Frank McDonald reports from Johannesburg on two events being held in different venues that are world's apart
Nelson Mandela, one of the world's few authentic heroes, was billed to open the Earth summit's Global Forum here yesterday. But to the intense dismay of environment and development activists, he wasn't able to make it. He is, after all, a frail old man.
The expected appearance of Mr Mandela had electrified the 3,000-plus delegates attending the Global Forum, which is being held in the Johannesburg Expo complex that cannibalised the veldt on the edge of this sprawling, heavily car-dependent city.
A largely black South African group of Mandela supporters could barely be restrained. They had spent half-an-hour beside the podium, joyfully toyi-toying, chanting slogans and singing songs associated with the African National Congress prior to his expected arrival.
Outside the vast hall, about twice the size of the Simmonscourt pavilion at the RDS in Dublin and just as shed-like, another South African was demonstrating his expertise with a chainsaw. He carved penguin sculptures from ice, to symbolise the threat of global warming.
After it was announced that Mr Mandela would not, unfortunately, be able to attend, an almost universal groan of disappointment erupted from the audience. Many had come along specially to see and hear him.
Instead, the delegates heard that their task over the 10-day forum, which is being held in parallel with the Earth summit, would be to weld a common platform containing "minimum demands" on 200-plus issues, for presentation to world leaders attending the summit.
But the two events are worlds apart. The Global Forum is being held in Nasrec, on the unfashionable south side of Johannesburg, while the UN summit is taking place behind a tight security cordon in the sumptuous, almost Beverly Hills-style northern suburb of Sandton.
This oasis of privilege and wealth remains overwhelmingly white.
Individual houses with shady trees and manicured lawns are in walled compounds with signs warning potential intruders of an "Instant Armed Response"; the dirt-poor Alexandria township is not far away.
In the marble-floored Sandton City shopping and entertainment complex, most of the waiters in its eclectic mix of restaurants and bars are black while the managers are nearly all white. It's almost as if nothing has changed since the ANC won its historic victory in 1994.
The shopping centres of Sandton are full of designer shops and their car parks full of BMWs and Mercs. Ritzy hotels and apartment blocks fringe Sandton Square. One of the latest eruptions, the Michelangelo Tower, promises residents "a lifestyle of distinction".
At Melrose Arch, "people are moving in before the paint is dry", says Lindsay Bremner, professor of architecture at the University of Witwaterstran.
What they want is its "pre-mixed design package \ the perfect lifestyle for an aspiring cosmopolitan".
Such flashy schemes, she says, have "carved Johannesburg into patrolled, flag-festooned, designer-paved precincts" with all the activities that make up a city in a much more secure environment. "It is the city as we wish it were, represented as an idealised fragment."
Everybody with money in Johannesburg lives in one of these artificial Dallas-like creations. They all have cars and wouldn't dream of using public transport, which is still mainly for blacks, so the city is criss-crossed by freeways bypassing its no-go areas.
Such is the sprawl of Johannesburg that it takes an hour, even in free-flowing traffic, to travel by specially provided summit buses from the Global Forum at Nasrec to the Earth summit at Sandton. That may be a metaphor for the gap that needs to be bridged between them.