Taming the Disorderly City

J. Murray Martin

Description

In postapartheid Johannesburg, tensions of race and class manifest themselves starkly in struggles over "rights to the city." Real-estate developers and the very poor fight for control of space as the municipal administration steps aside, almost powerless to shape the direction of change. Having ceded control of development to the private sector, the Johannesburg city government has all but abandoned residential planning to the unpredictability of market forces. This failure to plan for the civic good-and the resulting confusion-is a perfect example of the entrepreneurial approaches to urban governance that are sweeping much of the Global South as well as the cities of the North.Martin J. Murray brings together a wide range of urban theory and local knowledge to draw a nuanced portrait of contemporary Johannesburg. In Taming the Disorderly City, he provides a focused intellectual and political critique of the often-ambivalent urban dynamics that have emerged after the end of apartheid. Exploring the behaviors of the rich and poor, each empowered in their own way, as they rebuild a new Johannesburg, we see the entrepreneurial city: high-rises, shopping districts, and gated communities surrounded by and intermingled with poverty. In graceful prose, Murray offers a compelling portrait of the everyday lives of the urban poor as seen through the lens of real-estate capitalism and revitalization efforts.

Sujets

• Afrique du Sud
• Human geography
• History of Africa
• South Africa
• Republic of South Africa

Informations

• Publié par: Cornell University Press
• Date de parution: 21 mai 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781501717000
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

Taming the Disorderly City

also by martin j. murray

Cities in Contemporary Africa(coedited with Garth Myers)

The Revolution Deferred: The Painful Birth of PostApartheid South Africa

Radical Sociologists and the Movement: Experiences, Lessons, and Legacies (coedited with Martin Oppenheimer and Rhonda F. Levine)

South Africa: Time of Agony, Time of Destiny. The Upsurge of Popular Protest in South Africa

South African Capitalism and Black Political Opposition

The Development of Colonialism in Indochina, 1870–1940

Taming the Disorderly City The Spatial Landscape of Johannesburg after Apartheid

MARTIN J. MURRAY

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2008 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 2008 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2008

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Murray, Martin J.  Taming the disorderly city : the spatial landscape of Johannesburg after apartheid / Martin J. Murray.  p. cm.  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 9780801445699 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 9780 801474378 (pbk. : alk. paper)  1. Sociology, Urban—South Africa—Johannesburg. 2. Urban renewal—South Africa—Johannesburg. 3. City planning—South Africa—Johannesburg. 4. Johannesburg (South Africa)—Social conditions. 5. Johannesburg (South Africa)—Geography. 6. Johannesburg (South Africa)—Politics and government. I. Title.

HN801.J64M87 2008 307.3'4160968221—dc22

2008001452

Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetablebased, lowVOC inks and acidfree papers that are recycled, totally chlorinefree, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Preface vii Acknowledgments xi List of Abbreviations and Nicknames xv

Introduction: The Untamed City of Fragments 1 1  Social Justice and the Rights to the City 15 2  Ruin and Regeneration Intertwined 39 3  The Fixed and Flexible City 59 4  Disposable People at the PeriUrban Fringe 90 5  The Spatial Dynamics of Real Estate Capitalism 125 6  The Struggle for Survival in the Inner City 154 7  Revitalization and Displacement in the Inner City 189 8  The Banality of Indifferent Urbanism 225

References 237 Index 257

Preface

The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. Walter Benjamin(1999, 473)

nInvisible Cities,Calvino recounts the story of a Venetian traveler, Italo I Marco Polo, who entertains the aged Tartar emperor Kublai Khan with apocryphal tales of the cities he has visited in his travels around the vast em pire. In time, it gradually becomes evident that each of the fantastic places that Marco Polo so artfully describes is really one and the same place: the city of Venice. For Calvino, cities are constantly evolving places that resist objec tification, summary, and closure. As openended aggregates subjected simul taneously to both centripetal and centrifugal forces, cites never congeal into cohesive universals or submit to totalizing perspectives. Among many other things, Calvino was concerned with the connection between memory and the experience of urbanity, or how place is the product of a relationship—part internalization of existing external realities and part intersubjective projec tion onto space. For him, since all cities are different cities wrapped into one (metaphorically at least), travelers never have to leave home to discover the “strangeness” in the familiar (Calvino 1974; see Curtis 2001, 56–65). It can be said that, speaking figuratively, Johannesburg resembles Calvino’s invisible Venice, for it is a prismatic, kaleidoscopic, and everchanging me tropolis that contains many cities in one (De Boeck 2002). It is at once a city of monumental architecture and abysmal slums; a city of luxurious playgrounds for the rich and empty wastelands for the poor; a city of utopian fantasy and dystopian anxiety; and a city of collective memory and intentional forgetting. Johannesburg is a place that cannot be truly grasped in its entirety as some kind of fixed and stable whole, since its morphological form, its places, and its people are in constant motion, continuously changing and evolving in ways both planned and unplanned, anticipated and unanticipated. The physical

