The Arboreal City: Trees in the Making of Johannesburg

Abstract

At its founding in 1886, Johannesburg was mostly a treeless place. A small town of shacks and diggings set among grasslands that led up to a spare, uninterrupted horizon. Now, a century-and-a-half later, some call it the world’s biggest man-made forest. Where grasses once rippled, shade is thick on the ground. There are more than two trees for every one of the city’s nearly seven million residents, and pavements are split by roots supporting the unending canopies that grow above a city shaped by punitive spatial inequalities. What are the social forces that turned a savannah into a forest in little more than a century? Environmental history has shown that industrialization drives deforestation. In Johannesburg, however, industrial capitalism ushered in a complicated history of greening. Using archival research, this paper will suggest a more-than-human history of South Africa’s biggest city to show that botanical actors have been a key, if understudied, element of the racial capitalist socio-nature that divided it. As the human-plant relations continue to shape Johannesburg’s future – well-resourced suburban associations use the environment to resist densification while luxury eco-estates are built on fantasies of indigeneity – so unearthing and understanding their pasts becomes more important.