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The Quandary of Post-Public Space:
New Urbanism, Melrose Arch and the
Rebuilding of Johannesburg after
Apartheid
Martin J. Murray a b
a Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University
of Michigan , Ann Arbor , USA
b Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, University of
Michigan , Ann Arbor , USA
Published online: 05 Dec 2012.
To cite this article: Martin J. Murray (2013) The Quandary of Post-Public Space: New Urbanism,
Melrose Arch and the Rebuilding of Johannesburg after Apartheid , Journal of Urban Design, 18:1,
119-144, DOI: 10.1080/13574809.2012.739544
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2012.739544
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The Quandary of Post-Public Space: New Urbanism,
Melrose Arch and the Rebuilding of Johannesburg after
Apartheid
MARTIN J. MURRAY
Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA,
also Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
ABSTRACT As city builders in post-apartheid Johannesburg have struggled to attach
themselves to a new identity as an African ‘world-class’ city, they point with pride to what
leading local architects and design specialists have glowingly hailed as a novel experiment
with New Urbanism called Melrose Arch. With its stress on mixed-use facilities, its
pedestrian-friendly streetscapes and its ‘small town’ atmosphere, Melrose Arch represents
a real-life variant of a ‘utopia in miniature’, a signature place offering the type of authentic
community lacking in the sprawling residential suburbs. Yet despite its outward
appearance as an exemplar of New Urbanist principles, Melrose Arch actually falls far
short of the philosophical ideals embodied in the Charter for New Urbanism. As a self-
contained urban enclave disconnected from the surrounding cityscape and accessible only
by automobile, this affluent, mixed-used precinct has reinforced the trend toward up-
market, stand-alone commercial retail environments for all those who can afford it,
regardless of race, ethnicity or national origin. Seen through the wide-angle lens of spatial
restructuring of the greater Johannesburg metropolitan region after the end of apartheid,
upscale themed entertainment sites such as Melrose Arch have contributed to the increased
fragmentation of the urban landscape.
Introduction
As city builders in Johannesburg after apartheid have sought to attach themselves
to a new cosmopolitan identity as a world-class African city that has shed its
odious apartheid past, they point with pride to what leading local architects and
design specialists have glowingly hailed as a novel experiment with New
Urbanism called Melrose Arch (Radebe 2002; Reilly [Pauling] 2003; Du Plessis
2007).
1
Centrally located in the heart of the premier northern Johannesburg office
corridor immediately south of the Sandton central business district, Melrose Arch
is an upscale, mixed-use precinct that combines commercial office space, retail
shopping, residential accommodation ranging from affordable condominiums to
luxury penthouse apartments, and leisure and entertainment opportunities in a
single location (Dirsuweit and Schattauer 2004; Mbmebe 2004; Sanders 2001).
2
Correspondence Address: Martin J. Murray, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban
Planning, University of Michigan, 2000 Bonisteel, Ann Arbor 48019, USA. Email:
murraymj@umich.edu
Journal of Urban Design, Vol. 18. No. 1, 119–144, February 2013
1357-4809 Print/1469-9664 Online/13/010119-26 q2013 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2012.739544
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As an exemplary expression of a self-contained ‘city-within-a-city’, this upscale
precinct has become the preferred location for a growing number of well-known
business enterprises and an immensely popular tourist destination for affluent
consumers regardless of race, ethnicity or national origin.
3
When Melrose Arch first opened in late 2001, the New Urbanist town planning
philosophy was a relatively novel concept in South Africa. While most property
developers have clung to the tried-and-tested conventions of mono-functional
building (such as sequestered office parks, walled residential precincts and old-
style shopping malls surrounded by parking lots), New Urbanist principles have
gradually gained a spirited and determined following in real estate circles in post-
apartheid South Africa (Reilly [Pauling] 2003). Working with a team of architects
and urban designers well versed in the tenets of New Urbanism, the real estate
developers who built Melrose Arch deliberately set out to integrate the
conventional components of modern urban life—residential housing, workplaces,
retail shopping, entertainment, and recreation—into a compact, pedestrian-
friendly, mixed-use neighbourhood setting (Sanders 2001; Reilly [Pauling] 2003;
Dirsuweit and Schattauer 2004; Murray 2011, 109– 112, 364).
In both the popular press and professional trade publications, Melrose Arch
quickly achieved recognition as a visionary project that artfully incorporated the
principles of New Urbanism (Sanders 2001; Reilly [Pauling] 2003; Dirsuweit and
Schattauer 2004). Recipient of numerous prestigious awards for innovative
excellence in retail design and hailed as a catalyst for creative solutions to combat
the unfettered suburban sprawl that has plagued the Greater Johannesburg
metropolitan region, Melrose Arch has achieved a great deal of international
acclaim as a stunning example of a master-planned, mixed-use precinct that has
broken free from the tired and formulaic protocols that characterized the era of
high-modernist city building which prevailed during the last years of apartheid
(ca. 1970s– 1990s). The real estate developers who carved Melrose Arch out of the
northern suburbs of Johannesburg hailed this mega-project as an innovative
investment in a radiant future—a stylistic marvel that has provided the genuine
qualities of urban life sorely missing under apartheid (Krige 2002; Fife 2009).
For city boosters, the financial and symbolic success of Melrose Arch has offered
real-life confirmation that Johannesburg is gradually inching its way up the ranked
hierarchy of cites, advancing toward the coveted status of a genuine ‘world-class’city
(Anonymous 2001; Fife 2009, 41; 2010, 58). But where do showcase business and
entertainment enclaves such as Melrose Arch fit into the evolving spatial landscape
of Johannesburg after apartheid? Does this upscale mixed-use precinct genuinely
embody the basic ideals of New Urbanism, or does it represent a distortion of these
philosophical principles, that is, a contrived counterfeit place masquerading as
something it is not? To what extent has Melrose Arch contributed to a more socially
equitable and racially harmonious city? Addressing these questions gets at the heart
of city-building practices in the Johannesburg after the end of apartheid. Looking at
the ideology and practice of New Urbanism at Melrose Arch enables us to critically
assess the extent to which the overall social impact of this highly celebrated mixed-
use mega-project squares with the political commitment of urban planners and city
officials seeking both to reverse the multiple legacies ofspatial apartheid and to build a
more socially equitable city (Dirsuweit 1999).
As a fluid assemblage of design principles rather than an unvarying
prescription appropriate under any and all circumstances, New Urbanism is only
as good as its practical application in actual places. For this reason, understanding
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the impact and meaning of such holistically planned, large-scale, mixed-use and
pedestrian-friendly redevelopment projects such as Melrose Arch depends upon
maintaining an analytic distinction between New Urbanism in theory and New
Urbanism in practice. As a reform movement in urban design, New Urbanism does
not present a finished agenda or a one-size-fits-all blueprint for ‘good urbanism’,
but instead offers a set of recommended guidelines that are open to varying
interpretations (Mehaffy et al. 2010). What happens when real estate developers try
to reconcile their profit-seeking motives with a set of New Urbanist design
principles that often appear to be too impractical, too expensive or too risky to
implement under particular circumstances? Despite their claims to follow New
Urbanist guidelines, real estate developers often engage in compromises and
corner-cutting, thereby undermining and subverting the original intent of
architects and design specialists (Mehaffy 2008, 57– 75).
