From Apartheid to Sustainable City: Johannesburg's Urban Transformation
10 min read
Johannesburg, South Africa's largest city, has joined the global C40 Cities network, which brings together cities that are most active in the fight against . This commitment to reducing its goes hand in hand with another major challenge: healing the urban and social divisions inherited from apartheid, which are still visible in the city's layout.
© AFP - A juxtaposition of wealthy, well-equipped areas and poor, outlying neighborhoods with no access to energy: Johannesburg's first order of business is to unite the population.
Johannesburg, South Africa, is neither the country's official capital—which is Pretoria—nor its economic capital, now represented by Cape Town due to the high concentration of innovative companies that have established themselves there. In the space of a decade, South Africa has established itself as the leading country on the African continent in the fields of digital finance, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. Cape Town has become the real hub of this development, driven by the presence of major international groups and top-level universities.
Johannesburg remains, however, the great historical and political metropolis, a symbol both of the apartheid regime and of the struggle to end it.
An Urban Legacy Marked by Apartheid
From 1948 to 1991, apartheid, established by the white Afrikaner minority, organized the separate development of populations according to racial criteria. In urban areas, this system produced a fragmented city, where wealthy, well-equipped neighborhoods were located far from large townships such as Soweto, Orange Farm, and Alexandra.
Today, Johannesburg has a population of nearly 5 million in its center, but more than 12 million in a sprawling metropolitan area that stretches almost to Pretoria, 40 miles
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From Apartheid to Sustainable City: Johannesburg's Urban Transformation
away. This high degree of dispersion has led to limited , very long commutes, and particularly complex urban governance.
Freedom Corridors: Reconnecting a Fragmented City
In 2013, city officials launched an innovative plan: “corridors of freedom,” i.e., large interconnected arteries connecting these fragments of the city to halve travel times and facilitate encounters and mixing. City councilors are prioritizing public transportation, based on the “bus rapid transit” model, often with dedicated lanes, high frequency, the lowest possible fares, and eco-friendly gas-powered vehicles. Urban development plans with shops and affordable housing are planned along these arteries to gradually fill in the gaps.
At the neighborhood level, particularly in Soweto, efforts have been made to improve water supply and sanitation, the construction of cultural facilities, the creation of more cycle paths and pedestrian walkways, and the development of digital infrastructure (1,100 km of fiber optics, more than 400 Wi-Fi zones, and training for undereducated populations by “digital ambassadors”). The stated ambition is to erase apartheid through a “new economic democracy.”
Electrification of Informal Settlements: A Social and Environmental Challenge
Since the end of apartheid, Johannesburg has been confronted with a new phenomenon: an influx of migrants from other parts of the country and other African countries. They settle in informal settlements, where residents have no and use paraffin stoves. According to statistics, there are more than 180 such slums, home to hundreds of thousands of people: some have been in existence for 20 years.
Electrification is considered a priority there. Currently, residents illegally connect to neighborhood power lines, causing not only an estimated loss of more than 10% of the city's consumption, but also two or three fatal accidents per month due to electrocution. These slums have already benefited from municipal plans to improve access to energy, using methods that rely heavily on :
- use of solar panels to power decentralized networks or supplement the central power supply;
- installation of solar water heaters on rooftops;
- supplying gas stoves and gas cylinders to reduce electricity use;
- producing methane from waste and setting up local micro-enterprises to process and recycle it.
With the support of university centers, particular attention has been paid to cooperation among residents, going so far as to imagine the management of remote electricity subscriptions by neighborhood associations.
Johannesburg on the International Stage: A Committed Metropolis
Johannesburg is also establishing itself as a major player in international networks of cities committed to ecological transition. It is a member of the international C40 network, which was very active during the Paris Climate Summit (COP21) and brings together 96 of the world's largest cities, representing more than 700 million people and a quarter of the global economy.
Johannesburg is also part of a broader international movement around urban “care” policies. This approach, popularized by several networks of cities committed to social justice and territorial equity, remains active today, notably through programs such as Metropolis Care2, which support cities developing urban services focused on the well-being of residents, access to healthcare, local services, and the reduction of inequalities.
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