Urban entropy and socio-natural temporalities in post-apartheid Johannesburg

In Johannesburg, the social, economic and morphological legacies of the apartheid years have collided with the effects of economic deregulation and uncontrolled in-migration to challenge conventional ways of thinking about urban development and rights to the city.  Unprecedented levels of poverty, crime and urban decay have eroded the shared public realm, and common cultural referents have been replaced by a multiplicity of expectations and spatialities. This seeming “collapse of urbanity” has been exacerbated by Joburg’s illegible cityscape, characterized by a lack of distinctive natural features, and a frequently-reconstructed built fabric stemming from its history as a center of mining capitalism.  The heterogeneity of memories at work today in Joburg mean that nurturing citizens identification with the city requires more than equal access to housing, services and infrastructure, and memory places celebrating the “rainbow nation”. Sola-Morales’ landscape construct of the terrain vague, which mediates both estrangement and hope, offers a way of reconstruing the unbuilt spaces of this historically-divided but ahistorical city as a “memory-scape” that integrates a spectrum of socio-natures, and introduces a sense of temporality absent from the built environment.

Jeremy Foster is trained as an architect and landscape architect, and
holds a PhD. in Human Geography from the University of London.  He has practiced architecture in South Africa and landscape architecture in the US, and has taught architecture, landscape architecture and urban design at the universities of Pennsylvania and Virginia, at Virginia Tech, and since 2003, at Cornell.  His design studios have addressed the interpretation of contested natural/cultural landscapes; questions of context, locale and place-identity; infrastructural and ecological change in urban contexts; and the relationship between media, public space and urban identity. His research and teaching interests include the history and theory of landscapes, cities and built environments; the role of socio-spatial practices in shaping urban identities; the relationship between visual culture and geographical imagination; and the urbanism of displacement (ie colonialism, post-colonialism, and diaspora). Jeremy has published several articles on the role of ideologies and representational practices in the cultural construction of landscapes.  His book "Washed with Sun: Landscape & the Making of White South Africa" recently came out from University of Pittsburgh Press.

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About the Lecture Series:

WE BUILT THIS CITY…

Architects build Cities, how?
Can we reduce the city as simply a collection of buildings, or do we need to distinguish between architecture and urbanism?
How can we ignore one if we are conceiving the other?
Isthe city a system of buildings or is it a complex system, which allowsfor buildings to be arranged in an orderly or chaotic manner?
Some cities are more desirable to live in than others, why?
Some cities are more expensive t han others, why? | Some cities are easier to get around, why?
Some cities are models for others, why?
Some cities are greener than others, why?
Some cities are dormitories, why?
Some cities are struggling with their glorious past, why?
Some cities are grounds for experiments, why?
Some cities are divided by war, why?
Some cities are automobile cities, why?
Some cities are exploited by politics, why?
Some cities are more public than others, why?
Some cities are…

Thelecture series 08/09 will explore the question of urbanity, and whatmakes the city of the 21st century a ground for another urbanism: Wewill debate the future possibilities of the metropolis. If Manhattanwas the model of a retroactive manifesto, what could be the future ofour urban living? And who is to build it?