The first Greenpeace HQ in Africa was in Melville, right next to Picobella. Proving you can plan to save the planet and still be within walking distance of a great pizza. Welcome to Melville Untold.

In This Week's Melville Untold:

• Fighting for Joburg: Julia Fish & JoburgCAN's War Against Municipal Decline

• Die Pienk Kerk Opens This Weekend

• Jozi My Jozi's JoziWalks Are Upon Us!

Let’s go. 

— Aubrey Moloto, Kele Jackson

The Digest ☕️

Fighting for Joburg: Julia Fish & JoburgCAN's War Against Municipal Decline 🚰

Amidst turbulent times and civil issues, specifically this water crisis, it's the perfect time to hear from the frontlines of the war against Jozi's decline. We met with the people's general, who is leading the charge. Meet Julia Fish, a resident of Melville and JoburgCAN manager.

Origin Story and Coming to Melville

For the second week running, we have a Joburg native. Julia Fish grew up in Yeoville and travelled to Greenside High by bus through Gandhi Square, walking through town daily. It was there that she fell in love with the city.

Her passion for Joburg soon manifested into unofficial walking tours, entertaining foreign guests and taking them around the inner city, further fostering that love.

Julia then went to Wits. Like many students do (especially in the naughty noughties), she started flirting with Melville, coming to the strip to have fun. At 22, she met the organisational director of then new Greenpeace Africa whilst attending a wine and cheese night at a Melville guesthouse—a Canadian who offered her a job at Greenpeace, here in Melville.

Finding JoburgCan and Civil Sector Work

After a stint overseas, at Rhodes University in the Eastern Cape and working as a sports journalist, Julia worked as a mobilisation consultant. She assisted civil society organisations with policy building and platform development. This included involvement in global climate change movements, organising UN climate conference protests, and taking action against coal and banking systems. She later ran "Fund Our Future", a banking and financial sector lobby group aimed at stopping fossil fuel funding.

As Yeoville declined, just before the pandemic, Julia’s mother had bought a house in Melville. Julia had also met her husband, who was from Pretoria. When they decided to move back home, they scoured for a place to invest their family's future in. By chance, they found a house in Melville, right next door to her mother!

Once settled, she felt the need to protect her family's investment and turn her community-building knowledge to her own doorstep. Julia joined the Melville Residents Association and held the Land Use portfolio. She was thrown right into the deep end, navigating complex building laws, land use issues and disputes. This gave her insight into the magnitude of civic issues citizens face.

Julia quickly realised that Melville's problems weren't unique. She began connecting with neighbouring RAs and soon formed a group of over 50 RAs across Johannesburg to tackle shared issues. This led to her being approached by the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse(OUTA) to run what is now JoburgCAN — comprising business chambers, civil society groups, and RAs focused on accountability and partnership with the City of Johannesburg.

How JoburgCAN Operates

JoburgCAN acts as a watchdog and overseer for the city's governance. They fulfil a role that voluntary organisations lack the resources to achieve. Their primary objective is "trying to get accountability and a partnership relationship with the City whilst influencing the policies that are going to govern our lives here."

Their key operations and mandates are:

Policy-Based Work: JoburgCAN tackles high-level policy-based work, getting RAs' voices heard in higher chambers.

Full-Time Capacity: This enables consistent engagement with city officials, attending council sittings, mayoral war room meetings, and presidential working groups.

Partnership and Collaboration: A significant shift in their approach has been moving from solely challenging the city to offering solutions and building partnerships. They now leave the litigious duties to OUTA.

Transparency and Accountability: JoburgCAN aims to create oversight and make illicit activities more difficult for the administration.

Budget Oversight: They attack "fruitless, irregular, wasteful and unauthorised expenditure" whilst analysing the Integrated Development Plan (IDP) and its annual amendments.

Basic Service Delivery: JoburgCAN is active in water, power, and roads networks presidential working groups to address these fundamental needs.

Civic Education and Empowerment: JoburgCAN runs online workshops and webinars on "everything from green belt occupation to bill disputes". This aims to help people understand certain parts of their rights and empower them to engage with city processes.

