Exploring Nightlife

Space, Society and Governance

Jordi Nofre Mateo, Adam Eldridge, Jordi Nofre Mateo, Adam Eldridge

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781786603289
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786603302
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

While the night has long been associated with crime and fear, over recent decades 'nightlife' has become increasingly associated with the creative economy, tourism, sociability, job growth, and urban regeneration. Debates about anti-social behaviour, morality, and safety continue to shape our understanding of the night but newer concerns have also emerged about gentrification, economic and social exclusion, commercialisation, and over-development. Exploring Nightlife: Space, Society and Governance is the first edited volume that critically examines nightlife from a cross-disciplinary and international perspective. Comprising original contemporary research, the collection brings together case studies from across the globe that explore topics including nightlife and urban development, race, gender and youth culture, alcohol and drug use, and urban renewal. In doing so, each chapter explores nightlife in relation to local and global structures of power and governance. Exploring Nightlife is an ideal introduction to the emerging field of night-time studies and will be a valuable resource for students and researchers with an interest in geography, cultural studies, sociology, youth, leisure, and urban studies.

Part 1

Nightlife and Urban Change in the Neo-liberal City

Chapter 1

Precarious Gentrification: Dreading the Night While ‘Taking Back the City’ in Johannesburg

Chrystel Oloukoï

‘Why study the night? Nothing happens at night here’, said the first resident of the Maboneng Precinct that I met when conducting my fieldwork. Many others asked the same or similar questions. What raised my interest in Johannesburg’s nocturnal spaces was the widespread idea that they were mostly deserted spaces, supposedly because of a fear of crime. At the same time, marketing images of the city were riddled with nightscapes, revealing a paradox between repulsiveness and attractiveness towards nocturnal spaces. From that starting question about deserted spaces at night to that startled question that I encountered many times (‘Why study the night?’), my research was guided by the feeling that nights actually had a lot to tell us about Johannesburg.

Until recently, cities at night had been notoriously understudied. A daytime approach has been dominant in the study of both urban activities and geographies of everyday life (van Liempt et al. 2015). Yet, when night falls, we are often faced with very different cities that deserve their own reading (Hornberger 2008). This is particularly the case in inner-city Johannesburg, where night spaces, at the exclusion of the commodified, enclosed, secured and private spaces of the clubs, are uniformly dreaded and avoided by middle- and high-income populations due to fears of criminality. In the middle- and upper-class imagination, the inner city at night is considered the emblematic space where crime unfolds. At the same time, both inner-city spaces and night-time itself arouse an ambivalent feeling of fear and desire, fear but desire (Oloukoï 2016b).

In the lower-class neighbourhood of Jeppestown, which has been undergoing a process of gentrification since 2008, in the gentrified space being renamed Maboneng¹ (Nevin 2014; Oloukoï and Guinard 2016) the night emerges as the main point of tension between the lower-class residents and the new upper-class residents. This class phenomenon is also heavily racialised in a context where the lower classes of the urban centre of Johannesburg are predominantly black, while the suburban middle and upper classes that try to ‘take back the city’, supposedly against crime, are predominantly white (Bremner 2010; Murray 2011). This class and racial phenomenon, the two being to a large extent intermingled in South Africa (Seekings 2008; Seekings and Nattrass 2008), brings out the symbolic importance of nocturnal spaces. While the process of gentrification is undeniable during the day, it is affected by dynamics of retreat and contraction at night, demonstrating the fact that gentrification is temporal as well as spatial.

In this chapter, I argue that the night has an ambivalent status in the context of Johannesburg’s gentrified inner-city spaces. Being a time-space over which the new residents’ claim over space is less tangible and less controlled, the night reveals the precariousness of the gentrification process. On the other hand, precisely because of the challenges they pose, nocturnal urban spaces are being targeted as the main focus of a new and ongoing gentrification phase in Maboneng (Oloukoï and Guinard 2016).