When seen through the wide angle lens of spatial restructuring in the greater
Johannesburg metropolitan region after the end of apartheid, the celebratory story
of Melrose Arch as a welcome addition to the urban landscape becomes much
more complicated. The argument presented here is three-fold. First, Melrose Arch
offers an example how large-scale real estate developers who have attached
themselves (rhetorically at least) to New Urbanist design principles have been able
to astutely shape and mould these to fit their own purposes. As a genuine mixed
use, urban redevelopment project that promotes a walkable, pedestrian-friendly
environment where residents and visitors can live, work and socialize without
undue reliance on automobiles, this self-styled New Urbanist precinct offers an
alternative to unfettered suburban sprawl and the steady increase in the numbers
of lookalike, gated residential estates on the metropolitan fringe. Yet in contrast to
the stated goals of New Urbanism, Melrose Arch appeals to a narrow spectrum of
income-mixing in its client and customer base and very little real class diversity in
its residential components (Dirsuweit and Schattauer 2004). Second, Melrose Arch
exemplifies the global trend toward the privatization of public space (Sorkin 1992;
Boyer 1994a; Low 2006; Low and Smith 2006). Rather than contributing to the
expansion of open, inviting and easily accessible spaces that bolster the public
realm of the city, Melrose Arch represents the archetype of (privately-owned and
privately-managed) post-public space. Third, even though New Urbanism puts a
great deal of stress on the ideals of face-to-face community, civic engagement and
social inclusiveness, Melrose Arch resembles an exclusive, island-like enclosure
that is packaged for upscale consumption and commodified for recreation and
spectacle. In denouncing the failures of modernist city building, New Urbanists
have sometimes embraced an idyllic image of premodernity which rests on a
nostalgic vision of traditional small town living (Saab 2007, 193). At Melrose Arch,
the reliance on idealized tableaux from an imaged past has tended to obscure the
real-life conditions of spatial inequality (and hence spatial injustice) that have
persisted long past the demise of apartheid. Whereas the Charter for New Urbanism
calls for a re-integration of the urban realm with the aim of creating a more
sustainable and human-scale environment (Congress for the New Urbanism 1999;
Salinaros 2006b; Mehaffy 2008), the real estate developers who built Melrose Arch
were primarily concerned with constructing a financially viable, profit-making
business enterprise. Despite its iconic status as a ‘must-see’ tourist and
entertainment destination, Melrose Arch has reinforced the pattern of spatial
fragmentation in post-apartheid Johannesburg, where the urban landscape has been
increasingly divided into fortified enclaves for the wealthy and degraded sites set
The Quandary of Post-Public Space 121
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aside for the confinement of the urban poor. The gradual accumulation of citadel
office complexes, gated residential communities and enclosed shopping malls
catering to affluent urban residents has carved the urban landscape into a
bewildering patchwork of fragmented enclaves that have turned their backs on the
surrounding cityscape, effectively divorcing themselves from any sense of
responsibility for binding the urban social fabric together in ways that promote
racial harmony and spatial justice (Murray 2008b, 12; 2011, 109–112).
New Urbanism as Planning Strategy for Rebuilding Modernist Cities
The urban planning and design movement popularly known as New Urbanism
(sometimes referred to as ‘traditional urbanism’ or ‘neo-traditional urbanism) began
in the United States in the 1980s and quickly spread around the world (Ellis 2002;
Fishman 2008). Early advocates for New Urbanism thought of themselves as
visionaries who lay particular stress on physical design as the key to improving the
quality of everyday urban living (Alexander et al. 1979). The founding of the
Congress for New Urbanism in 1993 brought together a loose collection of urban
theorists, city planners, architects, design specialists and other practitioners,
effectively fashioning a reform movement out of what had been a chorus of critical
voices seeking a human-scaled alternative to the environmentally destructive impact
of automobile-dependence and unfettered suburban sprawl (Duany and Plater-
Zyberk 1991, 1994, 1995; Bray 1993; Calthorpe 1993; Katz 1994; Talen 1999, 2000, 2005,
2008a, 2008b; McCann 1995; Kelbaugh 1997, 2002; Southworth 1997, 2005; Duany,
Plater-Zyberk, and Speck 1999; Calthorpe and Fulton 2000; Dutton 2001; Ellis 2002;
Deitrick and Ellis 2004; Fishman 2004). The adoption of a Charter for New Urbanism
in 1996 provided a convenient platform for supporters to put forward their proposals
in a more coherent fashion. As a normative exercise promoting what the ‘good city’
should be, New Urbanism synthesizes a wide range of design principles that seek to
achieve such planning goals as growth management, urban revitalization and
sustainable development (Ellis 2002, 261; Salingaros 2004, 2005; Grant 2006).
At root, New Urbanism represents an alternative approach to the hyper-
modernist paradigm of city building that stressed functional specialization,
automobile-dependent circulation and single-use zoning. Advocates of New
Urbanism favour greater density over horizontal suburban sprawl, pedestrian-
oriented streetscapes overautomobile dependence, and land-use diversity over strict
formal zoning and segregation of uses. They have claimed with a great deal of
passion that neo-traditional town planning principles can bring a more socially
cohesive and environmentally sustainable form of urban development across the
entire metropolitan region, ranging from suburban ‘new towns’, to urban infill
projects, and to low-income housing rehabilitation. In reviving the traditional town
planning principles of mixed use, connectivity and integrated, open street systems,
advocates of New Urbanism seek to restore the qualities of pedestrian-friendly,
mixed-use neighbourhoods to otherwise sterile and unplanned, low-density
suburban sprawl (Congress for the New Urbanism 1999; Duany and Plater-Zyberk
1992; 1995; Huxtable 1997, 42–47; Kelbaugh 1989; Leccese, McCormick, and
Congress for the New Urbanism 2000; Mehaffy et al. 2010; Rees 2003; Salingaros
2006a, 2006b; Schuyler 1997).
Like many reform movements in urban design and architecture, New
Urbanism has proven to be difficult to define and to characterize with any
precision. The apparent clarity and simplicity of its design principles are indeed
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deceiving: New Urbanism cannot be so easily pigeon-holed as either its
proponents or detractors might like. As Robert Beauregard (2002: 182) suggested,
the philosophical doctrines of New Urbanism suffer from a “chronic ambiguity”.
By mixing modernism and progressivism with historicism and nostalgia, New
Urbanism resembles more an eclectic blend of earlier design movements than a
decisive break with the past (Vanderbeek and Iraza
´bal 2007; Fishman 2008).
Despite (or perhaps because of) of its popularity within urban design and
planning circles, New Urbanism has attracted its fair share of scepticism and even
outright hostility. The scholarly critiques of New Urbanism are well rehearsed and
need not be repeated here in any great detail (Till 1993, 2001; Falconer Al-Hindi and
Staddon 1997; Harvey 1997; Robbins 1998; MacCannell 1999; Dunham-Jones 2000;
Falconer Al-Hindi 2001; Till and Falconer Al-Hindi 2001; Zimmerman 2001; Ellis
2002; Brain 2005; Saab 2007; Vanderbeek and Iraza
´bal 2007; Hirt 2009).Suffice it to say
that the theoretical criticisms of its underlying principles have focused primarily on
several alleged deficiencies, including “an escapist desire to return to a less complex
state in an imaginary past” (Ellis 2002, 266), the firm belief in the power of physical
design to act as a catalyst for positive change (Day 2003), and the over-reliance upon
inauthentic and contrived landscapes, thereby producing places that appear artificial
(Huxtable 1997; Harvey 1997; Robbins 1998; Upton 1998). Scholars such as Nina
Veregge (1997), for example, have argued that the ‘traditional small town’ setting
which New Urbanists have invented is both timeless, ignoring the changing historical
conditions which produced it, and placeless, leaving regional and local cultures
unaccounted for. A great deal of scholarly attention has focused on the claim that
New Urbanism rests on a type of naive, backward-looking, romantic attachment to
an idealized past, expressing a desire to reclaim some long-lost “traditional ways of
living”, and the supposedly cohesive communities that went with them. To the extent
that New Urbanism promotes community, critics have suggested that it does so by
reinforcing a largely middle-class identity, replacing civic engagement and
spontaneous social interaction with the class exclusivity of property-owners
associations (Till 1993; Harvey 1997; Day 2003; Bressi 2002).
