The Drama of Hospitality: Performance, Migration, and Urban Renewal in Johannesburg

Abstract

The agents I mention above include arts organizations Joubert Park Project and Trinity Session, as well as the public city agency Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA); their projects include Hillbrow/Dakar/Hillbrow, Pedestrian Poetry, and Welcome to our Hillbrow. Artists and activists have harnessed public and private resources in works that combine artistry and planning, play and productivity, and imaginative performance with acts of urban civility in a city that has been notorious for violent crime and a pervasive indifference to civil responsibility. These events are formal in that they choreograph particular acts and actions in specific sites, and productive in so far as artists work with planners to effect new spatial practices and reshape the urban forms that accommodate them. They are significant because they attempt to change the built environment and the social as well as aesthetic experience of participants in urban life, and to include as participants both South African citizens and migrants who live in inner-city Johannesburg. In the nearly two decades since the post-apartheid era officially began in 1994, the interventions of planners and artists have changed the former central business district (CBD) into a central administration district (CAD) made up of government, corporate, and cultural precincts.

In the dead of night an artist paints pedestrian crossings across an otherwise dangerous inner-city street and writes in them slogans like ‘to cross is to transact’ and ‘these are bridgeable divides’; by day, informal guards use these crossings to compel taxi drivers to pause for pedestrians. On a different occasion, two local white men, urged by black immigrants to turn back at the threshold of a district inhabited largely by migrants, use the process of documenting the immigrants’ journeys as an opportunity to lead other locals back into the inner city they had abandoned. A consortium of local and international artists, artisans, architects, planners, tour guides and their apprentices create a festival that combines art, performance, manufacture, and social mobilization to transform work and play into what might be called a ‘drama of hospitality’.