The night-time economy refers to a transformation of urban nightscapes in a context of heightened competition between cities, with the promotion of city centres as ‘sites of mass consumption at night’ and ‘a proliferation of leisure, entertainment and drinking spaces . . . [which] are increasingly corporatized and monopolized’ (Gallan 2015, 556). Turning away from the consequences of that shift to the night-time economy in terms of spatial fragmentation and exclusion at night, I analyse in this chapter the origins of that shift and what leads to the identification of night spaces as the main stakes in the reconquest of the city by a cosmopolitan, young, middle-class and mostly white new elite. If the impacts of the night-time economy on class relations are well documented, the relationship of the night to race appears under-examined in this scholarship (Talbot 2004, 2007; May and Chaplin 2008; May 2014), especially seen in the light of the post-apartheid cities of South Africa. Through the use of various ethnographic methods, participant observation, semi-structured interviews and urban walks (Anderson 2004; Evans and Jones 2011; Oloukoï 2016a) conducted from January to April 2015, I argue that the destabilising impact of the night on the gentrification process in Maboneng has turned nocturnal spaces into an urban frontier; no longer being at the margins of the gentrification process, they have ended up constituting its core.

My analysis is threefold. First, I give a brief overview of the gentrification process in Maboneng and how it differs from other contexts. Then, I insist on the place the night occupies in a series of discourses and images produced by the developers or the residents to legitimise the existence of the Maboneng Precinct. Finally, I move to explore the dynamics that belie the developers’ and residents’ self-legitimising discourse. This last part concludes with a critical analysis of the way the night is envisioned as a frontier (Turner 1921; Smith 1996; Shaw 2015b) and a stake of the gentrification process in Maboneng by developers.

Gentrifying Maboneng: An Overview

Jeppestown is undergoing a process of gentrification, the reclaimed space being renamed Maboneng. By gentrification I mean not merely a change in residents but more accurately an entire remodelling of the urban space (pavements, lighting, security, building renovations, etc.). Such a colossal enterprise is not the doing of isolated individuals whose converging actions ultimately lead to social change, as in Ruth Glass’s now-canonical story (1964). Gentrification in Jeppestown resembles more Smith’s (2002) depiction of a reinvestment by capital before people, in the sense that while ‘the key actors in Glass’s story were assumed to be middle and upper-middle-class immigrants to a neighbourhood, the agents of urban regeneration thirty-five years later are governmental, corporate, or corporate-governmental partnerships’ (ibid., 439). Gentrification has evolved from a marginal and random phenomenon to something ‘increasingly systematized’ (ibid.).

Three main characteristics singularise the urban regeneration process in Jeppestown. First, instead of being the convergence of multiple individual initiatives (Ruth Glass’s version of gentrification), this process is led by a unique actor. In 2007, Jonathan Liebmann,² the mastermind behind the Maboneng Precinct, created the urban regeneration company Propertuity, a wordplay on ‘property’ and ‘perpetuity’. In 2008, Liebmann acquired his first building in Jeppestown, bought from DF Corlett Construction,³ and named it Arts on Main. From then on, he expanded his territorial hold over Jeppestown and, to a lesser extent, Doornfontein, a neighbouring area to Jeppestown. Both neighbourhoods are characterised by a landscape of dilapidated industrial buildings, which echoes Kolko’s argument (2007) about the importance of older housing stocks in the gentrification process.

Second, instead of confining itself to housing, this model led to taking charge of the urban environment in a holistic manner: landscapes, commercial spaces, residential spaces, leisure spaces, security. Most of the buildings were first rehabilitated by Propertuity and changed to a set of specific purposes (retail, offices, accommodation). It was only then that they were leased or sold to other developers. Through Propertuity, Liebmann participated to an unusual degree in urban production. While Harvey’s entrepreneurial city (Harvey 1989) blurs the lines between public and private by incorporating private tenets into fields that are the prerogative of public actors, Propertuity blurred them in the opposite direction, taking charge of public prerogatives but with a discourse that rearticulated tenets of public intervention. Complementary to the figure of the entrepreneurial city emerged a figure of a city-maker entrepreneur, that is, entrepreneurs who act as city planners and increasingly substitute themselves for public actors. Furthering this logic, Maboneng is going through a voluntary City Improvement District establishment process. This will allow Propertuity to raise an additional tax among the area owners to fund more services than those furnished by the municipality, mainly in regard to the cleaning of streets and improving security.

