All Roads Lead to Durban

Let’s first look at transport in Durban by considering the location of major transport hubs in relation to each other.  The new airport, King Shaka International Airport, opened in 2010 in time for the World Cup, and it located about 22 miles from the city centre.

King Shaka International Airport 

http://warwickchapman.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Airport_058jpg.jpg

It makes sense that the city’s central train and bus stations have much more convenient locations with respect to the downtown areas.  Durban Railway Station is located just north of the CBD, in walking distance from key office areas, the political centre at the City Hall and the commercial centre at Victoria Street Market, only just over a mile to the harbor and just under a mile to the beach.  The bus station is situated just a couple of blocks to the northeast of the train station, facilitating travel that uses a combination of train and bus or taxi.  That said, there was very little available information on this so-called “main” bus station, to the point that I was unsure as to whether I really had found the central hub.  Certainly, reviews of public transportation in Durban warn visitors that bus companies have been in disarray for as long as nearly four years now since violent industrial action in 2009.

Durban Railway Station

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hennie_rautenbach/5632384964/

Worldtravels.com describes Durban’s public transportation as “ad hoc at best.”  With the recent decline of the main bus system, “working-class Durbanites” depend on minibus vans known, as they are called around much of southern Africa, as Kombies.   The irregularity of their schedules and routes, in addition to their reputation for danger both on the road and within the vehicle, considerably complicates the daily commute of many of the city’s inhabitants.  Very recent signs show some signal of improvement in the near future as municipal officials look to minimize travel inefficiencies.
Check out more information on these two sites:

http://www.wordtravels.com/Cities/South+Africa/Durban/Transport

http://www.mile.org.za/QuickLinks/News/Pages/news_20120315.aspx

Kombies

http://onechildoneheart.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/traffic-2.jpg

  

A study conducted back in 2000 addressed the rapidly changing story of migration to Durban at the end of the 20^th century.  Violence in the city  during the 1980’s limited the numbers of people who sought to migrate there, but the mid to late 1990’s saw a dramatic boost in numbers of foreigners, both legally and illegally immigrating.   Immigrants from all over sub-Saharan Africa arrive in Durban, often not directly from their home countries but via another city or region, and numbers continue to flow in from further destinations like India as well! 

http://www.jstor.org/stable/486110?seq=3

New African Immigration to the Durban Region. Brij Maharaj and Vadi Moodley. Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines , Vol. 34, No. 1, Special Issue: Transnationalism, African Immigration, and New Migrant Spaces in South Africa (2000), pp. 149-160.

Reflecting many of our course readings this semester, Durban has seen a steady influx of South Africans from rural areas.  Many of these migrants, however, maintain strong ties with their villages and families back home so their stay in Durban may be a temporary one.  Some migrant workers make their Durban homes in the informal settlements, such as the one in the photo below, which were established in but still remain from the apartheid era.

http://exploringafrica.matrix.msu.edu/images/highdesnity2_durban.jpg

Rectification Continues!

Overall, the process of rectifying maps onto the modern WorldMap has been a fascinating but frustrating process.  For each map, I have complete confidence that the control points I used to warp the maps were accurate, yet most of these maps show sections where roads on the new version are quite clearly off-kilt with their counterparts on the old version.  Take the first map here, for example.  The road intersections in the red box on the bottom left were some of the easiest to warp because of the clear square blocks.  While that section of the map has warped very well, however, the red box on the top left shows a major discrepancy between the old and new versions.

I'll hold off on showing the complete rectified picture until I add the final piece to the puzzle on next week's blog - let the suspense build!!

Rectification continued!

To my great relief, I'm beginning to get the hang of the warp tool, so warping old maps onto worldmap is taking less time than it did last week.  It's also more exciting now that I can see the four historic maps of Nairobi together on the worldmap base.

In both of the two newly rectified maps, the streets and railways line up quite well, but the river does not match between the images.  It would be interesting to find out whether the river is simply marked incorrectly on the historic map or whether the path of the river really changed that substantially over the last 55 years.

Above, we can see the four rectified maps of Nairobi so far, beginning to get an idea for what the larger original historic map might look like!

To mix it up a bit, I also rectified one map of Taourirt, Morocco.  It was a somewhat confusing assignment, as I was supposed to rectify a map of Melilla, Morocco, but the map was titled, "Taourirt (Melilla)," and the historic map did not actually encompass Melilla at all!  Below, the historic map is overlayed onto the Worldmap base using the cities of Taourirt and El Aioun, along with the railway line that has run between them at least since the older map was produced, as control points.  The Moulaya river lines up nicely between the old and new map.

 This next image below highlights where Melilla is in comparison to the rectified map - close, but not the same!

