WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.520 The following content is provided under a Creative 00:00:02.520 --> 00:00:03.970 Commons license. 00:00:03.970 --> 00:00:06.360 Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare 00:00:06.360 --> 00:00:10.660 continue to offer high quality educational resources for free. 00:00:10.660 --> 00:00:13.350 To make a donation or view additional materials 00:00:13.350 --> 00:00:17.190 from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare 00:00:17.190 --> 00:00:18.320 at ocw.mit.edu. 00:00:27.460 --> 00:00:29.960 JULIAN BEINART: Let me tell you what I've handed out to you. 00:00:33.560 --> 00:00:38.090 My argument is that race is the significant factor 00:00:38.090 --> 00:00:42.410 in urban history of South Africa. 00:00:42.410 --> 00:00:47.630 I will justify that at the beginning of my talk. 00:00:47.630 --> 00:00:55.640 Secondly, the form of Johannesburg from 1876 onwards 00:00:55.640 --> 00:01:00.110 can be judged in terms of the location of Black people 00:01:00.110 --> 00:01:03.710 and attitudes towards Black people. 00:01:03.710 --> 00:01:09.200 Essentially, apartheid as a philosophy 00:01:09.200 --> 00:01:15.260 regarded cities as violently against the norm, 00:01:15.260 --> 00:01:21.500 which would keep Black people in rural or semi-rural situations 00:01:21.500 --> 00:01:23.930 by tribe. 00:01:23.930 --> 00:01:30.140 There's an old colonial method of dealing with the population. 00:01:30.140 --> 00:01:34.010 And that's by keeping them in a tribal situation. 00:01:34.010 --> 00:01:38.660 The city, at its most magnificent, 00:01:38.660 --> 00:01:43.890 is an educative instrument, an enabler of change. 00:01:43.890 --> 00:01:49.280 Change is what South Africa was trying to avoid. 00:01:49.280 --> 00:01:53.690 That is the hegemony of white people over Black people. 00:01:53.690 --> 00:01:57.050 And the city becomes a phenomenally important 00:01:57.050 --> 00:01:58.490 instrument. 00:01:58.490 --> 00:02:01.610 I will try to take you through the five 00:02:01.610 --> 00:02:10.340 stages of South African urbanism in the case of Johannesburg-- 00:02:10.340 --> 00:02:15.470 the mining camp from 1876-- 00:02:15.470 --> 00:02:21.770 well, 1885 to 1917, the informal city, the rationalized city, 00:02:21.770 --> 00:02:25.880 the regional city, and the current open city, 00:02:25.880 --> 00:02:29.780 post-apartheid city. 00:02:29.780 --> 00:02:36.590 I will look at the detail in the second city, the informal city. 00:02:36.590 --> 00:02:40.340 That is of a township called Western Native Township, 00:02:40.340 --> 00:02:43.550 which consisted of 15,000 people living 00:02:43.550 --> 00:02:48.230 in 2,000 houses, the first public housing 00:02:48.230 --> 00:02:56.480 buildings in Johannesburg during the influenza epidemic. 00:02:56.480 --> 00:02:59.330 Every time public action takes place, 00:02:59.330 --> 00:03:02.780 spatially it's in a site which is 00:03:02.780 --> 00:03:10.430 considered to be either a dump site of some low value. 00:03:13.850 --> 00:03:21.320 And often the decision occurs because of some disease. 00:03:21.320 --> 00:03:25.460 The first movement out of the mining camp in 1904 00:03:25.460 --> 00:03:29.030 occurs because of the plague epidemic. 00:03:29.030 --> 00:03:32.420 And who happens to be, in South Africa, the most important man 00:03:32.420 --> 00:03:35.850 ever to live in South Africa even for a short time? 00:03:35.850 --> 00:03:37.436 Who is that? 00:03:37.436 --> 00:03:38.660 AUDIENCE: Mahatma Gandhi. 00:03:38.660 --> 00:03:39.618 JULIAN BEINART: Gandhi. 00:03:39.618 --> 00:03:41.780 Yes, of course. 00:03:41.780 --> 00:03:45.980 Gandhi learnt his politics in South Africa before returning 00:03:45.980 --> 00:03:47.490 to India. 00:03:47.490 --> 00:03:49.020 And he was in Johannesburg. 00:03:49.020 --> 00:03:58.340 And the Indian township, which was burnt down 00:03:58.340 --> 00:04:02.450 because of the plague, he interceded 00:04:02.450 --> 00:04:05.570 with the Transvaal government to allow the people to return 00:04:05.570 --> 00:04:11.000 at night to dig in their basements to retrieve gold 00:04:11.000 --> 00:04:13.400 which they had stored away. 00:04:13.400 --> 00:04:19.940 Anyway, Western Native Township is the first publicly built 00:04:19.940 --> 00:04:22.820 housing for Black people. 00:04:22.820 --> 00:04:31.550 I want to examine it from 1917 to 1965. 00:04:31.550 --> 00:04:36.310 If those of you've read what I've written about this, 00:04:36.310 --> 00:04:38.780 the story of Western Native Township 00:04:38.780 --> 00:04:41.720 appeared on the cover of three architectural magazines 00:04:41.720 --> 00:04:49.280 in three parts of the world in September 1966. 00:04:49.280 --> 00:04:52.890 So it's a fairly well-known story. 00:04:52.890 --> 00:04:56.300 I'm repeating it for the 999th time. 00:04:56.300 --> 00:04:58.270 And I hope it's not too boring for you. 00:05:02.030 --> 00:05:09.440 The second page is a summary of the location 00:05:09.440 --> 00:05:15.030 of Black people over time. 00:05:15.030 --> 00:05:17.210 You will see that Black people are 00:05:17.210 --> 00:05:21.650 moved from the center of the city further outwards in one 00:05:21.650 --> 00:05:23.500 vector towards the southwest. 00:05:27.290 --> 00:05:30.670 The bar graphs below indicates-- 00:05:33.830 --> 00:05:36.050 when we look at this slide, I'll indicate 00:05:36.050 --> 00:05:37.440 some of these subtleties. 00:05:40.331 --> 00:05:48.390 The solid black is housing by the public. 00:05:48.390 --> 00:05:53.410 The horizontal line is housing by the private sector. 00:05:53.410 --> 00:05:58.530 You will see at the beginning of Soweto, the-- 00:05:58.530 --> 00:06:00.420 yeah, no. 00:06:00.420 --> 00:06:02.250 I'll go to this in some detail. 00:06:02.250 --> 00:06:04.020 I have to worry about time because we 00:06:04.020 --> 00:06:07.110 cover a lot of stuff. 00:06:07.110 --> 00:06:11.490 The graph showing cumulative housing built 00:06:11.490 --> 00:06:18.810 indicates that the attempt to marshall the Black population 00:06:18.810 --> 00:06:24.690 in the city took an enormous leap in number 00:06:24.690 --> 00:06:28.980 from about 1950 onward. 00:06:28.980 --> 00:06:31.455 This was the building of the major part 00:06:31.455 --> 00:06:36.652 of Soweto, population of about 1.5 million people. 00:06:36.652 --> 00:06:38.610 AUDIENCE: Is this is a public housing building? 00:06:38.610 --> 00:06:39.443 JULIAN BEINART: Yes. 00:06:39.443 --> 00:06:40.218 AUDIENCE: OK. 00:06:40.218 --> 00:06:41.385 JULIAN BEINART: Yeah, sorry. 00:06:46.140 --> 00:06:49.005 The next few pages deal with Western Native Township. 00:06:55.750 --> 00:07:06.120 These two pages which follow are a little difficult 00:07:06.120 --> 00:07:10.770 to follow, but deal with the four stages 00:07:10.770 --> 00:07:15.390 in the life and death of this township in regard 00:07:15.390 --> 00:07:18.990 to a number of things, the social organization. 00:07:18.990 --> 00:07:29.340 This research was done from the Black newspapers, 00:07:29.340 --> 00:07:34.560 which have a long tradition in South African journalism. 00:07:37.980 --> 00:07:44.760 Much of this data is transcribed by one of my Black assistants 00:07:44.760 --> 00:07:45.810 doing this work. 00:07:50.020 --> 00:07:55.360 It's an extraordinarily difficult piece of work to do. 00:07:55.360 --> 00:08:00.370 We had to justify some of the comments 00:08:00.370 --> 00:08:03.130 about gangs, about the origins of jazz 00:08:03.130 --> 00:08:09.040 and so on, through interview with older people 00:08:09.040 --> 00:08:10.570 to justify some of it. 00:08:10.570 --> 00:08:13.990 Although this is social science research, 00:08:13.990 --> 00:08:20.230 which approximates things more than anything else. 00:08:23.330 --> 00:08:28.550 The next page is a quote from a book on fascism, 00:08:28.550 --> 00:08:31.160 architectural fascism. 00:08:31.160 --> 00:08:34.549 The paragraph which I marked, I think, 00:08:34.549 --> 00:08:40.220 explains the formal declaration of this township 00:08:40.220 --> 00:08:46.760 on the walls, which I will go to into some detail with you, 00:08:46.760 --> 00:08:51.690 as a piece of reconstruction of nature. 00:08:51.690 --> 00:08:55.670 And I think this paragraph, which deals largely 00:08:55.670 --> 00:09:00.020 with our classical architecture works, 00:09:00.020 --> 00:09:03.350 deal very well with the issue of the facade. 00:09:03.350 --> 00:09:06.380 And the last page is just one example 00:09:06.380 --> 00:09:08.700 of the facades of these houses. 00:09:24.250 --> 00:09:31.810 So to return to the beginning, racial segregation 00:09:31.810 --> 00:09:35.980 underlies all urban history in South Africa. 00:09:35.980 --> 00:09:42.970 It's the most extreme version of segregation based legally 00:09:42.970 --> 00:09:44.395 on the basis of race. 00:09:47.130 --> 00:09:52.650 Had South Africa not legislated race legally, 00:09:52.650 --> 00:09:54.980 the rest of the world would have left it alone. 00:09:57.750 --> 00:10:00.870 There's discrimination on the basis of race in the American 00:10:00.870 --> 00:10:05.220 South still today, although the central government 00:10:05.220 --> 00:10:12.510 has acted in civil rights issues after many years of not 00:10:12.510 --> 00:10:16.740 doing anything about it. 00:10:16.740 --> 00:10:20.490 But in South Africa, from the earliest times onwards, 00:10:20.490 --> 00:10:25.230 there was a move reinforced by the Dutch Reformed Church 00:10:25.230 --> 00:10:29.520 to regard Blacks as temporary inhabitants 00:10:29.520 --> 00:10:33.060 although they were the majority of the society. 