Advocates for New Urbanism have mounted an impassioned defence of their
design philosophy, countering that many of these criticisms rest on premature
judgements, unrealistic expectations and an ideological bias (Ellis 2002, 261). By
focusing on particular New Urbanist projects and their purported short-comings,
critics miss the larger point, namely, that the New Urbanism presents a coherent set of
planning principles designed to reinvigorate urban places and provide a meaningful
alternative to suburban sprawl. New Urbanists claim that the strict codes and rules
regulating street orientations, compact urban form, and the spatial dimensions and
aesthetic forms of buildings counteract the placeless effects of conventional real
estate development and create a necessary discipline that stirs innovative solutions
(Ellis 2002). Even the most ardent critics of the New Urbanism have difficulty in
denying the salience of its public agenda. New Urbanists have constructed a long
litany of problems they seek to address, including neglect and abandonment in
central cities, the spread of placeless suburban sprawl, entrenched segregation along
the lines of race and income, environmental degradation, loss of agricultural lands
and wilderness areas, and the diminishing role of neighbourhood cohesiveness in
contemporary urban life (Calthorpe and Fulton 2000; Talen 2000).
New Urbanism positions itself squarely within the historical evolution of
ideas and theories about urban design. It defines itself as a normative theory,
projecting a vision of what cities should be in the future. As Moudon (2000, 38) has
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argued, “this type of theory falls in the realm of advocacy, both professed and
practiced in hope of promoting a better future”. No matter how elegant, these types
of normative design theories have shown themselves to be notoriously
impermanent. Since they are based on belief, rather than proof, they are largely
dependent on (and often the eventual victims of) the vagaries of changing fashion,
the cyclical nature of real estate markets and consumer demand. Urban design and
planning theorists have long warned that normative theories largely amount to
assertions of belief in a particular interpretation of ‘goodness’ on the part of their
supporters. As a general rule, these normative theories “demand that followers
make a leap of faith and simply trust in the beneficial outcomes that they claim will
occur” (Moudon 2000, 38). In order to maintain their relevance, these theories must
ground themselves in substantive achievements, and hence provide the necessary
‘proof of goodness’, that is, “explicit and compelling evidence that their claims will
have the intended effect”. “Proof of goodness” thus moves normative theory “from
a state of conjecture and advocacy” to one grounded in empirically-verifiable
claims to success (Moudon 2000, 38).
Critics have charged that while its underlying principles may indeed be
laudable and its goals praiseworthy, New Urbanism in practise sometimes falls far
short of its stated intentions (Dowling 1998; Day 2003; Nasar 2003; Kenny and
Zimmerman 2004; Brain 2005; Fishman 2008; Haas 2008; Talen 2008b). The message
of New Urbanism is as much a moral appeal as it is an aesthetic approach to urban
design. New Urbanists believe that traditional town planning approaches are the
key to restoring a genuine sense of community. Alex Krieger argued that while
New Urbanists have expressed their commitment for laudable goals such as
curtailing sprawl, revitalizing decaying inner cities, bolstering public space and
increasing socio-cultural diversity, the movement has largely produced isolated
and privatized enclaves, automobile-dependent subdivisions that are skillfully
marketed with “carefully edited, rose-colored evocations of a golden age of small-
town dominated urbanism” (Krieger 2002, 51). As Sonia Hirt (2009, 249) suggested,
this ‘folk mythology’ amounts to a type of wishful, nostalgic longing for “good old
(premodern) times is hardly a realistic recipe for a sustainable future” (see also
Falconer Al-Hindi 2001; Till 2001).
Other critics have argued that New Urbanist design principles do not
appreciate that cities are spontaneous creations that can only be loosely guided, but
not decisively controlled in the manner New Urbanists might want. They suggest
further that the enforced ‘tidiness’ of mandated designs, the intransigent building
codes and strict land-use regulations inhibit individual creativity and promote
unnecessary homogeneity (Audirac and Shermeyn 1994; Lehrer and Milgrom
1996). Still other critics have suggested that many existing New Urbanist projects
have failed to deliver on their promise to foster social equity and to promote
cultural diversity by providing a balance of market-rate and affordable housing for
low-income urban residents (Newman and Ashton 2004; Grant 2007; Talen 2008c;
Gonza
´lez and Lejano 2009, 2949; Lara 2011). By and large, New Urbanist projects
tend to draw homogenous groups of residents because their residential units have
targeted mostly upper-middle income buyers. As a consequence, the socio-cultural
diversity that often comes with the promotion of mixed-income neighbourhoods
remains an elusive goal (Lehrer and Milgrom 1996; Falconer AJ-Hindi and Staddon
1997; Harvey 1997; Rees 2003; Talen 2008c). As Talen (2005) has argued, the
realization of social equity goals requires more than carefully engineered physical
designs. Without policy requirements and the attendant the institutional and
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programmatic support, social equity goals easily fall by the wayside (Smith 2002;
Day 2003; Talen 2005; Garde 2006).
Perhaps the most telling criticism of New Urbanism in practise is the fact that
while New Urbanists design projects, real estate developers actually build them. A
number of critics have suggested that once real estate developers take charge of
master plans, they often compromise on basic principles, and hence deliver New
Urbanist projects in name only. Just because a project has a New Urbanist label
attached to it does not mean that it embodies its core principles (Mehaffy 2008;
Salingaros, Mehaffy, and Steil 2008). Real estate developers are risk-averse by nature.
It is often the case that they selectively discard New Urbanist design principles as
they seek to ensure the financial viability of projects and to avoid offending the
prevailing sensibilities of building tenants and paying customers. Once they inherit
well-intentioned master plans, real estate developers often build projects that do not
generate a sense of uniqueness and locality, but instead rely on conventional
formulas. The resulting redevelopment projects may have the outward appearance
of organic and vibrant mixed-use neighbourhoods, but they are, in the end, formulaic
reproductions of standardized building protocols (Mehaffy 2008, 68).
The Disjointed Metropolis: Situating Johannesburg after Apartheid
Like other rapidly expanding urban agglomerations where the centripetal
forces of deindustrialization, decentralization and unfettered suburban sprawl
have substantially reconfigured the urban landscape, the greater Johannesburg
metropolitan region has become a vast, disjointed megalopolis without clearly
recognizable boundaries; a spatially fragmented and increasingly multi-nodal
conurbation on the boundless scale of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Houston and
Phoenix. Beginning in the 1970s but picking up the pace over the past several
decades, Johannesburg has experienced a massive horizontal building boom of
unprecedented proportions that not only pushed the geographical boundaries of
the metropolis away from its historic downtown core but also triggered the
metamorphosis of what were once somewhat remote suburban locations into
thriving business and commercial centres in their own right. As it lost its grip as the
pre-eminent location for business and finance, the Johannesburg central city has
experienced a 30-year battle between the forces of neglect and decline aligned
against the forces of regeneration and re-invention (Mbembe 2008; Murra y 2008b, 3,
127, 156; Winkler 2009). The spatial restructuring process—often referred to as “the
urbanization of suburbia”—has produced a distended, polycentric landscape
consisting of a galaxy of rival edge cities (such as Sandton, Fourways and Midrand)
and rapidly urbanizing cluster points (such as Ilovo, Sunninghill, Melrose Arch and
Hyde Park) arrayed in a northern arc around an historic urban core and connected
by an extensive grid of high-speed freeways, overbuilt axial corridors and corridor
highways, and congested arterial roadways (Bremner 2000; Murray 2008b, 3).
