Responses to the inferno that engulfed a Johannesburg building and claimed 77 lives remind me of a metaphor that Harvard Business School professor Chris Argyris and MIT urban planning professor Donald Schon used to describe organisational learning. They distinguished between what they called single-loop and double-loop learning. Single-loop learning, they argued, referred to surface level solutions to organisational problems while double-loop learning inquired into the underlying causes of such problems.
That distinction is easily transferable to social and political analysis. For example, a single-loop learning response to South Africa’s fiscal crisis might be to cut expenditure to balance the budget. A double-loop approach might ask whether this country can afford nine provinces.
Much of the analysis of the fire has been at the single-loop level, with many writers focusing on the decrepit nature of the buildings. In doing so they have mostly missed the forest for the trees. Even those who have ventured beyond the building-centric approach remain within the technocratic framework of the good governance variety. They argue that we can avoid such disasters by making sure that the city enforces building and maintenance regulations.
A double-loop approach would take us back to the debates that took place in the 1990s about the nature of the postapartheid city. The dominant metaphor among policymakers was the idea of building a world class city that would be attractive to both domestic and international investors. To achieve that goal, cities had to tighten their belts and balance their budgets.
The result was a shift from those areas that required budgetary outlays such as the inner city to those that would generate revenues by attracting investors. Property owners who had been profiting from the de-racialisation of cities now put their money in Sandton, which was quickly developing into the playground of wealthy investors from all over the continent and the rest of the world. The city was up for sale, and all talk of planning be damned. Glitzy, ugly glass buildings filled up every inch of available space, as if competing for the worst architecture in the world. You would be hard pressed to find public spaces in Johannesburg or Sandton.
The focus on good governance and technical competence is necessary, but it is far from sufficient in solving the city’s problems. Only an active citizenry could make the trains run on time. Someone said to me that there are even schools run from within these buildings, at which point I asked: “But where is the government?” It would seem the country is run by a somnambular government, with politicians not only sleeping on the job but walking while sleeping, which is even more perilous.
To avoid a recurrence of the Johannesburg inferno we must return to the idea of cities as systems of social relations and networks. It is hard to imagine cities being “hijacked” by criminal syndicates if residents had been integrally involved in directing the underlying processes of city development.
There is no shortage of examples of cities that have stayed true to the best traditions of city planning as it was developed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution in Britain and the US. One of the most celebrated examples of a citizen-driven approach to planning took place in Chicago in the 1980s under the leadership of the city’s first African-American mayor, Harold Washington. When Washington ran for mayor he went to each of the city’s neighbourhoods to get citizens to come forward with their priorities. Even the white neighbourhood organisations that had mounted racist campaigns against his candidacy began to come around because of his inclusive approach to planning.
The idea of balanced development was at the centre of the Washington administration, and it became a model for other cities around the world.
When I came back to South Africa, I joined efforts with my former planning professor Richard Tomlinson, Robert Beauregard and Lindsay Bremner to edit a book titled Emerging Johannesburg. I argued in a chapter titled “Johannesburg: A City in Flight From Itself” that: “The challenge facing Johannesburg is to think of urban futures that are as attentive to the development of human values, capabilities and social networks in the real cities where people live as to globalisation. The urban futures of our global cities are inescapably dependent on the capabilities of local places.”
Another way to think of urban development is to borrow yet another metaphor, this time from Yale University scholar James C Scott. In his book Seeing Like a State, Scott described how the Prussian government sought to maximise tax revenues from timber by cultivating tall trees that would be easier to cut down with great efficiency. To achieve economies of scale the government removed all the shrubbery around the trees. Prussia prospered and dominated the global supply of timber for the better part of the 18th century. And then the trees began to die, because the government had destroyed the ecosystem that tied the shrubbery to the trees. By focusing on individual buildings and regulations we are missing the forest for the trees, substituting single-loop for double-loop learning.
In an essay titled “Looking Forward: History and the Future”, historian Eric Hobsbawm noted that “we are wrong to put a particular face and costume to the interesting stranger whose arrival we were told to expect”. There is no way of knowing with any exactitude the form that the next tragedy will take. What I do know is that our cities are doomed without a major overhaul of the way they are planned. No amount of single-loop technocratic tinkering at the edges will prevent the next inferno. The same goes for the nature of our entire system of government, but that’s a topic for another day. It’s tragic to see a country for which we fought so hard go over the cliff with our eyes wide open.
* Mangcu is professor of sociology and history at George Washington University
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