions of globalisation, which allegedly thwart state intervention
>in the markets, Johannesburg officials have apparently given up hope of ever
>putting the two empty spaces and vast social needs together.
>
>Technical solutions investment incentives, business improvement districts,
>rates rebates and even closed-circuit cameras to allow maximum surveillance
>power are failing to restore Johannesburg's big-business glory.
>
>Meanwhile, the incessant drive to attract foreign investors seems to be
>preventing the obvious oldstyle planning solution: expropriation of
>buildings whose landlords have fallen far behind in rates payments, and
>revival of public housing alongside transformation of streets into people's
>parks.
>
>Worries about sending the wrong signals and a withered municipal fiscus have
>left instead a dangerous CBD where the middle class fears to tread.
>
>Worse, the only force that could really push the city into action, urban
>social movements the study of which made Castells' reputation in academia
>two decades ago appear fragmented and confused. Tuesday's anticipated
>municipal strike was called off and angry workers dispersed.
>
>Residents once capable of disciplined mass action through SA National Civics
>Organisation branches have been overtaken by what a Business Day report on
>July 5 (incorrectly) termed "popcorn civics".
>
>Though not always in the news, politics in Johannesburg's townships do often
>degenerate into yet another global phenomenon, the "IMF Riot": uprisings of
>angry people who take to the streets when subsidies are withdrawn, services
>are cut or prices soar.
>
>SA is at the top of the world rankings in inequality.
>
>Although our organised urban movements were probably the finest in the world
>during the mid1980s, their subsequent demobilisation is one of the greatest
>of postapartheid tragedies.
>
>Witness the hounding of maverick councillor Trevor Ngwane out of his Soweto
>African National Congress leadership role by a dogmatic Johannesburg clique
>that would not countenance Ngwane's attempt to strike up a dialogue over the
>merits of Igoli 2002.
>
>Thus, says Castells, we are witnessing a new "concentration of the urban but
>without mechanisms of social integration", which in turn means that
>Johannesburg officials are "adapting to global forces by playing a game of
>competitiveness rather than heeding concerns of citizens".
>
>Sassen, an Argentine scholar based at the University of Chicago, spelled out
>some political implications: "The chaotic space of the megacity makes
>possible the emergence of informal players, such as squatters, the homeless,
>anarchists, lesbian and gay activists, defenders of the rights of immigrants
>and migrants, trade unionists, militant communities. These political
>subjects emerge from the condition of lack of power. But they gain a
>presence and power vis--vis each other."
>
>This is 21st-century class conflict: corporate capital versus fragments of
>protest. For, in Sassen's view, "both seek a strategic domain for their
>power projects. Each actor is marked by incipient denationalisation, as
>their operations enter the global circuits."
>
>The Urban Futures conference was, in a very minor way, "Seattled", though
>without the drenching rain that accompanied disruptive protest at the World
>Trade Organisation summit meeting seven months ago.
>
>But the water balloon that no doubt takes pride of place as shrapnel on
>Muller's fireplace mantle still could one day detonate, soaking the rich and
>poor, right and left alike.
>
>The authors are Wits academics and co-directors of the Municipal Services
>Project. For further info contact pbond at wn.apc.org
>
>http://www.bday.co.za/bday/content/direct/0,3523,656718-6096-0,00.html