Challenges and Victories

JoburgCAN faces deep-rooted challenges that contribute to the "crisis of governance and service delivery" in Johannesburg:

Infrastructure in Ruins

There's been massive underinvestment in infrastructure over the past 10 to 15 years, resulting in an astronomical backlog of repairs. This is evident in crumbling infrastructure: structurally unsound bridges, malfunctioning traffic lights, and leaking reservoirs.

By Law Enforcement Breakdown

A "complete lack of bylaw enforcement has seeped into the culture of the city and is devastating." This contributes to the city looking "grubby" due to unpaid outdoor advertising, billboards, and banners everywhere, illegal dumping and badly maintained buildings—leading to billions of rands in lost revenue that could have funded infrastructure maintenance.

The Water Crisis

The city is losing 45% of the water we buy from Rand Water to non-revenue water, which is things like leaks and illegal connections. Water shedding and closing reservoirs at night exacerbates the problem, leading to water hammers, airlocks and imploding pipes.

The city is accused of not funding Joburg Water adequately, owing them R4 billion that's been diverted for interest-earning in a central account. This directly impacts critical projects, with contractors for the Brixton reservoir having "downed tools because they haven't been paid."

 Mismanagement of Free Basic Services

The city is funded by the Treasury to cover 1.1 million households for free basic services, but only has 130,000 people on its indigent register, with estimates of people actually receiving the full grant closer to 50,000. Julia says this "non-conditional grant" money was "just being absorbed into the rest of the budget and we can't track it," essentially robbing indigent people and resulting in a higher risk of illegal connections or non-payment.

Financial Mismanagement and Corruption

The city's budget, though big enough to deliver on its core mandate, is bogged down in staff costs and captured in excessive tenders. "Astonishingly, a R90 billion budget is still being balanced on Excel spreadsheets, despite hundreds of millions being spent quarterly on SAP systems that aren't integrated and are largely non-functional."

JoburgCAN targets "fruitless, irregular, wasteful and unauthorised expenditure," which is some of the highest in the country's history.

Neglect of City Property and Green Spaces

The Johannesburg Property Company (JPC) fails to maintain its 29,070 buildings, leading to tragic incidents, including fires and fatalities. JoburgCAN actively fights the commercialisation of green spaces, as these are "vital to people's access to the city, the environmental sustainability and recreational green space." Julia feels our free spaces act as a "great equaliser" for society—anyone can enjoy them, rich or poor.

Political Instability

The city has experienced a massive cycle of political instability. JoburgCAN campaigned against Mayor Kabelo Gwamanda and his mayoral committee, demanding transparent, accountable, and qualified leadership and is pushing for competent members of the service entity boards and a quality City Manager.

Billing Disputes

People's bills being wrong is pervasive, with court cases being brought against the city because of incorrect billing. JoburgCAN works on dispute resolution, addressing issues like disconnections based on false estimates.

Displaced Persons and Informal Settlements

The systemic occupation of green spaces by displaced persons is also a major concern. Whilst acknowledging it as a genuine global problem, JoburgCAN advocates for social welfare responses like reopening city shelters and expanding substance abuse rehabilitation resources rather than letting people live undignified lives in green belts. Low-cost and accessible housing must be funded, and a crackdown on exploitative landlords taking advantage of lower-income earners to charge high rentals for informal and degraded, smaller and smaller spaces.

Significant Victories

Despite extensive challenges, JoburgCAN has achieved several significant wins with Julia at the helm:

• The recent repeal of the CCTV Bylaw

• Solar policy pushback to prevent exploitation and high registration charges

• Eskom vs City Power debt negotiations

• City stakeholder recognition

• Community advocacy for green spaces (Parkhurst Bowls Club development)

• Legislative amendments (successful comments on multiple bills and regulations)

• Education Drives

• Improved Service Response

• Billing Dispute Resolution

• E-Tolls Challenge

These are massive wins on behalf of citizens. If they keep this aggressive attack against decline and mismanagement up, we'll surely start seeing a turning point!

Vision for the Future

Julia's long-term vision is to "work myself out of a job"—meaning a future where the city can operate, function, and include public participation with stakeholder engagement, true representation, and transparent operations.

