Letter from Johannesburg.

Jeremy Melvin looks for signs of regeneration after the fearful architecture of apartheid.

'A journalist could come here,' someone in Johannesburg told me, 'and write 20 stories, 10 optimistic and 10 pessimistic - and they might all be true.' As my taxi halted at a red light in the darkened, deserted city centre one night, I feared my own story was about to veer towards pessimistic. Local advice is to ignore traffic signals, especially in so notorious a district as I was being driven through. Even to write my pessimistic story I would have at least to survive the hijack that locals like to convince nervous visitors is almost inevitable in such circumstances. A solitary car crossed our path. The lights turned green; the driver moved off, to locate my remote destination as easily as a London cabbie might find Buckingham Palace.

It was as if a crack had opened up in urban mythology, offering me a glimpse of Johannesburg as a city rather than a psychotic condition. This city's urban form is complex. Sandwiched between the sprawl of affluent suburbs to the north and poorer ones to the south, a dense city centre spreads into a series of small communities. Each has its own grid, often with small block sizes - once Paul Kruger, president of the Boer Republic of the Transvaal, had reluctantly acceded to the formation of a new city to exploit the gold reef, he thought it might as well have as many prime corner pitches as possible. If these districts had run directly into each other, their low-rise buildings and regular junctions would have made them monotonous, but awkward topography and the original division of the land into farms mean that the grids are rarely contiguous. Between them loom slag heaps from the mines, Dickensian mounds which still contain enough gold to be commercially extracted after the mines are exhausted.

Geological and historical accident had divided Johannesburg into a series of more or less self-contained communities long before apartheid. When political ideology confirmed and strengthened the divisions, architecture became almost irrelevant. The herd instinct and the lack of overseas investment opportunities in the 1980s caused developers to create a patchwork of shoddy, half-empty suburban malls. It took only one irregular site within the Manhattan grid to produce the Flatiron building, but in Johannesburg, where grids clash all the time, there is no equivalent. Only occasionally does architecture assert itself. The incongruous setting of a pseudo-Italian piazza in the wealthy suburb of Sandton sports a refined library (AR March 1995) designed by Glen Gallagher, a student of Louis Kahn.

In the past, Herbert Baker designed a few distinguished residences for the rich 'randlords', while more recent monuments, at each end of the central business district, include SOM's Carlton Hotel and Helmut Jahn's supposedly diamond-shaped glass headquarters for Anglo-American. Both have received their comeuppance as big business has fled, leaving the centre to a teeming mass of informal trading. Even after 1994, centrifugal forces have continued to act on the city. The wealthy cower in gated enclaves, while the ANC's election slogan speaks for itself: 'A house for every family, a car in every garage and a chicken in every pot.'

All this makes Johannesburg a splendid place to study 'Urban Futures' -- the theme of a conference jointly organized by the city council and Witwatersrand University. The city exhibits in its starkest form just about every pathological condition that can afflict a large conurbation. Its health and transport facilities are grossly inequitable. It suited the apartheid regime to divide the city into numerous zones; it now has five districts, and shortly it will become one. This gives the city the opportunity to raise revenue in wealthy areas and spend it in poor ones. One speaker at the conference identified a rateable differential of 31 280 percent between the richest and the most deprived districts. A thriving tax base and accurate information would make a good foundation for developing decent public services. But parts of the city centre have untraceable patterns of tenure, while rates and utilities charges carry connotations of the previous regime, and this makes the planned privatization of water services especially controversial. A lack of hard data seems to be a persistent trait. Several times I asked to see a city plan; I was assured an accurate one existed and even had a diagram drawn for me on a restaurant napkin. But I have still to see the real item.

Ironically, while apartheid compromised urban culture in the white areas, overcrowding and lack of facilities fostered some form of communal life in the townships. One of the most notorious, Alexandra, still managed to nurture an amazing number of distinguished politicians and artists, and the Old Prison had numerous noted alumni. The children of this culture have taken over the inner city, colonizing buildings once designated for the privileged minority, and in defiance of the architecture of buildings such as the sub-Rockefeller-Center Chamber of Mines.

The various bodies attempting to regenerate the inner city have started to identify a hidden history, a form of counter-narrative that has developed below the surface, So the prison precinct is scheduled to become Constitution Hill, its centrepiece the Constitutional Court, whose competition-winning design, by the young Durban duo of Andrew Maken and Janina Robertson, is a notable attempt to devise an architecture which responds to history, climate and purpose. Van der Byl Square has become Gandhi Square, providing much-needed bus facilities and commemorating the political leader who developed the principle of passive resistance in Johannesburg in the years before the First World War.

In the same vein, the former market district, around the renowned Market Theatre, is to become that universal panacea for urban ills, an 'arts district'. It already has the Museum Africa, while the former Electric Workshops have acquired a series of mezzanine floors connected by ramps, making spaces which are, diagrammatically at least, something like the Pompidou Centre. And to see them thronged with protesters against water privatization is, perhaps, to see the beginnings of a connection developing between public institutions and grass-roots democracy.

This is a good place to appreciate the contradictions of the city. A distant tower, in contrast to the message of its brash neon advertisement, is entirely occupied by informal traders from Francophone Africa. Vacant lots ringed by a two-tier highway, overshadowed by anachronistic commercial monoliths, could suggest dystopia; but with half-shut eyes it is almost possible to imagine that the Electric Workshops turbine hall could become a collection of desirable loft apartments. It's not going to happen very soon, but if the interaction of greed, fear and complex urban form which we call Johannesburg does regenerate, it would reassert the value of urban culture over the most naked attempts to deny the principles of civil society.