There's a real social cost to gentrifying Joburg

By 2020 it's expected that one in three urban dwellers will live in slum conditions.

For a city like Joburg, the UN Habitat statistic means more people forced into abandoned buildings without basic services and maintenance.

So-called bad buildings exist at the blurry margins of development strategies. They're also the centre of a storm as Mayor Herman Mashaba declared war on slumlords as a priority in his 100 days in office speech in December. Mashaba took aim at human rights lawyers and undocumented migrants but didn't give a plan for those most vulnerable in the city who can't afford low-cost housing or social development housing.

Once people are evicted, the rejuvenated buildings are held up as models of development success. What is seldom factored in is that the city's housing crisis - the human beings affected - have simply shifted elsewhere.

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It's peeling back the layers of this paradox that's at the heart of the work of the likes of architect Hariwe (Harry Johnson). Hariwe and his collaborators, photographer Jono Woods and filmmaker Dirk Chalmers, are the force behind the Dark City exhibition that broke attendance records at Circa Gallery in Rosebank earlier this month.

Hariwe spent three years working towards his architecture Master's thesis by focusing on Dark City, the street name of a former bad building in Doornfontein. Most Fridays for 18 months the trio visited the building, immersing themselves in the organised calamity - sick realities like three floors used as a toilet and garbage dump - and the certain violence and criminality that breed in such conditions.

What they also found, though, were community networks and ties, a spaza shop in operation, and adaptive resilience in the ways people survive and cohabit. Herein lie lessons and opportunities for architecture and city planning, Hariwe says.

His close interrogation, along with scholarly methodology, has prompted his push-back against Joburg's development-driven agenda - which comes at the cost of collapsing existing community ties, he says.

"I feel that the more we know about each other the better our chances of survival - and perhaps the creation of a better framework of knowledge around how we create our cities will inspire us to design better ones," says Hariwe.

He adds that the admen's label of Joburg being a "World-class African City" distorts the ideals for a city that should be finding its own sustainable, people-oriented, model of development.

"Why is there pressure to conform to first-world norms? Can current city procedures (police brutality, unlawful evictions, etc) be world-class?" is his challenge.

block_quotes_start The admen's label of Joburg being a "World-class African City" distorts the ideals for a city that should be finding its own sustainable, people-oriented, model of development block_quotes_end

For Tanya Zack, researcher, town planning policy developer and author of the Wake Up This is Joburg series of books with photographer Mark Lewis, the city's authorities have ignored the nuances in the housing crisis. She says bylaws are out of step with accelerated urbanisation and fast- evolving housing needs.

"In Yeoville, for example, we found that some buildings that didn't meet bylaw standards for health and safety were still functioning by the individual communities' making," she says.

It's not romanticising the dysfunction for Hariwe or Zack, it is holding up a mirror to the authorities that development models for Joburg need a shake-up - and that communities at the edges also have a stake, and maybe even have lessons to share about balancing needs in contested urban spaces.

• This article was originally published in The Times.