Alex Wafer

Scale, governance and the maintenance of privileged control: The case of road closures in Johannesburg’s Northern Suburbs

An examination of development patterns, especially since 1990, leads one to the assertion that not only are racial divisions still firmly entrenched in the spatial order of the metropolis, if anything the location of significant urban facilities, notably, shopping centres, offices, cinemas, and restaurants are now more concentrated in the dominantly white-occupied ‘northern’ suburbs than ever before (…) together they form an ‘enclave’ that constitutes 28.8% of the area of Johannesburg and one that by the close of 2003 contained some 70% of all the shopping facilities located in the large malls of the city (SA Reconciliation Barometer, 2005).

Suburban road-closures and the ruinous landscapes of privilege in Johannesburg

In this article we trace the emergence of road-closures – i.e. the barricading by local residents of public roads ostensibly in response to crime – in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg in the decade after apartheid. We argue that road-closures manifest an attempt at material “fixing” an urban order of privilege, even as privilege and inequality is increasingly “deterritorialised” in the city of the global South. While conventionally theorised as part of a broader global trend towards the privatisation and securitisation of urban space, we demonstrate that road-closures contain qualitatively different expectations of the urban order to e.g. private gated communities. Whereas gated communities are premised on and driven by a political economy of self-exclusion from urban life, road-closures simultaneously resist and prefigure this “deterritorialised” reordering of privilege in the post-apartheid city. Based on archival research in local community newspapers over a 10-year period between and 2004 (the high-water mark of the so-called road-closure “debates”), we trace shifting discourses about road closures and the city: from anxieties about crime and loss of privilege, to fantasies of abandonment, to the assertion (and rupture) of a mythical suburban utopia. Drawing on a literature on ruins as the material effects of a past order manifest in the urban order of the present, we assert that despite anxieties about the loss of privilege, these enclosed neighbourhoods remain spaces of extreme privilege, now implicated into an emergent geography in which old and new spaces of privilege overlap to reinforce spatial inequalities in post-apartheid Johannesburg.

Loitering reassembling time in the cityoftheglobalsouth

Abstract One of the most powerfully visible ways in which public space in inner city Johannesburg is ordered is through the material presence of apparently idle young men – a context profoundly linked to the precarious position of young and immigrant men in the post-apartheid economy. For the most part, these young men are regarded with disdain, the objects of fear and anxiety. In the following discussion, based on two years of field research with a group of unemployed young men (between the ages of 15 and 30 years old) who attend a weekly bible study and soup kitchen at a church in the inner city, I demonstrate ways in which these young men structure their daily lives in response to the over-abundance of time. I consider how the act of loitering in public space serves to reassemble the relationship between time and value at the peripheries of the urban economy, extracting value from the apparently idle activity of waiting in the present, but uncoupled from a sense of control over the past and future.

The Spirit of Hillbrow: Religion and the Ordering of Social Space in Inner-City Johannesburg

Like many cities in the Global South, the religious and spiritual realms are vividly present in the ordering of everyday life in Johannesburg. Urban spaces are saturated with religious iconography and symbolism, everywhere evident in the naming of internet kiosks and hair salons, and religion is an important element of people’s social routines in ways that challenge the assumptions of the inevitable link between modernity and secularism in the twentieth century (cf. Becci and Burchardt, Topographies of Faith: Religion in Urban Spaces, 2013; Durkheim 2012). Yet I am interested in—more than merely the presence of religion in the materiality of the city of the Global South—the ways that religion and spirituality order the materiality of the city, providing a set of tools through which to interpret and also engage with an urban context characterised by alienation, anomie and precarity as much as by networks of affiliation and association. In this chapter, I consider two examples, from the inner-city suburb of Hillbrow in Johannesburg, of the way in which individuals order their everyday life through rationalities that move between the spiritual/religious domain and the material domain. I refer loosely to Durkheim’s theorisation of the sacred and the profane, although I suggest that this is not the only way to think about the intersection of the material and the non-material in Hillbrow. Rather, I suggest that what we may refer to as the spiritual realm—rendered ever present in the material realm—provides a framework for ordering a material realm that seems hopelessly implicated within a multiplicity of competing orders.

Precarity and intimacy in super-diverse Hillbrow

Much of the recent literature on migration and diversity in Johannesburg has, perhaps understandably, focused on the persistence of xenophobic attitudes — and sometimes violence — to which foreign nationals are subject in some of the city’s most marginal and impoverished neighbourhoods (Neocosmos 2010, Crush 2011, Duncan 2011, Von Holdt and Kirsten 2011, Charman and Piper 2012, Kirshner 2012, Magubane 2013). There is a far smaller literature in the Johannesburg context on the modes through which individuals and groups encounter and interact with one another in more productive ways (although see Landau and Freemantle 2010). In this chapter, I describe two examples of situations in which individuals and groups voluntarily engage in meaningful and sustained encounters across boundaries of difference, even as they express anxiety about those others with whom they forge encounters.