African's In and Out of the Global City: Socio-Spatial Exclusion during and after Apartheid in Inner-City Johannesburg

"African's in and out of the global city: socio-spatial exclusion during and after Apartheid in inner-city Johannesburg"

The Manchester School has informed much of what we know about the urbanization of South Central and Southern Africa and has largely focused on rural to urban migration flows and its resultant effects on class formation and political identity. This has been echoed in studies of the urban condition in earlier ethnographic understandings of forms of ‘detribalization’ and what Loic Wacquant might call peripheral ‘ghettoization’ in South African cities during the heyday of Apartheid. In Johannesburg, a veritable postcolonial city, new forms of immigration and municipal aspirations have complicated both the flows and the possibilities for class formation and politicization for inner-city residents most of whom have immigrated from other African cities and rural areas. This paper considers the forms of social networks forged and the kinds of spatial negotiations that African immigrants must deploy to persist in inner-city Johannesburg so as to defend their putative ‘right to the city’ in the face of spatial and economic dislocation brought on by the state’s bid to renew Johannesburg and make of it a “World Class African City”. It relies on nine months of ethnographic and archival work performed between 2009 and 2011 to establish the current conditions of socio-spatial exclusion based on nationality in Hillbrow, Johannesburg. Further, it comments on the historical path to this state of affairs by probing both the archives and secondary sources as it relates to socio-spatial exclusion based on race in the Apartheid (1970-1983) dispensation. The continuities expose the limits of class and identity formation but the postapartheid moment shows new arenas of struggle for urban citizenship.