Transport Geography in South Africa

Pirie, Gordon

doi:10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2013.06.002

Cited by 9 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…On the other hand, this shows how Black bus riders (and drivers) have come to create specific mobile geographies to contend with the uneven investment in movement. Other African scholars also explain the radical potentiality of a politics of movement both as a platform for struggle and reclamation of space (Pirie, 2013; Rink, 2020). Khosa (1995) explains how transportation networks are not only representative of broader racist geographic organization, strategically connecting and disconnecting Black and white South Africa but have also been a platform for critiquing and struggling against white supremacy.…”

Section: Mobile Blacknessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward an expanded approach on Black mobilities

Hinger

2021

Progress in Human Geography

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Mobilities scholars have shown how injustices may arise from forced movement or stillness. However, with notable exceptions, these studies tend to collapse analyses of race into a simplistic binary of immobility as an inherent characteristic of non-white people and the possibility of movement as only granted to white people. In this article, I call for an expanded approach that is inclusive of both the controlling forces of white supremacy and life-affirming resistance against and despite these constraints. Drawing from Black studies and Black Geographies, I argue for a more unified Black mobilities research agenda.

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Section: Mobile Blacknessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward an expanded approach on Black mobilities

Hinger

2021

Progress in Human Geography

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“…The sharing economy intersects labour in an industry—private driving—which extends to what is known as the formal and the informal economy (Rogerson, ). Historically in South Africa, the latter has been associated with risk and crime, both in the pre‐ and post‐apartheid eras (Khosa, ; Barrett, ; Pirie, ). Several of my interlocutors related stories about GPS trackers, background checks and driving tests.…”

Section: Marketization By Softwarementioning

confidence: 99%

Forefronts of the Sharing Economy: Uber in Cape Town

Pollio¹

2019

Int J Urban Regional Res

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The sharing economy, often phrased as 'platform capitalism', enables firms such as Uber and Airbnb to monetize, through specific technologies of mediation, the networks, the assets and the precarious labour of those who are described as 'the entrepreneurs of sharing'. This article explores the urban geographies of ride-sharing in the marketization of Uber in Cape Town, South Africa. I use empirical evidence collected during the first phase of its operations in the city, between 2013 and 2015, to show how Uber relied upon the developmental entrepreneurialism of Cape Town to embed its ride-sharing market locally, and how the drivers enacted multiple technical, economic and ethical regimes within and without the constraints of the software platform. The research presented in this article thus contributes to understanding how the discourses of millennial development, with its promises of entrepreneurial empowerment, are adopted by global sharing-economy firms to enact their markets in the global South. It also reveals how a different genealogy of Uber's urban transactions offers an alternative perspective on the normative rationalities of the sharing economy and on the diverse economies that exist in relation to platform capitalism in the global South.

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“…A salient example for our purposes is the Gautrain, a high-speed locomotive line linking Johannesburg and Pretoria to O. R. Tambo Airport. Envisioned as a project for the improvement of public transport throughout greater Johannesburg, the train symbolizes its neoliberal, global aspirations and has been vigorously criticized as a privileged form of transport that is unaffordable for the majority and the preserve of tourists and commuters from affluent suburbs (Pirie, 2013: 313). Three lines from a recent poem by Karen Lazar (n.d.) address this exclusivity: In sandton the sand had turned to marbleAnd my feet grew coldNot all can afford this ticket…”

Section: Resistant Localitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The train as motif in Soweto poetry

Jones

2016

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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This article considers protest poetry written between 1961 and 1976. I argue that the Soweto poetry of the 1970s enabled activism that would change Johannesburg's landscape, facilitating the racial mixing of inner city areas and eroding the segregationist policies that had defined the city from its beginnings. Concomitantly, the paper focuses on representations of the train as a site through which black localities were produced as resistance. Via close readings of poetry by Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali, Sipho Sepamla, and Mongane Wally Serote, I show how the train establishes Soweto as a "neighbourhood", while also constructing a white "other" against which its identity is affirmed.The genealogy of racial spatialization in South Africa is well known (see, for example, Robinson, 1996): under colonialism and then apartheid, black South Africans were forced to the economic, political, and social margins of society through legal measures that deprived them of land and limited their means of survival in the rural areas, while making them non-citizens in the urban. Spatialized racial segregation was in turn deeply embedded in formations of place. The pre-apartheid state's insistence on the whiteness of the urban was increasingly entrenched during the period of National Party governance beginning in 1948, under which the creation of Bantustans, the implementation of Pass Laws and the restriction of black people to under-resourced, peripheral townships in the cities were all ways in which the discriminatory power of the white state found spatial

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Transport Geography in South Africa

Cited by 9 publications

References 45 publications

Toward an expanded approach on Black mobilities

Toward an expanded approach on Black mobilities

Forefronts of the Sharing Economy: Uber in Cape Town

The train as motif in Soweto poetry

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