Reinventing the Johannesburg inner city

After the discovery of the Witwatersrand gold reef in 1886, the city of Johannesburg became, within a very short period of time, the financial and commercial hub of sub-Saharan Africa. It maintained this position throughout the earlier half of the twentieth century in the face of increasing opposition to the apartheid political system. By the late 1980s, however, this had changed. The restructuring of the global economy and increasing political pressure had resulted in a city whose economic base was declining and in which the social and economic exclusion upon which it had been built,vas no longer sustainable. This resulted in successive attempts by the urban authorities to reinvent a city which could claim a position in the mainstream global economy and become a city all its citizens could feel part of. This paper sketches these attempts, locates them in certain traditions of urban regeneration and exposes their theoretical and practical inadequacies. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.