Habitus, spatial capital and making place: Housing developers and the spatial praxis of Johannesburg’s inner-city regeneration

Abstract

This paper presents a sociology of housing developers, stressing the contingent, socially and spatially embedded nature of their practices. It complicates prevailing views of developers and demonstrates how urban development is, in fact, a spatial praxis requiring adaptability and capacities to adjust dispositions and practices to suit the particular environments in which it takes place. A growing body of work tries to understand the motivations and practices of property developers. While this has contributed to understandings of developers’ networks, the ways they understand their roles and the ways different national or regional contexts shape approaches, it largely lacks a spatial perspective, and does not account for the contingency, fluidity and adaptability of developers’ actions. Most importantly, it does not theorize how experiences in space shape practices. Developers are still largely presented as powerful actors who are able to exercise domination over space in relatively straight-forward, linear ways. In contrast, in this paper I demonstrate that developers are influenced by competing dynamics and agendas, and actively adapt their strategies and activities in accordance with the demands and realities of particular places. Building on the work of Centner (2008) and Marom (2014), the paper further develops the concepts ‘spatial capital’ and ‘spatial habitus’ and attempts to use them to make sense of the practices of property developers and affordable housing providers working in inner-city Johannesburg

Comparing the relational work of developers

“…But this is not a given. Our cases demonstrate other and older practices of developers in negotiating their relationships with finance through local 'spatial capital' (Mosselson, 2019). Some have deep enough pockets to survive financial famines -such as after the 2016 European Union referendum in the UK (Brill, 2019), or the pullback of banks from development finance after the 2008 property crash in Johannesburg (Butcher, 2019).…”

“…There was no clear division between the social interests of state actors and the economic interests of the private sector. In cases 1 and 2, private sector actors articulated socially progressive intentions and rejected models of gentrification because they would be neither economically nor socially appropriate (Mosselson, 2019). In a number of cases, state actors saw the economic attractiveness of development as a core goal in and of itself, even where they also saw it as a means to an end.…”

“…In downtown Johannesburg, daring entrepreneurs have found that they can profitably reintroduce previously abandoned high-rise buildings back into the market by converting them into working-class rental accommodation (Mosselson, 2019). New markets have also been ‘discovered’ on the city’s periphery where owners of historically agricultural land supply entry-level detached housing to first-time black homeowners (Butcher, 2019).…”

“…Financial actors in these studies (thick underline in column B) pursued their interests proactively or reactively through state or developer-initiated projects. The increasing financialisation of urban development – treating everything from land to infrastructure to condominiums as fungible tradable financial assets (see Searle, 2016) – might drive the production of space in some instances: through new asset classes from which to capture rental streams, such as affordable housing in Johannesburg (Mosselson, 2019; Todes and Robinson, 2019), or in the ultimate power financiers had to ‘pull the plug’ as the Bank of China did in Modderfontein (Ballard and Harrison, 2019). But this is not a given.…”

“…Some have deep enough pockets to survive financial famines – such as after the 2016 European Union referendum in the UK (Brill, 2019), or the pullback of banks from development finance after the 2008 property crash in Johannesburg (Butcher, 2019). The interests of financiers can intersect in unexpected ways with the interests of state actors in urban regeneration or reconfiguring the spatial logic of city building for other use values such as affordable housing (Mosselson, 2019; Todes and Robinson, 2019). State actors themselves were financiers in several of the cases (Mouton and Shatkin, 2019; Todes and Robinson, 2019).…”