Mediated multinational urbanism: a Johannesburg exemplar

Abstract

With increased international immigration, South African cities have come to contend with the threat of a violent multinational urbanism. Xenophobia, in its violent and symbolic manifestations, signifies this challenge. From an empirical grounding in Johannesburg, this paper explores the possibility of living together in contexts of multinational urbanism. It argues that strategic action and communicative action, in the Habermasian sense, are essential to the everyday mediation of multinational urbanism.

Seeing numbers

“…They are rarely expanded on or considered as fully fleshed-out people with lives, families, and dreams of their own. The fafi man, or, as an ethnic caricature, the "China man," is considered another outsider in the unhinged landscape of the city, and xenophobic sentiments are interwoven with gamblers' reliance on the fafi man and the predictability of his arrival every day (Katsaura 2015;Katsaura and Abe 2016). Not black, or white, or coloured, and without a visible historical connection to the antiapartheid movement like Indian South Africans, Chinese South Africans occupy a peculiar space in the South African imaginary, and this has only intensified with the new era of Chinese investment in and migration to South Africa (Park 2010;Harrison, Moyo, and Yang 2012;Louw 2019).…”