While rectifying old maps of Nairobi and Melilla, it makes sense to think about them in comparison to each other and to Durban.  Durban (on the right) and Melilla (below) are strikingly alike from a distance.  Obviously both seaports, they even share similarly shaped harbours with narrow inlets around which the city centres were built.  Both cities feature areas that are structured on an organized grid but the discontinuity between those small areas suggest organic rather than entirely planned growth on a city-wide scale.  Melilla differs substantially from Durban in the fact that it is a constrained city, an area surrounded by a fence demarcating the Spanish territory from the rest of Morocco.      

 As we can see below, Melilla lacks the extensive beaches of which Durban can boast, so its city buildings lie more immediately on the coast.  

In contrast to both Durban and Melilla, Nairobi is a sprawling, landlocked city.  With rivers rather than a central port, the location of Nairobi's city centre appears more arbitrary than in the other two cities.  It is difficult to easily distinguish the borders of the city, as the downtown area blends into more surburban and slum neighbourhoods. In the image below, for example, one doesn't get a sense that the entire city is contained in the photo's dimensions, yet zooming out further makes it hard to see that one is looking at a city at all!  While Nairobi's outskirts are far more extensive than Durban's, they both feature a mix of middle-class suburban neighbourhoods and slum sections.

Below, we can see that, like Durban and Melilla, Nairobi's downtown area features sections of grids, rather than one constant structure.

Rectifying Maps

For this week's assignment we needed to find a historic map of our city to rectify onto modern maps.  I learned that such maps of Durban are practically impossible to find online!  I was unable to find even one good historic map of Durban that I could access (free of charge).  Imagining what maps from the mid-20th century might look like, I would expect that there would be evidence of apartheid planning - divisions of the city into areas for different races and ethnicities, which often meant divisions of the city by wealth too.  I would expect to see residential areas with large houses conveniently located near key downtown areas, separated by roads or perhaps railway tracks from other sections with significantly smaller, more crowded housing.  Today, aerial views of Durban do show a great variation from one neighbourhood to the next, but wealthier-looking sections are mixed in randomly with sections that appear poorer, which is a change from the larger homogenous sections we might have seen in historic maps.  Using google earth today to view the Durban suburb below, we can see large houses with considerable properties and swimming pools very close to a series of much smaller, more tightly-packed houses.

Like historic maps, historic newspaper articles on Durban are also tricky to come by but I was able to find this short clipping, reposted on a number of websites, focusing on the development of the locomotive engine.  In the mid-19th century, A Leeds-based engine company produced the locomotive for the new Natal Railway in South Africa. The locomotive, appropriately named “Natal,” became, in June 1860, the first locomotive in South Africa to haul a public train.  The article below was printed in September 1860 in the Leeds Mercury. 

http://c9425687.myzen.co.uk/MRT/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=58&Itemid=138

The article is an optimistic and excited report of the development to people back home in England.  It describes the opening day as one of “unprecedented rejoicing” and expresses pride in the fact that the colonists were able to organize such a feat “without external pecuniary aid.”  The article’s author does not miss a chance to compare this modern development to the assumed ignorance of the “natives,” as he describes the amusing sight of “wonder-stricken Kaffirs” chasing after the train but “of course” – these words emphasizing that they should have already known they did not stand a chance against the locomotive marvel – failing to keep up.

I had a little bit more success with rectifying historic maps of other cities, largely because I was assigned images to warp so did not have to hunt the pictures down first!  Below are two rectified historic maps of Nairobi, Kenya from 1955.  

 I was able to locate each historic map within the WorldMap by identifying roads and rail lines that remain the same nearly 60 years later.  Although some of the paths of roads and shape of intersections remained the same, the names of the roads had changed, often from the names of English cities to those of post-independence heroes.  Many roads and train tracks had been expanded or even truncated since 1955, making alignment even more challenging!  In the map above, the historic map only shows a small, concentrated portion of the roads that exist today, so the overlap of the two demonstrates the expansion that has taken place in the last half-century.

This map demonstrates that even if one identifies the correct location of intersections, the historic and modern maps may still not line up perfectly.  Quite frustrating!

 In addition to exploring the art of Warping, I’m beginning to plan ahead for my final paper.  As I’m planning to write my senior thesis on Abahlali baseMjondolo, the Shackdwellers’ Movement based in and around Durban, I’m hoping to explore the movement in this paper as well.  If the necessary information is available online, I would really like to map the location of informal settlements in Durban today and trace their history, focusing on their size and location at the initial establishment and following their growth and movement.  There have been several cases of forced removal of informal settlements by the government, so I’m interested in tracking potential patterns as initial readings suggest that removals have tended to shift informal settlements away from urban centres.  Ideally, I would also like to research the sites of major protests by the marginalized poor throughout Durban, comparing where the Shackdwellers’ Movement organizes protest today with the locations of major apartheid demonstrations.  This comparison would address interesting larger questions of the memory in space over time!