City of Extremes: The Spatial Politics of Johannesburg, and: Marginal Spaces: Reading Ivan Vladislavic (review)

Since its beginnings, 125 years ago, Johannesburg has reinvented itself several times over, from the lawless booming mining town in the 1890s to its arriviste self-promotion on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary (and the first Empire Exhibition outside Britain) as "Africa's Wonder City," to the bastion of apartheid capitalism on the eve of the Soweto uprising in the 1970s, to the capital of crime, grime and decline in the 1990s, to the current aspiration, heading up the official city web site, to make Johannesburg "a world-class African city." On each occasion, boosters and detractors alike have tended to act as though these reinventions are utterly new but, as the long view shows, the oscillation between the extremes of celebration and condemnation is as old as the city itself. While Murray's analysis of the city's "spatial politics" and Gerald Gaylard's anthology of essays on Johannesburg writer Ivan Vladislavic may seem far apart, a solid grounding in the city's spatial politics is necessary to understand its fictional treatment; conversely, Vladislavic's chronicles of the city, inhabited and imagined, have, despite their singularity, captured key moments in the evolution of Johannesburg over the last twenty years, mapping subtle changes in built and social environments that are sometimes missed by sociological studies or by statements from the extremes.

City of Extremes expands Martin J. Murray's previous study of Johannesburg, Taming the Disorderly City (2008). The earlier book focused as its title suggests on migrants and other marginalized people whose struggles for survival in the inner city or on the peri-urban fringe have provoked charges of disorder from city government, media, and other stakeholders. The current study adds an historical overview, borrowing from architect Clive Chipkin and geographer Keith Beavon, and more detailed analysis of economic and political governance, drawing on Murray's own observations as well as the work of urbanists Lindsay Bremner, Graeme Götz, Soraya Goga, Alan Mabin, AbdouMalique Simone, and others. It focuses on the dominant role played by real estate capitalism in suburban sprawl and on the obsolescence of once celebrated structures, as well as the fragmentation of the city into fortified enclaves and competing centers of power and money like the Sandton business district, which has largely supplanted the old CBD. Murray's argument is strongest when he focuses on Johannesburg's "double life" after apartheid, on the contradictions between the cosmopolitan aspirations of the "world-class African city" and the persistence of "spatial dynamics" that continue to exacerbate the widening wealth gap (7). His accounts of the Cosmo City development in the far northern suburbs is exemplary since it highlights, in the context of "laissez-faire urbanism and unfettered suburban sprawl" (172-203) the power of major banks and other conglomerates whose speculative search for profit, at the expense of democratic rights to the city, has driven most development. He also shows the persistent influence of the affluent ten percent who oppose housing projects that might combine market-rate houses and condos with middle- and low-income housing, or in the upmarket Dainfern Golf Estate, using the rhetoric of environmental preservation to justify removing poor shack dwellers outside the gates (301-15). His analysis of the inner city and especially of Hillbrow, the high-rise apartment district, reputedly Africa's densest square mile, which declined from a cosmopolitan, but mostly white imitation of Manhattan's twenty-four-hour urbanity under apartheid to the disorderly abode of mostly black transients, criminal or otherwise, in the 1990s, is likewise illuminating, especially when he draws on the insights that informed his earlier book.

While Murray is a keen observer of postapartheid Johannesburg, his reliance on others to document the pre-1990 city can lead to errors. Sometimes these may trivial, such as an American translation of Hillbrow's "flatland" as...