00:10:33.060 --> 00:10:37.530 In 1904, a government white paper says, 00:10:37.530 --> 00:10:40.560 "let them understand that the towns of the colony 00:10:40.560 --> 00:10:44.670 are the special birthplace and abode for the white man who 00:10:44.670 --> 00:10:45.920 are the governing race." 00:10:45.920 --> 00:10:48.600 This is 1904. 00:10:48.600 --> 00:10:52.720 My god, South Africa only became a country in 1910. 00:10:52.720 --> 00:10:58.200 This is under British rule, British colonial rule. 00:10:58.200 --> 00:11:03.010 1921, "it should be understood that the town is 00:11:03.010 --> 00:11:06.660 the European area in which there is no place for the London 00:11:06.660 --> 00:11:12.300 native, who neither works nor serves his or her people. 00:11:12.300 --> 00:11:15.450 The town is a white phenomenon. 00:11:15.450 --> 00:11:20.670 Blacks only visit for labor temporarily." 00:11:20.670 --> 00:11:25.500 Between 1960 and 1985, one person per minute 00:11:25.500 --> 00:11:29.340 was prosecuted under the Pass Laws in South Africa. 00:11:29.340 --> 00:11:35.850 The Pass Laws required for you to have work continuously 00:11:35.850 --> 00:11:40.110 for 10 years for one employer, for example. 00:11:40.110 --> 00:11:44.310 If you were in the city and couldn't fulfill that demand, 00:11:44.310 --> 00:11:47.400 you're prosecuted under Pass Laws. 00:11:47.400 --> 00:11:53.310 So you have a white city and a phenomenally migrant 00:11:53.310 --> 00:11:54.570 population-- 00:11:54.570 --> 00:12:01.140 migrant not in their own belief or judgment, 00:12:01.140 --> 00:12:07.530 but in the judgment of a hegemonous white population. 00:12:07.530 --> 00:12:11.880 Black people are only there to serve to serve 00:12:11.880 --> 00:12:17.655 the whites in cities, 1921 00:12:17.655 --> 00:12:22.280 In 1976, Mr. MC Botha the minister 00:12:22.280 --> 00:12:24.510 of Bantu Administration-- 00:12:24.510 --> 00:12:27.810 again, the use of terminology is interesting. 00:12:27.810 --> 00:12:32.940 Blacks, Bantu is a linguistic group of languages. 00:12:32.940 --> 00:12:35.550 The minister of Bantu administration 00:12:35.550 --> 00:12:38.880 could either be the minister of Black administration, 00:12:38.880 --> 00:12:42.630 the minister of native education, 00:12:42.630 --> 00:12:45.240 the minister of African education, 00:12:45.240 --> 00:12:47.940 or the minister of Azanian education. 00:12:47.940 --> 00:12:51.750 It's one of these independence group 00:12:51.750 --> 00:12:53.310 named South African Blacks. 00:12:56.610 --> 00:13:05.240 The use of the racial denomination is interesting. 00:13:05.240 --> 00:13:09.050 Because South Africa traded with Japan, 00:13:09.050 --> 00:13:12.170 Japanese were considered white in South Africa. 00:13:12.170 --> 00:13:13.655 Chinese were considered Black. 00:13:16.860 --> 00:13:21.000 Colored people or the miscegenous group 00:13:21.000 --> 00:13:26.900 are considered Black, but in this special category. 00:13:26.900 --> 00:13:30.690 The whole idea is, if you denominate the population 00:13:30.690 --> 00:13:35.820 by tribal group, whites are the superior race by number. 00:13:35.820 --> 00:13:39.210 They beat the number of Zulu people in South Africa. 00:13:39.210 --> 00:13:44.040 So if you keep on categorizing people as Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana, 00:13:44.040 --> 00:13:50.070 Khoisan, whatever, Ndebele, and so on, 00:13:50.070 --> 00:13:54.000 you will break down the society into tribal groups, 00:13:54.000 --> 00:13:57.510 which the whites are the superior group. 00:13:57.510 --> 00:14:05.370 It's an incredibly interesting and awful phenomenon, 00:14:05.370 --> 00:14:09.090 which comes out of this doctrine, whereby 00:14:09.090 --> 00:14:14.370 the doctrine is that the city is a polluting environment. 00:14:14.370 --> 00:14:16.770 It causes people to change. 00:14:16.770 --> 00:14:18.090 It educates people. 00:14:18.090 --> 00:14:22.020 And that's frightening because it educates people to move out 00:14:22.020 --> 00:14:26.220 of hegemony of tribalism where you 00:14:26.220 --> 00:14:28.920 live according to code of behavior 00:14:28.920 --> 00:14:32.860 and moving to the cities where they become industrial workers, 00:14:32.860 --> 00:14:39.960 join trade unions, and are open to political democracy. 00:14:39.960 --> 00:14:44.160 So the South African experience is fundamentally 00:14:44.160 --> 00:14:46.440 important for those of you who are 00:14:46.440 --> 00:14:51.450 interested in the details of policy 00:14:51.450 --> 00:14:54.810 in order to maintain white-- 00:14:54.810 --> 00:14:58.410 migrant labor is a phenomenon all over the world. 00:14:58.410 --> 00:15:01.110 Abu Dhabi depends on migrant labor. 00:15:01.110 --> 00:15:03.900 So does Dubai. 00:15:03.900 --> 00:15:07.740 The relationship between Turkey and Germany 00:15:07.740 --> 00:15:12.840 has, for a long time, been a relationship of migrant labor. 00:15:12.840 --> 00:15:17.440 India has a phenomenal use of migrant labor still today, 00:15:17.440 --> 00:15:21.676 an interesting aspect of Indian urbanism. 00:15:21.676 --> 00:15:23.140 AUDIENCE: Mexico to US. 00:15:23.140 --> 00:15:25.680 JULIAN BEINART: Mexico to US, absolutely. 00:15:28.350 --> 00:15:32.460 I don't want to get into a discussion of the values 00:15:32.460 --> 00:15:34.725 or disvalues of migrant labor. 00:15:37.740 --> 00:15:39.990 But in the South African situation, 00:15:39.990 --> 00:15:46.620 migrant labor was not only labor from within South Africa, 00:15:46.620 --> 00:15:50.250 but Black labor from the adjoining countries, 00:15:50.250 --> 00:15:57.960 from Zimbabwe, as far away as Malawi on the basis of service 00:15:57.960 --> 00:16:03.840 to the gold mining and uranium mining industries, 00:16:03.840 --> 00:16:09.900 keeping people outside of the normal family situation, 00:16:09.900 --> 00:16:14.220 living in hostels, being paid money in order 00:16:14.220 --> 00:16:19.150 for them to export the money to the local poor origins. 00:16:28.700 --> 00:16:33.620 The first city occurred because gold-- 00:16:33.620 --> 00:16:36.665 as I said in a previous class, Chicago and Johannesburg 00:16:36.665 --> 00:16:42.030 were the two most important cities of the 19th century. 00:16:42.030 --> 00:16:42.815 People can argue. 00:16:45.950 --> 00:16:48.260 You can postulate some other candidates, 00:16:48.260 --> 00:16:52.970 but which other city is founded in the 19th century? 00:16:52.970 --> 00:16:55.505 Athens was rebuilt in the 19th century. 00:16:55.505 --> 00:16:59.220 It was virtually nothing. 00:16:59.220 --> 00:17:02.220 But new cities of the 19th century, I 00:17:02.220 --> 00:17:06.030 argue that Johannesburg and Chicago are the two 00:17:06.030 --> 00:17:08.579 significant examples. 00:17:08.579 --> 00:17:11.160 Gold was discovered on the reef. 00:17:11.160 --> 00:17:15.390 That's the ridge which Johannesburg is built. 00:17:15.390 --> 00:17:24.390 And the mining camp which resulted in a plan 00:17:24.390 --> 00:17:27.869 which I'll show you, which has very small lots. 00:17:27.869 --> 00:17:31.410 One of the reasons for making small lots in a mining camp 00:17:31.410 --> 00:17:34.950 is that there are many corner blocks. 00:17:34.950 --> 00:17:38.220 The corners go to bars. 00:17:38.220 --> 00:17:40.170 So you make small lots. 00:17:40.170 --> 00:17:44.520 Whenever you have to choose a lot size, the bigger the lot, 00:17:44.520 --> 00:17:47.880 the fewer corners there are. 00:17:47.880 --> 00:17:49.800 So you can look at the plan of Manhattan 00:17:49.800 --> 00:17:51.720 in terms of the number of corners 00:17:51.720 --> 00:17:55.620 there are in the geometry and calculate 00:17:55.620 --> 00:17:59.250 how valuable it would have been had the blocks being shorter 00:17:59.250 --> 00:17:59.840 in length. 00:18:02.400 --> 00:18:09.090 Léon Krier, whose work we'll discuss in a few weeks' time, 00:18:09.090 --> 00:18:14.250 argues in his plan for Barcelona the subdivision of the Cerdá 00:18:14.250 --> 00:18:25.680 block of 1,000 into 3,000 or 3 times 300 or 4 times 250. 00:18:25.680 --> 00:18:29.030 Tel Aviv has very small blocks. 00:18:29.030 --> 00:18:31.380 It has enormous traffic problems caused 00:18:31.380 --> 00:18:35.580 by the blocks are too small. 00:18:35.580 --> 00:18:37.440 Traffic conditions are bad enough 00:18:37.440 --> 00:18:43.860 in Manhattan given the long length of the blocks east-west, 00:18:43.860 --> 00:18:47.295 but we're not talking about Manhattan at the moment. 00:18:50.670 --> 00:18:53.080 Gold attracts people very quickly. 00:18:53.080 --> 00:18:56.370 And 10 years after Johannesburg's birth, 00:18:56.370 --> 00:18:58.710 there were 100,000 people in the city. 00:18:58.710 --> 00:19:03.840 50% were Black, Africans, Malays, coloreds, Indians, 00:19:03.840 --> 00:19:06.510 and Chinese. 00:19:06.510 --> 00:19:11.655 Each of these groups was located in what is called a location. 00:19:11.655 --> 00:19:15.420 A location is a British colonial term 00:19:15.420 --> 00:19:20.100 for locating people whom you consider to be workers. 00:19:20.100 --> 00:19:25.400 And generally, they are Black or colored in some form or other. 00:19:25.400 --> 00:19:28.590 We find locations in Zimbabwe and Kenya 00:19:28.590 --> 00:19:31.220 and other parts of Africa as well. 00:19:35.380 --> 00:19:40.810 This was a city of primitive feudal social relationship. 00:19:40.810 --> 00:19:43.780 There was a Bantu-- 00:19:43.780 --> 00:19:45.520 there was a Kaffir location. 00:19:45.520 --> 00:19:48.970 Again, remember, look at the word, the terminology. 00:19:48.970 --> 00:19:53.140 Kaffir an Arab word which refers to bad people. 