Johannesburg From The Riverbanks

It is often remarked that Johannesburg is exceptional as a major city in that it has no large body of water. While it may be true that the city does not boast commercial harbours, busy canals, or navigable rivers, spruits and wetlands saturate the city, and are home to many of its non-human inhabitants. These have largely been overlooked as participants in the urbanization of Johannesburg despite shaping, and being shaped by, the city’s development. This book’s focus on the Jukskei river—in which some of the first gold was found on the Witwatersrand—invites a re-centering of waterways as a device to organize how we think about this baffling city.

The river, after all, runs past many notable features of Johannesburg’s landscape. Starting under Ellis Park (due to a lack of any environmental planning when the city was built), it first sees daylight in the poor urban neighborhood of Bertrams before flowing northwest to Hartbeespoort Dam, on the way passing through Alexandra township, Leeuwkop Prison, and the upscale gated estates of Waterfall, Dainfern, and Steyn City. This volume brings together a variety of activists, community members, journalists, artists, social scientists, and natural scientists to examine the relationship that Johannesburg has to the Jukskei. Centering the river as environmental, urban, socio-economic, political and cultural artefact from which to further understand Johannesburg offers an interdisciplinary approach to studying the human-environment interface. Such an exercise is crucial at a time when the urgency of climate change has made that interface especially volatile, and disciplinary distinctions untenable.

Urban rivers like the Jukskei, even if not especially useful to industry, are important in our collective socio-ecological efforts to live better together, in cities and with nature. This will be the first volume to critically consider the role of the river in the cultural, social, political and scientific life of the city of Johannesburg. As the main economic hub in the country, and indeed one of the main economic hubs on the continent, Johannesburg rightly garners a lot of critical and scholarly attention.

The Jukskei river, which not only runs through the city but emerges from beneath the weight of its concrete, is neglected not only by urban planning and the city’s inhabitants, but by critical theory and research. This book brings together a collection of writings from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, that navigate Johannesburg’s Jukskei.