Johannesburg street blast underlines urban decay in 'New York of Africa’

The tired young woman was at the end of her day and near the end of her patience, just one of a horde of people all pushing their way home, dodging heavy traffic and weaving around street vendors on one of Johannesburg's busiest inner-city streets, when the ground shook and then opened up in front of her, tossing vehicles, people and stalls around like children's toys.

The suspected gas explosion that last week tore a three-block chasm in Bree Street, literally in the heart of Johannesburg, killed one person and injured about 50.

That toll was described by metro officials as "relatively light" given the force of the blast and the damage it caused - including the destruction of scores of matatu minibus taxis, which are the means of transport for most people in Johannesburg, dubbed the "New York of Africa".

The blast was so powerful that some matatus filled with commuters ended up on top of each other.

With a gorge in the road up to two metres wide in places, the explosion and the destruction it caused brought Johannesburg's notoriously heavy rush-hour traffic to a standstill.

Witnesses reported hearing a loud explosion and seeing vehicles flying through the air.

"I thought I was going to die," said the shocked young woman, who saw the road detonate like an exploding volcano before her eyes.

Too shocked to speak, the unidentified witness was among dozens of others taken to hospital to be examined for internal injuries after being thrown into the air by the underground explosion.

In a world where much bigger disasters happen every day, the incident was a blip on the screen for most Africans.

But for Johannesburg, nicknamed Jozi by its residents, who often report a love-hate relationship with Africa's most developed and richest megalopolis, it was a stark reminder that 140 years after it mushroomed from a tent city housing alluvial gold miners, the city is in desperate need of a major infrastructure — and socio-economic — renewal programme.

On one level, this is to be expected, as every major urban centre in history has had to redevelop itself, sometimes several times, as in Cairo, Rome or Athens, as the initial infrastructure installed during their initial growth becomes worn out and outstripped by the needs of the burgeoning population.

The Johannesburg metro authorities know this, and have embarked on a programme of urban renewal and infrastructure upgrading and maintenance.

But circumstances are working against such planning, including politics, in the form of repeated rounds of 'musical chairs in the mayor's chambers', as one wag put it, commenting on the city's seethingly unstable governing body, where no political party has complete control and shifting alliances see regular upheavals of who is in charge.

Indeed, just like New York, Jozi is suffering from urban decay and socio-economic dislocation very similar to what that great American city went through in the 1970s and 1980s.

A visit to Time Square in central New York at the height of the decay was a high-risk adventure that could easily include mugging, pickpocketing and even murder in broad daylight, while nearby densely populated Harlem, famous for its basketball showmasters the Harlem Globetrotters, was far more dangerous.

There are parts of Jozi, two decades into the 21st century, that are every bit as dangerous as New York ever was — even during that city's bloody engagement with numerous organised gangs in the late 19th century, as depicted in the Leonardo DiCaprio film Gangs of New York.

Hillbrow, which, as the name suggests, sits on a small hill about a kilometre from the Jozi CBD, is a high-density central urban area, once popular with students from the nearby University of the Witwatersrand, but these days an overpopulated perpetual danger zone, even for savvy locals who know which corners, streets and buildings to avoid.

Nearby Yeoville, also once a student and artsy neighbourhood that still retains some of that ambience, has become overrun with murderous types, many not from South Africa, but making their way in a harsh new world where only the quick and well-armed are relatively safe.

Wedged roughly between Yeoville and Hillbrow is Berea, once made up mainly of large middle-class apartment blocks, but now, along with these two neighbouring districts and four other adjoining areas, the scene of a peculiarly South African crime — the hijacking of entire buildings by organised gangs.

These buildings, which were already old and dilapidated, had become increasingly unattractive to those who used to live or run businesses there throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s.

Initially, some buildings, abandoned as too expensive to repair, upgrade and pay rates on, were occupied by the homeless and criminals.

Then, at the turn of the 21st century, what started as a few buildings became a rapidly growing number.

At the latest count, authorities say an audit has revealed at least 500 'bad' buildings in the central business district (CBD), revealing not only how much rebuilding needs to be done, with many beyond economic repair, but also how far the city has fallen into the cycle of deterioration and decay, with at least 134 whole buildings illegally occupied, taken over and now used as criminal hubs.

The decay extends outwards from the CBD, northwards into the once 'whites only' leafy and plush suburbs, where potholes can be as impassable as in the high density suburbs such as Soweto in the south, once a 'blacks only' area, where roads and other amenities have always seemed almost incidental to city management.

As the Bree Street gas explosion revealed to the naked eye, the city's underground systems — the bones and nerves of these man-made concentrations of activity called modern metros —are in advanced decline.

Tens of thousands of kilometres of sewage, gas, electricity, telephone and ITC lines, along with ancillary underground structures, are in need of replacement, while road surfaces in many suburbs are increasingly deteriorating.

The city centre itself has undergone much upgrading — some of which was undone by last week's gas explosion — after years of neglect.

But outside the CBD, Johannesburg is a city on the slide towards urban decay, just as the New York of the late 1980s was.

There, a "no broken windows" policy that prevented authorities from turning a blind eye to problems, along with a lot of tough policing and a lot of redevelopment money, turned that megalopolis around.

In today's Jozi, it seems, there is not enough of anything to turn the city around — certainly not enough money, not enough skills in areas such as engineering, and not enough time to fix everything that needs fixing.

Many who once lived in Johannesburg and loved it despite its drawbacks, including heavy smog, constant traffic and high crime, have left for places like Cape Town, convinced that what was once their home is fast becoming the equivalent of a giant film set, suitable for shooting zombie and other apocalypse scenes, but not much else.

The unanswered question is whether the 'New York of Africa' can pull off the same self-renewal trick that the Big Apple has done more than once.