The CBD is often dismissed as chaotic, but with efficient services, vibrant street vendors and working infrastructure, there's proof it can still thrive.
On Saturday, fans turned out in their tens of thousands to enjoy the rugby at Ellis Park.
Many would have used Gautrain, a wonderful example of a public private partnership – and then transitioned seamlessly onto a Prasa-operated train that would have deposited them straight outside the stadium.
It’s enough to make you weep that we should be even reading that with wonder, but there you are. We’re congratulating fish for swimming.
It is precisely the integration between Gautrain and Metrorail that will save Ellis Park Stadium, because parking there is a nightmare – and then you have to make it out past all the tour buses and e-hailing taxis to leave at the end.
But it’s not the only thing that works in the city, that public opinion tries to tell you otherwise – aided and abetted by the efforts of some of our elected officials to serve themselves, rather than the ratepayers.
The department of home affairs’ Johannesburg office in Harrison Street is a wonderful case in point.
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Parking requires some illicit private partnerships with self-appointed marshals doubling as the usual touts and there’s still a queue outside like other home affairs offices, but the street vendors; from the amagwinya (fat cakes) and cool drink sellers to the Heath Robinson baristas with flasks of hot water and tins of Frisco, provide a better service than you’ll find elsewhere.
Inside is where it all comes together; one hall, properly managed by a home affairs greeter, plenty of staff, queues that move in literally a fraction of the time you’d spend doing the buttock shuffle on the silver chairs in Randburg – if you’ve managed to queue outside the correct little pondokkie among the collection that make up hatches, matches, dispatches and IDs/passports.
Harrison Street home affairs has always been one of my favourites, even if it does look like something straight out of the set of The Walking Dead.
It works and it works well, but far too few of us denizens of the northern suburbs can get past the popular hype of the CBD as the 21st-century edition of Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness.
There’s a lot going for the CBD, whether it is getting vital documents or witnessing a great game of rugby, but the longer we rely on others to fix it for us, the poorer we will be.
We need to reclaim our space and make it work.
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