Third, far from being haphazard, this process is very intentional. From the start, it was not about a single building, or a single street, but about a whole precinct. As Liebmann (Pitnam 2013) states, ‘I didn’t want to just do my own apartment. . . . I wanted to become a property developer’.⁴ Another sign of the intentional aspect of the process is the close collaboration between the private developers (Propertuity) and artists. Conscious of the role of artists in the image of a place (Zukin 1995), Propertuity actively sought their collaboration through various incentives, in a classic case of art-washing. In Liebmann’s words:

While travelling and in my time living near 44 Stanley I’d learnt that artists and creatives are often the best catalysts for change. They are the perfect first adopters. It’s not in any way unique to Arts on Main. It’s been proven in many cities throughout the world. It was important to get them in as they would become the foundation of the community.⁵

The use of the term ‘foundation’, which means both the origin of something and what allows its stability throughout time, reveals the developers’ project of a new community, with different foundations than the existing community. This statement renders visible the process of erasure upon which is predicated the development of Maboneng. In addition, this statement elicits Liebmann’s accurate knowledge of urban developments around the world and the way he uses them as benchmarks to improve his own localised project. It testifies to the circulation of urban models and best practices throughout the globe, circulation that largely undergirds ‘the generalization of gentrification as a global strategy’ (Smith 2002, 437).

Finally, despite the connections the developers made to various places across the world when they elaborated on their inspirations, the gentrification phenomenon in Jeppestown has also been significantly anchored in a larger South African, and more specifically Johannesburg, context (Garside 1993; Visser and Kotze 2008; Winkler 2009). The inner city occupies a special place in the collective imagination of the residents of Johannesburg suburbs. The early urban desegregation in the late 1980s was followed by a white flight phenomenon, the white residents leaving the inner city for the suburbs because they feared an increase in criminality and a decrease in property values (Crankshaw and White 1995; Guillaume 2000, 2004; Beall et al. 2002; Beavon and Orrock 2004). Like Liebmann himself, a white thirtysomething South African, the current residents of the Maboneng Precinct grew up in the suburbs of Johannesburg or other secluded neighbourhoods of various South African cities, estranged from the inner city. Having left the inner city in their early childhood or being born in the suburbs, they construe their attachment to Maboneng as being generated by a sense of loss.

The inner city emerges as a symbolic space that has structured and still structures familial narratives (Gervais-Lambony 2012). Therefore, it elicits a feeling of urban nostalgia, defined as ‘a geographical sadness that associates time and space since it is as well the regret of a lost time than the regret of a lost space’⁶ (Gervais-Lambony 2012, 1). ‘Some people doing Critical Mass⁷ have not come back in town since the fall of apartheid, since they were kids’, said Loïc Bellet, one of the organisers of Critical Mass, during an interview. This feeling of nostalgia is all the more complex that it is associated with a time (the apartheid regime) and a space (the apartheid city) that is delicate to express regret for (Dlamini 2009). Thus, the inner-city space is the support of a project longing to resurrect a golden age in which images of a regretted past and images of desired contemporaneous urban locales that embody a specific vision of modernity are confusedly merged. A conflicted regime of historicity sprung from these imaginations and discourses, in Hartog’s sense of a context-bound and localised articulation between past, present and future (2003). Here, both past and future are convoked by the middle and upper classes to erase a present inner city deemed worthless because it is populated by low-income residents.

Discordant voices exist in this erasure process, however. For instance, Melvin Neale, one of the organisers of Critical Mass, states:

For a long time, our city has been viewed as a dangerous place and it is not. . . . But the slogan ‘take back the city’, I really think it is a really bad choice of words, the city has always been there, it is just that people don’t use it, you don’t have to take it back from anybody, so I don’t like that comparison, Critical Mass is not about taking back the city, but about using the city.