Together with JoburgCAN, their plans include:

1. Protecting green spaces

2. Addressing homelessness and social welfare

3. Enforcing bylaws with humane alternatives

4. A "whole of society" approach to the water crisis

5. Systematic governance change

6. Promoting active citizenship

"Not getting involved is tacit agreement to the status quo," she says. "You're not being neutral—you're actually in favour because you're not doing anything." Julia urges citizens to "get out from behind their walls" and engage, as "mass mobilisation has and does lead to change."

Julia also mentioned a great initiative called Civic Saturdays by the Johannesburg Crisis Alliance; community-driven events to educate residents about their rights and responsibilities, fostering civic awareness and capacity building.

Despite the challenges, Julia remains "the least pessimistic person." She feels hopeful and "completely inspired by the future of the city" due to the "people and champions who are rolling up their sleeves and getting stuff done." 

Their goal is to enable residents' associations to "go back to block parties and celebrating the city we live in rather than fighting municipal planning tribunals." She believes Joburg will come right purely on the determination of the people who live here.

I Love Melville

Julia's personal connection to Melville underscores the importance of local community in JoburgCAN's broader mission. She highlights the unique spirit of Melville as a walkable suburb; "the streets have life!"

Her most memorable moment was the night before the 2023 Happening, when people who had come together to install the festival lights on 7th celebrated their achievement together. She describes it as a "complete meeting of action, community, and the friendships that were built around that active citizenry."

What she loves about Melville is the community spirit. "Residents raising money to build community water tanks to support each other during outages and rebuilding the stairs on 3rd Street are examples of how people don’t wait for change from elsewhere". She knows every single resident on her block, has their number, and has communicated with them all. She also values "the cosmopolitan artistic nature of the residents that call it home," which she believes breeds everything else.

You can see how this local passion fuels JoburgCAN's wider efforts; it shows the power of active citizens to drive change from the ground up!

Happy to have more insight on the state of Jozi’s civil matters? Consider giving us a tip, buy us a coffee.

What’s Happenin’ 🤔

Sun's out, guns out! 💪 No idea what to do? Don't stress, we're here.

Check out the events calendar for regular events - The Melville Pulse Events Calendar 

Melville Weather For The Week 🌸

Wednesday 

26° 🌡️ 12°  | 🌤️ |  🌧️ 1% | SSW 15 km/h 💨

Thursday  

28° 🌡️ 12° | 🌥 | 🌧️ 1% | ENE 11 km/h 💨

Friday 

29° 🌡️ 13° | 🌤️ | 🌧️ 1% | ESE 7 km/h 💨

Saturday 

27° 🌡️ 13° | 🌥 |  🌧️ 1% | NE 15 km/h 💨

Sunday

27° 🌡️ 9° | 🌤️ | 🌧️ 0% | N 13 km/h 💨

Monday 

31° 🌡️ 9° | ☀️ |  🌧️ 0% | N 11 km/h 💨

Tuesday 

27° 🌡️ 9° | 🌤️ |  🌧️ 0% | SWS 15 km/h 💨

Live & Music Events Lowdown 🎸

 Vibe hunters, fear not! We have your fix. 

12/09 | Friday | From 3 pm | Ratz Bar Meville | Circles & Squares | Free

12/09 | Friday | 7 pm | chiesa PAZZO LUPI | Umuthiomkhulu Ensemble ft. Nubam, Kamogelo Ramotse, Tumelo Mathabela, Jamson Chaba and Rocky B | R180

14/09 | Sun day | 7 pm | Chiesa PAZZO LUPI | Likhona Camanne and Andrei Van Wyk ft. DJ Aureli | R100

For more updates as the week goes on, visit our instagram page @snapson7th or our new Melville Pulse event calendar

Business Bites 📂

Die Pienk Kerk Opens This Weekend!

The whispers are growing into countdown chants! The iconic Pink Church on the border of Melville and Richmond is officially opening for business as a café this Saturday, 13th September!

They're "preparing a feast for the opening!" They'll be serving coffee, cyclists will find secure parking for bikes, the garden has been revamped and will "bloom with bougainvillaea over outdoor seating," plus there's a gift and lifestyle shop as well.