viii

Preface

remnantsandculturalartifactsofpasttimesarerepeatedlysubjectedtodestruc tion and ruination, whether the result of deliberate intervention or the conse quence of benign neglect. The endless cycles of building and rebuilding have endowed the urban landscape with a contingency and elusiveness that make it difficult to classify, categorize, and define. This ontological instability attached to the built environment has resulted in a gap between the city and its repre sentations, that is, between its provisionality and the efforts to explain its erratic p atternsofgrowthanddevelopmentintermsofconventionalmodels,para digms, or deductive theories of urban transformation (Abbas 1994, 442–445). Wellestablished image categories—most apparent in political commentar ies, journalism, fiction writing, documentary film, popular media, and urban scholarship—have portrayed Johannesburg after apartheid as a sprawling me tropolis in constant flux, a disorderly and edgy place that is formless in struc ture, illegible in appearance, and difficult to decipher, manage, and negotiate. Like all other cities, it consists of highly differentiated and heterogeneous spaces that reflect a great diversity of experiences, activities, and lifestyles. En thusiastic image makers have never tired of drawing attention to the city as the “World’s Greatest Gold Producer,” the “New York of Africa,” the “City of Record Sunshine,” and the “Heartbeat of South Africa” (Sihlongonyane 2005, 22). But beneath the glittering veneer that endowed Egoli, the City of Gold, with its dis tinct qualities of place is a recurrent tale of boom and bust, of reinvention, re creation, and makebelieve. It is a complicated story that did not end with the demise of apartheid, but has continued to unfold as powerfully new schisms along class and racial lines intersect in new and different ways to reshape the city for future generations (Robinson 2002; Sawhey 2002; van Niekerk 1999). As Johannesburg struggles to shed the visible (and notsovisible) remind ers of its odious past as the quintessential apartheid city, the city has become something like a prism through which we can focus attention on a host of questions concerned with the connections between the social forces reshap ing the built environment, architecture, and urban design, on the one hand, and enduring social and racial inequalities, national identity, and citizenship, on the other. As with all cities in South Africa, the urban landscape of Johan nesburg continues to bear the marks of racial separation and class division. With the end of apartheid and the transition to parliamentary democracy, Jo hannesburg finds itself in a virtual frenzy of future projections, and, in line with the roseate image of the “rainbow nation,” in the midst of intense debates about how to reshape the urban landscape in conformity with the genuine commitment to racial harmony. The lack of regular work, affordable housing, and social security for ordinary people has engendered increased demands for the “right to the city,” including spatial justice and legal enforcement of the entitlements of full citizenship. In seeking ways to position Johannesburg

Preface

ix

among elite cities with worldclass aspirations, city builders have struggled to balance marketdriven growth with the maintenance of social safety nets for the poorest of the poor. Yet these boosterist visions of a radiant future are both haunted by structural legacies and collective memories inherited from the past and undermined by citybuilding strategies that seem oblivious to addressing persistent inequalities of the present (see Huyssen 1997). Put broadly, this book is an invitation to look at Johannesburg and other cities not only in formal and functional terms but in figural and symbolic ways as well. To make sense of the citybuilding processes that have spatially reconfigured the urban landscape of Johannesburg after apartheid requires the adoption of an interpretive approach that is capable of acknowledging the in terplay between surface layers and the deep structural forms, that is, between scenographic visionscapes saturated with aestheticized images and their un derlying material conditions of existence. The urban landscape consists not only of a built environment subject to radical alteration and modification but also of a constellation of outward signs that convey a host of overlapping, intersecting, and sometimes conflicting meanings. The visible appearance of buildings and other assembled material objects that make up the cityscape always gives rise to intuitive or evocative allusions. Citybuilding processes oscillate between creative interventions, the fashioning of something new that never existed before, on the one side, and selective destruction, erasure, and elimination, on the other. The result is a hybrid layering of architectural sites, woven together and juxtaposed in sometimes strange and seemingly odd combinations (Boyer 1992; 1994a, 3, 5, 9, 19, 21, 25). The methodological approach that informs this book seeks to bypass the crude reductionism, onedimensionality, and abstract qualities of many d eductivetheoriesofurbantransformation.Insteadoftryingtoforciblyshoe horn the individual case of Johannesburg into a single explanatory logic de rived from such available theories as “urban growth machines,” “global cities,” and postmodern urbanism, I seek instead to retain the detailed richness, com plexity, and heterogeneity of the urban experience by focusing on different parts of the story and how these separate pieces fit together into a coherent whole. This synthetic approach, which manages to convey some sense of the panoramic totality of the city through the patchwork assemblage of fragments, finds a great deal of its inspiration in Walter Benjamin and his writings on Paris, particularly the unfinishedArcades Project(Benjamin 1999, 33–36, 65, 87). It involves the identification of persistent themes or common threads that, when brought into relation with one another, constitute something akin to a unified totality. This way of thinking, which resembles a montage of seemingly disconnected glimpses of city life, enables us to approximate a holistic vision of city building in Johannesburg after apartheid (Harvey 2003, 18–19).