Walk into any office and you can usually tell within seconds whether it wants you to collaborate or put your head down and work independently. The layout does the talking.
The same is true of any public space: we read the cues around us to figure out who belongs, what's supposed to happen there and how we're meant to behave. Our physical environments influence how creative, interactive or safe we feel — and in turn, the stories we tell about a place influence our perception of said place.
When we think about inner-city Johannesburg, the buildings carry decades of history, memory and socio-political meaning. While the physical condition of space matters, so does the meaning people attach to it. What's interesting is how those two things inform each other.
Take a neglected façade, it's never just about peeling paint. A crumbling exterior confirms something people already suspect: that the area has been abandoned, that no one's looking after it, that it isn't worth their time. That belief has consequences: it shapes who walks in, who invests, who sticks around long enough to bring the place back to life — and who simply keeps driving.
So, does the building break down first or is it peoples reaffirming beliefs that allow neglect to take root? The answer is a little more complicated than one or the other, and the restorative community work in Johannesburg's inner-city speaks to this.
This past Sunday, 13 September, the Ponte Stairs Challenge turned one of Johannesburg's most recognisable towers into an endurance course, with participants climbing 948 stairs to the top of the building in support of Dlala Nje's community work in Berea and Hillbrow.
Every person who took on those stairs chose to step into a building that carries a complicated public history of decline. These decisions do a lot more than change the exterior of the place, it affects how the space is experienced and who is doing the experiencing.
The Barbican tells a similar story. Built in 1931 on the corner of Rissik and President street (now Helen Joseph), it spent decades as one of the inner-city's saddest landmarks with stripped floors, shattered windows and standing essentially empty for more than ten years.
Then property developer Michael Ciani and architect Brian McKechnie took it on, choosing restoration over renovation — salvaging old flooring and furniture as opposed to replacing it with something new and erasing the building's past. Bridge Books has moved back into the ground floor, fashion designer David Tlale has brought his studio and academy into the middle levels, and a restored penthouse now sits at the top.
This restoration is less a superficial redesign than an attempt to let culture, education, entrepreneurship and community coexist under one roof again.
Research into Johannesburg's public spaces consistently raises this point: papering over Johannesburg's public spaces does little to bridge the city's deeper socio-spatial divides. A new façade on its own doesn't produce a new public perception — because, although how a space is created prescribes its use, meaning isn't automatically attached to a building's surface. That builds over years, through use, memory and association.
If that's how meaning gets made, then changing it requires people to encounter these spaces differently, not just look at them differently.
Improving infrastructure alone won't rewrit Johannesburg's inner-city narrative — it requires reasons for people to experience it in a new way. Driven by prominent community members like the ones mentioned above, that shift is already happening from the ground up.
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*Image courtesy of Canva and Facebook
**Information sourced from The Citizen, Elsevier, media update, Good Things Guy, Financial Mail, and Dlala Nje