Just as haphazard horizontal sprawl has transformed the urban form of the
greater Johannesburg metropolitan region, the expanded use of introverted
building typologies—namely, the ‘fortress effect’—has reshaped the built
environment (Lipman and Harris 1999). The steady accretion of citadel office
complexes, gated residential communities, showcase commercial arcades, upscale
shopping malls, city improvement districts, luxurious gambling casinos and
securitized residential precincts has transformed the metropolitan landscape of
Johannesburg into a jumbled patchwork of enclosed micro-spaces that provide
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what Edward Soja (2000, 299) has referred to as the “anticipated protection against
the real and imagined dangers of daily life”. Inserted into the urban landscape with
little thought as to their impact on the overall plan of the city, these fortified
enclaves have come to resemble an archipelago of island-like enclosures “that both
voluntarily and involuntarily barricade individuals and communities in visible
and not-so-visible urban [redoubts]”, overseen by restructured forms of public and
private power and authority (Soja 2000, 299).
What distinguishes these inward-looking, sequestered places from other
building typologies is that they are “totally designed environments”, that is,
entrepreneurially-driven, privately-owned and master-planned precincts orga-
nized around particular uses and social practices. When juxtaposed against the
pervasive and disturbing noir-image of post-apartheid Johannesburg as a frightful
place of uncertainty and danger, the detached and formidable appearance of these
ornamental architectural compositions—expressed by both spatial and symbolic
distance—becomes even more exaggerated and jarring (Murray 2007, 228). These
self-enclosed micro-universes offer compelling testimony to the spatial
transformation of urban life in Johannesburg after apartheid, where a formidable
array of barriers, gates and surveillance technologies have combined to shield
affluent residents from only but the most casual contact with the urban poor
(Murray 2008a, 2011).
New Urbanism, Melrose Arch and Post-public Space: Divining the
Johannesburg ‘Future City’
The urban form [of Johannesburg] responds to the perception that
vehicular traffic systems are paramount to the successful flux of the city.
(Paul Sanders, Melrose Arch architect 2001, 50)
With some exceptions, the built environment of the greater Johannesburg
metropolitan region has always lacked distinction and quality. The modernist
and high-modernist thinking which dominated city building practices over most of
the 20th century produced mono-functional zones based on segregated land uses
along with vast expanses of socially homogeneous residential suburbs dependent
on the automobile. For the most part, real estate developers have conceived of their
property developments as stand-alone and dislocated initiatives, inserted into the
urban landscape with little thought as to how they contribute to a wider matrix of
urban public and civic life. The steady proliferation of gated residential commu-
nities, enclosed shopping malls and cocooned townhouse cluster developments that
have reshaped the northern suburban landscape gives the distinct impression
that Johannesburg consists of not much more than a disconnected assemblage of
mono-functional, fortified enclaves tethered together by high-speed motorways.
Almost without exception, these island-like enclosures are cut off from the
surrounding streetscape, where carefully monitored access-control points permit
the only conduit between inside and outside worlds (Murray 2008a, 154).
For at least the past 40 years, the greater Johannesburg metropolitan region
has been subjected to the types of haphazard city building that property analysts
have referred to as ‘leapfrog development’, where real estate speculators bypass
properties adjacent to existing residential suburbs in order to obtain land further
away, leaving vacant tracts in between. The resulting scattered patterns of
unplanned horizontal sprawl have produced a distended and bloated urban form
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without clear-cut boundaries or well-defined edges (Heim 2001). With the end of
apartheid and the transition to parliamentary democracy, city officials have tried to
slow down the serial reproduction of monochromatic strip malls, gated residential
communities, securitized office parks and enclosed townhouse clusters that have
pushed the metropolitan frontier further afield into what not so long ago was
undeveloped farmland (Robinson 2008).
Without a doubt, the principles of New Urbanism offer a welcome antidote in
the greater Johannesburg metropolitan region to thedeleterious effectsof unplanned,
low-density suburban sprawl (with its serial reproduction of tract housing estates,
monochromatic strip malls, cavernous shopping malls and townhouse cluster
developments), mono-functional land use patterns, and increased traffic congestion
associated with the lack of reliable public transportation and longstanding auto-
mobile dependence (Murray 2011). As an alternative to conventional laissez-faire
approaches to city-building that produce haphazard and disjointed patterns of
accelerated growth matched with abandonment and decline, New Urbanism uses
the tools of environmental design to foster inclusiveness, diversity of use, walkability
and a closely-grained spatial organization geared to the human scale (Calthrope
1993; Katz 1994; Kelbaugh 1997).
The principles of New Urbanism dovetail with the goals of a new generation
of post-apartheid urban planners. Armed with fresh approaches and ideas
borrowed from ‘international best practices’, these planners have set their sights
on reversing the racial compartmentalization of spatial planning under apartheid
by promoting the highly-acclaimed town planning principles captured in the
tripartite formula of the Compact City, the Sustainable City and the Liveable City
(Murray 2008b, 84– 85, 209–212; Robinson 2008).
Looking at the upscale, mixed-use urban redevelopment project known as
Melrose Arch enables us to investigate the extent to which real estate developers
mimic the superficial details of New Urbanism in order to capitalize on its
widespread popularity as a design strategy. The Melrose Arch precinct is located
on a triangular site of prime real estate bounded on the east by the M1 freeway
connecting Johannesburg with Pretoria, in the north by Corlett Drive and in the
west by Athol Oaklands Drive. In carving out space to make way for this
sprawling high-density complex, corporate builders tore down a once-fashionable
residential suburban neighbourhood. From the time it first opened, Melrose Arch
became a ‘must see’ site on upscale tourist itineraries (Anonymous 1999; Dirsuweit
and Schattauer 2004).
The real estate developers and architects behind this $150 million, mixed-use
precinct sought to offer a stylish, entertaining alternative to the proliferation of
mass-produced cluster townhouses, far-flung shopping nodes, and lookalike strip
malls built more for convenience than for aesthetic taste. In contrast to the sterility
and monotony of the affluent resident suburbs that surround it, Melrose Arch
offers a concentrated variety of different uses and social amenities gathered
together in a single location (Sanders 2001, 50). The popularity of Melrose Arch
rests with its walkable streetscapes, its pleasurable ambience that encourages social
interaction, and the type of relaxed atmosphere captured by the slogan ‘live,
work and play’ (Sanders 2001; Anonymous 2001; Ridyard 2003; Mbembe 2004).
Investec Property Group, the corporate managers of Melrose Arch on
behalf of Sentinel Industry Retirement Fund, have laid particular stress on the
variety of entertainment and retail choices, claiming with a great deal of
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justification that these bring something entirely new to the Johannesburg scene (Du
Plessis 2007, 91).
At the start, this mixed-use development (with 144 000 square feet of office
space and 26 000 square feet of retail space in Phase One alone) consisted of an
assemblage of 12 separate buildings incorporating business offices, upscale retail
shops and specialty boutiques, condominiums and apartment units, a five-star
hotel, leisure facilities, and a village square designed as a central location for social
gathering. With plans for three phases taking up more than 725 000 square feet of
rentable space to be rolled out over a 15 to 20-year span, this mega-project
represented perhaps the single largest coordinated building effort ever
undertaken in urban South Africa (Anonymous 2000; Anonymous 2001; Fife
2001, 46; Sanders 2001; Dirsuweit and Schattauer 2004, 239; Du Plessis 2007, 91).
Figure 1. Map of Johannesburg northern suburbs. Credit: Stephanie McClintick
128 M. J. Murray
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Almost overnight, this landmark mixed-use precinct became one of the most
sought-after business and entertainment hubs in the great Johannesburg
metropolitan region, attracting such leading corporate heavyweights as Allan
Gray, Bidvest, the Bond Exchange of SA, Xstrata Coal and Xstrata Alloys, and the
financial services company Stanlib to its core tenant base. Strong demand for
premium AAA-grade office space at Melrose Arch pushed rental rates steadily
upward, catching up with and eventually surpassing those of the Sandton CBD,
the financial heartland of South Africa, in 2008 (Anonymous 2008a). Besides its
125 fully occupied residential units (with many more in the planning stages), this
showcase leisure site also boasts of some of the trendiest restaurants in the city
(Anonymous 2001; Fife 2001, 46; Anonymous 2008b; Anonymous 2008c). As this
aesthetically charming site grew in popularity and stature as both a model for
entrepreneurial success and a marketable brand, its quaint ‘urban village’
qualities became a touchstone for real estate developers in other cities in South
Africa who have emulated its built form and aesthetic style when building mixed-
use developments (Dirsuweit and Schattauer 2004; see also Till 1993, 709).