00:19:55.810 --> 00:20:01.030 Coolie, what does the word coolie in Indian mean? 00:20:01.030 --> 00:20:02.263 AUDIENCE: It's a worker. 00:20:02.263 --> 00:20:03.680 JULIAN BEINART: What does it mean? 00:20:03.680 --> 00:20:04.890 AUDIENCE: It's a worker. 00:20:04.890 --> 00:20:08.520 JULIAN BEINART: A worker, but it's a pejorative word. 00:20:08.520 --> 00:20:10.140 I grew up in South Africa. 00:20:10.140 --> 00:20:14.445 And I remember buying fruit from the coolie store. 00:20:18.130 --> 00:20:23.110 Language indicates intention fairly well in urbanism. 00:20:23.110 --> 00:20:28.420 One should be careful what we word, how we name, things. 00:20:28.420 --> 00:20:32.560 Numbering street by number has some implication. 00:20:32.560 --> 00:20:37.480 Calling a street Merrymount Street has other implications. 00:20:37.480 --> 00:20:39.460 We shouldn't take this too seriously. 00:20:44.220 --> 00:20:46.660 This city ends with the disease. 00:20:46.660 --> 00:20:53.040 The plague, in 1904, forces the Emancipation of Black people 00:20:53.040 --> 00:20:57.840 immediately out of the Black, the Kaffir location 00:20:57.840 --> 00:21:01.050 to the site of the Anglo-Boer war camp 00:21:01.050 --> 00:21:04.380 15 kilometers to the southwest. 00:21:04.380 --> 00:21:08.400 And that's the origin of Soweto. 00:21:08.400 --> 00:21:13.510 It's a town called Pimville where Miriam Makeba comes from, 00:21:13.510 --> 00:21:16.440 a famous Black South African singer. 00:21:16.440 --> 00:21:19.470 And she's known as Pimm's Number 1. 00:21:19.470 --> 00:21:24.150 Pimm's Number 1 refers to a British drink. 00:21:24.150 --> 00:21:27.870 I'm getting too sophisticated here, 00:21:27.870 --> 00:21:29.625 playing games with language. 00:21:32.250 --> 00:21:39.810 1917 to 1948, the informal city, it begins with the influenza 00:21:39.810 --> 00:21:42.240 epidemic of 1917. 00:21:42.240 --> 00:21:48.450 The cities now face to house Blacks for the first time. 00:21:48.450 --> 00:21:51.900 Next to the municipal dump, it chooses 00:21:51.900 --> 00:21:56.340 to develop Western Native Township. 00:21:56.340 --> 00:21:58.950 The annual expenditure on Black housing 00:21:58.950 --> 00:22:01.245 is the same as the annual budget for the zoo. 00:22:03.950 --> 00:22:08.340 Sophiatown, which is a private enterprise environment. 00:22:08.340 --> 00:22:13.160 The cornation formed the western areas. 00:22:13.160 --> 00:22:15.380 This is the equivalent of Harlem. 00:22:15.380 --> 00:22:18.890 It was where African music, journalism, 00:22:18.890 --> 00:22:24.620 African political parties, the cooperative movement, gangs, 00:22:24.620 --> 00:22:27.350 the nexus of Black culture develops 00:22:27.350 --> 00:22:33.140 in an extraordinary period of time of about 30 years. 00:22:33.140 --> 00:22:35.750 Sophiatown is free held. 00:22:35.750 --> 00:22:41.060 At that time, about 50% of Black housing is private. 00:22:41.060 --> 00:22:43.280 50% is public. 00:22:43.280 --> 00:22:46.880 It's the city of informal relationships. 00:22:46.880 --> 00:22:51.110 There's shared shopping on the seams, generally Indian shops. 00:22:51.110 --> 00:22:55.100 There's a strong self-help identity and many journey 00:22:55.100 --> 00:22:59.150 to work options, including walking to work. 00:22:59.150 --> 00:23:02.930 The informal cities have become enormously overcrowded 00:23:02.930 --> 00:23:05.630 with South Africa's industrialization 00:23:05.630 --> 00:23:11.420 in the '39, '45 war and the South African 00:23:11.420 --> 00:23:14.780 so-called liberal political parties defeated 00:23:14.780 --> 00:23:18.840 in the '48 elections, replaced by the Afrikaner National 00:23:18.840 --> 00:23:19.340 Party. 00:23:22.740 --> 00:23:24.450 The Afrikaner National Party-- 00:23:29.100 --> 00:23:33.480 driven by a number of fundamentalist initiatives. 00:23:33.480 --> 00:23:38.820 The word [AFRIKAANS],, which is Afrikaans for Black danger, 00:23:38.820 --> 00:23:42.570 is a term which is employed to threaten white South 00:23:42.570 --> 00:23:45.090 Africans that the Blacks, who are 00:23:45.090 --> 00:23:48.720 the majority of the population, will 00:23:48.720 --> 00:23:52.590 destroy the white population and white civilization. 00:23:52.590 --> 00:23:55.980 White civilization is promoted to the-- 00:23:58.980 --> 00:24:06.720 South African whites produced bad German opera whilst Blacks 00:24:06.720 --> 00:24:10.830 were playing jazz based on American music and music which 00:24:10.830 --> 00:24:12.720 they understood politically. 00:24:17.870 --> 00:24:23.080 I was part of the South African jazz movement for a while 00:24:23.080 --> 00:24:25.750 because I had a lot of jazz material 00:24:25.750 --> 00:24:28.390 from America when I was in graduate school. 00:24:32.470 --> 00:24:37.420 And it contrasts, again, the informal popular notion 00:24:37.420 --> 00:24:43.060 of music which, in the South African case, 00:24:43.060 --> 00:24:46.900 in the South African Black case, migrates 00:24:46.900 --> 00:24:48.850 from playing the penny whistle, which 00:24:48.850 --> 00:24:52.540 is a very primitive instrument, to the saxophone. 00:24:52.540 --> 00:24:57.700 South African jazz musicians played the alto saxophone 00:24:57.700 --> 00:25:00.190 more than they played the trumpet, again, 00:25:00.190 --> 00:25:02.680 for reasons of choice, which based 00:25:02.680 --> 00:25:06.880 on the kind of musical vibrations 00:25:06.880 --> 00:25:09.580 that those instruments gave to them. 00:25:09.580 --> 00:25:17.310 The whites emulated badly classical Western German music. 00:25:19.900 --> 00:25:23.740 So you have, in the Western areas, the growth 00:25:23.740 --> 00:25:26.140 of informal movement. 00:25:26.140 --> 00:25:29.920 I regard the declaration system in Western Native Township, 00:25:29.920 --> 00:25:32.230 which we'll discuss in a few minutes, 00:25:32.230 --> 00:25:40.510 as a popular phenomenon, which people use to make-- 00:25:40.510 --> 00:25:43.240 well, let's wait until we get there. 00:25:51.564 --> 00:25:56.790 The notion that Blacks are a rural people 00:25:56.790 --> 00:26:01.140 is manifest in apartheid religion. 00:26:01.140 --> 00:26:04.920 It allows one to believe that Blacks should be returned 00:26:04.920 --> 00:26:06.950 to rural tribal existence. 00:26:10.460 --> 00:26:14.390 Public housing is built at low densities, no elevators. 00:26:14.390 --> 00:26:18.080 Blacks are racially subdivided into tribes 00:26:18.080 --> 00:26:20.660 in the new apartheid regime. 00:26:20.660 --> 00:26:25.520 Soweto, Western Native Township, as you will see, 00:26:25.520 --> 00:26:28.490 did not separate people by tribe. 00:26:28.490 --> 00:26:35.630 This was in the setting of the informal city. 00:26:35.630 --> 00:26:43.220 And apartheid Soweto was allocated into separate ghettos 00:26:43.220 --> 00:26:46.820 of tribal entity. 00:26:46.820 --> 00:26:50.180 Houses were built, so that people 00:26:50.180 --> 00:26:53.990 could be seen as rural people. 00:26:53.990 --> 00:26:56.000 The house in Western Native Township 00:26:56.000 --> 00:26:58.580 was about 250 square feet. 00:26:58.580 --> 00:27:02.570 It had seven people in it. 00:27:02.570 --> 00:27:07.340 It had a porch of 100 square feet. 00:27:07.340 --> 00:27:11.030 The porch was where people at sundown 00:27:11.030 --> 00:27:14.870 should sit and watch the sun go down 00:27:14.870 --> 00:27:17.100 or the sunrise in the morning. 00:27:17.100 --> 00:27:22.340 It is absolute nonsense to build housing 00:27:22.340 --> 00:27:26.310 at that density with an open porch. 00:27:26.310 --> 00:27:30.350 No wonder that was 70% of the porches 00:27:30.350 --> 00:27:34.670 were enclosed, as we will see in the process of the changes 00:27:34.670 --> 00:27:38.000 to the house, adding 100 square foot to the house. 00:27:42.740 --> 00:27:47.080 There are a couple of other pieces to the apartheid story. 00:27:51.450 --> 00:27:56.100 Between 1955 and 1960, 33,000 houses 00:27:56.100 --> 00:28:00.970 were built, twice as many as in the previous 37 years. 00:28:00.970 --> 00:28:04.860 The effort houses a quarter million people in five years. 00:28:04.860 --> 00:28:07.170 In the Johannesburg brochure, it talks 00:28:07.170 --> 00:28:10.460 about it being the biggest housing project in the world. 00:28:16.110 --> 00:28:18.390 Why were the houses not mass-produced? 00:28:22.840 --> 00:28:26.579 Why are they houses built of bricks and tin roofs? 00:28:26.579 --> 00:28:27.662 AUDIENCE: The were hotels? 00:28:27.662 --> 00:28:28.495 JULIAN BEINART: Hum? 00:28:28.495 --> 00:28:30.970 AUDIENCE: So they were built as hotels? 00:28:30.970 --> 00:28:33.640 JULIAN BEINART: Not quite, but it has to do with labor. 00:28:37.450 --> 00:28:41.770 The Bantu Building Act eliminated Black labor 00:28:41.770 --> 00:28:43.500 from the white building industry. 00:28:43.500 --> 00:28:47.680 Therefore, Black labor could only build for Black houses. 00:28:47.680 --> 00:28:50.540 In 1947, in Jabavu building costs 00:28:50.540 --> 00:28:52.930 were 1 rand per square foot. 00:28:52.930 --> 00:29:02.980 It dropped to $0.60 per square foot during the apartheid era. 00:29:02.980 --> 00:29:06.880 No industrialized building, only laying bricks-- 00:29:06.880 --> 00:29:11.620 the third city is a city of total insulation, isolation. 00:29:11.620 --> 00:29:16.540 In Soweto, population of 1.5 million with few shops, 00:29:16.540 --> 00:29:19.210 hardly any entertainment, the journey 00:29:19.210 --> 00:29:23.290 to work cost 300% more than in the second city, 00:29:23.290 --> 00:29:26.095 total reliance on the white central business district. 