Wits City Institute Seminar
Never Modern: High-rise Housing and Race in 1950s Johannesburg
Wits City Institute Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Jonathan Cane presented his up-coming chapter ‘Never Modern: High-rise Housing and Race in 1950s Johannesburg’ in The Wits Anthropology Museum.
Friday 20 April / 13.00-14.30 Anthropology Museum, Robert Sobukwe Block
Presenter: Jonathan Cane
Discussant: Margot Rubin
Image Credit: D. M. Calderwood, NE 51/9, Native Housing in South Africa (1953)

In 1996 the Housing Generator launched a competition to design post-apartheid housing for the “New South African City.” On the cover of its “Overture” publication, an illustration showing a row of three identical houses—like children’s drawings or computer-generated wingding houses—bore an unmistakable resemblance to the ‘matchbox’ houses which had come to dominate Black residential areas since the middle of the twentieth century. Unlike practically every other country in the world (Urban 2012), South Africa explicitly rejected high-rise housing for the poor and instead favoured single-storey detached houses. One specific design, the NE51 (Non-European 1951) by D.M. Calderwood, became the basis for planning modern housing on behalf of the so-called ‘urban Native’. Modular, rational and replicable, the NE51 system was ultra-modern and yet, as David Dewar argues in his Housing Generator essay, it was “strongly anti-urban” (1996: 82). What is perhaps even more peculiar than South African’s rejection of low-cost high-rise housing has been the persistence of the matchbox—as a typology, a preference and an ideology—even after the end of apartheid. There is a great irony that the housing stock built under the framework of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) has reproduced the low-density segregation of apartheid, except, it is sometimes argued, in even lower quality and less generous proportion than before.
This research aims to address the seemingly interminable horizontality of low-cost housing by examining three discursive themes which have constrained vertical imaginaries and built propositions for the poor. The argument put forward is that Black urbanites have been constructed as heterosexual, provisional and, paradoxically, anti-urban. Through analysis of a Johannesburg-focused archive consisting of plans, legislation, dissertations, exhibitions, public presentations, industry publications and built environments, the chapter shows how planners and officials struggled to come to terms with Black urbanization and to imagine a place for Black lives in the city. By considering the ‘politics of verticality’, a novel set of theoretical questions is opened up: What do we learn when we ask questions about power and verticality, when we consider power at work through the vertical, especially in cases where the vertical is denied? Further, how does horizontality work to obscure the vertical problematic, what is occluded in that, what heights and depths, what ways of living?





