TY - JOUR
T1 - New Ward for a New Johannesburg? Reformatting Belonging and Boundaries in the City’s South
AU - Butcher, Sian Catherine
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by University of Minnesota’s (UMN) Global Spotlight Doctoral Dissertation International Research Grant (2012–2013).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.
PY - 2021/6
Y1 - 2021/6
N2 - Straddling apartheid’s buffer zone between Soweto and Johannesburg South lies a newly demarcated municipal ward. Described by its councillor as a miniature “Rainbow Nation”, it is a provocative site for stitching together the apartheid city and for exploring postapartheid socio-spatial change at a mesoscale between the neighbourhood and the city. Qualitative fieldwork reveals that reconfigured political boundaries are just one of many boundary-making projects unfolding at multiple scales. Formerly white suburbs are racially desegregated, but have also witnessed white flight out of neighbourhoods, institutions and public space, and some enclavisation through gated complexes and private schools. Microgeographies of racially coded space inform everyday life, now often attributed to “cultural difference”. Black residents produce connections to other parts of the city through relationships to family and friends in townships and create new communities in developer-built subdivisions. Infrastructural distinctions between “township” and “suburb” are blurring, with new and old infrastructural inequalities and entanglements emerging. Not all discourses and practices of belonging and exclusion can be mapped onto racial categories or racialised space: new alliances based on property ownership, class and security are emerging, along with new shared “others”. This site demonstrates how new boundary placements overlay and cathect existing boundaries and their repertoires of belonging and exclusion in ambivalent ways.
AB - Straddling apartheid’s buffer zone between Soweto and Johannesburg South lies a newly demarcated municipal ward. Described by its councillor as a miniature “Rainbow Nation”, it is a provocative site for stitching together the apartheid city and for exploring postapartheid socio-spatial change at a mesoscale between the neighbourhood and the city. Qualitative fieldwork reveals that reconfigured political boundaries are just one of many boundary-making projects unfolding at multiple scales. Formerly white suburbs are racially desegregated, but have also witnessed white flight out of neighbourhoods, institutions and public space, and some enclavisation through gated complexes and private schools. Microgeographies of racially coded space inform everyday life, now often attributed to “cultural difference”. Black residents produce connections to other parts of the city through relationships to family and friends in townships and create new communities in developer-built subdivisions. Infrastructural distinctions between “township” and “suburb” are blurring, with new and old infrastructural inequalities and entanglements emerging. Not all discourses and practices of belonging and exclusion can be mapped onto racial categories or racialised space: new alliances based on property ownership, class and security are emerging, along with new shared “others”. This site demonstrates how new boundary placements overlay and cathect existing boundaries and their repertoires of belonging and exclusion in ambivalent ways.
KW - Desegregation
KW - Johannesburg South
KW - Middle-class
KW - Postapartheid change
KW - Suburbanisation
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U2 - 10.1007/s12132-021-09426-8
DO - 10.1007/s12132-021-09426-8
M3 - Article
SN - 1015-3802
VL - 32
SP - 183
EP - 204
JO - Urban Forum
JF - Urban Forum
IS - 2
ER -