Taming the Disorderly City

The Spatial Landscape of Johannesburg after Apartheid

Martin J. Murray

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781501716997
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

1

Social Justice and the Rights to the City

The right to the city is like a cry and a demand,…a transformed and renewed right to urban life.

Henri Lefebvre (1996, 158)

In linking geographical mobility with contemporary globalization, Zygmunt Bauman (1998, 77) has declared, “Nowadays we are all on the move.” In distinguishing between different groups of mobile travelers, Bauman divides people on the move into affluent tourists and impoverished vagabonds, that is, between those who travel from place to place as “vicarious or actual privileged consumers of the world as a globalized spectacle” and those uprooted, desperate people who are forced to move by straightened circumstances beyond their control (quotation from Faulkner 2004, 93). For affluent tourists, faster forms of travel, streamlined border controls, and a ballooning service industry catering to their every need and desire have transformed what were once inaccessible places into exotic adventure lands for the leisure class. In contrast, the movement of vagabonds takes place out of necessity, not as a consequence of the calculated choice of consumer preference. As Bauman (1998, 94) puts it, “the vagabond is the alter ego of the tourist.” While tourists and vagabonds are separated by their dissimilar experiences of travel, their movements within the global economy are structured and shaped by overlapping and intersecting forces that allow a privileged few to enjoy the freedom of movement and at the same time deny these options to others. Indeed, the expansion of global spheres of privilege not only enables the temporary translocation of the tourist but also acts to limit the freedom (and choice) of movement of the world’s poor. Whereas affluent travelers can subject their choice of destination to the rational calculation of consumer preference, the rootless poor are often forced to move against their will (Faulkner 2004, 93–94).

Pulled by the illusive dream of steady income or pushed by despair and hopelessness, tens of thousands of recent arrivals have come to the greater Johannesburg metropolitan region in search of a better life. Yet opportunities for socioeconomic advancement are largely restricted to those urban residents with inherited wealth, talents, and educational attainment. Johannesburg after apartheid has metamorphosed into a city where sociospatial stratification, racial inequality, and marginalization have become entrenched features of the urban landscape. An intricate mosaic consisting of an overlapping grid of legally sanctioned property regimes, statutory regulations, zoning ordinances, and institutionally enforced bylaws has helped to generate and reinforce these pervasive urban processes that have reconfigured the spatial landscape. Johannesburg is a city almost entirely constructed around a forbidding architecture of enclosure. The gradual expansion of such fortified urban enclaves as citadel office complexes, city improvement districts, gated residential communities, and sequestered shopping malls have produced a spatially uneven and hierarchically arranged landscape where large-scale property owners—protected by legally sanctioned barriers to entry, restrictive covenants, and exclusionary codes—clash with the claims of the propertyless urban dwellers who assert their right to the city by demanding a more egalitarian and collective understanding of land use (Blomley 2004, xiii–xxi).

Exclusionary Urbanism and Spatial Injustice

In Johannesburg as elsewhere, the technocratic urge toward eliminating ambiguity, indeterminacy, and uncertainty in urban space is an ingrained habit of city building. Seen through the moralizing lens of those planning discourses that stress the need to maintain the orderly city, displacement mutates into spatial purification. The paranoid vision of workless legions of rootless vagabonds wandering aimlessly around the city has played a pivotal role in the construction of the postapartheid identity of the propertied residents of middle-class suburban neighborhoods. Middle-class anxiety about the dangerous city has spilled over into a visceral distrust, resentment, and indifference to the plight of the poor. As propertied and privileged urban residents retreat behind walls, the jobless poor are forced to survive in the atrophying public spaces of the city, with their deteriorating infrastructure, inadequate services, and limited opportunities for income generation.

Displaced persons have little choice but to continue carrying out what amounts to a nomadic existence shuffling between the cracks and crevices of social space. In contrast to the mapped and monitored spaces of sovereignty and municipal authority, the lived spaces of the displaced—the temporary shelters, the squatter camps, the unauthorized shantytowns, abandoned buildings, parks, cemeteries, prisons—exemplify the marginalization of those for whom there is no rightful place in the city. These dispersed, pulverized, indeterminate spaces constitute the “Invisible City,” and they exist outside the boundaries of official scrutiny and institutional governance. Those who occupy these marginal sites are “both invisible and too visible.” Even if their voices are not silenced, their protests and complaints are largely unheard—and hence unrecognized (Delaney 2004, 847–848; see also Kihato and Landau 2005; Landau 2005, 2006; Groth and Corijn 2005).

