The City Otherwise: The Deferred Emergency of Occupation in Inner-City Johannesburg

Abstract

This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Johannesburg between 2011 and 2019 in inner-city unlawful occupations and temporary emergency accommodation sites. These are often referred to as “hijacked buildings,” “bad buildings,” or “dark buildings.” However, they are also spaces of refuge, intimacy, and sociality for tens of thousands of South Africans and foreign nationals excluded from formal rental markets and often displaced by the drive for urban regeneration. This essay mobilizes two concepts to characterize these spaces. The first is the notion of the “city otherwise,” engaging Elizabeth Povinelli’s concept of “spaces of otherwise.” The residents of these occupations endure in spaces of emergence and potentiality. Furthermore, I argue that they exist in a juridical condition that I characterize as “the deferred emergency.” This condition entails the indefinite deferral of an emergency, framed around both the juridical and the infrastructural form of “temporary emergency accommodation” for the evicted.

Dispossession as depotentiation

“…I have argued elsewhere (Wilhelm-Solomon, 2020a) that occupations of the sort that I have encountered in recent years are sites of potentiality in a sense that most closely approximates what Povinelli (2011) understands as modes of being and relating in spaces of the 'otherwise'. In making this manoeuvre I have left aside the language of the 'commons' to avoid analysing existing occupations in relation to either a teleological, transcendental or comparative notion of the 'commons'.…”

“…The post-apartheid constitution, with its robust protections against evictions and homelessness, has opened up new terrains of struggle; municipalities are obliged to provide those to be rendered homeless with temporary emergency accommodation. Yet, in spite of these protections, brutal evictions by private security have continued, and even those victorious against eviction are subjected to long legal cases and then relocation to temporary emergency accommodation; they are rendered in a condition of permanent liminality, which I have characterised elsewhere as 'the deferred emergency' (Wilhelm-Solomon, 2020a). Unlawful occupations have also continued to be the focus of humiliating and unconstitutional police raids.…”

“…In spite of the divisions, the women of The Petticoat Government remained friends even after the eviction, visiting one another and providing support in times of illness (Wilhelm-Solomon, 2020a). The actual event of eviction is part of a wider process of dispossession which requires affective networks while also inflaming division and conflict.…”

“…Dispossession as depotentiation indicates that dispossession can be characterised broadly by three interconnected dynamics: first, the diminishment of the power to act politically or to form enduring affective relations; second, the disruption of emergent socialities and the reification of struggles for recognition into divisive identities (while acknowledging that dispossession can also be generative of new alliances, subjectivites and forms of resistance); and third, the foreclosure of social and political potentialities and the capacities to live 'otherwise' (Povinelli, 2011;Wilhelm-Solomon, 2020a). My argument is that affective capacities and potentialities, construed in relation to urban space, are not simply impacted as a by-product of evictions and other forms of displacement; they are precisely what is being dispossessed.…”

Between Informality and (Il)legality: Congolese Migrants’ Survival Mechanisms in South Africa

“…Furthermore, this criminalization is manifested through frequent police raids, resulting in the arrest of migrants and the confiscation of their belongings. Over the years, South Africa has gained a reputation as one of the world's leading countries for deporting immigrants (Wilhelm-Solomon 2015).…”