The spatial design of the Melrose Arch precinct resembles a quaint, miniature
European city centre with curving, cobbled streets, expansive plazas and open
vistas. The street grid is organized in such a way as to offer frequent origins and
destinations at a human scale. Pedestrian walkways conveniently connect the
shops, the restaurants, the office buildings, the apartments and the underground
parking facilities (Mbembe 2004). Corporate boosters promote Melrose Arch as a
place with “twenty-four hours of non-stop activities” (Sanders 2001, 50). The key
to a vibrant nightlife depends upon the spatial integration of residential
components—ranging from upscale penthouses to modestly-priced flats—with
entertainment sites. These mixed-income residential units are strategically located
at key positions in the precinct, but are particularly prominent at the top floors of
the perimeter block buildings. The mixed-use component of the development also
provides for organic surveillance akin to what Jane Jacobs (1961) referred to as the
ubiquitous ‘eyes on the street’. The precinct plan is consistent with the objectives
of creating a ‘public domain’ through an inner-connected grid of vibrant streets
with curbside and pavement activity serving as access to a multiplicity of
opportunities for tenants and visitors alike (Sanders 2001, 50).
Graham Wilson, leader of the architectural team for Melrose Arch, introduced
various promotional campaigns that specifically targeted young professionals
as the preferred customer base. “We are offering the kind of thing”, he argued,
“[that] they are looking for where they can do virtually everything they want to
without having to leave the precinct” (Wilson, quoted in Anonymous 2001). With
its trendy nightspots, fancy restaurants and carefully staged faux-‘European’
atmosphere, Melrose Arch embodies the new logic of consumption that has
gripped Johannesburg after apartheid. By carefully crafting an ambient street life to
resemble an organic civic milieu that has all but disappeared from the diminishing
public places of the city (or never existed at all), this upscale mixed-used
precinct functions as a type of island-like enclosure that exemplifies the growing
trend toward the creation of ‘utopias in miniature’ carved out of urban space
(Harvey 2000). In its appeal to upwardly mobile, young professionals, media
personalities, sports figures, foreign dignitaries, business executives and entre-
preneurs with disposable income, Melrose Arch has come to symbolize the carefully
manicured image of the ‘new South Africa’: cosmopolitan, mobile, tolerant,
globally connected and trendy (Krige 2002; Dirsuweit and Schattauer 2004).
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In 2009, the Melrose Arch precinct almost doubled in size with the addition
of an open-air, faux-Mediterranean piazza surrounded by a dynamic fusion of
street-level shopping and upper-level, premium-grade office space. This R1 billion
($73 million), multi-dimensional building project took its inspiration from some of
the world’s best known piazzas such as Piazza del Campo in Sienna and from
internationally-acclaimed high street shopping destinations such as Regent Street
in London (Dlamini 2008; Fife 2009, 51; Ndaba 2009). The shopping arcade, called
Melrose Arch Shopping, consists of 100 new street-level shops and small boutiques
spread across 92 000 square feet of retail and leisure space. The upper-level offices
were distributed amongst seven buildings and expanded the available AAA-grade
commercial space by additional 105 000 square feet (Anonymous 2008a;
Anonymous 2009; Mokopanele 2009; Uhlmann 2010). “In the pecking order of
successful property developments”, one property analyst proclaimed, “Melrose
Arch is highly rated” (Mann 2008).
Along with other large-scale property owners such as Liberty Properties and
Old Mutual Investment Group, the corporate owners of Melrose Arch were
actively engaged in investigating the possibility of installing their own electricity
generators in order to power its business, retail and residential components. This
assertion of energy independence represented one small step in the overall
strategy of privately-owned enclave developments to effectively secede from the
municipality (Robbins 2008). Melrose Arch has become both a successful
investment and a proven brand. With over 330 000 square feet of bulk land still
available for further expansion, real estate developers have set their sights on once
again doubling the size of the this mixed-used precinct by 2015. This massive
development functions as workplace, leisure precinct and home for an estimated
6000 skilled ‘knowledge workers’. Promoters for Melrose Arch have projected that
this figure could easily increase to more than 22 000 in the near future when the
planned further expansion of the precinct is completed (Dlamini 2008; Piliso 2008;
Ndaba 2009; Shevel 2009).
Figure 3. Melrose Arch outdoor plazaFigure 2. Melrose Arch architectural stylistics
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Melrose Arch and the Post-industrial Metropolis
Melrose’s Arch new extension ...is probably as close as a single owner can
get to recreating the human-scale urban space that emerged over millennia
in the great cities of Europe. It certainly lifts your spirits—in direct contrast
to the way the enclosed shopping malls deaden them. (Ian Fife 2009, 51)
The far northern suburbs of Johannesburg are saturated with decentralized office
parks and enclosed shopping malls in places such as Hyde Park, Rosebank,
Illovo, Sunninghill and Sandton. This combination of new Edge Cities and nodal
growth points has contributed to the unfettered horizontal sprawl of the greater
Johannesburg metropolitan region. In contrast, Melrose Arch provides a more
densely packed urban environment, along the lines promoted by the advocates of
the Compact Cities model, a place where employment opportunities, residential
accommodation and leisurely entertainments are located in close proximity to
each other (Radebe 2002; Sanders 2001, 50).
The signature feature of New Urbanism is the appeal of mixed land uses, a
variety of housing types and densities, connectivity, integrated open street
systems, pedestrian-oriented design and clearly defined public and private
domains (Beauregard 2002). At Melrose Arch, real estate developers and architects
applied these neo-traditional town planning principles to cobble together a
collage-like assemblage of highly stylized parts that are fashioned to resemble a
real ‘urban village’, seemingly transported from another time and place (Till 1993,
709; Garde 2006, 4). As the embodiment of the outward appearance of New
Urbanist principles, Melrose Arch is designed to replicate the intimate atmosphere
Figure 4. Melrose Arch offices
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of small-town life in a mythical urban past, albeit one that never existed in urban
South Africa. Looking outside South Africa for inspiration and borrowing liberally
from such urban spectacles as Potsdamer Platz (Berlin), the London Docklands and
Rouse Hill Centre (outside Sydney), the real estate developers who conceived of
Melrose Arch wanted to associate themselves with what they considered a genuine
cosmopolitan, up-to-date urbanism that characterizes world-class (and aspiring
world-class) cities elsewhere (Dirsuweit and Schattauer 2004, 243). By mixing
outdoor and indoor spaces along with a cornucopia of commercial retail, upscale
housing and leisure spaces in an enclosed location, this trendy ‘quaint space’ offers
an alternative to automobile-dependent mega-malls with their vast parking lots
and equally fungible retail outlets (Ellen 1999, 95 –96; Garde 2006).
By incorporating design features borrowed from the aesthetic principles of
New Urbanism, Melrose Arch promotes social mixing and chance encounter. The
stress on easily accessible social gathering places provide a relaxed setting for the
‘acting out’ of racial harmony and cross-cultural tolerance in the ‘new South
Africa’. By fostering casual social contact within its carefully monitored confines,
Melrose Arch partially fulfils the promise of racial reconciliation embodied in the
idea of the ‘rainbow nation’ (Mbembe 2008). Mixed-use developments such as
Melrose Arch seek to address the challenges of contemporary urban life—
suburban sterility, automobile dependence, and anomic disorientation—with bold
efforts to recapture the strengths of neighbourhoods and older communities. While
New Urbanist precincts such as Melrose Arch and such fortified enclaves as gated
residential communities, citadel office complexes and enclosed shopping malls
reflect divergent planning aims and principles, the development practices that
guide their production reveal striking similarities (Grant 2006, 2007). Despite their
physical and aesthetic differences, all these building typologies reflect the impulse
toward ‘privatopia’, that is, entrepreneurially-driven ‘landscapes of privilege’ that
separate and divide the urban landscape into fragments (McKenzie 1994).
