Universities, revive Joburg's hippest 'hood

Mail & Guardian

3 days ago

(Graphic: John McCann/M&G)
Melville, once declared one of the world's hippest neighbourhoods, is in serious decline. The suburb is an important asset to our academic life and must be restored.
I often host students and faculty from universities in Europe and the US. For a long time, Melville was the automatic place for academic visitors, professors and students to visit and stay while passing through Johannesburg.
Located next to the University of the Witwatersrand, one of our two great universities, as well as the up-and-coming University of Johannesburg (UJ), Melville has long provided a convivial environment for academics and post-graduate visitors. In 2020, just five years ago, Time Out magazine ranked Melville as one of the 40 coolest neighbourhoods in the world.
Academic travel matters, and academics want to enjoy their experience of travel. For decades Melville, buzzing with coffee shops, restaurants, live music venues, galleries and a very good second-hand bookshop provided exactly what academics and post-graduate students needed to enjoy their time in Johannesburg.
The turn to Zoom during Covid has reduced academic travel quite a bit, but spending two days on Zoom rather than travelling for a conference is a painful and vastly less rewarding experience.
Melville was hit hard by the Covid lockdown though, and has been hit just as hard by the general collapse in the functioning of the Johannesburg municipality.
Many of the restaurants on the once world-famous 7th Street shut down during the lockdown and many of the buildings on the strip remain empty. If there had been some vision to support the strip, understanding it as a wider asset to the city, and the country, this could have been avoided.
Driving into Melville recently with a group of students and academics was a depressing experience. Coming up Main Road, which divides Melville and Westdene, is bleak.
There are three large holes, which are so big they cannot be described as potholes, on Main Road that have been left unattended for months — aside from placing a plastic barrier in front of them.
Some of the shopkeepers dump their refuse on the pavement next to the pedestrian litter bins rather than keeping it for the weekly refuse collection.
The homeless people on Main Road, many struggling with addiction, live in squalor and the lack of public toilets has inevitable consequences.
Uber and delivery drivers face the same lack of access to toilets with the same unfortunate results.
Turning into Melville itself is no less disheartening. Streets no longer have working lights, there are a couple of abandoned and looted or vandalised houses, and some of the electricity poles have a mess of dangling wires, some live.
Around the suburb piles of rubble have been left on the pavements after work done by Egoli Gas and various arms of the municipality. It seems that it is no longer expected that rubble will be removed after maintenance work alongside the streets.
The 7th Street strip, with its many empty buildings, has large ditches filled with sand at each end. They have also been there for months.
On the corner of 3rd Avenue and 7th Street, part of the road has been left in a dug-up state and with a pile of rubble sitting on the road. It too has been like this for months.
Private property owners are beginning to do the same. On the corner of 2nd Avenue and 7th Street a homeowner has left two large piles of building rubble on the pavement for months.
A slow water leak has been trickling down 7th Street for months. There are no drain covers on the strip. This is unsightly and a hazard for pedestrians. The road markings have long faded away. Anyone on the strip who looks like they may have some money is immediately accosted by desperate people trying to get a few rand.
Water outages are common in the area, sometimes going on for as long as two weeks. There are also occasional electricity outages that can go on for days. This makes things very difficult for the owners of the B&Bs that remain in the neighbourhood, as well as the surviving restaurants and other businesses.
Driving out of Melville on 9th Street towards Parkview, a suburb that remains in good nick, there are more piles of rubble on the pavements and more deep holes in the road. As on Main Road, both the rubble and the holes have been left for months.
It is not immediately clear why nearby suburbs such as Parkview, Greenside and Parkhurst are in a good condition while Melville is in decay.
An academic neighbourhood requires a good bookshop and, thankfully, the good second-hand bookshop on the Melville strip endures, but it's no longer open in the evenings. There are some signs of new life after the devastation of the lockdown though. De Baba, a new bakery and coffee shop at the bottom of the strip is always buzzing.
On the other side of the road there's a new and very hip coffee shop, Sourcery. It would fit right into Brooklyn, New York, and is perfect for an arty and academic neighbourhood like Melville. A vinyl-obsessed friend tells me that the music selection is extraordinary. Unfortunately, Sourcery seems empty most of the time. The same is true of Arturo, an excellent and equally hip African Latin-American fusion restaurant further on up the strip.
Some of the problems faced by Melville are a result of South Africa's wider social crisis. For as long as we face catastrophic levels of unemployment people will be forced to live on the streets. The heroin epidemic is also a national problem. Although the municipality can take some steps to ameliorate some of the consequences of these problems it cannot fix them.
But much of the sad state of Melville is a result of the failures of the municipality. Some of these failures could be resolved in a single day. Light bulbs could be installed on the street lights, the large holes on Main Street, 7th Street and 9th Street could be fixed, the rubble left along the pavements could be removed, the water leak on 7th Street could be attended to and the road markings redone.
The private businesses dumping their waste alongside the pedestrian bins on Main Road could be fined, as could the private homeowner who has left piles of building rubble on the corner of 2nd Avenue.
Other issues that fall within the remit of the municipality, such as the failure to provide public toilets on Main Road, cannot be resolved in a day, but with some vision and energy they could be resolved in a few months.
Getting the water and electricity systems functional is a much bigger project but is also something that can be achieved with the right commitment. The abandoned properties, with at least one house stripped to nothing but its walls, should be expropriated and sold, with the money invested into regeneration projects.
There should also be active support, including subsidies, for art galleries and live music venues. All the world's great cities actively support cultural life and the same should be done in Johannesburg. Again, this is something that would, even with the right vision and commitment, take at least a few months to kick into gear.
When Melville was the vibrant and world-regarded home to Johannesburg's arty and academic scene it was a major asset to the city. It was an asset to the city's residents, and to visitors to the city, including its wider tourism economy. Melville was also an important asset to the city's two universities, making visits by academics and post-graduate students from elsewhere in the country and abroad an enriching and fun experience.
There is scant hope that the municipality will, on its own, take the initiative to act to restore Melville to what it once was and can easily be again.
Universities are powerful institutions in society; Wits University and UJ should lobby the municipality to act to restore Melville as one of the world's great academic neighbourhoods. A well maintained and vibrant Melville would be a boon for the city.
With the right commitment it would only take a single day to begin to turn things around.
Dr Imraan Buccus is a research fellow at the University of the Free State and the Auwal Socioeconomic Research Institute, ASRI.