This special issue focuses on urban marginality in diverse contexts across the world (Africa, Latin America, Arab States and Europe) and proposes anthropological perspectives on contemporary urbanity that take into account the complexity of the social positions of those city dwellers that are on the margins. Three aspects of urban margins come to the fore. First, urbanites respond to increasing marginalisation through the production of alternative meanings and narratives about the city. While grand, powerful narratives may present cities as 'divided', 'dual' or 'conflicted', urban dwellers may carve out symbolic space through discourses of the non-spectacular and non-political, emerging out of lived space. Second, the cuts and frictions constituting urban margins do not only limit urban dwellers capacities, but can also provide spaces of agentic possibilities. As it is well known, the absence of state control can be turned by versatile urbanites into opportunities of the 'informal' economy. Third, urban dwellers engage in manifold practices that connect and entangle their marginalised position with spaces of power and resources. Through their practices urban margins become a relation to, not a disconnection from the 'centre'. In this special issue we understand 'urban margins' not as essence or entities, but as forms of relations between urban dwellers shaped by processes of political, economic, spatial and social marginalisation. Seen in this way, urban margins constitute a perspective on the urban: a lens to entice comparisons of urban agency in the world of cities [

This chapter uses three different approaches to talk about middle class in two South African neighbourhoods (a white suburb and a black township). Firstly, I argue that property ownership is an important signifier of middleclassness which is yet underemphasised in debates about African middle classes. Based on an ethnographic comparison, I explore property ownership and middleclassness as social categories. Secondly, I approach social differentiation as it evolves in everyday urban lives through the concept of relational micromilieus (Hradil 1999) embedded in different urban spaces, namely in various neighbourhoods. Thirdly, I use the class definition of Seekings and Nattrass (2005), who developed a nine-fold classification scheme for South Africa based on occupational groups in the Weberian tradition, to point out socioeconomic differences between the two groups in focus. The cases from Johannesburg presented in this chapter highlight the relationship between spatial arrangements and political attitudes in two contrasting social milieus the diverging social trajectories of which need to be viewed in the context of South Africa's past. The two milieus discussed in this chapter are surprisingly similar concerning their relationship to property ownership and display conservative political attitudes.

The many studies that see shopping malls as places of power, control and exclusion have often neglected the potential of malls as places of encounters. Drawing on ethnographic data from the divided cities of Johannesburg in South Africa and Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina, we examine the ways in which urban dwellers who enter the mall from a marginalised positionpoor black urban dwellers at a regional, middle class and whitedominated mall in Johannesburg and Bosniak city dwellers at a mall located in the Croat part of Mostaruse the mall, what kind of relations they build to others and how they rework boundaries of race, class, religion and ethnicity at the mall. Rather than being spaces that strengthen and reproduce centre-margins relations, urban dwellers appropriate them as places where these relations become reworked.

No abstract

How do people live together in cities shaped by inequality? This comparative ethnography of two African cities, Maputo and Johannesburg, presents a new narrative about social life in cities often described as sharply divided. Based on the ethnography of entangled lives unfolding in a township and in a suburb in Johannesburg, in a bairro and in an elite neighborhood in Maputo, the book includes case studies of relations between domestic workers and their employers, failed attempts by urban elites to close off their neighborhoods, and entanglements emerging in religious spaces and in shopping malls. Systematizing comparison as an experience-based method, the book makes an important contribution to urban anthropology, comparative urbanism and urban studies.