Johannesburg the Segregated city

Johannesburg Institutional sector

The presence of an Institutional sector in Johannesburg’s urban fabric only became manifest during the 1960s although, in retrospect, it had already begun to develop during the early years of the city’s existence. Initially it grew about two major nodes, one medical, and one educational in nature. The first was established on 29 March 1889 when the Johannesburg General Hospital was officially opened on Hospital Hill, subsequently known as Hillbrow, to cater for the needs of the rapidly expanding mining community.

The second focused upon the University of the Witwatersrand, better known as Wits, which was established in 1910 as the South African School of Mines and Technology. The sector remained relatively undefined up to the early 1960s, when it began to undergo extensive development and consolidation, giving it a clear identity. By the 1970s it included the following major components:

• The Johannesburg General Hospital, also known as the Hillbrow Hospital, together with its attendant nurses’ homes and some 15 other subsidiary hospitals, maternity homes and clinics. Added to this was the Medical Research Institute, the Adler Museum of Medicine, the old Medical School facilities attached to Wits, a Lazaretto and fever hospital, a specialised children’s hospital, a morgue, and a host of office and residential buildings for medical staff. This concentration of health-based functions was reinforced during the 1970s by the erection on the Parktown Ridge of a new, and controversially located, Johannesburg General Hospital, now known as the Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital, with an outpatient’s section, an attendant Medical School attached to Wits University, and residential facilities for nurses. This complex is surrounded by a number of other medical establishments, including the Park Lane and the Kenridge Nursing Home, since renamed the Wits Donald Gordon Medical Centre.
• A block away from the Hillbrow Hospital is the Johannesburg Fort, which, in spite of its historical importance, continued to be used as a prison until the mid-1980s when it was taken over by the military, and subsequently converted to a museum. Today part of its grounds house the new Constitutional Court (see key sites), while retaining a small concentration of buildings housing law-enforcement facilities, as well as residential quarters for police employees and their families. Other buildings include the Municipal offices, the Civic Theatre, the Department of Education, Roedean School, St John’s School and King Edward VII School, the former Afrikaans Business School, the Ballet School, a number of halls of student residence, the Wits School of Business Administration, the Institute of South African Architects, the Order of St Johns, the Brenthurst Library, the Wits University Press, and the Wilds gardens and greenhouses.
• The University of the Witwatersrand east and west campuses, together with the John Orr School, the Planetarium, Parktown and Helpmekaar High Schools, the Bensusan Museum of Photography, and the former Johannesburg College of Education, which has since been absorbed into the Wits School of Education. It must also be borne in mind that Wits University has extensive property holdings in Braamfontein, immediately south of the East Campus, which are largely used to house off-campus postgraduate students, as well as a number of other facilities.
• In the early 1970s a second university, the Rand Afrikaanse Universiteit (RAU), was founded in Johannesburg. This was originally housed in the old Castle brewery premises opposite Wits but in 1979 it was moved to a new campus in Auckland Park, built on land expropriated from the Country Club. It has since been renamed the University of Johannesburg (UJ), in the process absorbing the former Goudstad Teachers Training College. Other facilities in this area include the UJ Auditorium, Art gallery and sports stadium, the Country Club, the Museum of Man and Science, the JG Strydom Hospital complex, since renamed the Helen Joseph Hospital, and the Coronationville Hospital, now known as the Rahima Moosa Mother and Child Hospital.
•  The SABC complex, including the television studios and the Brixton Tower, the Municipal Fire Department’s Training School on the southern side of the Brixton Ridge, and the Chamber of Mines Hospital nearby. Connected to them, if a little tenuously, is the Garden City Clinic.

This sector begins to break down when it reaches the Hillbrow-Berea wedge where, over the years, the development of a high-rise residential suburb has made land too expensive for institutional use. However, scattered elements may still be found in this area, including the Art School, the Joubert Park complex of gardens, hothouses and Art Gallery, the former Railway Museum and Archives, and the SABC Tower in Hillbrow. The Johannesburg Technikon campus, formerly in Braamfontein and since relocated to Doornfontein under the aegis of the University of Johannesburg, brings the eastern arm of this arc to a terminus.

