the corner office

I'm trawling through more interesting links over at Gauteng Blog. Apparently the small Gauteng province is running out of space, and more high-rise buildings are expected to be built over time. It will be interesting to see that play out, methinks. The ever-growing horizontal sprawl of housing complexes upon housing complexes growing out into the countryside around the city speaks to the Joburg mindset - after the formerly popular high-rise suburbs of Hillbrow and Berea quickly decayed and turned into a slumlands in the late 80s and 90s, your average Joburger is not going to rush off and buy property in an area with lots of high-rise buildings. Pity.

Another interesting part of the problem is that a large part of Gauteng sits on top of dolomitic (limestone) rock, which isn't suitable for building houses. Why? 'Cause they can get swallowed up in sinkholes, basically. I grew up in the mining town of Carletonville which was particularly badly hit by this in the 60s. The mining in the area resulted in lots of water being pumped away, and large underground cavities being left behind as the water table dropped. These caused all sorts of unpleasantness. Throughout Carletonville, there were suburbs where one house on a block, or sometimes entire blocks were open land with nothing more than the original foundations of houses, because ground movement and settling had caused the houses to collapse or be destroyed to avoid the sinkhole threats. The bottom of this page (also linked to by GP) has a picture of a huge sinkhole in Kaolin street, Carletonville. We lived two streets up, and that area had plenty of empty lots. Freaky stuff. Those open lots with their uneven ground always had an eerie feel to them. By the 70s and 80s most areas were considered 'safe', but I remember that in one area a new housing complex quickly had to ban the construction of swimming pools, because all that extra water increased the sinkhole risk if pools leaked. Didn't do much for their property values, as I recall.

Another side effect of all the mining was the amount of seismic activity and tremors we were exposed to all the time, so much so that you eventually didn't even notice them. I remember coming back to one of the Carletonville mines as an auditor. An auditing team of Joburg city slickers nearly soiled themselves and were almost diving for cover under tables when a tremor hit, while the locals, including myself, carried on doing our thing, completely oblivious to the seismic wibble. Some wibbles were worse than others, though, and we were always near the epicentre, so even we got frights now and then. I will admit that I resolved at a young age that California was probably one part of the world I'd probably not want to live in.