For the populations who feel that they have something to take back, however, the night functions as a synecdoche of their lost relation to the city. Night-time, while it materially challenges the gentrification process by stressing precariousness, is nonetheless a privileged medium for gentrification because it plays on people’s imagination and fantasies (Oloukoï 2016b) in the context of Johannesburg. Indeed, for a large part of the middle and upper classes from the suburbs, and predominantly for the white part of it, as the demographics of the Critical Mass event reflects, night spaces in the inner city are no-go areas. Therefore, the attempts, like Critical Mass, at reclaiming that time-space generate a strong symbolic message.

Nocturnal Representations as a Field of Power

Setting Up the Stage for ‘Maboneng – Place of Light’

Reclaiming space in Jeppestown is achieved through a self-legitimising discourse that articulates a sense of loss towards the inner city and a forged vision of inner-city nocturnal spaces as uniformly dangerous and deserted. It is mainly by contrasting itself to Jeppestown that Maboneng – which includes the developers and the residents – constructs its identity, positing itself, first, as fundamentally different from Jeppestown and, second, as an urban revival in a context of dearth. Watching one of the numerous promotional videos made about Maboneng for instance, we are told from the start:

Downtown Johannesburg has at night the appearance of an abandoned movie set. The high crime rate keeps the streets empty and people out of the inner city. But there is one street where the lights are on day and night: a lively area full of art, creative people and entrepreneurs. It’s called the Maboneng Precinct. (Janssen 2012)

This characterisation epitomises the imagery of the city centre as deserted and dangerous at night among middle and higher classes. Maboneng developers build on the myths surrounding central night spaces in Johannesburg. In that sense, the sentence also captures the ethos of the urban regeneration project. Maboneng, far from being an anodyne name, means place of light in Sotho. Through place naming, discourses and images, the developers set the stage for their urban redevelopment project, legitimising their enterprise. Indeed, Maboneng is supposed to ‘bring back life into the inner city’, according to their website. The dichotomy between life and death, redevelopment and abandonment, light and darkness is used ad nauseam.

In a previous work (Oloukoï and Guinard 2016), I have argued that symbolic violence is inflicted upon nocturnal practices and spaces in Jeppestown by both the developers and the residents of Maboneng. This symbolic violence can be deciphered in discursive acts of erasure. Comparing the city centre of Johannesburg at night to an abandoned movie set, for instance, is a blatant example of how the social uses of the nocturnal spaces in Jeppestown are rendered non-existent. In the same vein, I was repeatedly told during my fieldwork that in Jeppestown ‘nothing happens at night’. In an interview, Alice Cabaret, the urban strategist of Propertuity, said: ‘Joburg, there really is an issue, at 9 p.m., the city is dead’.

Whether nocturnal practices and spaces in Jeppestown are negated, discredited or criminalised, it is not that surprising if we consider the ambivalent relationship Maboneng residents entertain with night spaces. For the middle and upper classes, night spaces are rarely, if not ever, experienced directly. Nocturnal spaces are approached through a series of mediations and filters (Oloukoï 2016b). Their nocturnal experience, far from being continuous, is archipelagic, from secured places to other secured places through the use of cars, rarely walking. Yet it is in the light of these partial and limited experiences that legitimate and illegitimate nocturnal spaces and practices are defined and reconfigured.

Seeing Like a Developer: Valuable Buildings, Invaluable People

While they recognise the value of the architecture of Jeppestown’s decaying buildings, the developers erase the people actually living there, their aspirations and uses of space. The mul...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• ‘Shaken, Not Stirred’: An Introduction to Exploring Nightlife
• Part 1: Nightlife and Urban Change in the Neo-liberal City
• Part 2: Power, Culture and Identity
• Part 3: Governance of the Urban Night
• Part 4: Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Editors and Authors