In 2013, the new mayor of the City of Johannesburg, Parks Tau, announced the city's commitment to ‘Corridors of Freedom’ in his State of the City Address. These Corridors, centred on Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) routes across the city, would connect strategic urban nodes and attract high-density mixed-use development, shifting the city away from the sprawling urban form inherited from apartheid. The ‘Corridors of Freedom’, he argued, were central to the realisation of the ‘right to a spatially integrated and united city’ (CoJ 2013: 5), one of the five rights promised in his speech.

Those familiar with South African spatial planning will recognise that these ideas are not new. Indeed, the notion of restructuring South African cities through dense mixed-use public-transport-oriented routes goes back to the 1970s and 1980s, and has been taken up in many national and local spatial policies since the 1990s (Todes 2006). What seems to be new, however, is the political commitment given to these ideas. Studies have argued that planning ideas to compact and integrate cities have had little real impact on spatial patterns (Harrison et al. 2008; Todes 2000, 2006; Turok 2001; Watson 2002), and that spatial policies have been marginalised within municipal decision-making structures (Todes 2002; Watson 2003). Is this a new era for strategic spatial planning, where these ideas have a real chance of realisation?

Most studies of the impact of strategic spatial planning reflect the period prior to the establishment of consolidated metropolitan governments in 2000, when there was considerable flux and many councillors and officials were new and inexperienced. The post-2000 period in Johannesburg is interesting as several of these conditions have seemingly changed, and spatial planning is in a much stronger position than before. In this chapter I trace and explain the evolution of strategic spatial planning in Johannesburg, from initiatives in the early 1990s to the current spatial framework and its 2008 Growth Management Strategy (GMS) with related policies which attempt to link strategic spatial planning more directly to implementation. Much of the chapter focuses on the period since 2000, after the formation of a single metropolitan municipality, which enabled the gradual development of a far more coherent set of policies and much stronger political support for their implementation. I then reflect briefly on the impact of these and related policies over time, and consider their potential to influence spatial change over the longer term.

In a bunna bet, talk is interspersed with silence and reflection. The coffee maker works between the table of empty cups, the fuel of the fire and the aroma of coffee and incense that permeates the room. She alternates visual checks with serving gestures, preparing the space to support interaction, fuelling encounters with caffeine, and creating a place like home. Her labour links this space to Ethiopia. In Jeppe.

Jeppe is in Johannesburg. Four city blocks condense the energy of the city and its flows into a sort of substance that is an intensification of its essential exchanges, moralities and demographics. The bunna bet presents a quiet moment in this urban swirl. You stumble out from a world of silent tasting, abuzz with caffeine, onto streets infused with visual and aural energy. Sound systems and bright displays of clothes and mannequins compete for the attention of customers. Customers and porters squeeze through the space between pavement stalls and shopfronts, lugging parcels of goods from vans or to the taxi ranks and stations to the north.

Since my first visit to this bunna bet in Joburg Mall, above Bree Street, I have been back to Jeppe quite oft en and never found it the same. The density and mood on the street fluctuates in response to the supply of goods and the threats of raids. New bunna bets come and go. The area grows, block by block. Moving upwards and inwards from the pavement, outwards from the intersection of Jeppe and Delvers streets, and into every lost space within the densest areas. Jeppe is more like an organism than a place. People produce this space through gestures and negotiations that revolve around the materiality of the buildings and the goods that they trade, as well as the immaterial connections that mark the trail of their translocated lives and assets.

Jeppe has convinced me and others of the inadequacy of the ways in which we describe and work in the city. From time to time I climb up, via rooftops and through the medium of mapping, to observe and outline the area. But more frequently I get lost in its interior, seeking contact with people beyond the thresholds of its thick commercial edge.

Informal settlements have formed an essential part of Johannesburg since its inception, to some extent shaping its growth, oft en being displaced by formal development but reemerging elsewhere. In this chapter we focus on the informal settlement situation within the municipal boundaries of the City of Johannesburg, and review changes in informal settlement over the past decade. While the city developed more nuanced data in 2012 and 2013, in part sparked by draft s of the research presented in this chapter, the official and political position on informal settlements in Johannesburg remains that this form of residence has been ‘mushrooming’ or ‘ballooning’. The official position is that as of 2013, over 189 such settlements exist in the city, of which around 50 are unsuited for in situ upgrading and require relocation.

The analysis presented in this chapter challenges political rhetoric, official data and the city's intervention programmes for informal settlements. Our call is for a more differentiated understanding of the situation, which may pave the way for more in situ upgrading. The City of Johannesburg increasingly acknowledges that the number of households living in informal settlements is a moving target, and that accurate data is unavailable. In 2013, the city was working on an assumption of a 20 per cent growth in the number of households in any informal settlement since its shack count of 2007, ‘unless “better” statistics exist’. However, the city's subsequent shack counts in individual settlements have shown that the 20 per cent growth is oft en an overestimate.

