Join us in Jo'burg next week for unsustainable development blahblah...
This is one of the concluding sections of a new book (out on Friday) which Africa World Press and Merlin are copublishing: Unsustainable South Africa--Environment, Development and Social Protest.
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Settlement patterns in question
A good place to start such consideration is the South African city, of which Johannesburg is surely the worst offender. David Harvey remarks,
If biocentric thinking is correct and the boundary between human activity and ecosystemic activities must be collapsed, then this means not only that ecological processes have to be incorporated into our understanding of social life: it also means that flows of money and of commodities and the transformative actions of human beings (in the building of urban systems, for example) have to be understood as fundamentally ecological processes.
The environmental justice movement, with its emphasis upon marginalised and impoverished populations exposed to hazardous ecological circumstances, freely acknowledges these connections. Many of the issues with which it is confronted are specifically urban in character. Consequently, the principles it has enunciated include the mandate to address environmental justice in the city by the cleaning up and rebuilding of urban environments.
This line of thinking takes us immediately to, but also far beyond, the questions raised above, over how cities are allocated their share of natural resources. Although it is vital not to assume any anti-urban sentiments (as do many ecological radicals), we have arrived at a position where it is only honest to address the ecological discourse established a century and a half ago in Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto. There we find the call for a `gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country'.
Johannesburg was born, after all, merely because of the discovery in 1886 of gold, that centuries-old relic of faithlessness in the value of money. But is Johannesburg's future golden or grim? There are now more industrial substitutes for gold. In the wake of dramatic financial market turbulence since the mid-1990s, the luxury consumption market for gold jewellery is unreliable. It is difficult to achieve profitable yields from ever-deeper mining operations. South African gold mining remains ecologically offensive, and particularly water-polluting. Add labour-related factors such as health, safety and migrancy, and there should be no geographical or locational grounds for Johannesburg continuing as South Africa's economic heartland over coming decades and centuries. Agglomerations of industry, particularly the outdated overcapacity that characterises uncompetitive Gauteng manufacturing, offer little basis for economic strength in a more flexible era based increasingly on the South African government's strategy, albeit a failure thus far, to promote export-oriented growth. It should be logical for Johannesburg gradually to decline, much like a Detroit or other rust belt towns.
If the response to Johannesburg's decline is the construction of a more humane system of production, it will require more than transcending the potent Minerals-Energy Complex that continues to prove so ecologically and economically self-destructive. At one point recently, South Africa promised a far greater degree of political capacity to shift production systems not only sectorally into more `sustainable', redistributive systems (such as using relatively decommodified, basic-needs infrastructure as the basis for kick-starting more balanced economic development), but also geographically.
As the ANC RDP mandated in 1994, `Macroeconomic policies must take into consideration their effect upon the geographic distribution of economic activity. Additional strategies must address the excessive growth of the largest urban centres, the skewed distribution of population within rural areas, the role of small and medium-sized towns, and the future of declining towns and regions, and the apartheid dumping grounds'. Amongst many other RDP promises, this was immediately broken in government's 1995 Draft Urban Development Strategy:
The country's largest cities are not excessively large by international standards, and the rates of growth of the various tiers also appear to be normal. Hence there appears to be little reason to favour policies which may artificially induce or restrain growth in a particular centre, region or tier ... The growth rate is sufficiently normal to suggest that effective urban management is possible and there is, therefore, no justification for interventionist policies which attempt to prevent urbanisation.
Indeed, because `South Africa's cities are more than ever strategic sites in a transnationalised production system' the debate has to be joined by a wider questioning of South Africa's insertion in the international division of labour. The same challenge can be posed of many Southern African cities, according to Swatuk:
All of these patterns of settlement and attendant problems are exaggerated in the context of apartheid engineering, replicated to a large degree in Zimbabwe and Namibia, and to varying degrees in Botswana, Swaziland and Zambia: alienation of fertile land and the creation of plantation agriculture; forced removals of indigenous people and their relocation to arid `homelands'; the creation of ill- or non-serviced `locations' which in the beginning were little more than dormitories for cheap labour.
Moreover, this `crush' of people in barren environs was made all the worse in the post-colonial and post-apartheid periods as the movement of indigenous people was no longer restricted. Families from the rural areas joined husbands and fathers in the townships and `high-density suburbs'; many others made the trek to urban areas in search of work. At the same time, the early post-apartheid period saw a large influx of Africans from beyond the SADC region into the urban and peri-urban areas.
Changing global structures of production and South African state-makers' attempts to find a neoliberal solution to them have also exacerbated settlement problems in the region. Countries which had long supplied labour to the mines and farms of South Africa in recent years have seen the return of tens of thousands of these citizens, retrenched as the South African mining industry continues to restructure. So, cities like Blantyre and Maseru are increasingly overrun with the newly unemployed and displaced.
Taken together, what these facts reveal is water security for the few and insecurity for the many. As stated at the outset of this paper, this is a `crisis' that is socially constructed. Its roots are historical, the result of deliberate actions taken in the service of settler and colonial interests. Its contemporary manifestations result from a combination of continuing elite privilege, shallow social and physical science, and the collective actions of millions of people responding `logically' to abiding conditions of poverty and underdevelopment.
A revolution is surely required to right these eco-social wrongs. Harvey concludes his analysis of environmental justice discourses by noting that `There is a long and arduous road to travel to take the environmental justice movement beyond the phase of rhetorical flourishes, media successes, and symbolic politics, into a world of strong coherent political organising and practical revolutionary action'.