From mine to life cycle closure: towards a vision for the West Rand, Johannesburg

Mine closure needs reinvention. The notion of the lifecycle might be helpful for this purpose, as waste then becomes just another resource for the next productive process cycle. By closing lifecycles, e.g. soil, water and urban, a vision for the West Rand could be constructed that turns mine closure from a somewhat unwelcome and expensive obligation of restoration into a possibly strategic reinvention of the district. Instead of providing ad hoc and end-of-life solutions, mine closure then becomes part of a continuous transformation process that incrementally realizes the envisioned future and vocation of the land. This paper discusses a design exploration – a methodology for Mine Closure – developed in parallel at the urban design studios of the Master of Urban Design (MUD) program at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and the Master of Urbanism and Strategic Planning (MaUSP) and Master of Human Settlements (MaHS) programs of the KULeuven, Belgium. Both studios elaborated on the Master’s thesis of Tahira Toffah. Through a methodology of research-by-design – a spatial exploration of integrating lifecycle closure – different visions were developed for the West Rand based on the water, soil and urban lifecycles. Everything started and thus starts with the soil lifecycle. Instead of seeing the topographic alterations of on-going mining activities – underground, open-pit and tailings reprocessing – as an avoidable by-product of mining activities, soil displacement could be an imaginative project that sculptures the landscape in such a way that it recreates the necessary conditions to bring back wildlife to the mining belt. The sculptured undulating landscape would potentially create places to drink, places to hide and sleep, accentuated by vegetation that simultaneously remediates the polluted soils. A new urban national park would emerge ex novo. The water lifecycle in the West Rand demonstrates several misbalances. An average of 27 Ml/day of acid mine drainage is being pumped out from the mine shafts and discharged in elementary treatment facilities; yet effective treatment of this excess water (in a region with water shortage) could systematically irrigate the downstream district with balanced amounts of clean water, thereby generating a new production landscape. In so doing, the mining belt adds high value. Intensively maintained cropland could provide a significant portion of Johannesburg’s increasing food demands while creating employment opportunities. In short, it could generate an oasis in the arid landscape. The urban lifecycle in this case consists of the reversal of the social disjunctions that have taken place here over time. The West Rand mining belt sits in between the township Kagiso and (the Victorian-era laid out) Krugersdorp, and as such, it could, through a transformation process, be turned from a divide into a common space where people work, exercise, educate; it could become the place of exchange. Specifically targeted strategic interventions that serve the urban fabric could create these common spaces. The idea of the cycle implies an immediate as well as a continuous effort. In order for such an operation to be successful, one must act immediately and never stop acting. In this conception there is, by definition, no end nor even mine closure, but rather a continuous innovation and design of intertwining lifecycles – soil, water, urban, etc. – that define mining and other activities on the land and deliver the means with which one can build a vision.No ISSNstatus: publishe