00:29:29.040 --> 00:29:30.930 In the study of the white central business 00:29:30.930 --> 00:29:33.210 district of Johannesburg, I was always 00:29:33.210 --> 00:29:37.440 puzzled by why some of the most expensive men's clothing stores 00:29:37.440 --> 00:29:41.010 were next to the railway station for Blacks. 00:29:41.010 --> 00:29:46.920 And jazz records, the best record stores, were close by. 00:29:46.920 --> 00:29:53.720 If you have 1.5 million people whom you isolate, 00:29:53.720 --> 00:29:58.170 there's no apartheid in the selling of goods. 00:29:58.170 --> 00:30:01.290 There is only apartheid in where you live 00:30:01.290 --> 00:30:04.230 and where you go to school and what your relationship 00:30:04.230 --> 00:30:05.970 with between race. 00:30:09.830 --> 00:30:15.110 Shopping is kept open to multiracial endeavor. 00:30:15.110 --> 00:30:17.700 The market works that way. 00:30:17.700 --> 00:30:21.050 So where do the expensive stores, which 00:30:21.050 --> 00:30:26.810 can use the 19th century train system from Soweto 00:30:26.810 --> 00:30:29.730 to Johannesburg, where do they locate? 00:30:29.730 --> 00:30:35.255 They locate very close to the Black railway station. 00:30:41.900 --> 00:30:46.520 Very briefly, because we have to look at a lot of material-- 00:30:49.490 --> 00:30:54.710 by 1970, the effort which produced Soweto 00:30:54.710 --> 00:30:56.960 could not be sustained. 00:30:56.960 --> 00:31:01.250 There was no more public housing built after 1970. 00:31:01.250 --> 00:31:07.340 A new urban regional pattern was conceived of. 00:31:07.340 --> 00:31:12.410 That is to create a set of tribal enclaves called 00:31:12.410 --> 00:31:20.900 Bantustans, mainly for the largest for the Zulu and Xhosa, 00:31:20.900 --> 00:31:23.090 the Xhosa in the Eastern Cape province, 00:31:23.090 --> 00:31:25.580 the Zulu in the Natal, the Tswana, 00:31:25.580 --> 00:31:31.710 the only free state in the Transvaal provinces. 00:31:31.710 --> 00:31:37.760 The idea would be to induce within centers factories 00:31:37.760 --> 00:31:41.990 to locate on the borders of these Bantustans, 00:31:41.990 --> 00:31:47.250 again, in an attempt to frustrate urbanization. 00:31:47.250 --> 00:31:50.930 So the pattern of the new regional city 00:31:50.930 --> 00:31:56.030 would have industries moving out of Johannesburg 00:31:56.030 --> 00:31:59.030 locating on the edges of a Bantustan 00:31:59.030 --> 00:32:01.650 a couple of hundred miles away. 00:32:01.650 --> 00:32:05.420 This is the same nonsense as the empowerment zones 00:32:05.420 --> 00:32:08.780 under the Clinton Administration in this country, 00:32:08.780 --> 00:32:11.150 that you could induce with the incentives industry. 00:32:11.150 --> 00:32:17.370 Industry nourishes itself on urbanization. 00:32:17.370 --> 00:32:22.160 There are reasons industry are in dense cities, not in-- 00:32:25.730 --> 00:32:28.700 by and large, in dense cities. 00:32:28.700 --> 00:32:33.170 Decentralized industry occurs under special conditions 00:32:33.170 --> 00:32:34.740 as well. 00:32:34.740 --> 00:32:42.260 But the notion that you pay industry special margins 00:32:42.260 --> 00:32:47.990 in order to locate, in order to maintain Blacks in rural areas 00:32:47.990 --> 00:32:56.000 as tribes, is a fantasy only to be concocted by a regionally 00:32:56.000 --> 00:32:59.000 illiterate mind. 00:32:59.000 --> 00:33:02.030 At one point, South Africa was contemplating 00:33:02.030 --> 00:33:05.060 getting the Japanese to build a monorail, 00:33:05.060 --> 00:33:09.200 to build a train line, from the Zulu areas in Natal 00:33:09.200 --> 00:33:14.195 500 miles to Johannesburg, so that the industry could locate. 00:33:17.200 --> 00:33:19.690 The famous story of David Goldblatt's photographs 00:33:19.690 --> 00:33:25.000 of 3 times 8, a Black laborer who 00:33:25.000 --> 00:33:31.330 lives in the Ndebele Bantustan and works in Johannesburg, 00:33:31.330 --> 00:33:35.440 spend 8 hours a day commuting, 8 hour day sleeping, 00:33:35.440 --> 00:33:39.010 and 8 hour a day working. 00:33:39.010 --> 00:33:42.925 One third of his day is spent in commutation by bus. 00:33:53.830 --> 00:33:57.580 Of course, the system blew up. 00:33:57.580 --> 00:34:02.880 It blew up for a number of reasons. 00:34:02.880 --> 00:34:08.125 It blew up because there were some important figures 00:34:08.125 --> 00:34:08.625 involved. 00:34:11.170 --> 00:34:15.840 It would not have occurred, the new fifth city 00:34:15.840 --> 00:34:20.760 would not have occurred, had the ANC not-- 00:34:20.760 --> 00:34:23.820 there's a long story behind all of this, which 00:34:23.820 --> 00:34:25.320 I haven't got time to tell you. 00:34:25.320 --> 00:34:28.170 But one day, if you're interested, 00:34:28.170 --> 00:34:33.330 I'll tell you about Margaret Thatcher's involvement 00:34:33.330 --> 00:34:35.429 with South Africa liberalism. 00:34:35.429 --> 00:34:38.250 She just died this week. 00:34:38.250 --> 00:34:40.409 She shouldn't be venerated so much. 00:34:40.409 --> 00:34:45.929 She was one of the few agents who supported the South 00:34:45.929 --> 00:34:48.210 African white government. 00:34:48.210 --> 00:34:50.520 South Africa-- the United States, 00:34:50.520 --> 00:34:53.400 of course, it boycotted South Africa. 00:34:53.400 --> 00:34:57.690 And SANOC, the South African National Olympic Committee 00:34:57.690 --> 00:35:01.020 had got South Africa kicked out of the Olympic games. 00:35:01.020 --> 00:35:05.350 In a sport-obsessed society, such as South Africa, 00:35:05.350 --> 00:35:10.590 it was as much rocked by international punitive actions 00:35:10.590 --> 00:35:13.860 against it taking part in international sport. 00:35:13.860 --> 00:35:17.892 But Maggie Thatcher, in the end, couldn't convince 00:35:17.892 --> 00:35:18.850 the rest of the world-- 00:35:18.850 --> 00:35:22.290 South Africa depends on foreign investment. 00:35:22.290 --> 00:35:26.190 And Maggie Thatcher finally told Mr.-- 00:35:26.190 --> 00:35:30.390 whoever the white South African prime minister was the time 00:35:30.390 --> 00:35:34.770 that she couldn't any longer support the ANC, the African 00:35:34.770 --> 00:35:36.540 National-- 00:35:36.540 --> 00:35:37.110 forgive me. 00:35:37.110 --> 00:35:39.120 It's a long story. 00:35:39.120 --> 00:35:42.260 Let's say South Africa changed. 00:35:42.260 --> 00:35:44.730 And let's look at Western Native Township 00:35:44.730 --> 00:35:52.590 because we can learn something from the environment of housing 00:35:52.590 --> 00:35:56.750 by looking in detail at housing. 00:35:56.750 --> 00:35:59.530 There are 5,000-- 00:35:59.530 --> 00:36:04.140 2,000 houses of different types with 80% of them 00:36:04.140 --> 00:36:06.600 about 250 square feet. 00:36:06.600 --> 00:36:16.470 The house is about 20 feet by 20 feet in dimensions with an 8 00:36:16.470 --> 00:36:18.675 by 12 porch. 00:36:22.060 --> 00:36:31.510 Over time, people changed their houses, firstly, 00:36:31.510 --> 00:36:33.310 enclosing the porch. 00:36:33.310 --> 00:36:40.900 Well, firstly, in a very tribal fashioned manner, 00:36:40.900 --> 00:36:45.880 the first residents who appeared in 1917 00:36:45.880 --> 00:36:51.440 still had cows roaming around the premises. 00:36:51.440 --> 00:36:57.010 The first act was to decorate the front of their houses. 00:36:57.010 --> 00:36:59.020 The fronts of their houses were always 00:36:59.020 --> 00:37:03.070 decorated, never the sides or the back. 00:37:03.070 --> 00:37:06.140 The house didn't have an internal toilet. 00:37:06.140 --> 00:37:11.340 The toilet was on the back of the house. 00:37:11.340 --> 00:37:13.380 The first attempt to-- 00:37:13.380 --> 00:37:23.640 the houses were two rooms plus a porch with a outfit for a coal 00:37:23.640 --> 00:37:26.750 stove in the first room. 00:37:29.670 --> 00:37:33.600 The first inhabitants reacted to their houses 00:37:33.600 --> 00:37:36.990 the way they acted to tribal circumstances. 00:37:36.990 --> 00:37:43.290 They used mud and [NON-ENGLISH] decoration systems which you 00:37:43.290 --> 00:37:48.190 scrape a pattern in the mud and use cow dung to-- 00:37:48.190 --> 00:37:53.490 the house had no ceilings, had no floors, had no gates. 00:37:53.490 --> 00:37:57.570 It was about the most primitive, cheap item 00:37:57.570 --> 00:38:00.270 that the society could produce. 00:38:04.430 --> 00:38:09.260 Over time, the enclosure of the porch started. 00:38:09.260 --> 00:38:13.640 It started by people buying rubbish material 00:38:13.640 --> 00:38:22.100 from Indian shops, old ceiling tiles, thrown away 00:38:22.100 --> 00:38:28.790 wood, some glass, and enclosed the porches in this way. 00:38:28.790 --> 00:38:33.320 You'll see them in the photographs. 00:38:33.320 --> 00:38:34.700 This was dangerous. 00:38:37.520 --> 00:38:39.410 Fires broke out. 00:38:39.410 --> 00:38:43.490 And the magistrate, in his intelligence, 00:38:43.490 --> 00:38:46.610 proclaimed that the people who had enclosed 00:38:46.610 --> 00:38:50.960 the porches innocent, saying that under such density 00:38:50.960 --> 00:38:54.260 you couldn't blame people for making more space. 00:38:54.260 --> 00:38:57.770 He argued, however, that the future decoration 00:38:57.770 --> 00:39:02.420 and enclosures should be more permanent and more safe. 00:39:02.420 --> 00:39:06.470 From that time onwards, the permanent decorations 00:39:06.470 --> 00:39:08.180 took place. 00:39:08.180 --> 00:39:15.020 These decorations form interesting for a number of-- 00:39:15.020 --> 00:39:16.460 you will see them. 00:39:16.460 --> 00:39:20.480 I don't know if you've seen them before. 