Residential alienation or the right to the city? ‘Rooms’ and ‘spaces’ as a mode of densification in Johannesburg and Cape Town

Brown, K. W.; Mayson, Simon Sizwe

doi:10.4337/9781789904949.00020

Cited by 2 publications

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“…These developments operate both within markets but in ways that often bypass more formal planning, real estate, and financing processes, including through forms of autoconstruction, underpinning a thick constellation of value-generating socioeconomic practices. The geographies of these forms of ‘peripheral’ densification are varied; not only on the suburbs and edges of cities but also on the rooftops of apartment blocks in Hong Kong or the backyards of homes in Johannesburg, as well as within empty and unused buildings (Rubin and Charlton, 2020; Coker, 2019; Brown and Mayson, 2020; Dörmann, 2020). As Rubin and Charlton (2020) argue in relation to Johannesburg, these kinds of densities not only reflect profound inequalities in land and housing in state policy and development trajectories, they also generate all kinds of ‘forced intimacies’ between landlords, tenants, and neighbours that involve various forms of cooperation and conflict.…”

Section: Density Domains: Speculative Regulatory and Popularmentioning

confidence: 99%

Density as a politics of value: Regulation, speculation, and popular urbanism

Habermehl

McFarlane

2023

Progress in Human Geography

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Density is at the centre of urban change, and is often politicised. Building on Geographical and Urban scholarship, we set out a critical approach to understanding density through a focus on value. Following a review of key approaches to density, we show that while value is often at stake in efforts to manage, change, defend, or promote densities of different kinds, it has rarely been the explicit focus of critical research on density. We address this by outlining how density propositions entail a politics of value through three inter-related urban domains: speculation, regulation, and the popular, followed by consequences for future research.

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