Of course, I read this with great regret and sadness, because it’s my home town being written off:
Johannesburg: The slow death of a city that may have outlived its purpose
Johannesburg is in an advanced state of decay, destruction, ruin, crime, waste, and all of it seems, sometimes, like a mirror image of South African society. We grieve over the once-great city in a veritable cult of grief.
But we are too afraid to look in the mirror because our vanity overwhelms our misery — we are, after all, a great people, and a great people we have to remain…
In and around the city, the families and communities in its suburbs and on the periphery are struggling to live full lives. As days and weeks go by, the denizens are losing reason to value their surroundings. The taps run dry frequently, energy supply is interrupted regularly, flagship institutions, and all those little things like roads, pavements, pedestrian crossings, traffic signs, road signs and robots are bleeding like wounds that will not heal on a body in terminal decline.
The city is depleted, and lacking in the nutrients and the energy necessary to bring it back to full functionality.
We can point, as we may, to mismanagement, maladministration, lack of planning, a lack of foresight and vision. We can, also, consider Johannesburg as a city that has reached the end of its natural life and is approaching the end of its purpose.
Johannesburg, as we came to know it, was established by European settler colonists in about 1886 for the sole purpose of exploiting the gold buried in the rocks below. Those gold deposits are finite. If it’s not entirely finite, mining it is becoming more expensive, while demand may well increase.
Yeah, what the hell. It’s just a shell of a place, an aggregation of concrete, glass and tarmac: it’s too difficult to govern or manage, so why bother?
One might also say the same thing about Manhattan or Los Angeles. In fact, one might say the same thing about all the major cities of the world, where concentration of the population has become too difficult and in most cases, too dangerous.
So let the animals take over and feast on the bones. And when the bones are gone and the animals need to go further afield to survive… then what?
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I think it’s time to go to the range.