Propertied Citizenship in a Township and Suburb in Johannesburg

Abstract

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.

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