00:39:20.480 --> 00:39:24.290 First of all, the decorations are only 00:39:24.290 --> 00:39:25.525 on the fronts of the houses. 00:39:28.520 --> 00:39:33.170 We only decorate the front of our houses as well. 00:39:33.170 --> 00:39:38.780 There's no house in Newton which has a decorated backyard. 00:39:38.780 --> 00:39:41.770 It has an antebellum facade. 00:39:44.690 --> 00:39:50.640 Number two, the houses are not free drawn decorations. 00:39:50.640 --> 00:39:54.980 There's a communal language which is created in order to-- 00:39:54.980 --> 00:39:59.780 so everybody decorates according to a communal language. 00:39:59.780 --> 00:40:03.740 The language consists of rectangular systems, 00:40:03.740 --> 00:40:11.750 circular systems, sun-dried systems, and half-moon systems. 00:40:11.750 --> 00:40:17.840 Most often refer ambiguously to the past and the present. 00:40:17.840 --> 00:40:21.560 When I talked to a woman about why she used a circle 00:40:21.560 --> 00:40:24.500 on her house, she says to me-- 00:40:24.500 --> 00:40:26.750 and it's mainly the women who decide 00:40:26.750 --> 00:40:29.120 what the decorations are. 00:40:29.120 --> 00:40:32.060 She says to me, look, you're smoking. 00:40:32.060 --> 00:40:35.540 The ashtray you're using is circular. 00:40:35.540 --> 00:40:37.040 It's modern. 00:40:37.040 --> 00:40:41.330 Another woman says, when you grow up in the country, 00:40:41.330 --> 00:40:43.190 you live on a flat plane. 00:40:43.190 --> 00:40:45.050 You see the sun rising. 00:40:45.050 --> 00:40:51.650 Therefore, a half-circle decoration is the sun rising 00:40:51.650 --> 00:40:54.650 or is the sun setting. 00:40:54.650 --> 00:41:02.270 So there's a syncretism between rural and urban. 00:41:02.270 --> 00:41:06.170 It's almost as if the decorative system manages 00:41:06.170 --> 00:41:11.090 to nourish people both in terms of the origins 00:41:11.090 --> 00:41:17.330 and their past and the future that they see in the city. 00:41:17.330 --> 00:41:22.010 The city is allowing them to migrate 00:41:22.010 --> 00:41:26.900 as individuals and as a society from a rural society 00:41:26.900 --> 00:41:29.030 to an urban society. 00:41:29.030 --> 00:41:31.400 Some of their houses, as I will show you, 00:41:31.400 --> 00:41:35.510 try to emulate white middle-class houses. 00:41:35.510 --> 00:41:40.910 There's an expensive suburb of Johannesburg called Houghton, 00:41:40.910 --> 00:41:46.400 H-O-U-G-H-T-O-N. There's a house called Hoyton in Western 00:41:46.400 --> 00:41:49.890 H-O-Y-T-O-N. 00:41:49.890 --> 00:41:55.010 There's something miraculous about a system of this kind, 00:41:55.010 --> 00:41:58.890 a communally agreed upon system. 00:41:58.890 --> 00:42:02.420 This is where the first self-help community 00:42:02.420 --> 00:42:06.605 organizations occurred in Black South African cities. 00:42:09.500 --> 00:42:15.320 Another interesting thing is that you use abstract forms 00:42:15.320 --> 00:42:18.570 to depict real situations. 00:42:18.570 --> 00:42:24.830 So if the fafi game, which is a Chinese gambling game, 00:42:24.830 --> 00:42:30.290 is played intensively in this environment-- 00:42:30.290 --> 00:42:33.290 there are 32 symbols. 00:42:33.290 --> 00:42:36.122 I think 32 or 24. 00:42:36.122 --> 00:42:40.240 A woman who runs a fafi saloon does-- 00:42:40.240 --> 00:42:42.000 I'll show you the image. 00:42:42.000 --> 00:42:45.740 There's a half-arch form on the outside of her house. 00:42:50.210 --> 00:42:53.750 If you look at it carefully, she says to me, 00:42:53.750 --> 00:42:55.670 you will see it's a horse. 00:42:55.670 --> 00:42:58.910 A horse was my lucky symbol. 00:42:58.910 --> 00:43:03.200 It doesn't look like a horse at all. 00:43:03.200 --> 00:43:09.230 The communist chairman of the first ANC Transvaal group 00:43:09.230 --> 00:43:17.060 puts a circle on this house with a serrated edge to the circle. 00:43:17.060 --> 00:43:19.460 When you ask him why he first uses this, 00:43:19.460 --> 00:43:22.070 he says, that's a Stalinist image. 00:43:22.070 --> 00:43:23.615 It promotes industry. 00:43:26.410 --> 00:43:27.640 There's a whole set-- 00:43:27.640 --> 00:43:29.320 I will show you two of them-- 00:43:29.320 --> 00:43:34.010 of decorations which are based on the rectangular family which 00:43:34.010 --> 00:43:35.920 become blades. 00:43:35.920 --> 00:43:37.090 Why blades? 00:43:37.090 --> 00:43:41.410 Because razor blades was, you know-- 00:43:41.410 --> 00:43:44.830 people were killed regularly in this township. 00:43:44.830 --> 00:43:48.280 There was a lot of violence, a lot of gang warfare. 00:43:48.280 --> 00:43:50.290 So blades become another form. 00:43:50.290 --> 00:43:55.010 But a blade, what is a razor blade made of? 00:43:55.010 --> 00:43:56.680 It's made of three circles-- 00:43:56.680 --> 00:43:59.260 a primitive razor blade-- 00:43:59.260 --> 00:44:01.900 and a rectangular outline. 00:44:01.900 --> 00:44:05.920 The genius of being able to conform to a communal language 00:44:05.920 --> 00:44:12.070 and yet express your particular message 00:44:12.070 --> 00:44:16.120 is what a city should be like. 00:44:16.120 --> 00:44:19.780 You should be able to promote your individual experience, 00:44:19.780 --> 00:44:23.650 but live within a communal language. 00:44:23.650 --> 00:44:27.010 At least that's the way I would describe the formal attributes 00:44:27.010 --> 00:44:28.900 of a good city. 00:44:28.900 --> 00:44:30.130 Don't quote me on that. 00:44:34.320 --> 00:44:37.980 There are a lot of byproducts. 00:44:41.060 --> 00:44:44.720 Let me just mention one or two for you to think about. 00:44:44.720 --> 00:44:48.560 The notion of the popular-- 00:44:48.560 --> 00:44:52.340 the poetics of the popular occur when 00:44:52.340 --> 00:45:00.060 you see African popular art is extensive 00:45:00.060 --> 00:45:05.130 and ranges all the way from tombstones in Nigeria 00:45:05.130 --> 00:45:11.880 to wall paintings to barbershop advertisements and so on. 00:45:11.880 --> 00:45:18.210 The popular large margin of freedom in people 00:45:18.210 --> 00:45:22.590 to express themselves without the classical requirements 00:45:22.590 --> 00:45:26.650 of orthodoxy, it bends things. 00:45:26.650 --> 00:45:28.230 It changes things. 00:45:28.230 --> 00:45:33.270 Again, I refer you back to the definition of classicism 00:45:33.270 --> 00:45:37.090 in this paragraph I isolated. 00:45:42.780 --> 00:45:46.840 Just before we look at the slide images, 00:45:46.840 --> 00:45:50.590 Let me see if I want to focus your attention on anything 00:45:50.590 --> 00:45:51.090 else. 00:45:56.400 --> 00:46:01.350 The role of the popular decoration is externalization-- 00:46:01.350 --> 00:46:05.010 the idea of the gaze, the idea of the house looking out 00:46:05.010 --> 00:46:05.700 on the street. 00:46:12.960 --> 00:46:14.550 OK, I think this is-- 00:46:17.490 --> 00:46:22.740 when I first showed this material in London many years 00:46:22.740 --> 00:46:29.640 ago at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, 00:46:29.640 --> 00:46:35.640 somebody in the audience stood up and said, 00:46:35.640 --> 00:46:43.230 was I sharing this work as if these were drawings on ghetto 00:46:43.230 --> 00:46:48.660 walls, would I make an exhibition of Jewish markings 00:46:48.660 --> 00:46:52.225 on Nazi war camps? 00:46:55.370 --> 00:46:59.450 I had always seen this and experienced this work 00:46:59.450 --> 00:47:03.450 as optimistic, as showing that people 00:47:03.450 --> 00:47:09.050 under extreme deprivation still have an image of responding 00:47:09.050 --> 00:47:11.960 to the city through educating themselves, 00:47:11.960 --> 00:47:15.290 through externalizing themselves, 00:47:15.290 --> 00:47:19.370 through communalizing and so on. 00:47:19.370 --> 00:47:24.320 And it's curious that the relationship 00:47:24.320 --> 00:47:27.530 between deprivation and resistance 00:47:27.530 --> 00:47:35.900 should be seen as negative, but I can understand the argument 00:47:35.900 --> 00:47:36.650 as well. 00:47:41.680 --> 00:47:46.780 Does the popularization of items done by poor people 00:47:46.780 --> 00:47:52.600 and sold as tourist goods enable or-- 00:47:52.600 --> 00:47:55.030 it helps them economically? 00:47:55.030 --> 00:47:56.580 Does it improve their culture? 00:47:59.620 --> 00:48:01.750 Who knows? 00:48:01.750 --> 00:48:04.420 We can debate these issues. 00:48:04.420 --> 00:48:10.000 I think the issue of deprivation and resistance 00:48:10.000 --> 00:48:13.600 has the fundamental aspect of an iconography 00:48:13.600 --> 00:48:15.115 of fascinating topics. 00:48:18.850 --> 00:48:20.800 I was surprised-- I didn't know how 00:48:20.800 --> 00:48:23.080 to answer the gentleman who asked-- 00:48:23.080 --> 00:48:26.020 who assaulted me in London. 00:48:26.020 --> 00:48:28.330 I've never been assaulted since. 00:48:28.330 --> 00:48:34.120 This material has been shared widely as part of the BBC film. 00:48:34.120 --> 00:48:41.190 And let's look at this stuff. 00:48:41.190 --> 00:48:46.770 I think the marginal quality of things in an urban environment 00:48:46.770 --> 00:48:51.360 is the grease which allows people often 00:48:51.360 --> 00:48:55.290 to engage marginally in an activity. 00:48:55.290 --> 00:48:57.760 They cannot build their own houses. 00:48:57.760 --> 00:49:02.640 They cannot select a house under the Group Areas Act. 00:49:02.640 --> 00:49:06.100 These people decorated their houses every year, 00:49:06.100 --> 00:49:09.210 despite the fact that they were renters. 00:49:09.210 --> 00:49:12.780 They assumed permanent ownership despite being 00:49:12.780 --> 00:49:17.620 renters because they were there for 25 years. 