2.4.
Lockdown in the CBD and the Inner-City
The presence of police and homelessness In the transition to a post-apartheid urbanity, central business districts (CBDs) and inner-cities underwent a period of urban decline and reinvention - where businesses and white residents moved out, and some landlords, particularly in Johannesburg, abandoned their properties (Mosselson, 2019). In both of Gauteng’s largest cities, Johannesburg and Pretoria, the inner-cities underwent a dramatic shift in the racial demographic of residents after 1994. The CBD was decentred from its apartheid role and many white residents moved out to suburban areas (Czegledy, 2003; Donaldson et al., 2003). While black residents had been renting (and sub-letting) in areas reserved for white residents in the inner-city of Johannesburg since the 1980s, significant increases in the number of black residents in the Pretoria CBD were only seen after 1994 (Mosselson, 2019; Donaldson et al., 2003). Although Pretoria’s inner-city has retained its function as a hub of national government headquarters, Johannesburg’s inner-city changed from being the centre of the financial sector and corporate headquarters to a new node of trade and smallscale business (Donaldson et al., 2003; Mosselson, 2019; Zach, 2016; Goga, 2003). Five participants regularly sent through diary entries from neighbourhoods that were located in central business districts (CBDs) or inner-city neighbourhoods in Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Kempton Park in Gauteng. The neighbourhoods of Berea and Arcadia, in close proximity to the CBDs, were also included in this cluster. Historically, both were considered suburban neighbourhoods – however, as Czegledy (2003) discusses with reference to Braamfontein and Hillbrow in Johannesburg, they are today “understood to be economically depressed appendages to the inner city rather than the southern boundaries of the northern suburbs’’. Most of the inner-city participants lived in multi-storey apartment buildings, albeit in varied arrangements. Mpilo* (26) rented in a managed apartment building where she didn’t know her neighbours. One participant lived in a fenced social housing development with a shared outdoor area, while another participant lived in a building that he described as an “occupied building or a homeless shelter”. Mokoena, lived in a house in a gated complex close to the Kempton Park CBD. As such, her diary entries, although coming from a “gated community”, were markedly different from the participants living in suburban gated complexes. Like in other areas, living arrangements varied in the inner-city – some people lived alone or with one other person, while one person lived with more than seven people. Although all inner-city participants had access to a balcony or rooftop, not everyone had access to a yard or garden. The most distinct observation from all participants’ diary entries in the CBD and inner-city neighbourhoods was the regular reference to police presence from the first day of lockdown. Significantly, unlike in other areas, participants made more than one reference to seeing the army.
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