Materialities, subjectivities and spatial transformation in Johannesburg

Harrison, Philip G.; Götz, Graeme; Todes, Alison; Wray, Chris

doi:10.18772/22014107656.5

Cited by 41 publications

(28 citation statements)

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“…Figures 1 and 2 use national census data from 2011 to map the variation of both unemployment and informal dwelling. The effect has been a compounding of "neo-Apartheid" spatial inequalities in the distribution of public goods (Harrison et al 2014;Murray 2011).…”

Section: The Production-and Reproduction-of Apartheid In Johannesburgmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By 2001, the city approved, for the first time, a spatial development framework, which included the formal establishment of an urban development boundary, the active creation of development nodes, including in the inner city, promotion of mixed use and densification along transport corridors, and to “avoid patterns of decline coupled with new growth elsewhere” (Todes 2015). Although this period has been cast by some as a move toward neoliberal “world class city” development, significant redistributive outlays persisted, especially in terms of continued physical infrastructural investments in Soweto (Harrison et al 2014).…”

Section: Venue-shoppingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Weapons of the Strong: Elite Resistance and the Neo-Apartheid City

Bradlow

2021

City & Community

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Transitions to democracy promise equal political power. But political ruptures carry no guarantee that democracy can overcome the accumulated inequalities of history. In South Africa, the transition to democracy shifted power from a racial minority in ways that suggested an unusually high probability of material change. This article analyzes the limits of public power after democratic transitions. Why has the post-Apartheid local state in Johannesburg been unable to achieve a spatially inclusive distribution of public goods despite a political imperative for both spatial and fiscal redistribution? I rely on interviews and archival research, conducted in Johannesburg between 2015 and 2018. Because the color line created a sharp distinction between political and economic power, traditional white urban elites required non-majoritarian and hidden strategies that translated their structural power into effective power. The cumulative effect of these “weapons of the strong” has been to disable the capacity of the local state to countervail the power of wealthy residents’ associations and property developers. Through these strategies, elites repurposed institutional reforms for redistribution to instead reproduce the city’s inequalities.

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Section: The Production-and Reproduction-of Apartheid In Johannesburgmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Venue-shoppingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Weapons of the Strong: Elite Resistance and the Neo-Apartheid City

Bradlow

2021

City & Community

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“…In the three decades since South Africa abandoned legislated segregation, residential spaces once reserved exclusively for white residents have become more racially integrated (Crankshaw, 2008), and, in the case of many inner-city areas, have very little white representation at all any more (Crankshaw & White, 1995;Harrison et al 2014;Morris, 1999;Parry & Eeden, 2015). These transformations have opened up the monopoly that white people once gave themselves over land and its access and ownership and over the accumulated advantages of spatial inequality.…”

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confidence: 99%

Scale of Belonging: Gauteng 30 Years After the Repeal of the Group Areas Act

et al. 2021

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Since the repeal of the Group Areas Act three decades ago, South Africa's oncedivided spaces have merged, and race-based restrictions on political participation have been eliminated. The result is that the territories to which people belong have transformed, and in many cases have increased in scale. This editorial introduces a special issue on the scale of belonging, which consists of a series of case studies in Gauteng Province. It considers the possibilities, complexities and limits of this aspect of spatial transformation. It provides two cross-cutting themes running through the articles. The first is that scales of belonging are produced by state practices, the private sector and ordinary users of space. The second is that actors invest in particular scales preferentially, either for their immediate benefit or for the benefit of society as a whole. Keywords Apartheid city • Urban spatial transformation • South Africa • InclusionOn 28 June 1991, the South African parliament repealed the Group Areas Act, along with other 'racially based land measures' (Fig. 1). For much of the twentieth century, white minority governments insisted that individuals living in South Africa were not a single people but belonged to different ethnically and racially defined nations, and allocated each their own national territories. As a result, the state maintained that most people who lived in urban areas did not truly belong to them, and

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“…It has involved constant orientation and disorientation in the city. As a white, male, middle-class South African, I have found the research process haunted by the specter of white violence, its spatial remainders and ruins on the landscape of the city (Harrison et al 2014;Dirsuweit and Wafer 2016). To navigate the sites of occupation, I have relied on personal alliances and friendships formed over several years.…”

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confidence: 99%

The City Otherwise: The Deferred Emergency of Occupation in Inner-City Johannesburg

Wilhelm-Solomon

2020

Cult. Anthropol.

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This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Johannesburg between 2011 and 2019 in inner-city unlawful occupations and temporary emergency accommodation sites. These are often referred to as “hijacked buildings,” “bad buildings,” or “dark buildings.” However, they are also spaces of refuge, intimacy, and sociality for tens of thousands of South Africans and foreign nationals excluded from formal rental markets and often displaced by the drive for urban regeneration. This essay mobilizes two concepts to characterize these spaces. The first is the notion of the “city otherwise,” engaging Elizabeth Povinelli’s concept of “spaces of otherwise.” The residents of these occupations endure in spaces of emergence and potentiality. Furthermore, I argue that they exist in a juridical condition that I characterize as “the deferred emergency.” This condition entails the indefinite deferral of an emergency, framed around both the juridical and the infrastructural form of “temporary emergency accommodation” for the evicted.

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Materialities, subjectivities and spatial transformation in Johannesburg

Cited by 41 publications

References 0 publications

Weapons of the Strong: Elite Resistance and the Neo-Apartheid City

Weapons of the Strong: Elite Resistance and the Neo-Apartheid City

Scale of Belonging: Gauteng 30 Years After the Repeal of the Group Areas Act

The City Otherwise: The Deferred Emergency of Occupation in Inner-City Johannesburg

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