00:49:17.620 --> 00:49:20.100 They never assumed that they would be moved out. 00:49:24.080 --> 00:49:27.950 So the notion of the popular, the notion of a fluid system 00:49:27.950 --> 00:49:32.750 which is generated in a city, is an interesting idea to me. 00:49:32.750 --> 00:49:38.180 Because the prismatic quality of identifying separate items 00:49:38.180 --> 00:49:43.250 in a city, the situationist's view of the city, 00:49:43.250 --> 00:49:45.500 is interesting in that regard. 00:49:45.500 --> 00:49:48.920 G. Debord's notion of Paris as being made up 00:49:48.920 --> 00:49:54.920 of fluid communities and Towards Cosmopolis 00:49:54.920 --> 00:50:00.890 book of the other, the new migrant environment in cities 00:50:00.890 --> 00:50:04.400 of permanent migrations is interesting, 00:50:04.400 --> 00:50:06.695 but we'll touch on these subjects a bit later. 00:50:09.200 --> 00:50:11.270 And let's look at pictures instead. 00:50:11.270 --> 00:50:12.830 It's much more refreshing. 00:50:16.000 --> 00:50:17.780 OK. 00:50:17.780 --> 00:50:18.660 Turn off the lights. 00:50:31.920 --> 00:50:36.510 The analysis on the right indicates 00:50:36.510 --> 00:50:38.730 the move towards the southwest. 00:50:42.330 --> 00:50:45.050 The horizontal lines are the public sector. 00:50:45.050 --> 00:50:49.800 In the early stages of the city, the mining companies 00:50:49.800 --> 00:50:54.060 provide housing in this Sophiatown housing. 00:50:54.060 --> 00:51:03.630 As soon as the supply of Black is too small for the market, 00:51:03.630 --> 00:51:08.220 you have these white dots, squatter settlements 00:51:08.220 --> 00:51:12.390 take place at the beginning of the apartheid city. 00:51:12.390 --> 00:51:18.150 Because the demand, the supply of white housing is, too. 00:51:18.150 --> 00:51:22.740 And soon, the white housing is completely-- at least 00:51:22.740 --> 00:51:25.890 the market housing is completely eliminated. 00:51:25.890 --> 00:51:35.930 And Soweto, which is these two black volumes, 00:51:35.930 --> 00:51:38.420 creates a second city. 00:51:38.420 --> 00:51:43.360 Next, this is the mining camp. 00:51:46.980 --> 00:51:49.250 Here's the Kaffir location-- 00:51:49.250 --> 00:51:53.060 there's no embarrassment about using the word Kaffir-- 00:51:53.060 --> 00:51:55.250 next to the Coolie occasion. 00:51:55.250 --> 00:51:58.460 The Coolie location is where the plague broke out 00:51:58.460 --> 00:51:59.930 and Gandhi intervened. 00:52:06.390 --> 00:52:10.790 Here are the small blocks of the white mining camp. 00:52:10.790 --> 00:52:11.290 Next. 00:52:19.160 --> 00:52:22.690 The third city, Soweto-- 00:52:22.690 --> 00:52:24.115 an engineer's madness. 00:52:27.050 --> 00:52:33.520 All houses are built like huts. 00:52:33.520 --> 00:52:38.710 The notion that Blacks in Harlem in the United States 00:52:38.710 --> 00:52:43.960 are crime ridden and dense housing 00:52:43.960 --> 00:52:47.680 produces criminal behavior is sold 00:52:47.680 --> 00:52:51.550 as part of the nationalist government's orthodoxy. 00:52:54.680 --> 00:52:58.010 You can see the only public space 00:52:58.010 --> 00:53:02.460 are large tracts of green space with a few isolated. 00:53:02.460 --> 00:53:04.970 There is no central business area. 00:53:04.970 --> 00:53:05.975 There are few schools. 00:53:12.910 --> 00:53:15.080 Whatever it looks like, it is. 00:53:15.080 --> 00:53:15.580 Next. 00:53:22.584 --> 00:53:30.760 The building of Soweto starts with Pimville in 1904. 00:53:30.760 --> 00:53:35.260 The public supply of Black housing 00:53:35.260 --> 00:53:39.880 increases slowly, but has incredible spike 00:53:39.880 --> 00:53:43.970 with the advent of the nationalist government in 1948. 00:53:43.970 --> 00:53:49.540 So from this point onwards, the whole governmental apparatus 00:53:49.540 --> 00:53:51.730 both at the national and at the city 00:53:51.730 --> 00:53:58.330 level is oriented toward the application of the Group Areas 00:53:58.330 --> 00:54:01.630 Act, the Pass Laws. 00:54:01.630 --> 00:54:06.430 The Johannesburg City Council passed 96 acts 00:54:06.430 --> 00:54:10.990 dealing with the Black people in each city in the few years 00:54:10.990 --> 00:54:17.085 of this second, third city. 00:54:17.085 --> 00:54:17.585 Next. 00:54:20.710 --> 00:54:26.350 The tallest building in Africa, 52 floors, 00:54:26.350 --> 00:54:29.740 one of the tallest concrete buildings in the world, 00:54:29.740 --> 00:54:33.280 was designed by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill 00:54:33.280 --> 00:54:35.425 with separate toilets for whites and Blacks. 00:54:38.560 --> 00:54:43.000 So when I was visiting-- 00:54:43.000 --> 00:54:47.890 were invited by the students to come and give a lecture, 00:54:47.890 --> 00:54:52.480 when they were asked by students how they could design toilets 00:54:52.480 --> 00:54:55.120 for whites and Blacks separately, 00:54:55.120 --> 00:55:00.320 they were embarrassed and said, well, you know, 00:55:00.320 --> 00:55:02.650 you have to work where you-- 00:55:02.650 --> 00:55:07.835 the gold mining dumps are part of the landscape. 00:55:07.835 --> 00:55:08.335 Next. 00:55:11.170 --> 00:55:13.540 The depiction of the center of city, 00:55:13.540 --> 00:55:17.830 this is the drawing for Charles Center, 00:55:17.830 --> 00:55:23.060 all depicting white people as the-- 00:55:23.060 --> 00:55:31.910 more and more, at the same time, the everyday environment 00:55:31.910 --> 00:55:34.005 was that of Black people. 00:55:34.005 --> 00:55:34.505 Next. 00:55:37.390 --> 00:55:42.040 Soweto produced, amongst its horrors, 00:55:42.040 --> 00:55:47.920 the use of a 19th century fixed-line rail 00:55:47.920 --> 00:55:51.540 system and a bus system to take people to work. 00:55:51.540 --> 00:55:53.185 Here's a line waiting for a train. 00:55:55.930 --> 00:55:58.780 Springs is a suburb of Johannesburg. 00:55:58.780 --> 00:56:01.360 "Whites only to springs." 00:56:01.360 --> 00:56:04.930 It's a bit strange to look at this. 00:56:04.930 --> 00:56:08.950 If you grew up in South Africa, this is what you grew up with. 00:56:08.950 --> 00:56:15.860 And it's amazing how striking it seems now. 00:56:15.860 --> 00:56:16.360 Next. 00:56:19.260 --> 00:56:29.980 1976, the famous shooting of this young Black boy 00:56:29.980 --> 00:56:37.660 by the police in this riot against Bantu education, 00:56:37.660 --> 00:56:43.040 one of the beginnings of the collapse of the rational city. 00:56:43.040 --> 00:56:43.540 Next. 00:56:48.600 --> 00:56:52.350 I just put in this diagram of somebody's approximation 00:56:52.350 --> 00:56:54.240 of apartheid city. 00:56:54.240 --> 00:56:57.130 And sector theory of Homer Hoyt-- 00:56:57.130 --> 00:57:03.060 which we referred to a couple of months ago in this class. 00:57:03.060 --> 00:57:09.630 The theory of Hoyt referred to the American city segregating 00:57:09.630 --> 00:57:17.050 itself out in terms of sectors, sectors moving, 00:57:17.050 --> 00:57:20.940 in the case of Johannesburg, in the opposite direction 00:57:20.940 --> 00:57:22.320 as Blacks. 00:57:22.320 --> 00:57:24.600 Blacks in the industry always are 00:57:24.600 --> 00:57:26.910 in the south or the southwest. 00:57:26.910 --> 00:57:31.440 Whites always are in the north, moving northwards. 00:57:31.440 --> 00:57:33.000 Next. 00:57:33.000 --> 00:57:37.750 These areas here, this is this Ciskei and the Transkei. 00:57:37.750 --> 00:57:41.280 And this is the Ciskei and the Transkei 00:57:41.280 --> 00:57:44.720 and Zululand and Botswana. 00:57:44.720 --> 00:57:50.030 And these are the Bantustans. 00:57:50.030 --> 00:57:59.180 Here is the notion of treating a rural population as rural, 00:57:59.180 --> 00:58:04.460 maintaining the rurality, but arguing 00:58:04.460 --> 00:58:09.020 that industry should located on the perimeter using 00:58:09.020 --> 00:58:10.580 this local population. 00:58:14.540 --> 00:58:18.500 This uses strange terms. 00:58:18.500 --> 00:58:25.010 Deconcentration points, what's a deconcentration point? 00:58:25.010 --> 00:58:28.250 Industrial development to deconcentration points 00:58:28.250 --> 00:58:34.730 in national states, I mean, this is like Nazi language. 00:58:34.730 --> 00:58:41.420 I mean, you know, planning language. 00:58:45.360 --> 00:58:49.450 Excuse me for getting a little sentimental about all of this. 00:58:49.450 --> 00:58:49.950 Next. 00:58:52.630 --> 00:58:54.100 Western Native Township-- 00:58:56.970 --> 00:59:03.900 2,000 houses, different types of houses, but largely 00:59:03.900 --> 00:59:06.780 250 square feet. 00:59:06.780 --> 00:59:10.210 I'll just point out to you a couple of other things. 00:59:10.210 --> 00:59:15.450 These black lines running horizontally, 00:59:15.450 --> 00:59:18.780 what this community spontaneously does, 00:59:18.780 --> 00:59:27.020 if the block size is too large, the house becomes a passageway. 00:59:27.020 --> 00:59:27.960 There are rituals. 00:59:27.960 --> 00:59:29.580 You knock on the door. 00:59:29.580 --> 00:59:30.720 You pass through. 00:59:30.720 --> 00:59:32.770 And you say hello to the woman of the house, 00:59:32.770 --> 00:59:34.520 and you walk out to the back of the house. 00:59:37.640 --> 00:59:40.140 There are a number of community institutions. 00:59:40.140 --> 00:59:44.700 There are shebeens, which are illegal drinking-- 00:59:44.700 --> 00:59:48.360 alcohol is barred to Black people 00:59:48.360 --> 00:59:50.250 entirely under apartheid. 00:59:50.250 --> 00:59:52.890 You could only drink kaffir beer, 00:59:52.890 --> 00:59:55.555 which was sold by the government to get great profit. 00:59:58.650 --> 01:00:01.410 A stokvels is an ongoing party. 