In the past several decades, displacement has emerged as one of the most persistent themes in human rights law, as well as a central focus in the scholarly fields of migration, diasporic, and refugee studies. Such scholarship has been instrumental in prompting a greater interest in questions of the forced mobility of unwilling subjects, along with the linkage of these concerns to discourses of social justice and universal human rights, citizenship, and national belonging (Bales 2004; Bauman 2003; Landau 2006; Ong 1999; Simone and Gotz 2003). As a conceptual framing device, displacement is linked to various modalities of coercive movement, the spatialization of power, and the infrapolitics of inclusion and exclusion. In a global age that typically celebrates hypermobility as the emblematic embodiment of personal and collective freedom, displacement focuses instead on mobility as a distinctive kind of coerced movement, “as against the will or wishes of subjects”(Delaney 2004,848) who, because they are deemed to be out of place, are compelled to relocate. As a concrete manifestation of enforced deterritorialization, displacement draws attention to the microtechnologies of power, or how people are denied entry or removed against their will. The spatial practices of expulsion and exclusion blend together in ways that bring to light the capillaries of the workings of power hidden in everyday life (Delaney 2004, 848).

Viewing displacement through the prism of an inaugural or threshold episode, such as the moment of eviction, forced removal, deportation, expulsion, or arrest, has the effect of reducing what is less a singular event than an ongoing state of being, or what sometimes becomes a permanent condition of existence (Kawash 1998). Displaced people—those who are uprooted and evicted—are literally put into motion, compelled to be constantly on the move in search of work, adequate shelter, and access to basic resources. Often it is brute force that operates as the active agency behind displacement: people flee or retreat when “confronted with men with guns”(Delaney 2004, 849). Yet undue stress on the threat or use of physical violence as the driving force behind coerced movement overlooks the ordinariness and banality of displacement as an integral element of everyday life. Coerced movement is also brought about by the persuasive force of reason, or the application of legal authority: the enforcement of such routine regulations as municipal bylaws, statutes, immigration laws, and health and safety codes, can result, no less than the use of physical violence, in the dispersal and coercive scattering of people (Delaney 2004, 849; Mbembe 1992).

Assorted figures of displacement—the unemployed, those who occupy abandoned buildings, asylum seekers, undocumented immigrants, refugees, runaway youth, prostitutes, and the itinerant traders—inhabit a material world that is saturated with the legal signifiers of property and ownership, sovereignty and territorial governance, nationhood and citizenship. This inextricable conjunction of spatial emplacement and legal rights makes the life-worlds of city dwellers meaningful in terms of the exercise, circulation, and justification of power. The ever-shifting interplay between material locations and legal signifiers renders ostensibly equal city dwellers legible as either legitimate city users (citizens, property owners, consumers, tenants, and guests) or illegitimate occupiers of urban space (undocumented immigrants, trespassers, squatters, or itinerant traders). Those who do not belong or are out of place are subject to removal and expulsion, exclusion and banishment (Blomley 2003; Flusty 2001; Landau 2005, 2006).

For newcomers to the city and for young people entering adulthood, social integration into the mainstream of urban life generally occurs through a combination of overlapping mechanisms: absorption into the everyday world of regular work, incorporation into the market for decent and affordable housing, and access to reliable physical and social infrastructure (piped water and sewerage, electrical power, social services such as health, education, welfare, and police and fire protection). These three mechanisms of social inclusion—steady income, decent housing, and access to basic urban services—intersect and complement one another. In combination, they anchor urban residents into a relatively stable place in the sociocultural fabric of the city. The rootedness in place—linked as it is to the materiality of locality and a sense of belonging—enables urban residents to mobilize and tap into the kinds of social networks necessary for their material survival (Keyder 2005, 124–125, 127).