While informal settlements must remain an area of urgent attention, we present a picture that is less dramatic, where growth in informal settlements is mostly punctual (restricted to specific areas) and spatially follows the trends in formal upmarket residential expansion with its domestic employment demands. In addition, the City of Johannesburg's new geographic information systems (GIS) data and the 2011 Census (Stats SA 2012) data show higher growth in numbers of backyard shacks across the city than of shacks in informal settlements. As of 2012, it was estimated that there were 165 000 units in informal settlements as opposed to 320 800 backyard shack units as identifiable using aerial photography. This corroborates earlier findings that the growth in backyard rental had intensified across South African cities when compared to growth in informal settlements (SAIRR 2008).

Restless city

How to upgrade and regenerate an inner-city environment where nothing is permanent but not everything is transient either? This seems to be the dilemma facing the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality. Does it rebuild an inner city that caters for a transient population and transient activities or does it rebuild it based on an assumption that greater stability is needed and that permanence is a legitimate aspiration? It seems that these choices lie at opposing ends of a continuum that the municipality has battled to position itself on when planning its interventions in the ever-changing spaces of the inner city.

Since pre-colonial times what is now the centre of Johannesburg has been the site of entering and leaving, staying put and moving on – a constant shift between transience and permanence. From the comings and goings of successive tribes of BaTswana, BaSotho and Matabele (Brodie 2008), to the arrival of Dutch settlers, to the appearance of prospectors, tradesmen and mine labourers – it has been a place of entry and exit, place-making and displacement, sett ling and struggling, a place where very little stays constant but some come to stay. Throughout these comings and goings, the spaces of the central city have played a number of different roles, some of which have been permanent while others have been transient and fleeting responses to the temporal and socio-political context of the day.

The bricks and mortar (or corrugated iron and timber) of the area we know as the inner city were put in place over the past 124 years. Each layer of the city's physical fabric successively represents a spatial form that tried to suit the function of the day, but the physical make up of the buildings signify only a small part of their story. The inner city has played multiple roles through time and is still required to fulfil many competing, simultaneous agendas. This dynamism has been matched by an inconsistent, fluctuating and at times incoherent governance response. Rapid spatial change as a result of social, economic and political forces has exacted a considerable toll on the state. The question of how to design, plan, manage, in some cases ‘control’ and maintain this space in flux has plagued city administrators since 1886.

The City of Johannesburg has invested heavily in the formalisation of street trading within the inner city. They have supplied traders with stalls from which to work and, through rental and permit schemes, have secured their tenure, thus largely freeing them from police harassment. Counter to the formalised street traders, who are mostly South African women, are ‘illegal’ traders, the majority of whom are young, male and foreign, who operate within the same areas but without secure tenure or permanent stands, and as a result, face constant police harassment. This study builds on reports by Mitullah (2003) and Tissington (2009), which described clear distinctions between legal and illegal street traders in the ways that they operate and use space, and also identified tensions between the two groups. We highlight some of the same themes but then look at how legal status affects traders’ profitability and the tactics that some use to compensate for their lack of legality and to generate profit. We present a brief description of the evolution of street trading policy in order to provide a context for informal traders in contemporary Johannesburg. We then refer to the findings of an exploratory study conducted in 2010 on street traders selling vegetables and fruits along Noord Street in inner-city Johannesburg, to demonstrate the intersections between legality, spatial and social practice as well as the tensions that have risen as a result of the current policy and by-laws.

A brief background on street trading

The history of informal-sector policy in South Africa reflects a profound ambivalence towards informality, alternating between reformist notions of street trading that view this sector as a viable alternative for people to make a living, and modernist planning that regards street trading as unacceptable within ‘modern’ cities (Bantubonse 2008). The apartheid state initially took a zero tolerance approach to street trading but by the 1970s it was apparent that management and control were more realistic options. Under the Licensing and Business Hours Ordinance 11 of 1973, traders were allowed to operate in certain areas and at certain times provided that they paid a levy to the city council (Karumbidza 2011). During the 1980s many of the regulations of the apartheid state fell away, either intentionally or through a loss of control, resulting in a massive growth of the informal sector.

Some time in 2006, I met a retired gold miner who called himself Bungityala in his home village on the coastline of eastern Mpondoland. Bungityala's village is among the most stunning places I have ever seen. The hills that surround it somehow manage to seem gently pastoral and yet exhilaratingly wild, for sometimes it is as if the wind is sweeping through you and lifting you off the ground and you are about to fly. In part it is because the topography is so unpredictable; you can turn a corner and suddenly find yourself staring way down at hilltops and you wonder how it is that you got so high. In the early evenings, I would sit in the spaza shops and the shebeens in little hillside sheds, drinking stout beer with the elderly people of Bungityala's village. I can vouch that these elderly people are capable of drinking a lot of stout beer. They grow drunken and coarse and all sorts of venom and humour and amusement come tumbling from them and you can learn a great deal about a place by insinuating yourself into these snug sheds of inebriation.