Die Pienk Kerk management has been teasing us with gourmet food, art, and decor on the socials, and have everyone drooling and raring to get through those doors.

We're excited to see what vibe they add to Melville's resurgence!

Welcome To Melville, Great Dane

After last week's brief intro to the new Ratz team, we thought it only right to tap in with the Great Dane guys as well. We spoke to Katlego Rams Tau, the new manager, to get the full scoop!

Can you tell us about the new Great Dane opening in Melville?

Great Dane has always been more than just a bar—it's been a cultural space where music, art, and nightlife come together. The new chapter in Melville is about reintroducing that same energy in a fresh way. Whilst the liquor licence process is still ongoing, we've opened the doors to start bringing people back into the space through food, music, and community events. The idea is to let Great Dane grow naturally with the neighbourhood, rather than just "relaunch" it.

A bit about the team and ownership?

The team is made up of people who genuinely love nightlife and hospitality. Many of us have been with Great Dane through its earlier phases, and some are new faces who bring fresh energy and ideas. I'm personally very hands-on in the project, from the business side down to the creative details. I've surrounded myself with a small team that understands both the culture and the grind it takes to run a place like this. We're building something sustainable and authentic, not just chasing hype.

What inspired the decision to move to Melville?

Melville has always had a strong cultural pulse. It's a neighbourhood that attracts students, artists, and professionals—people who want a good night out but also care about creativity and community. For me, Melville felt like the right place to reintroduce Great Dane because it has history, diversity, and the kind of soul that matches what Dane is all about. It wasn't just a business move; it felt like a natural fit for the next phase.

What can the hood and long-term Dane patrons expect from this new phase?

Expect a space that's familiar but grown up. The energy, the music, the late nights—that's all still here—but we're also being intentional about creating experiences beyond just parties. That means curated events, collaborations with artists, food that actually holds its own, and a space that feels welcoming whether you're coming for a wild night or just a drink and conversation. For long-term patrons, it's going to feel like coming home, but with some new tricks up our sleeve.

What's going to remain the same or be brought back from legacy Dane?

The DNA of Great Dane has always been music-driven nights, a bit of chaos, and a lot of good memories. That's not going anywhere. We're keeping the spirit of eclectic DJ line-ups, the open-door energy, and the sense of being a place where literally anything can happen. At the same time, we're bringing back certain elements people loved—from the playful branding to the way the space is designed to make you feel part of something bigger. It's about honouring the legacy without being stuck in the past.

And there you have it! Words straight from Rams himself about the new direction and intentions in their Melville era. With SK down for now, we hope their patrons can find a vibe in the new places that have come into the hood—Great Dane and the new/old Ratz! May the great nightlife migration be a smooth and joyous one.

Koppies Check-In ⛰

If you still haven't seen Merle Grace's storytelling at the Koppies yet, you're missing out!

There are only four left for the year. This weekend's Heritage Month stories are a 20,000-year-old one about the Bushman and the invention of fire, plus "Book Tree"—a children's story that speaks to the current phenomenon of administrations around the world (especially the west) banning certain book titles from libraries.

This weekend's event will be at Koppies Central during their opening times on Sunday, from 8 to 11:30. Story time is from 9:00, try to be there at 8.30.

Merle joked that her target audience is ages 4 to 104! One of her best moments at these storytelling events is when "adults become children for a moment", lost in the story and engaged just as much as the little ones.

It’s basically therapy, but with more fresh air and fewer awkward silences. Sounds wonderful!

If you can't make this one, the last three of the year are on:

• 12 October

• 9 November

• 14 December

Normal Koppies entrance prices apply:

R100 for adults, R50 for under 18s and free for under-5s - All fees go towards the Koppies conservation

The Tail End 🐾 

Missing Pets

Two kitties are missing. One was found and needs to find his family, and the other is a cute ginger kitty that's missing from Bounty Hunters. If you have any information or can help in anyway, please contact the numbers below each picture:

Art in Melville 🖼

Denzil's & Jo's Is Leaving JAM

Speaking of Ratz, the previous owner, Denzil Sibanda and co-owner of Denzil's & Jo art gallery, is shaking things up and rolling the dice again. Proving once again that the only thing constant in Melville is change (and the quest for a good parking spot). After selling the bar, he's now moving the art gallery to Parktown North.