Conversely, social exclusion refers to a failure of the mechanisms of social integration to incorporate the urban poor into the mainstream of urban life. The shrinkage of wage-paid employment under juridical-legal supervision, the lack of affordable residential accommodation, and highly restricted access to the physical and social infrastructure of the city has rendered the daily lives of the urban poor vulnerable in the extreme. Without regular work, authorized shelter, and basic social services, the urban poor are cast adrift from the ties that bind them to the urban fabric (Kihato and Landau 2005; Landau 2005, 2006).

The variegated multitudes of impoverished urban residents have crystallized into a permanent underclass, constantly moving back and forth between casual and informal work, self-employment, and unemployment, largely dependent on the outside assistance of others for their survival (Rogerson 1996b; Keyder 2005, 132). Displacement, exclusion, and marginalization of this propertyless underclass are the result of both deliberate policy choices of property owners and municipal authorities and the everyday operations of property regimes, land markets, and the legal enforcement of codes, regulations, and bylaws. The visible expressions of revanchist urbanism—such as forced removals of homeless squatters from unauthorized settlements and arresting vagrants and beggars—constitute a war on the poor (Smith 1996, 1998). Municipal authorities have effectively criminalized the urban poor by treating the structural problems that arise from unemployment and poverty as matters of law enforcement. In the official mind popular illegalities such as drug dealing, prostitution, sleeping in public parks, erecting curbside stalls on the pavements, and panhandling, contribute to the disorderly city and therefore must be eradicated in order to fashion a cityscape that conforms to middle-class sensibilities (Merrifield 2000; Mitchell 1997).

But to focus exclusively on the draconian measures designed to drive the urban poor out of the city ignores the everyday routines that make it virtually impossible for the truly disadvantaged to survive in the city. The triumphant rise of market liberalism has tied the provision of such basic urban services as water, electricity, education, health care, and welfare to the commercial ethos of supply and demand. The commodification of urban services—with its “pay-as-you-go” logic of cost recovery—has driven a wedge between the haves and the have-nots. The inosculated overlay of property regimes, restrictive covenants, city bylaws, and land-use regulations has ensured that unwanted and undesirable people are denied entry to the fashionable zones of the urban landscape.

At a time characterized by diasporic peoples, hybrid subjects, and porous borders, it is not possible to understand or make sense of displacement and exclusion simply or exclusively in terms of citizenship and national belonging (Merry 2001; Sanchez 1997, 2001). Rather, new modes of urban governance have come to depend on strategies of spatial governmentality, that is, the adoption of regulatory techniques that aim “to manage populations in place” by grafting technologies of sociospatial control with discourses of community, risk minimalization, and security (Sanchez 2004, 871). These new modes of spatial governance operate along the lines of legitimacy, that is, on what side of the criminal law one stands. As a central organizing principle governing the use of urban space, exclusion revolves around the question of legality. The identification, categorization, and differentiation of urban space in terms of which city dwellers are legally entitled to use particular places has the effect of criminalizing some individuals and their behaviors while incorporating others “into the domain of the city” (Sanchez 2004, 866).

As part of a wider deployment of a range of technologies of control, spatial governmentality depends on a delicate balance between differential inclusion and differential exclusion. The theory and practice of differential inclusion rest on a hierarchical classification of social collectivities in terms of the relative value and usefulness of their labor power at any given historical moment. In contrast, the theory and practice of differential exclusion direct their attention toward supernumerary urban dwellers, that is, those “surplus people” whose numbers are deemed excessive and whose working capacity is superfluous from the vantage point of their failed absorption into existing labor markets. The urban poor who inhabit unauthorized squatter encampments, who invade abandoned buildings, and who sleep on the sidewalks typically survive outside the law and the legitimacy and entitlements it provides. Enforcement of the plethora of municipal statutes, city laws, and health and safety regulations that outlaw such practices as constructing self-built shelters in unauthorized places, occupying abandoned buildings or vacant lots, sleeping on city sidewalks or in public parks, curbside trading, begging and panhandling, selling drugs, and prostitution constitutes a form of spatial governance that seeks to draw a protective boundary between the everyday spaces of privileged, propertied urban residents and the bare life of those whose toil is not counted as legitimate work. As an expression of municipal authority, power operates both as a totalizing force of urban order and discipline and as an individualizing mechanism that divides and differentiates the urban poor into different legal categories and classifications by criminalizing their survivalist strategies. In other words, power is efficacious because it defines who belongs and who does not, and because it differentiates between what rights to the city are legitimate and which are not. Because of their precarious existence at the margins of urban life, the urban poor are forced into a constant struggle to be less excluded. Exclusionary practices are effective precisely because they operate partially and differentially for different categories of the urban poor, thereby turning the struggles of displaced persons into a competition to be less excluded than someone else. Put in another way, exclusion thus becomes a matter of degree and distance. For the urban poor, it is the degree of exclusion and distance from the rights and privileges of citizenship that help to explain its efficacy. For the practice of exclusion is far more effective a strategy for keeping the urban poor off balance if “it is not an all-or-nothing proposition,” as Lisa Sanchez contends, “if it instills and perpetuates a hierarchy of the excluded who stand divided against power and who have a partial stake, a glimmer or hope, relative to those more excluded, of achieving inclusion and legitimacy” (Sanchez 2004, 881).