Sitting in one of these sheds in the early evening, drinking stout beer with two elderly women, I looked out of the shed's open door and I saw the legs and the torso of a great, athletic horse pass right by, just inches from the door. I stepped outside the shed to find an elderly man in sharp riding boots atop a magnificent racing horse. He looked down at me imperiously and smiled to himself, his eyes quite bloodshot, which struck me as odd, because he had not even sat down to his beer. I was to discover later that Bungityala had spent the entire afternoon taking his horse from one shebeen to another, that he already had a great deal of stout beer in his veins and this was his last stop on his way home, which was across the beach and on the other side of the lagoon.

Bungityala tethered his horse and entered the shed in his heavy riding boots and ordered a stout beer. He was a short man and his riding boots came almost up to his knees, which made him look even shorter, for it was hard not to imagine that the man only began where the boots ended.

This book deals with aspects of the history of the black, predominantly Setswana-speaking population of today's North West Province of South Africa. It covers the period from approximately1840, with the beginning of settler and colonial domination, to the present. It is not a comprehensive account but, rather, a number of interrelated chapters on different topics which chart the various political and economic forces that have shaped the fortunes of communities and personalities in the province.

The North West Province is a recent geographical construct that arose out of the Constitution underpinning the new democratic dispensation in 1994. It comprises parts of the former western Transvaal, most of the former homeland of Bophuthatswana, and the northern reaches of the Cape Colony, later Cape Province (see Map 1). In one sense, the construct is not entirely artificial, for its inhabitants broadly comprise two culturally and politically homogeneous units – Setswana-speakers and Afrikaners – who have experienced close to 200 years of contact with one another. This is not to suggest that both societies were sealed off from outside influences. Both had extensive contact with their surrounding inhabitants and there was a constant infusion of other people into this region over a long period of time. Both societies interacted with British colonialism and bore the imprint of that association.

The history of the baTswana in South Africa has by no means been neglected. The early arrival of missionaries, traders and hunters from south of the Orange River, and the settlement of the Boers on the western highveld have ensured that many aspects of their societies were written down, providing a rich source of information for later scholars.

Generally speaking, however, the prominent Tswana personalities are less well-known and respected than leading figures among other African societies in South Africa such as the amaZulu, amaXhosa and baPedi, and some of their contemporaries in Botswana. Of course there are exceptions. Silas Modiri Molema wrote an excellent account of the life of Montshiwa of the Ratshidi baRolong, surely one of the most outstanding African figures of the nineteenth century. Kevin Shillington published his important doctoral thesis on the colonisation of what he terms the Southern Tswana (mainly the baTlhaping, baTlharo and baRolong) in 1986, putting them on the map.

‘Your name?’

‘Hannah’

‘How do you spell it?’

‘H-a-n-n-a-h’

H|A|N|N|A|H, the policeman wrote painstakingly.

‘Your ID number?’

‘I don't have a South African ID … but my passport number is A470 …’

‘When were you born?’ interrupted the officer, glaring at Hannah.

‘I was born on twenty three March, nineteen eighty six.’

|1|9|8|6|0|9|2|3| | | | | | There were blank spaces left in the form, but this would have to do, the policeman thought to himself. His boss would have to understand – few migrant women had local identity documents. In any case, we all knew that they provided false information to hide their identities.

‘Nationality?’ he asked brusquely.

M|A|LA|W|IAN he wrote, squeezing the extra letters together. The form only provides six spaces for this entry. [5 spaces given above]

‘Address?’

‘Flat 103, Fatis Mansion, Jeppe; corner Harrison Street, Johannesburg.’

F|L|A|T| |1|0|3| |F|A|T|I|S| |M|A|N|S| | … continued officer Molokomme. His left hand moved slowly, making jerky movements with the strokes of his pen. Each letter was carefully written in the spaces and no matter what he felt, whether he believed in what he was writing or not, I could see he did take some pride in his written work. Knowing this was going to take a while, I resigned myself to watching the goings-on on Klein Street, right there where we stood, on the pedestrian path between Plein and De Villiers. I cast my eye at the scene in front of me and understood immediately why the superintendent and I were there – why we had to be there.

It was a late summer morning on the last day of March 2008. Although we were still 15 minutes away from midday, when the heat of the sun was inescapable, I was hot from the scorching sun on the police car's dashboard. The area is close to the Noord Street taxi rank, one of the busiest transport nodes in the city. It was easy to understand why the traders set up their illicit trade here – the number of people passing through daily guaranteed them a ready market. Moreover, business at the end of the month is always good.