Denzil's & Jo was once one of the most prominent art galleries and businesses in 27 Boxes, especially throughout the tough post-COVID days. Whilst Melville was on the decline, Denzil's, together with Stokvel Gallery, were keeping our art identity alive with many openings and events hosting some of South Africa's most talented artists (especially in the emerging category), many times through 2021-2023.

Things seemed to slow down last year, and they unfortunately haven't had an opening this year yet after cancelling their massive June 16 Youth Day exhibition. It looks like it's time for a change of scenery.

On 1 October 2025, the gallery will reopen at its new home at Parknorth Heights, 17 4th Avenue, Parktown North. It's a larger space and a "significant step forward" for the gallery. Denzil says, "This move represents a pivotal moment for our gallery," opening them up to new opportunities and possibilities.

Sad to see a business that held Melville down in the tough times leave, but best of luck on the next chapter!

Extra Sprinkles 🧁 

Jozi My Jozi's #JoziWalks 2025 Are Upon Us!

We recently announced that we entered the JoziWalks 2025 competition by Jozi My Jozi in collaboration with Johannesburg In Your Pocket and The Gauteng Tourism Authority in celebration of World Tourism Day—and we won! Our tour was one of the 14 chosen in several suburbs around the city.

Tickets were launched yesterday, Tuesday, 9 September, and are live on Quicket! We've planned a very immersive and interactive experience that includes many businesses and community members to celebrate our hood, called: Melville Unlocked - The Voices Of Our Village.

The Walk Experience

The walk will be guided by me (Aubrey Moloto), with Danny of Creass as my second and safety specialist, and Kele Jackson of Snaps On Seventh documenting and liaising between places and people.

We'll bring in and activate many community spaces and offerings, starting with:

• The Melville Mansions in Resource Gallery with breakfast by Gourmet Gimba and coffee by Billy Dukes from The Sourcery

• Shepard the Wire Works vendor on the strip

• Kruisgemeente Church at the Melville Market during their Spring Festival

• Melville Koppies East with Wendy Carstens giving a short lecture

• Melville Artisanal Market with Estelle Lötter providing much-needed refreshments after the mini hike

• Architectural walk up the alley stairs to Agterplaas for a final stop

We'll start and finish at 27 Boxes underground parking and courtyard, where we'll gift our participants and share snaps of the day!

It promises to be a very full day of authentic Melville experiences. Basically, we’re packing a week's worth of Melville into one morning. Wear comfy shoes. 

We'll be talking a bit about the history, but mostly focusing on current matters, community initiatives and this new identity we're trying to forge as we hit this turning point again.

Get your tickets here!

The Happening Calls For Participation

Once again, we're here with a reminder for everyone to pull together, contribute, and join in the fun at this year's The Happening event on 25 October. Communication for businesses to contribute has been sent out, and residents are urged to participate and bring their offerings to make the event more epic and memorable!

Don't sleep on your talents, gifts, and ideas—occupy some space and put up a stall! Whether you make the best damn chilli jam in Joburg, craft sculptures out of old bottle caps, or can sing your cell’s phonebook and make it sound good, they want you!

We're thinking about doing a Melville museum at the event. If you have Melville-relevant artefacts and paraphernalia you can contribute, especially historic items like maps, pictures, print media, or anything that tells the story of Melville, please reach out by replying to this email or contacting us directly via WhatsApp. Or maybe you have ideas and/or would like to collaborate?

Thank you! 🙏

Thank you for reading the 50th edition of Melville Untold! We hope our interview with Julia Fish has brought you more insight to Jozi's civic frontier. If you enjoyed the read, consider buying us a coffee.

Read a gem? Forward this email to a friend who loves Melville. 🤍 

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'Til next Wednesday, Melville,

Stay aware/awe, stay awesome, stay artistic!

Khoda hafez ✌️