While it offers an appealing alternative to the sequestered ‘fortress city’
approach that defines mega-project building schemes in the greater Johannesburg
metropolitan region, Melrose Arch has done little to curb the deleterious effects
spatial fragmentation and socio-cultural segregation of the urban landscape. As an
entrepreneurially-driven enterprise, this mixed-use development reflects the
ascendance of private commercial concerns over public interests. Because it is
artificially implanted in a highly uneven urban landscape divided between
affluent enclaves of exclusivity and impoverished sites of deprivation, Melrose
Arch is infused with ambivalence, paradox and contradiction. In its outward
appearance it promotes socio-cultural diversity, inclusive cosmopolitanism and
the playful qualities of contemporary urban life, but, at the same time, in
privatizing the public realm in order to shield itself from the discomforting
aspects of contemporary urban life, it fosters an insularity and exclusivity that in
the end only reinforce the existing spatial inequalities (Lipman and Harris 1999;
Dirsuweit and Schattauer 2004; Dawson 2006).
The Potemkin Village
Place-Marketing and the Art of Playful Deception
While its boosterist, promotional materials lay particular emphasis on the ludic,
playful qualities of social life associated with postmodernist sensibilities, the
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Melrose Arch precinct is a totally planned environment where nothing is left to
chance. Land uses are mixed but they are never haphazard. While open spaces
replace the cage and the cocoon, the entire site is saturated with layer upon layer
of security systems. Unlike the centre-less, fuzzy boundaries and ‘anything goes’
ethos of postmodernist city building, New Urbanist projects depend upon spatial
hierarchies that distinguish cores and peripheries, establish well-defined centres
and clearly delineated edges. For New Urbanist designers, the relational clarity
of centres and edges are meant to act as counterweights to the uncertainty
ambivalence that typically characterizes conventional city-building practices.
Well-established boundaries symbolize stability and provide the ontological
security so sorely lacking in the modern metropolis. Corporate owners of New
Urbanist precincts such as Melrose Arch use a withering array of zoning
ordinances, building codes, land use regulations and design guidelines to protect
and insulate property values from the unregulated competition of the capitalist
marketplace (Dowling 1998; Beauregard 2002; Hirt 2007, 2009; Vanderbeek and
Iraza
´bal 2007).
With their ‘small-is-beautiful’ approach to city living, advocates for New
Urbanism seek to counteract the diminishing role of neighbourhood cohesiveness
in modern urban life by providing carefully-scripted environments that offer the
type of face-to-face community lacking in conventional downtown business
districts and in the sprawling residential suburbs (Ellen 1999, 93). New Urbanist
practitioners often invoke the populist rhetoric of anti-modernism, localism
and community in seeking to promote an upbeat image of ‘quality urbanism’
(Harvey 1997; Sanders 2001; Beauregard 2002; Kenny and Zimmerman 2004;
Vanderbeek and Iraza
´bal 2007; Hirt 2009). The ‘selling’, or branding, of Melrose
Arch underscores the desire of its corporate owners to reinforce the image of
Johannesburg as an aspirant ‘world-class’ city that has broken free from its odious
past as the quintessential ‘apartheid city’. By staging a theatrical re-enactment of a
lost civic ideal, themed entertainment sites such as Melrose Arch contrive to
recover a vanishing sense of face-to-face community lacking in suburbia and in
the high-modernist city (Boyer 1992).
In carefully constructing the mythical spirit of a ‘traditional’ European urban
village, the real estate developers, architects and landscape designers—who
typically look upon themselves as ‘popular visionaries’—have tried to reshape
this enclosed micro-universe into an aesthetically pleasing spectacle organized
around multiple and diverse spaces of consumption: outdoor cafe
´s, nouvelle
cuisine restaurants, exclusive retail boutiques, upscale shopping venues, theatres,
art galleries, trendy bars and nightclubs (Pinder 2002, 236). They point to Melrose
Arch as a safe and secure place that exhibits the ostensible benefits of a genuine
and authentic urbanity—the contagious energy of crowds, choice and variety,
visual stimulation, entertainment opportunities and a delightful experience. This
complete fruitful bounty of contemporary consumerist culture comes without
exposure to the grim underside of urban living: particularly petty crime, begging
and other visible signs of poverty (Sanders 2001; see Goldberger 1996, 136– 137).
With echoes and visible hints of such well-travelled European cities as Paris,
Rome, Barcelona and Milan in its sleek postmodern design, Melrose Arch has
created an attractive destination in line with the demanding tourist expectations
of the 21st century. In piecing together an eccentric architecture of whimsy and a
stylized historicist look of a European town square, faux-‘urban villages’ such as
Melrose Arch are archetypical exemplars of introverted places that have
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reinforced the trend toward up-market, stand-alone commercial environments
catering to all those who can afford the high prices, regardless of race. As a site
invested with all the visible signs of global familiarity, Melrose Arch conforms to
the stylized model of a festival marketplace which offers what Jon Goss (1996, 221)
called a “regionally sensitive adaptation of an ‘ideal market form’”. By providing
an escape or refuge from the risks and uncertainties of everyday urban living, it
becomes a place of performance that “does not make sense apart from it people
and their mix of purposes and expectations” (Wilson 1990, 54). As a cocooned
enclave spatially disconnected from the urban fabric, Melrose Arch has come to
epitomize the insular, ‘city-within-a-city’ approach to city building in Johannes-
burg after apartheid (Schoonraad 2002; Dirsuweit 2009; Murray 2011, 109– 112).
New Urbanism, Post-Public Space and the Ambient Power of Seduction
Put broadly, the privatization of public space, and the accompanying
commercialization of the public realm, has produced new types of administered
space in cities, variously referred to as privatized public space, quasi-public space,
pseudo-public space, post-liberal space or post-public space. In trying to account
for the exclusionary logics regulating access to, and the use of, these packaged
built environments, an entirely new vocabulary—domestication, purification,
militarization, pacification, Disneyification, revanchism etc.—has come into play.
As John Allen has persuasively argued, great deal of conventional thinking
suggests that the exercise of power in these post-public or privatized public spaces
“has to rest ultimately on some form of domination, where the choice over who
enters is constrained by certain kinds of watchful power or discriminating rules of
entry” (Allen 2006, 443). This type of dominating power is usually equated with
the marked presence of physical barriers, visible policing and surveillance
technologies (Davis 1992; Christopherson 1994).
In general, such functionally specialized enclaves as citadel office complexes,
gated residential communities and enclosed residential precincts depend upon
narrowly fixed principles governing which people are the ‘authorized users’ and
which are not. Those who enter these carefully monitored (and highly regulated)
places are under no illusions about who is wanted or who is not. In order to
Figure 5. Melrose Arch at night
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maintain tight control over access and to monitor use, functionally specialized
enclaves typically rely on various types of filtered exclusion, where the exercise
of power works through the assemblage of walls, gates, barriers, electronic
monitoring systems and hard policing so that only the ‘right types’ of authorized
visitors are permitted to enter (Allen 2006, 443).