01:00:04.806 --> 01:00:08.360 There are all of these self-help institutions, 01:00:08.360 --> 01:00:13.070 which are part of the popular culture place of this kind. 01:00:16.750 --> 01:00:17.250 Next. 01:00:20.470 --> 01:00:26.000 Here is the house as provided to the people. 01:00:26.000 --> 01:00:26.500 Next. 01:00:29.630 --> 01:00:38.660 A number of types of house, it's a bit wrong. 01:00:38.660 --> 01:00:42.650 Almost 80% of the houses were type B 01:00:42.650 --> 01:00:47.720 without the additional dotted area at the top. 01:00:47.720 --> 01:00:55.490 Type B is this plus that if your porch is enclosed. 01:00:55.490 --> 01:01:03.440 It's 250 plus 100. 01:01:03.440 --> 01:01:10.330 This is analysis of the walls of the house. 01:01:10.330 --> 01:01:16.880 These solid black indicates that the porch 01:01:16.880 --> 01:01:21.280 is enclosed and decorated. 01:01:21.280 --> 01:01:23.672 The hollow circles are where the porch 01:01:23.672 --> 01:01:26.380 is enclosed, but not decorated. 01:01:26.380 --> 01:01:31.400 The empty lots are nothing has happened. 01:01:31.400 --> 01:01:34.150 You can see the intensity of decoration 01:01:34.150 --> 01:01:37.480 is larger in this area of the township, 01:01:37.480 --> 01:01:43.970 large close to the outside and entrance to the area 01:01:43.970 --> 01:01:46.780 and, also, because some of the prominent families lived 01:01:46.780 --> 01:01:47.720 in this area. 01:01:47.720 --> 01:01:48.220 Next. 01:01:52.040 --> 01:01:54.320 That's just what I've tried to explain. 01:01:54.320 --> 01:01:57.290 This is the density of decoration. 01:01:57.290 --> 01:02:02.090 And this is the breakdown of facing street 01:02:02.090 --> 01:02:04.250 in terms of tribe. 01:02:04.250 --> 01:02:06.980 I think yellow is Tswana. 01:02:06.980 --> 01:02:08.030 Blue is Zulu. 01:02:08.030 --> 01:02:11.390 And three is Tsonga. 01:02:11.390 --> 01:02:15.680 And four, I think, is Xhosa. 01:02:15.680 --> 01:02:17.930 Five is Ndebele and so on. 01:02:23.415 --> 01:02:23.915 Next. 01:02:27.820 --> 01:02:32.410 The result is that the street is made up 01:02:32.410 --> 01:02:38.740 of a consistent iconography, circles, 01:02:38.740 --> 01:02:42.415 sun systems, and other sun systems, 01:02:42.415 --> 01:02:44.290 a half-arch plus circles. 01:02:47.780 --> 01:02:49.610 This is an undecorated house. 01:02:53.180 --> 01:02:59.030 In addition to changing the face of the house, 01:02:59.030 --> 01:03:12.730 the external environment of the fences, the mail delivery 01:03:12.730 --> 01:03:21.670 options, gates, trees are added to the city. 01:03:21.670 --> 01:03:22.170 Next. 01:03:25.930 --> 01:03:31.330 Here is the original response on the left, 01:03:31.330 --> 01:03:36.040 mud and using a fork or your fingers 01:03:36.040 --> 01:03:39.010 to make traditional decoration. 01:03:39.010 --> 01:03:41.650 On the second is the second attempt 01:03:41.650 --> 01:03:45.390 to enclose the porch using throwaway material. 01:03:45.390 --> 01:03:47.380 Next. 01:03:47.380 --> 01:03:55.140 You can see everything is taken into account 01:03:55.140 --> 01:03:59.760 from the mail delivery point through to floor 01:03:59.760 --> 01:04:07.530 polish zone, a garden, two half-gardens. 01:04:07.530 --> 01:04:09.810 The porch is not enclosed in this case, 01:04:09.810 --> 01:04:12.900 but is made into an outdoor room. 01:04:12.900 --> 01:04:18.840 The major wall is decorated by a rising sun. 01:04:18.840 --> 01:04:23.130 You can see the architectural ideas, 01:04:23.130 --> 01:04:26.445 which would make an architect like Louis Kahn proud. 01:04:29.510 --> 01:04:34.830 Here is an example of a sun system embracing 01:04:34.830 --> 01:04:35.910 the whole of the thing. 01:04:35.910 --> 01:04:37.950 The porch is enclosed. 01:04:37.950 --> 01:04:41.220 There's a little-- one of the problems 01:04:41.220 --> 01:04:47.236 was that this porch was always asymmetrical in a facade. 01:04:47.236 --> 01:04:51.345 Here is a permanently parked automobile as an external room. 01:04:54.230 --> 01:05:01.280 An interesting idea, you could actually use an automobile 01:05:01.280 --> 01:05:04.250 as a living room. 01:05:04.250 --> 01:05:06.230 I think a Lexus automobile attempts 01:05:06.230 --> 01:05:09.170 to be a living room, but a mobile one. 01:05:09.170 --> 01:05:12.470 I think it would be interesting in if we ever got to the state 01:05:12.470 --> 01:05:16.980 where we are to regard Lexus as permanent. 01:05:16.980 --> 01:05:17.480 Next. 01:05:20.360 --> 01:05:27.190 Two other examples-- here's a razor blade phenomenon. 01:05:27.190 --> 01:05:28.790 AUDIENCE: Which one's the razor blade? 01:05:28.790 --> 01:05:29.940 JULIAN BEINART: The green. 01:05:29.940 --> 01:05:30.300 AUDIENCE: Oh, yeah. 01:05:30.300 --> 01:05:30.800 I see. 01:05:30.800 --> 01:05:31.300 Yeah. 01:05:33.913 --> 01:05:35.580 JULIAN BEINART: There's a version of it, 01:05:35.580 --> 01:05:39.530 a more abstracted version, and the more literal version of it 01:05:39.530 --> 01:05:46.630 there on top of which is a gable and a classical attempt to-- 01:05:46.630 --> 01:05:51.090 the sunrise of the gate. 01:05:51.090 --> 01:05:54.080 There's sunrise gates all over the world. 01:05:54.080 --> 01:05:56.550 I know with the sunrise-- 01:05:56.550 --> 01:06:01.010 I suppose, if you're interested in heliocentricity. 01:06:01.010 --> 01:06:03.540 When I once showed this material, 01:06:03.540 --> 01:06:06.830 a man who was an Egyptian heliocentrist 01:06:06.830 --> 01:06:13.890 said that this was all a subliminal sun devotion system. 01:06:13.890 --> 01:06:15.135 I don't understand that. 01:06:15.135 --> 01:06:15.635 Next. 01:06:18.470 --> 01:06:20.605 Here are rectangular forms. 01:06:24.650 --> 01:06:35.150 You find this in Florence in decorative wooden wall systems. 01:06:35.150 --> 01:06:37.880 The old idea in heliocentricity is 01:06:37.880 --> 01:06:41.900 that this is a skin which is pinned down 01:06:41.900 --> 01:06:48.320 in the four corners, allowing these quarter circle set backs. 01:06:53.280 --> 01:06:56.490 The architectural problem was often 01:06:56.490 --> 01:06:59.545 dealing with the asymmetry between the two sides. 01:06:59.545 --> 01:07:00.045 Next. 01:07:03.710 --> 01:07:09.920 Here the large form of the facade 01:07:09.920 --> 01:07:13.810 is reproduced in the mailboxes. 01:07:16.370 --> 01:07:19.190 On the other side is a combination 01:07:19.190 --> 01:07:23.070 of the rectangular system with a circular system. 01:07:23.070 --> 01:07:23.570 Next. 01:07:27.940 --> 01:07:33.925 Difference in material-- this is all cheap concrete. 01:07:37.770 --> 01:07:41.100 The two circles-- next. 01:07:47.740 --> 01:07:52.720 The use of the color of the back wall of the main facade wall 01:07:52.720 --> 01:07:57.040 and the floating of a rectangular texture on it 01:07:57.040 --> 01:08:01.480 leaving the four circles in the background is predominant. 01:08:01.480 --> 01:08:01.980 Next. 01:08:04.810 --> 01:08:07.480 Here's the razor blade. 01:08:07.480 --> 01:08:13.900 Three circles, four empty circles and a rectangle 01:08:13.900 --> 01:08:17.500 constitutes a razor blade. 01:08:17.500 --> 01:08:19.828 On the right-hand side is another version 01:08:19.828 --> 01:08:20.620 of the razor blade. 01:08:20.620 --> 01:08:22.790 We saw in the drawing. 01:08:22.790 --> 01:08:23.290 Next. 01:08:27.300 --> 01:08:32.399 The fafi saloon lady elephant on the-- or horse I think it 01:08:32.399 --> 01:08:40.040 is on the right And the communist industrial rotor 01:08:40.040 --> 01:08:44.580 for the ANC leader on the right. 01:08:44.580 --> 01:08:47.863 AUDIENCE: There are some colors that keep repeating themselves, 01:08:47.863 --> 01:08:50.210 like this light blue-- 01:08:50.210 --> 01:08:51.168 JULIAN BEINART: Yeah. 01:08:51.168 --> 01:08:53.210 AUDIENCE: --kind of pistachio even and this light 01:08:53.210 --> 01:08:53.835 terracotta-- 01:08:53.835 --> 01:08:54.710 JULIAN BEINART: Yeah. 01:08:54.710 --> 01:08:56.627 AUDIENCE: --is there a preference in the color 01:08:56.627 --> 01:08:58.910 that they use? 01:08:58.910 --> 01:09:00.740 JULIAN BEINART: No, not that I can answer. 01:09:00.740 --> 01:09:04.430 The trouble was that, during the period 01:09:04.430 --> 01:09:08.960 that we studied this community, I 01:09:08.960 --> 01:09:12.170 got to know this community through the Jazz movement, 01:09:12.170 --> 01:09:17.779 by taking Black musicians home at night. 01:09:17.779 --> 01:09:22.220 And one night, the lights shone on these walls. 01:09:22.220 --> 01:09:25.250 And I said, my god, something strange is happening here. 01:09:25.250 --> 01:09:26.509 I never been here. 01:09:26.509 --> 01:09:28.550 Whites don't go to Black townships, 01:09:28.550 --> 01:09:32.715 not at that time in South Africa's history. 01:09:32.715 --> 01:09:36.590 It was too dangerous. 01:09:36.590 --> 01:09:40.189 So by the time I got involved in this 01:09:40.189 --> 01:09:44.960 was in protests which was starting against the removal 01:09:44.960 --> 01:09:47.660 of Blacks from Sophiatown. 01:09:47.660 --> 01:09:52.439 So the demolition of Sophiatown caused enormous Black anger. 01:09:52.439 --> 01:09:56.260 And I was one of the people who was there 01:09:56.260 --> 01:09:59.645 as a supposedly urbanist. 01:10:02.630 --> 01:10:08.720 And I came back to Western Native Township 01:10:08.720 --> 01:10:12.050 when the people were starting to be moved out. 01:10:12.050 --> 01:10:15.470 And colored people were being moved in 01:10:15.470 --> 01:10:20.940 to replace the Black people as temporary houses. 01:10:20.940 --> 01:10:26.330 Some of the color system is over painted by colored people 01:10:26.330 --> 01:10:30.290 on top of the Black people. 