The historical fabrics of the Motor City and the City of Gold are not so different, say Terence McNamee and Madelynne Wage.
Johannesburg - When the city of Detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history last month, the earth didn’t move in Joburg. Not even a tremor. It was just another news story about a city that seemed as dissimilar in politics as it was distant on the map.
Yet the historical fabrics of the Motor City and the City of Gold are not so different. Both are largely defined by race and, as their nicknames attest, a single industry. Their legacies manifest in everything from racially-segregated neighbourhoods and poor public schools to abandoned factories and mine dumps.
Could Joburg collapse one day as dramatically as Detroit?
Twenty years ago it was moving in that direction. The city’s administration was in paralysis, unable to stem the tide of decay, lawlessness and capital flight out of the urban core.
Things are better today. Newfound political will allied to the determined efforts of developers and entrepreneurs is reviving the CBD. SA’s largest city and economic hub could have its best days ahead of it.
But that will partly depend on how the government addresses some of the perils – joblessness, inequality and corruption – which sank Detroit. The future of Joburg and swelling cities across Africa – the world’s most rapidly urbanising continent – lies in the balance.
Detroit’s rise in the first half of the 20th century was driven by the automotive industry’s “Big Three” – Chrysler, GM and Ford. In its heyday the industry provided workers with hard jobs but sizeable living wages. And auto employment was plentiful. Detroit made the American dream attainable for the newly arrived white immigrants, mainly from Eastern Europe, and blacks, many of whose forebears moved to the industrialising north after the Civil War.
By the 1950s, Detroit had become a worldwide hub of auto manufacturing and the US’s fourth largest city, with one of the country’s highest per-capita incomes.
That began to change when production techniques required auto factories to move out of the city and black workers were generally denied the opportunity to follow. Restrictive covenants, a type of neighbourhood agreement defining racial guidelines for property sales, blocked black land purchases in white areas.
As more affluent whites fled to the suburbs – a trend accelerated by Detroit’s race riots of the 1960s – poorer blacks would eventually become trapped beneath Detroit’s towering, unsustainable infrastructure. Today, African Americans account for 82.7 percent of the city’s population of about 700 000 – down from its mid-20th century high of 1.7 million – but only 14.2 percent of the state of Michigan’s. Those bound to Detroit by discriminatory practices found it difficult to access stable employment or accumulate wealth. Their children attended deteriorating, segregated schools. Crime rose. The city failed to attract new businesses. Detroit became a byword for urban misery.
The decline of the auto sector continues to sap the city. Well-paying auto jobs that require relatively little skill have dried up in the face of foreign competition. Detroit’s infrastructure to tax-base ratio is increasingly lopsided. And because the auto sector’s success had long reduced the emphasis on higher schooling, economic transitions away from manual labour are difficult for the city to manage.
But Detroit’s leadership held on to political power even as the city was drained of its finances and basic services provision virtually ceased.
Residents trapped in the city continued to elect governments that vowed to protect black interests. They had witnessed their own neighbourhoods demolished by the state to make room for freeways built so (overwhelmingly) white Detroiters could get to the suburbs more easily. Marginalised and embittered, city dwellers came to see the state and anyone other than “their own” as out to get them.
As the city’s government grew to symbolise “Detroit’s struggle”, corruption also grew. It reached its apogee in 2008 when Kwame Kilpatrick was forcibly removed as mayor. He was charged with two-dozen federal counts of corruption and bribery committed during his seven-year tenure.
When Kevin Orr, appointed emergency manager to get the city’s estimated $17 billion in liabilities under control, filed for Detroit’s bankruptcy on July 18, a raft of scarcely believable statistics flooded the media: more than 40 percent of Detroit’s residents lived in poverty, 47 percent were illiterate and the city was home to nearly 80 000 abandoned buildings.
The conservative American columnist George Will has controversially suggested the people of Detroit got what they deserved. “Well, what did they vote for? For 60 years, they voted for incompetents, malcontents and in some cases, criminals.”
Others have put the blame on market forces, portraying Detroit as a victim of deindustrialisation and an ever-changing economy that will inevitably, from time to time, produce some big losers.
Even if neither explanation seems wholly satisfactory, Joburg and other African cities must take heed.
All municipal governments are acutely aware of the dangers of urban sprawl, when businesses, skilled workers and money begin to desert the city centre. Crime often fills the vacuum, pushing yet more middle-class residents out of the city. What’s left is the city shell, occupied by mostly poor residents starved of basic services and with limited employment opportunities.
In the US, race is often deeply entwined in this process. But it is even more so in Joburg, where apartheid bequeathed even deeper racial segregation than restrictive covenants and so-called “red lining” in Detroit. Stark racial divisions lead to a dysfunctional urban system. Public transport in Joburg is a prime example. Planners are right to emphasise “transit-oriented development”, knitting the different parts of Joburg together through improved access and infrastructure, as central to the “2040 Strategy”.
Detroit’s failure to diversify its economy away from its traditional industrial sector bore extreme socio-economic consequences. Corruption and crime soared, deep pools of unemployment were created and schools were drained of teachers and resources.
Joburg is grappling to overcome similar challenges, although its record of diversification is far better than Detroit’s. The city originally built as a mining camp has become the financial and services centre of the region, if not the continent.
Nevertheless, the sheer size of Joburg – five times that of Detroit – and its service commitments impose an even greater need to innovatively tackle apartheid’s legacy and urban sprawl. The government also confronts the additional challenge of largely unregulated, pan-African migrant flows to the city.
Setting the right conditions for the private sector to grow and create jobs must be a priority.
Human capital development is essential. Detroit left itself unprepared for transitions in the global economy. Joburg’s economy will ossify, too, if it does not raise the standards in which most of its young people are educated and attract more skilled workers to the sectors that will drive the city’s future economic growth.
Another potent lesson from Detroit’s demise is the role of inequality.
The fact that societies with less inequality have much higher social mobility has long been established, but new research also suggests that the ability of the poor to rise is influenced by residential segregation – the more urban sprawl and people of different incomes living further apart, the less likely those at the bottom will be able to improve their circumstances.
Joburg is one of the most unequal cities in the world.
Other large cities in Africa – whose urban population is forecast to grow by 250 percent between 2000 and 2030 – also register high levels of inequality, as measured by the Gini co-efficient. This could mean a further expansion of Africa’s vast urban slums, which have emerged in inner cities and urban peripheries. Studies show that if most city residents are ensnared in unhealthy conditions, then productivity will suffer and markets won’t expand.
African cities – driven as they are by many complex, bottom-up dynamics – are sure to evolve in a different way to Detroit. But they, too, are enervated by a limited and fragile tax base. This makes it difficult for governments to raise the revenues necessary to maintain vital services and build new infrastructure. Many will struggle to remain solvent unless levels of funding from national treasuries are increased in line with rates of urbanisation.
Those stark challenges aside, the massive growth in Africa’s working-age urban population has spawned much talk of the “demographic dividend” – a boom period where the labour force is growing at a faster rate than the population that is dependent on it – which underpinned East Asia’s economic miracle.
Such potential can only be realised if Africa’s cities are stable and function efficiently. Throughout history, cities have been the main engines of growth and innovation for nations. Another reason why Detroit’s fall, for all its unique features, demands a closer look.
* Dr Terence McNamee is the Deputy Director and Madelynne Wager, a native of Michigan, is the Machel-Mandela Intern at the Brenthurst Foundation.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.
The Star