The trip made for technical visits as promoted by the 2014 Portal, at the beginning of March, to the most important football stadiums constructed or refurbished by South Africa for hosting the 2010 World Cup can be compared to a real voyage of discovery. This was the general opinion of the team of 18 architects of the architecture firms responsible for the projects of the stadiums for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil which, together with representatives from the sponsors of the trip and directors of the 2014 Portal, were part of the delegation that travelled around South Africa between 1 and 8 March 2010.
This comes as no surprise. For the immense majority, who had never been to South Africa before, the general quality of the infrastructure as observed in the cities visited - Johannesburg, Pretoria (the capital of the country), Durban, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town, left all 26 members of the Brazilian delegation completely awestruck. In the words of architect Leon Myssior, the Architecture Vice-President of Sinaenco and coordinator of the Team of World Cup Architects forum, “South Africa was a highly pleasant surprise, much better than what we had expected to find in this African country and, in general, much better than our reality”.
On arrival at the modern and well-installed Johannesburg Airport, the good impression caused by the main South African cities visited, the five largest and most important in the country, continued in a highly repetitive fashion, although surely with differences between them: airports, roads, avenues, parks, public and private buildings, commercial centers and the excellent level of cleanliness, along with the country’s natural beauty as well as cultural, social and economic diversity, highly impressive to us Brazilians, which thitherto had not known about these features of the country that shall be hosting the next World Cup, this coming June.
Problems
Of course not everything is perfect in South Africa, which does indeed have its problems, with the poverty visible in the townships - the equivalent of the Brazilian favelas, as well as high unemployment (21.7% in 2008), especially among the Black population, which makes up the majority of the country, and made worse by the droves of immigrants coming in from neighboring cities such as Lesotho, Namibia, Swaziland, Mozambique and others, attracted by the relative wealth of South Africa which alone accounts for 1/5 of the wealth of the whole African continent.
There are also problems with public transport, once again a bad inheritance from the days of apartheid: as the White population always got around by car, the regime based on racial segregation did not really care about improving the conditions of transport for the Black people. In addition, the services are still lacking - the South African efficiency of other areas has not yet reached the employees of hotels, restaurants and other establishments serving the public.
Information Technology in South Africa is also beset with problems - Internet connections are painfully slow and files that could be transferred within a few minutes in Brazil can take more than one hour to be transferred in most South African cities. There are other consequences of the apartheid regime, officially ended in 1994, but whose vestiges still linger on, shown in the social and economic differences and also through the dissatisfaction with changes on the part of the dominant, although minority, White population, made up of descendants of British, Dutch and German people, mainly. Finally, AIDS is at alarming levels in the country: no less than 5.5 million South Africans have the HIV virus. Security is not a strong point in South Africa either: tourists that arrive in the country, especially in the larger cities like Johannesburg and Durban, receive folders in the hotels warning them about the security measures. One of them, in Johannesburg, recommends that the tourists should not go out after 9 p.m., when there is a type of unofficial curfew.
A Reference Benchmark for Brazil
None of this, however, wipes away the fact that South Africa can indeed be a benchmark for Brazil, as the two countries have the same level of economic development - the Gross Domestic Product (GDP, the total of all the wealth produced in the country) of Brazil was US$ 1.636 against US$ 0.506 billion in South Africa, both figures referring to 2008 - especially because our country presents, without any doubt, much greater possibilities for economic growth, which can and should be turned into improvements to the social and economic conditions of the population and also the quality of infrastructure in our cities. Brazilian architecture and engineering need to look at this example to make one giant leap in quality, so that we may build not only stadiums, but also airports, seaports, housing, sanitation, motorways, avenues, parks and other leisure areas, as well as tourism infrastructure with quality. “The quality of the project and the construction that we have found, for the stadiums and urban infrastructure in the cities we have visited show clearly that Brazil has the same technical and economic conditions for meeting this stage. It is up to us, as architects, and also to the engineers of projects and construction, to seek this level of quality as our target”, says Myssior.
General Cheer
The local populace has shown extreme enthusiasm with the prospect of hosting the World Cup. The local people participate, sing and dance, while doing the Mexican wave and blowing into Vuvuzelas, like in the game between South Africa and Namibia; the Cup is heavily in the news and also in propaganda on television, newspapers, radio stations and hoardings as well as local buses, but many people do not have an exact idea of what exactly shall be played. The explanation for this apparent contradiction is the fact that South Africa is not a traditional footballing nation. The national sports are rugby and cricket, inherited from the English, followed by baseball and basketball. Football is only in fifth place in the preference list of South Africans, leaving the country in a position very similar to that of the United States, Korea and Japan, when the World Cup was held in these countries, where football does not wow the crowd either. The difference is that, for South Africans, hosting the 2010 World Cup is a matter of national pride, even though they do not know exactly why.
highlights
04/05 | News
