City of Extremes
eBook - PDF

City of Extremes

The Spatial Politics of Johannesburg

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

City of Extremes

The Spatial Politics of Johannesburg

About this book

City of Extremes is a powerful critique of urban development in greater Johannesburg since the end of apartheid in 1994. Martin J. Murray describes how a loose alliance of city buildersā€”including real estate developers, large-scale property owners, municipal officials, and security specialistsā€”has sought to remake Johannesburg in the upbeat image of a world-class city. By creating new sites of sequestered luxury catering to the comfort, safety, and security of affluent urban residents, they have produced a new spatial dynamic of social exclusion, effectively barricading the mostly black urban poor from full participation in the mainstream of urban life. This partitioning of the cityscape is enabled by an urban planning environment of limited regulation or intervention into the prerogatives of real estate capital.

Combining insights from urban studies, cultural geography, and urban sociology with extensive research in South Africa, Murray reflects on the implications of Johannesburg's dual character as a city of fortified enclaves that proudly displays the ostentatious symbols of global integration and the celebrated "enterprise culture" of neoliberal design, and as the "miasmal city" composed of residual, peripheral, and stigmatized zones characterized by signs of a new kind of marginality. He suggests that the "global cities" paradigm is inadequate to understanding the historical specificity of cities in the Global South, including the colonial mining town turned postcolonial megacity of Johannesburg.

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Yes, you can access City of Extremes by Martin J. Murray in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & African History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Contents
  2. List of Maps
  3. List of Illustrations
  4. Preface
  5. Acknowledgments
  6. Abbreviations
  7. Introduction - Spatial Politics in the Precarious City
  8. Part I - Making Space: City Building and the Production of the Built Environment
  9. Part II - Unraveling Space: Centrifugal Urbanism and the Convulsive City
  10. Part III - Fortifying Space: Siege Architecture and Anxious Urbanism
  11. Epilogue - Putting Johannesburg in Its Place: The Ordinary City
  12. Appendix
  13. Notes
  14. Bibliography
  15. Index