The ruinous vitalism of the urban form: ontological orientations in inner-city Johannesburg

Wilhelm-Solomon, Matthew

doi:10.1080/21681392.2017.1337520

Cited by 24 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Diamond Exchange was an unlawfully occupied building in the inner city from which residents were evicted in late 2013; it was a space in which hundreds of residents lived, mostly asylum seekers, in conditions of extreme precarity (Fassin, Wilhelm-Solomon, and Segatti 2017;Wilhelm-Solomon 2015). The residents were violently evicted by a private security company called the Black Bees in late 2013.…”

Section: Diamond Exchangementioning

confidence: 99%

Affective Trajectories: Religion and Emotion in African Cityscapes

Homewood

2021

Journal of Africana Religions

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The book series examines the religious, cultural, and political expressions of African, African American, and African Caribbean traditions. Through transnational, cross-cultural, and multidisciplinary approaches to the study of religion, the series investigates the epistemic boundaries of continental and diasporic religious practices and thought and explores the diverse and distinct ways African-derived religions inform culture and politics. The series aims to establish a forum for imagining the centrality of Black religions in the formation of the "New World.

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Section: Diamond Exchangementioning

confidence: 99%

Affective Trajectories: Religion and Emotion in African Cityscapes

Homewood

2021

Journal of Africana Religions

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“…Zivai, a former fish trader in Zimbabwe, had been elected leader in part because residents believed that the blind could not be evicted. This perception built on the experience of residents in a nearby building known as Chambers, where an eviction had been overturned because there were blind residents who were eventually offered alternative accommodation (see Wilhelm-Solomon 2016). Many members of the blind community knew each other from Zimbabwe-having attended Margareta Hugo School in Masvingo, a Dutch Reformed mission school providing schooling for blind learners-and they had come to South Africa when the Zimbabwean state radically cut disability support.…”

Section: Enduring the Otherwise: The Stationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Wilhelm-Solomon

2020

Cult. Anthropol.

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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.

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“…This approach recognises that across sub-Saharan Africa, formal and social institutions together structure movement and varying socio-spatial transformations. These include trans-oceanic channels involving recruiters, brokers, employers and state regulators, less formal trans-Saharan/trans-Mediterranean migration infrastructures and street-level governance structures (see Brachet, 2016; Casas-Cortes et al, 2015; Wilhelm-Solomon, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…" " (Park Station) " " " " migration infrastructures and street-level governance structures (see Brachet, 2016;Casas-Cortes et al, 2015;Wilhelm-Solomon, 2017). This article argues that informal mechanisms shaping human and material mobility are a particular form of urban repurposing in central Johannesburg.…”

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confidence: 99%

An enclave entrepôt: The informal migration industry and Johannesburg’s socio-spatial transformation

Zack

Landau

2021

Urban Studies

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The spatial concentration of production in cities attracts international and domestic labour in ways that change the character and scale of urban space. Drawing on two decades of research on migration and informal trading in Johannesburg, South Africa, this article argues that the global trade in Chinese ‘fast fashion’ interacts with South Africa’s immigration policy, transportation networks, informal trade and established migration infrastructures to transform the city’s Park Station neighbourhood into an enclave entrepôt. Operated and supported by a network of informal logistics services that keep the enclave within but apart from the city, it is exquisitely tailored to cross-border shoppers. At the social and legal margins but at the city’s geographic core, it enables fluidity in an otherwise hostile space; it is at once highly visible and invisibilising. Formed in the shadows of formal institutions and law enforcement, this entrepôt is migrant-driven and serves the needs of people often seeking to remain invisible from the South African state and citizenry. As such, its services are adapted from the infrastructures that service legal and irregular migration in the subcontinent. Unlike ethnic enclaves or neighbourhoods that work as arrival zones, it provides the means to move ‘through’ rather than ‘into’ the city. The entrepôt is a form of migrant space-claiming by vulnerable and mobile people wishing to be in but not of the city. It acts as portal into, through and beyond national territory.

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The ruinous vitalism of the urban form: ontological orientations in inner-city Johannesburg

Cited by 24 publications

References 42 publications

Affective Trajectories: Religion and Emotion in African Cityscapes

Affective Trajectories: Religion and Emotion in African Cityscapes

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

An enclave entrepôt: The informal migration industry and Johannesburg’s socio-spatial transformation

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