In contrast, themed entertainment sites, such as festival marketplaces,
enclosed shopping malls and glitzy ‘shoppertainment’ extravaganzas, depend for
their commercial success upon the staging of a certain type of accessibility,
inclusiveness and openness. The scripted nature of post-public, accessible spaces
that promote social congregation enables anonymous strangers to move freely
around the grounds, “yet unknowingly remain subject to a form of control that is
regularized, predictable, and far from chaotic” (Allen 2006, 443). Unlike the totally
contrived, artificial atmosphere and anesthetized, self-enclosed micro-worlds of
Disneyfied gambling casinos such as Montecasino or Gold Reef City, themed
entertainment sites such as Melrose Arch provide an experience of authentic
social mixing that is not merely illusory, but real (Huxtable 1997). There is a
genuine invitation to mingle, circulate and inhabit the space not as passive
consumers of ersatz spectacle and counterfeit imagery, but as active participants
in ‘experiencing the vibe’. Closure in these multi-functional sites relies upon
complex modes of power that are less obtrusive and more subtle than those
mechanisms of spatial control that monitor and regulate the use of space in
functionally specialized enclaves (Atkinson 2003).
As Allen argued, there is more to the exercise of power in commercial
post-public places than the exclusionary logics of physical barriers and visible
displays of authority. Closure in the types of post-public spaces that depend
upon staging a type of spatial openness is not just about domination but also
about seduction. The power of seduction works “through the experience of the
space itself”, through its ambient, sensory qualities of sights, sounds and smells
(Allen 2006, 442). Ambient power derives from the character of these post-public
spaces, where the spatial layout, aesthetically pleasing architecture and controlled
experience produce “a particular atmosphere, a specific mood, a certain feeling”
that together induce conformity with expected behaviour and action. The flowing,
‘open plan’ design of outside space evokes feelings of unrestricted, easily
navigable space, where the great variety of places offer a mix of activities and a
range of choices. Somewhat akin to the evocative metaphor of “pacification by
cappuccino” coined by Sharon Zukin (1995, 28), ambient power works through the
flexible powers of seduction rather than simply brute force, through persuasion
not strict regulation. The sensory qualities of these post-public places create an
‘economy of effect’ where the experience of the space itself, rather than
commodified objects per se, becomes that which is consumed (Allen 2006, 449;
Klingmann 2007). This logic of seduction effectively closes off options, restricts
choices and curtails possibilities, thereby “enticing visitors to circulate and interact
in ways that they not otherwise have chosen” (Allen 2006, 441).
If New Urbanism by definition promotes genuinely accessible public space
open to all, then Melrose Arch falls short of these expectations. Closure at themed
entertainment sites such as Melrose Arch depends upon a mixture of regulatory
mechanisms, combining the exclusionary power of domination with the
inclusionary power of ambience and seduction. All the trappings of an ‘excluding
power’ remain firmly in place, from the shadowy use of electronic surveillance
that monitors movement to the physical gates and barriers at the entryways that
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restrict entry. But control in these types of post-public, accessible space also works
through what Zukin and others have called the “domestication of space” (Zukin
1995, xiv; see Atkinson 2003; Low 2006). Closure is achieved through a seductive
type of inclusion rather than simply enforced exclusion. In making post-public
spaces attractive to ‘acceptable users’ but not to others, architects have ‘softened’
their features by eliminating hard edges and erasing uncertainty, designed out
indeterminate places, opening them to more sedate and relaxed forms of
recreation and leisure, while simultaneously monitoring these sites through a
range of largely surreptitious security measures. The staging of inclusiveness in
post-public spaces such as Melrose Arch cannot be reduced to manipulation and
deception, even though these play a part in the spectacle. Melrose Arch is not
Disneyworld. The openness and accessibility are real, just as the mechanisms of
closure and the constraints that accompany them. These post-public places are
“accessible yet closed, inclusive yet controlled” (Allen 2006, 442). The registers of
power that operate at Melrose Arch are more subtle, but no less insidious, than the
hard-edged policing and management of fortified enclaves (Allen 2006, 454).
Melrose Arch resembles what some scholars have called the ‘privately-
owned public space’. Owners and managers of ‘privately-owned public space’
can affect the use of, access to, and behaviour within these places by manipulating
legal, design and surveillance techniques to create more exclusive, less open and
accessible spaces (Mitchell 2003; Miller 2007). As such, the physical and spatial
characteristics send strong signals to potential users about who belongs and who
does not, thereby excluding unwanted people deemed ‘out of place’ (Sorkin 1992;
Kohn 2004; Ne
´meth 2009). Unlike the genuinely private spaces of gated residential
communities and enclosed shopping malls, social gathering places such as
Melrose Arch are increasingly complex, aesthetically pleasing and amenity-filled
urban spaces. However, they also tend to be more restrictive of access to the space
and more vigilant over what is acceptable behaviour within the space than is
immediately obvious to the casual observer. Paradoxically, these types of
post-public spaces are both more open and more closed, more inclusive and more
exclusive than exclusively privatized space. They can be appropriately
characterized as filtered spaces, seeking to attract only those users deemed
desirable or appropriate (Ne
´meth 2009; Schmidt, Ne
´meth, and Botsford 2011).
Privatized Planning and the Post-public City
In the greater Johannesburg metropolitan region, carving the urban landscape into
sequestered enclaves is one way to meet the criteria of ‘civilized urbanity’ that the
propertied middle classes have come to associate with progress and improvement
in the post-apartheid era. The serial replication of such ‘normalized enclosures’ as
faux-Italianate gambling casinos, enclosed shopping malls, recycled ‘historic
districts’ of invented cultural heritage, gentrified neighbourhoods for the affluent
and sequestered ‘urban villages’ have transformed the urban landscape into
collage-like assemblage of architectural spectacles and entertainment sites set
apart from the dystopian realities of derelict buildings, declining municipal
services, shrinking public spaces, deteriorating urban infrastructure, litter-strewn
streets, homeless encampments, sidewalk hawkers, youthful runaways, aban-
doned children, jobless vagabonds, petty thieves and criminal gangs (Boyer 1992,
191; Goldberger 1977, 257; Murray 2008b).
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Since the end of apartheid and the transition to parliamentary democracy,
there has been a steady increase in the number of new (self-contained) urban
villages consisting of mixed-use facilities, such as office complexes, residential
accommodation, retail stores, lifestyle centres, both indoor and outdoor
recreational activities, and even medical clinics and private schools, all located
in a single, secure and enclosed environment in cities in South Africa. For the real
estate developers who build them and the advertising and marketing agents who
sell them, it is no surprise that security-conscious business tenants and middle-
class homeowners have embraced this type of urbanism which combines a
truncated variation of New Urban principles with the fortress-like features of the
security estate (Hook and Vrdoljak 2002). With the prospects for a significant
reduction in crime and for improved public policing at best a remote possibility,
real estate developers and marketing agencies have actively promoted these types
of self-contained, hybrid villages in the heart of suburbia as the wave of the future
for South Africa. For relatively affluent South Africans, unsettled by many years of
exposure to high levels of crime, mixed-use developments that bring together
office buildings, retail shopping and residential accommodation in one location
offer opportunities for homeowners to work, shop and play without venturing
outside the confines of their secure ‘urban village’.
