By Taryn Cohn

Sandton Central is labeled as the “Richest Square Mile of Africa”.
It’s a district synonymous with Acquisition, Big business and rampant Consumerism

In a recent visit to find out more about their winning of a BASA Award for one of their public art programms (the Illumination Project- the “Why Men” by artist Usha Seejarim), what I found was an ethos that sees a very different set of ABC’s at work- Art, Big Brother and Community.
Johannesburgers fall into two groups. Those who get it, and those who don’t. Everyone has a few of both in their social circle, to be counted on to rehash the debate at every dinner party.

Those that don’t get it are the ones who can recite the entry requirements for Australia, Canada and good old London in such detail, and so often that you’d wish they had left already.

Those who get it are the people who can see through the intermittent darkness onto the other side of the congested, and sometimes collapsing roads to where the city is heading. Fortunately it seems that the latter are beginning to tip the scales in their favour.

Sandton Central is an area made up of three city improvement districts, that falls within the boundaries of Sandton Drive, Katherine Street into Rivonia Road and Grayston Drive.

“In the research that preceded the set up of the Sandton Centrals Management District (SCMD) it was found that most people believed that Sandton is soulless” says Cara Reilly, Marketing Manager of the SCMD. “ It was likened to a mine in reverse, where people arrive and ascend their office towers to work and are not seen for the rest of the day, until they surface again to go home.”

As a place where some of the richest people in Africa eat, play, work and live, it was felt that the public spaces don’t mirror the private spaces. It was with a mandate to change all this that the SCMD was set up.

According to the policy statement, the development of the Sandton Central Arts Programme Strategy was aimed at re-inventing Sandton Central. It is supposed to integrate with the area’s marketing strategy, urban development framework and property development plans for the area so that it has a lasting influence and actually affects the public environment.

Good jargon, but what does it all mean.

A Management District (often referred to as a City Improvement District, CID) is a defined geographical area within which property owners agree to pay for supplementary and complimentary services such as improved security, cleaning and maintenance of public spaces. The objective of a CID is to add value to the commercial investment of the property owners.

Simply put, the property owners in an area need to protect their interests and ensure the value of their investments stay high by improving the area their properties or businesses occupy. In real terms, it means protecting the private spaces by managing the public ones.

“Art was seen as a way to bring the soul back to the streets of Sandton Central” says Reilly.

Art has been a fundamental element of the district’s planning since 2005.

Launching as a mural painted along Maude Street, managed by the Trinity Session, depicting activities of the stock exchange, the Sandton Central art experiment began small, and was apparently well received.

How, I asked, can you tell that?

“ In the four years since it was painted, this mural has not once been vandalized- no graffiti. The mural is still intact.”

Rather than a nice add on, art has since been intrinsic to the plans of the district, being incorporated in small and large ways into plans for public spaces, public amenities and facilities.

“It’s about reinstating public spaces using art”

The Why Men project, which saw a series of illuminated wire men wrapped in rope light engaged in every day tasks placed around the district, earned the District a BASA ward earlier this year. This project was the result of a little bit of ingenuity and a while lot of trouble shooting.

The illumination project launched during the festive season in 2006 saw 500 trees wrapped in lights. For the 2007 season, and inspired by a similar project from Turin, Italy, the SCMD wanted to use the same rope light strung across the streets in designs developed by artist Usha Seejarim. They then discovered that the street lights and poles over the designated spots were positioned erratically and made it near impossible to string anything across the streets.

“So we sat with 5km of rope lights and unusable designs” says Reilly. “ Usha said give me a week and she came back later with the Why Men concept. It was simple, yet so unique.”

“And you should see the designs for this year- “Why men” hanging in trees and huge “Why Men” embracing buildings – hope we have the money to do this!”

And the inevitable question, how can they illuminate Sandton Central in the current energy crisis?

“ We’re exploring solar power and battery options and tapping into private power sources. But we are also chatting to City Power about how the power draw would affect the area if we did tap into the national grid”.

The restoration of the old fountain on the corner of Maude Street and Rivonia Road as a public space complete with benches and mosaic spaces was another success story. Another project managed by the Trinity Sesstion, within the space of a few months the space was transformed.

“Mothers were pushing prams and people came down from their offices to eat their lunch on the benches”.

And then the train came…as did new phone cables, and the constant flow of developers in and around the area.

Driving through the streets of Sandton as a whole is a real challenge these days, where it seems that the holes in the ground from the never-ending building developments, infrastructure upgrades and Gautrain works are as deep as the cold skyscrapers are tall.

These developments have halted the plans to place artists’ designed custom benches Individually sponsored by the occupants of Sandton, such as Bowman and Gillfillan, Tiber, Discover, the JSE and Investec to name a few, the BenchMark Comssion project is an urban furniture programme that redefines public spaces through the use of utilitarian art.

Artists and designers have been commissioned to design the benches, which will be located around the public spaces of the district and are aimed at inviting people to actually sit down and enjoy the area.

“The streets of Sandton Central are forever being dug up. If it not new telephone cables, then it’s the city utilities repairing infrastructure . The problem with projects like this is that we can’t wait until the ‘one day’. If you stop moving forward, you regress,” says Reilly. “I’ve just decided to go ahead and they must dig around my benches”.

Public furniture is all very well and good but it brings with it a whole new set of management challenges, that of allowing the residents to utilize the facilities, without encouraging “local residents” to take up the invitation of a more permanent open air address.

Enter big brother. It would seem that a charmed life in Sandton Central, like most places in the world is a see-saw balancing act where, the price of public safety is privacy.

With fifty public safety ambassadors on the streets and ten CCTV camera “we know every pothole in the area and can see exactly what the guys are up to.” says Reilly. The flipside is that the Sandton Central Management District, with one of the highest concentration of the most expensive cars in the Africa, has only seen 5 hijackings in 4 years

With two public “art parks”, a heritage project and a public exhibition project in the future most would say that pervasive security is a small price to pay for being able to take advantage of the weather and nature that makes so many of us stay in South Africa. I would certainly sit under a tree rather than only view it from my office window.

Home to the JSE, and the offices many of the most powerful men and women on the continent, Sandton Central is without a doubt the seat of power in Africa. And a beautifully designed seat it might turn out to be after all.

Taryn Cohn works for
Johannesburg based art agency, ArtSource.