01:10:30.290 --> 01:10:33.230 I have no record of what this thing looked 01:10:33.230 --> 01:10:35.150 like 10 years before. 01:10:35.150 --> 01:10:36.920 Nobody has. 01:10:36.920 --> 01:10:42.290 This is the only record that exists. 01:10:42.290 --> 01:10:44.420 So I would have to guess. 01:10:44.420 --> 01:10:47.180 I think the colors would be more restrained. 01:10:47.180 --> 01:10:50.690 I think the color over painting-- 01:10:50.690 --> 01:10:53.900 you'd see pink and bright colors-- 01:10:53.900 --> 01:10:57.600 is probably not the colors that we used. 01:10:57.600 --> 01:10:58.100 Next. 01:11:00.760 --> 01:11:04.900 This is an example of the problem of symmetry. 01:11:04.900 --> 01:11:09.010 This is the halfway line in the facade 01:11:09.010 --> 01:11:13.180 and this incredible architectural move 01:11:13.180 --> 01:11:20.590 of marking the center of the facade by a color shift 01:11:20.590 --> 01:11:28.450 and still then using these identical forms on either side. 01:11:28.450 --> 01:11:31.180 Next. 01:11:31.180 --> 01:11:34.540 The half-circle-- again explained consistently 01:11:34.540 --> 01:11:37.280 as the sunrise or sunset. 01:11:37.280 --> 01:11:37.780 Next. 01:11:41.100 --> 01:11:43.170 The sun itself takes many forms. 01:11:45.890 --> 01:11:46.390 Next. 01:11:49.980 --> 01:11:55.410 That pink is a colored painting, over-painting. 01:11:58.020 --> 01:12:01.680 One could do a study of the colored temporary migration 01:12:01.680 --> 01:12:02.520 before. 01:12:02.520 --> 01:12:05.110 This township doesn't exist anymore. 01:12:05.110 --> 01:12:06.440 It's gone. 01:12:06.440 --> 01:12:15.440 The coloreds who moved in is a temporary phenomenon. 01:12:15.440 --> 01:12:19.860 AUDIENCE: So each inhabitant of the house usually 01:12:19.860 --> 01:12:21.900 would design completely their own? 01:12:21.900 --> 01:12:24.610 JULIAN BEINART: Yeah, yeah. 01:12:24.610 --> 01:12:28.460 Yeah, generally, the woman in the house. 01:12:28.460 --> 01:12:29.335 AUDIENCE: I see that. 01:12:29.335 --> 01:12:31.270 JULIAN BEINART: The husband was either 01:12:31.270 --> 01:12:35.470 too busy drinking or earning a living 01:12:35.470 --> 01:12:39.220 or being a member of a gang or whatever. 01:12:39.220 --> 01:12:41.852 The women in this-- 01:12:41.852 --> 01:12:44.275 this is a very matrilineal society. 01:12:50.000 --> 01:12:53.290 The people I spoke to who seemed to know 01:12:53.290 --> 01:12:56.350 most about the decoration of the houses were women. 01:13:05.640 --> 01:13:14.290 And often, if I asked why did you choose the sun system, 01:13:14.290 --> 01:13:18.290 the answer would be the sun represents hope. 01:13:18.290 --> 01:13:22.580 Or where I grew up in the country, 01:13:22.580 --> 01:13:26.270 I saw the sunrise every morning. 01:13:26.270 --> 01:13:29.630 You know, what do you expect people to say? 01:13:33.870 --> 01:13:38.230 If I were to ask you why you have a painting in your house, 01:13:38.230 --> 01:13:42.775 you say, I like Piero della Francesca, or I prefer Uccello. 01:13:42.775 --> 01:13:46.930 Or I happen to have a Picasso because my mother gave it 01:13:46.930 --> 01:13:49.810 to me when I was a child. 01:13:49.810 --> 01:13:54.625 Does somebody, say, give you analysis of Picasso's painting? 01:13:58.200 --> 01:14:02.775 Why do you expect these people to know more about the way? 01:14:02.775 --> 01:14:03.275 Next. 01:14:07.040 --> 01:14:11.810 Two houses nearby-- these are white middle class houses, 01:14:11.810 --> 01:14:14.730 low white income, middle houses. 01:14:14.730 --> 01:14:19.760 They are often referred to as models for these people 01:14:19.760 --> 01:14:24.590 to look at as a symbol of improvement-- 01:14:24.590 --> 01:14:28.130 next-- whereas they come from an environment 01:14:28.130 --> 01:14:29.470 in their own countryside. 01:14:29.470 --> 01:14:37.040 This is a Ndebele decoration on the left and Zulu decoration 01:14:37.040 --> 01:14:38.405 on the right. 01:14:38.405 --> 01:14:40.280 Could you just turn on the light at the back? 01:14:40.280 --> 01:14:43.790 AUDIENCE: The last one is a book of all this research? 01:14:43.790 --> 01:14:45.190 JULIAN BEINART: Sorry. 01:14:45.190 --> 01:14:48.510 AUDIENCE: The last slide was a book of this research? 01:14:48.510 --> 01:14:50.300 JULIAN BEINART: No, it was published. 01:14:50.300 --> 01:14:52.850 It's been published extensively. 01:14:52.850 --> 01:14:55.250 I never wrote a book because I'm too lazy-- 01:14:55.250 --> 01:14:56.330 [LAUGHTER] 01:14:56.330 --> 01:14:58.310 --to write books. 01:14:58.310 --> 01:15:01.580 I write long articles instead of books. 01:15:01.580 --> 01:15:02.982 Books are-- 01:15:02.982 --> 01:15:05.780 AUDIENCE: Was that normal? 01:15:05.780 --> 01:15:09.296 JULIAN BEINART: It was in Edilizia Moderna, 01:15:09.296 --> 01:15:12.065 a special issue on Africa, which I edited. 01:15:15.920 --> 01:15:18.930 This appears in a number of different forms. 01:15:18.930 --> 01:15:22.130 The piece, which I gave you in the required reading, 01:15:22.130 --> 01:15:25.490 is good enough. 01:15:25.490 --> 01:15:29.570 And it's got enough of what I've said today in it. 01:15:29.570 --> 01:15:32.120 It's an endless story. 01:15:32.120 --> 01:15:35.030 I mean, what interests me more is your reaction 01:15:35.030 --> 01:15:38.145 to this material than the material itself. 01:15:41.960 --> 01:15:47.000 I mean can you enlarge on this phenomenon 01:15:47.000 --> 01:15:52.700 where does it make you think of In Soweto, people 01:15:52.700 --> 01:15:57.560 don't decorate the external public facades anymore. 01:15:57.560 --> 01:15:59.090 They become like all of you. 01:15:59.090 --> 01:16:03.950 They buy expensive overstuffed furniture and the television 01:16:03.950 --> 01:16:05.480 set. 01:16:05.480 --> 01:16:10.820 They've interiorized the environment as we have. 01:16:10.820 --> 01:16:15.230 Nobody in Manhattan cares about the public facade 01:16:15.230 --> 01:16:19.490 of the apartment block except for the way you enter it. 01:16:19.490 --> 01:16:25.370 You've got to have a canopy and a man dressed up in uniform 01:16:25.370 --> 01:16:28.460 for it to be expensive. 01:16:28.460 --> 01:16:31.990 So we all have notions of explicating our status. 01:16:34.790 --> 01:16:41.300 If we were in a tribe, in an urban tribe, 01:16:41.300 --> 01:16:45.950 in a ghetto and had some way of wanting to improve 01:16:45.950 --> 01:16:47.540 our conditions, there's-- 01:16:47.540 --> 01:16:50.120 remember, there were seven people in these two rooms. 01:16:55.230 --> 01:17:02.140 And sometimes there were additional items as well of 01:17:02.140 --> 01:17:02.770 space. 01:17:02.770 --> 01:17:09.340 But 80% of the houses had about two rooms. 01:17:09.340 --> 01:17:13.120 I think it's a very positive enlarging phenomenon 01:17:13.120 --> 01:17:16.090 that people have the capacity-- 01:17:16.090 --> 01:17:19.840 we regard children as having the capacity to demonstrate 01:17:19.840 --> 01:17:23.350 something unique when they do drawings. 01:17:23.350 --> 01:17:28.360 That capacity is lost as we become adults. 01:17:28.360 --> 01:17:32.500 You could say these people are naive. 01:17:32.500 --> 01:17:34.750 They are primitive. 01:17:34.750 --> 01:17:39.580 They still have the courage or whatever 01:17:39.580 --> 01:17:44.050 it is to do something naive in front of their house. 01:17:44.050 --> 01:17:45.295 To them, it wasn't naive. 01:17:48.660 --> 01:17:51.000 But it raises the issue of the popular 01:17:51.000 --> 01:17:53.160 in the urban phenomenon. 01:17:53.160 --> 01:17:56.010 And it's, I think, an extraordinarily 01:17:56.010 --> 01:18:00.150 interesting and important concept. 01:18:00.150 --> 01:18:04.960 Why this received such publicity when it was published 01:18:04.960 --> 01:18:10.560 and I was giving lectures all over the place 01:18:10.560 --> 01:18:15.630 was because people like John Turner here at MIT, 01:18:15.630 --> 01:18:19.770 [? Jonah Brockin ?] in Hartland before he came to MIT, 01:18:19.770 --> 01:18:24.970 were talking about changeable structures. 01:18:24.970 --> 01:18:34.220 [? Jonah Brockin ?] book says that indwelling 01:18:34.220 --> 01:18:37.370 is a creative phenomenon, that we only 01:18:37.370 --> 01:18:39.230 need to build supports for people who 01:18:39.230 --> 01:18:42.170 can finish products themselves. 01:18:42.170 --> 01:18:46.280 Individuation, expression of individual identity, 01:18:46.280 --> 01:18:52.450 all of these meaningful items in urbanism 01:18:52.450 --> 01:18:57.170 are what this raises for me. 01:18:57.170 --> 01:19:00.480 South Africa is an extreme case. 01:19:00.480 --> 01:19:03.530 If this were class in pathology, it 01:19:03.530 --> 01:19:09.485 would be like showing a case of a dying cancer patient. 01:19:13.400 --> 01:19:15.220 Look at the extreme. 01:19:15.220 --> 01:19:21.790 There is no more extreme public doctrine of racialism 01:19:21.790 --> 01:19:24.010 as in South Africa. 01:19:24.010 --> 01:19:27.070 And this is the response. 01:19:27.070 --> 01:19:30.310 This is one of the responses. 01:19:30.310 --> 01:19:37.400 Hundreds of thousands of people died in that regime as well. 01:19:37.400 --> 01:19:49.990 But I don't know. 01:19:49.990 --> 01:19:54.340 What I can suggest is that you think about this phenomenon 01:19:54.340 --> 01:19:58.540 and transported into your own understanding of the cities 01:19:58.540 --> 01:20:01.840 that you live in and deal with and make plans for. 01:20:04.550 --> 01:20:07.610 If only everybody in the world had the capacity 01:20:07.610 --> 01:20:11.150 to react in this positive way to-- 01:20:11.150 --> 01:20:14.110 our cities would look different.