The Politics of Location: Struggling to Survive in the Depleted Landscapes of Despair

Like sprawling urban agglomerations elsewhere, Johannesburg after apartheid has been subjected to the twin pressures of order and disorder. Ordinary people—those whose marginal existence has been overlooked in the official planning scenarios—have encroached upon the interstitial spaces of the city, infringed upon official regulations governing the proper use of urban space, and intruded into orderly places where they are not wanted. The unsatisfied demand for proper residential accommodation has led to the proliferation of illegal building occupations, unauthorized shantytowns, and unofficial, informal settlements. The lack of wage-paying employment has forced discouraged work seekers into the bloated informal sector where they compete for space in already overcrowded niche markets. The legal geographies of various regulatory regimes have effectively criminalized all sorts of activities closely associated with the survival strategies of the urban poor, adding another layer of vulnerability to their daily existence (Landau 2005; Baviskar 2003).

Despite some notable achievements in assistance programs designed to bring relief to the “poorest of the poor,” Johannesburg after apartheid has remained a city where those residents who occupy the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder have to scramble to find even a precarious foothold in the furious race for space and work. The inability of the municipality to keep up with the demand for low-cost housing has ensured that unauthorized, informal settlements are the only possible option for shelter. While the official gaze of urban planners looks on these encroachments as disfiguring the urban landscape, the urban poor have little choice but to take advantage of whatever opportunities for enterprise present themselves. The spatial unevenness accompanying the implementation of different strategies for disciplining the urban poor has left room for negotiation and accommodation in some places, while making violence and repression inevitable in others (Bremner 1999, 2002).

The conjoined practices of social exclusion, marginalization, and isolation do not exist in a vacuum. Instead they are embedded in a network of social practices that, taken together, constitute a contested field of sociocultural action whereby the propertied, privileged, and powerful seek to maintain (and even extend) the prevailing hierarchies and structural imbalances in the social order and, conversely, the propertyless, underprivileged, and powerless employ whatever means are at their disposal to challenge the status quo. Social collectivities such as trade unions, mass political parties, and social movements make use of conventional avenues of mobilization and popular protest, including strikes and work stoppages, political rallies, street demonstrations, and mass marches, in order to press for the redress of grievances. In contrast, such structurally atomized individuals as the unemployed and the unemployable, homeless squatters, curbside hawkers, itinerant work seekers, casual toilers, informal workers, migrants, refugees, immigrants, and other socially marginalized and excluded people constitute free-floating social clusters that operate outside the formal institutional frameworks of organized workplaces, schools, and associations. This fluid condition of peripatetic nomadism means that ...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations and Nicknames
• Introduction: The Untamed City of Fragments
• 1 Social Justice and the Rights to the City
• 2 Ruin and Regeneration Intertwined
• 3 The Fixed and Flexible City
• 4 Disposable People at the Peri-Urban Fringe
• 5 The Spatial Dynamics of Real Estate Capitalism
• 6 The Struggle for Survival in the Inner City
• 7 Revitalization and Displacement in the Inner City
• 8 The Banality of Indifferent Urbanism
• References