In imagining the construction of the built-form after apartheid, middle-class
aesthetic sensibilities have proven themselves remarkably resilient and adaptable,
able to deftly jettison the outmoded, racially-coded governance principles of the
apartheid cityscape and to adopt new mechanisms of social exclusion and spatial
management. The proliferation of such ‘utopias in miniature’ signals a retreat from
active, critical engagement with actually existing cities, and an insularity born from
a loss of faith in the possibility in securing the type of vibrant urbanity defined by
the vitality of public space, the sociability of crowds and the liveliness of the
streetscape. Dwarfed by the sheer scale of the new urban phantasmagoria and
stifled by lack of attention, public space as a meaningful arena of civic interaction,
chance encounter and face-to-face sociability has gradually slipped into decline. By
offering no real alternative to the flattened, one-dimensional, all-absorbing
presentism embodied in consumer culture, the steady accretion of ‘utopias in
Figure 6. Post-public space
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miniature’ work to “instantiate rather than critique” the existing state of affairs
(Harvey 2000, 168). Their presence suggests complacency, resignation and
withdrawal into privatized enclaves at exactly the moment when the newly
enfranchised black citizens have been able to claim the public realm of the cityscape
as their own. This philosophical ‘new realism’ signals a collective willingness to
reach accommodation with the status quo (Boyer 1994b, 474; Pinder 2002, 235, 236 –
237). In the face of practical constraints of financing and profitability, the doctrinal
purity of New Urbanism invariably gives way to compromise mixed with
subterfuge. Self-styled but deeply flawed New Urbanist experiments such as
Melrose Arch represent “less a journey to a safe and stable new world than a
complex negotiation of a deeply divided present” (Beauregard 2002, 182).
The construction of such post-public, social gathering places as Melrose Arch
underscores the extent to which privately-planned spaces of consumption have
assumed a prominent place in city building in Johannesburg after apartheid.AsGavin
Shatkin (2008, 384) argued, one defining characteristic of urban development on a
world scale is “the unprecedented privatization of urban and regional planning”. In
aspiring world class cities everywhere, private real estate developers have acquired
far-reaching, discretionary planning powers that enable them to insert huge com-
mercially-oriented megaprojects into the urban social fabric without little regard to
their overall consequences for sprawl or densities, for traffic patterns and congestion,
and for added burdens to existing infrastructure and services. By becoming facilitators
for private business initiatives, municipal planning agencies have effectively
abandoned the once dominant idea of public purpose. The mantra of public-private
partnerships provides a ready justification for giving real estate developers carte
blanche powers to build master-planned enclaves that enable middle-class urban
residents to retreat behind walls, gates and barriers. This transfer of planning autho-
rities to real estate developers is premised on the widely-held view that private
enterprise is more capable than municipal authorities in not only defining the public
interest but in creating the types of places that can realize it (Shatkin 2008, 398). The
steady accretion of fortified enclaves scattered across the urban landscape is sympto-
matic of the logic governing the evolution of the hypermodern city, an ethos which
privileges the spatial partitioning of the cityscape into one ‘showcase’ enclave after
another over the maintenance of open public gathering places (Murray 2008b, 3, 27, 35).
New Urbanist architects and designers portray neo-traditional townscapes
and urban villages as good places to live by distinguishing them from the
deadening sterility of single-use residential suburbs and the unknown dangers of
blighted central cities. Through a combination of Edenic myths, nostalgic histories,
claims to environmental sustainability and green marketing, New Urbanist practi-
tioners have gained legitimacy as ‘heroic’ visionaries battling against contempor-
ary building practices through their aesthetically-pleasing designs for sustainable,
healthy and inclusive communities in an otherwise alienating and uncertain
present. Yet these efforts to promote a return to a simpler time and place—
communicated through place-based nostalgic images of an idealized European
urban village and skillfully crafted branding campaigns—merely reinforce existing
social geographies of otherness (Wilson 1990; Falconer Al-Hindi and Staddon 1997;
Falconer Al-Hindi 2001; Till 2001; Till and Falconer Al-Hindi 2001; Saab 2007).
With its stress on urban spectacle as the driving force behind spaces of
consumption, New Urbanist precincts such as Melrose Arch form an integral part of
the ‘experience economy’ that combines entrepreneurial capital with symbolic
representations (Klingmann 2007). What underpins the New Urbanist promise of
138 M. J. Murray
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vibrancy and diversity are strictly monitored security regimes that include visible
checkpoints at all entryways and exits, a blanket of CCTV surveillance and private
policing. As spatial niches that shape the experience of the city, privately-planned
spaces such as Melrose Arch have become post-public substitutes for the types of
genuine public spaces in Johannesburg that have fallen out of favour due to
abandonment, neglect and the perceived threat of risk and danger. Despite the quasi-
populist rhetoric of improving urban life by designing inviting social space, the
trendy ambience of experiments with the New Urbanism reproduces class
differentiation by excluding marginal people such as street traders, the homeless,
runaway children and panhandlers (Goldberger 1996, 136– 137; Zimmerman 2001).
New Urbanism assembles much of its rhetorical force through a nostalgic
appeal to ‘community’, inclusiveness and diversity as welcome panaceas for what
has gone wrong with contemporary city-building efforts. Yet these terms are as
ambiguous as they are muddled (Hall 1998; Beauregard 2002). They are typically
employed as elitist categories of aesthetic judgement that reflect more subjective
sensibilities and desires of financially secure consumers than the objective traits of
particular places. Inserted into wider discourses about safe and secure
environments in the ‘good city’, these terms can easily become weapons for
claiming the right to exclude those who do not ‘perform’ their prescribed roles as
leisurely strollers with middle-class tastes in the intricately choreographed display
of conspicuous consumption. The words and images that accompany the vision of
cities as collections of ‘urban villages’ create a language that embodies the desire
for comfortable, risk-free and aesthetically pleasing spaces closed off from the
grittiness of actual urban life. In projecting their image of quality urbanism, city
boosters alternate between two tropes: on the one hand, proclaiming their faith that
creating wealth for a few will eventually trickle down to benefit the many; and on
the other, associating low-income urban residents with the distasteful features of
urban life. In this sense, they engage in a type of collective amnesia and clever
sleight of hand, “persuading us that consuming the authentic city has everything
to do with aesthetics and nothing to do with power” (Zukin 2009, 551).
Under circumstances where significant numbers of impoverished or nearly
impoverished urban-dwellers simply do not have themonetary means to consume at
Melrose Arch, these high-sounding invocations of community, inclusiveness and
diversity ring hollow. Themed entertainment sites such as Melrose Arch offer a type
of sanitized, air-brushed patina that covers over the sometimes grim realities of the
everyday urbanism of ordinary people (who literally struggle to survive) with a
cultural dream-form of cosmopolitan internationalism. The corporate developers of
Melrose Arch boast that they have created a people-oriented place that fosters social
mixing and conviviality. But this one-of-a-kind enclosed space is not so much an
actual place that reflects the full range of urban life as a style of display, but a type of
carefully crafted merchandizing opportunity and ‘entertainment machine’ (Lloyd
and Clark 2001). At the end of the day, the social amenities at Melrose Arch are
organized around the interests, desires and preferences of a free-floating and
unattachedcommunity of affluent consumers (Harvey 1997, 68; Upton 2000, 64– 67).
According to one critic, the Melrose Arch precinct “is not a real city as it excludes all
but the very rich. It is similar to suburban security estates in that it is an enclave based
on ‘lifestyles’” (Schoonraad 2002, 44). In erecting both physical and semiotic barriers
to protect its own blinkered version of civic-minded urbanism, Melrose Arch
promotes “an exclusionary sense of social cohesion and community identity” that
does little to challenge the status quo (Till 1993, 729). As a consequence, it merely
The Quandary of Post-Public Space 139
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reinforces the socio-spatial divisions that have remained embedded in the urban
fabric of Johannesburg after apartheid (Schoonraad 2002, 44; Bremner 2005).
Notes
1. The author’s thoughts about New Urbanism benefited from conversations with Doug Kelbaugh
and Robert Fishman (both at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of
Michigan). The ideas and argument expressed here are those of the author alone.
2. The ideas for this paper are grounded in numerous on-site visits to Melrose Arch, starting in May
2006 and ending in July 2011.
3. Often referred to as ‘the richest square mile in Africa’, Sandton is primus inter pares in a galaxy of
edge cities, commercial nodal points and business ‘growth points’ that have blossomed, starting in
the 1970s, in the vast suburban belt to the north of the historic downtown core of Johannesburg
(Bremner 2005).
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