It is difficult to establish with any certainty whether the origins of an educational and institutional belt within Johannesburg's urban fabric were the result of historical coincidence or the pragmatic implementation of deliberate planning policies. Certainly the establishment of a hospital on the Hillbrow Ridge in 1889 indicates that even then this area was capable of fulfilling the primary requirements for institutional land use. The fact that, in subsequent years, other institutions were added to this area seems to confirm the judgment of early planners.

It is also important to point out that, during the 1970s, the development of Johannesburg’s Educational and Institutional sector was achieved largely at the expense of Parktown. Rightly or wrongly, the Afrikaner political establishment had always viewed the suburb as representative of the interests of British imperialism and Jewish finance, and had treated its residents with distrust, feeling uncomfortable with their Uitlander values and disliking the power they wielded in the South African economy.

This antipathy was transmitted, over the years, to new generations of administrators, and by the time the Nationalist Party was returned to power in 1948, right-wing nationalist politicians felt ready to act. During the 1960s the Government began to expropriate properties in Parktown and to demolish their houses, ostensibly to provide the Johannesburg College of Education, a small institution which numbered less than two thousand students, with sports facilities.

In these terms, the disappearance of large parts of Parktown cannot be seen in simple terms of the old making way for the new. It was rather the climax of four generations of rivalry between differing cultures and economic classes holding conflicting social and political ideologies. The subsequent redevelopment of the remaining parts of Parktown into a low-rise office park was thus no more than the completion of a process initiated by a bureaucracy fuelled by atavistic inferiority complexes and racial hatreds. Ironically, in more recent times, the administrators of the Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital are slowly replacing these playing fields with buildings of their own.

It is doubtful that the growth of a suburban business district so close to the CBD-Braamfontein complex would have taken place of its own accord and without the interference of a central government. It is true that many of Parktown’s formerly grand mansions had become uneconomical to maintain, and had thus become derelict. However it is probable that a heritage-sensitive town planning policy permitting higher housing densities and the subdivision of large properties, as was subsequently implemented in Houghton, would have retained the suburb’s essential residential character, allowing most of its historical homes to be conserved as prestigious corporate headquarters.

The future of this sector does not appear to be easy to predict. The CBD has always been subject to the combined forces of rising land prices, limited land availability and intensive infrastructural development. During the 1960s these encouraged the city’s centre to expand into Braamfontein and, more recently by default, into Parktown. However, in spite of the fact that institutional development is generally subject to relatively low building densities, this sector already represents a sizeable investment in terms of its specialised infrastructure.

Thus, in spite of being vulnerable to commercial redevelopment, it is probable that this sector will retain its institutional and educational character for many years to come. Pivotal to this has been the decision taken by Wits University in 1984 to remain in Braamfontein rather than relocate to a new campus on the perimeter of Johannesburg.

A critical factor to these developments has also been the decision to make former mining land south of the CBD available for low-rise commercial, light industrial and warehousing facilities. It is not certain whether this land will, in the long term, meet Johannesburg’s commercial and business needs especially since the completion of the M1-M2 motorway complex has inhibited further southward development.

It is probable therefore that the consolidation of an educational and institutional belt north of Johannesburg’s business centre will provide a solid container to the CBD’s northerly expansion, playing the same restraining role as the railway yards did prior to 1950. Unlike the 1950s however, when the CBD could move into the relatively underdeveloped areas of Braamfontein and Doornfontein, commerce and business did not have a similar option open to them, and instead chose to leapfrog surrounding residential areas by moving into low-rise, decentralised office and retail developments in Rosebank, Sandton, Randburg, Bedfordview and, more recently, Halfway House (Midrand). As a result, land formerly zoned for agricultural use on either side of the M1 motorway has been taken over by office, commercial, small manufacturing and warehouse activity linking, with little break, the cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria with an almost continuous ribbon of low-rise development.

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