Great Expectations: thirteen years on from South Africa's first democratic elections, Matthew Barac considers the challenges confronting architects and urban designers in a country profoundly convulsed by the effects of social and political change.(comment)

Twelve years ago Catherine Slessor's introdction to the last AR devoted to South Africa was entitled 'Brave New World' (AR March 2005). In the 2006 catalogue for South Africa's contribution to the Venice Biennale, Peter Ahrends referred to apartheid's urban legacy as 'A Tale of Two Cities'. And in writing this essay, taking stock of South Africa's architecture and urbanism more than ten years after the advent of democracy, I have fallen back on another literary classic to convey the epic essence of the moment: Charles Dickens' Great Expectations.

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Sidestepping, for a moment, possible accusations of what Edward Said (1) would call 'cultural imperialism', it is worth noting that such a journalistic manoeuvre--that of translating events all around us into the larger stories we read and tell--is an ordinary human tendency Characters in the great works of fiction, whether in Dickens or in modern classics such Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, memorably weave their everyday lives into the political and cultural traffic of the times. In his writings on social change, Charles Wright Mills describes this intellectual act of explaining the world as a give and take between 'the personal troubles of milieu and the public issues of social structure'. (2)

Biography and history

In 1994 South Africa emerged from under the shadow of apartheid, marking the end of half a century of resistance--the 'freedom struggle'--in which so many unsung heroes suffered, fought and died. Nelson Mandela's autobiography, The Long Road to Freedom, tells of these events as a journey from darkness to light. Beneath this overarching modern-day myth of one man's heroism, ordinary people narrate their experiences and expectations of epochal change, thereby making sense of the changes affecting their lives. Poverty and prejudice sum up the historical experience of the black majority whose expectations, allied to the newly won right to vote, naturally focused on the realignment of their lifestyle with that enjoyed by most white people: with wealth and choice. Freedom, so politicians said, would bring equality. Unsurprisingly, those living in degraded environments looked forward to being equal and to the easier life that cars, homes, and cash would surely bring.

Such a story of everyday expectations dashed by disappointment is less of an oversimplification than one might suppose. Many of South Africa's poor have seen their poverty deepen, compounded by greater uncertainty and increasingly mysterious forms of fear. Nothing brings this home more concretely than the lack of fit between the idea of a harmonious 'new world' (famously dubbed the Rainbow Nation by Desmond Tutu) and the making-do (3) and soldiering-on of life in the townships--especially in sprawling shanty-towns at the periphery of every city. Freedom's initial euphoria gave way to inertia, as personal expectations were unmatched by the economic realities of political transformation and the implacable advance of Aids.

The tension between hope and loss--the hope that fuelled the 'struggle' and the loss of solidarity that …