Keyes is synonymous with creative energy and urban gathering, woven into Rosebank's cultural life. Now, bureaucracy has caught up at last and it's a go for the precinct's next phase.

Time in Joburg doesn't move in a straight line. It bends, stalls, accelerates and loops. A minute here can hold a universe of change - and just as easily, years can pass while you wait for a pothole to be filled or a streetlight to stop blinking.

Ten years ago, the Keyes Art Mile launched in lower Rosebank with the Trumpet building beside Circa Gallery. What was imagined as the beginning of a new precinct gradually drew in its neighbours, from St Teresa's School to Everard Read, sketching the outline of an art mile.

And then came the wait.

It has taken close to a decade for the precinct plan to be formally registered. Ten years for bureaucracy to catch up with what investment banker-turned-property developer Anton Taljaard and his team first imagined. That is the diplomatic version. For years, the City's building plans lay strewn across the floor of a condemned Metro Centre in Braamfontein, a fitting metaphor for how urban ambition in Joburg so often is trapped between vision and approval.

Despite being more Keyes Art Inch than Keyes Art Mile, the Trumpet building has become woven into Rosebank's cultural life, somehow bigger than its physical footprint. Keyes...