Vortrag: Urban entropy and socio-natural temporalities in post-apartheid Johanne

Vortrag von Jeremy Foster, Lanschaftsarchitekt, Cornell University, im Rahmen der Vortragsreihe “We built this City” am Institut für Kunst und Architektur im Sommersemester 2009.
Urban entropy and socio-natural temporalities in post-apartheid Johannesburg

In Johannesburg, the social, economic and morphological legacies of the apartheid years have collided with the effects of economic deregulation and uncontrolled in-migration to challenge conventional ways of thinking about urban development and rights to the city. Unprecedented levels of poverty, crime and urban decay have eroded the shared public realm, and common cultural referents have been replaced by a multiplicity of expectations and spatialities. This seeming “collapse of urbanity” has been exacerbated by Joburg’s illegible cityscape, characterized by a lack of distinctive natural features, and a frequently-reconstructed built fabric stemming from its history as a center of mining capitalism. The heterogeneity of memories at work today in Joburg mean that nurturing citizens identification with the city requires more than equal access to housing, services and infrastructure, and memory places celebrating the “rainbow nation”. Sola-Morales’ landscape construct of the terrain vague, which mediates both estrangement and hope, offers a way of reconstruing the unbuilt spaces of this historically-divided but ahistorical city as a “memory-scape” that integrates a spectrum of socio-natures, and introduces a sense of temporality absent from the built environment.

Jeremy Foster is trained as an architect and landscape architect, and
holds a PhD. in Human Geography from the University of London. He has practiced architecture in South Africa and landscape architecture in the US, and has taught architecture, landscape architecture and urban design at the universities of Pennsylvania and Virginia, at Virginia Tech, and since 2003, at Cornell. His design studios have addressed the interpretation of contested natural/cultural landscapes; questions of context, locale and place-identity; infrastructural and ecological change in urban contexts; and the relationship between media, public space and urban identity. His research and teaching interests include the history and theory of landscapes, cities and built environments; the role of socio-spatial practices in shaping urban identities; the relationship between visual culture and geographical imagination; and the urbanism of displacement (ie colonialism, post-colonialism, and diaspora). Jeremy has published several articles on the role of ideologies and representational practices in the cultural construction of landscapes. His book “Washed with Sun: Landscape & the Making of White South Africa” recently came out from University of Pittsburgh Press.