Changing Space, Changing City: Johannesburg After Apartheid ed. by Philip Harrison, et. al (review)

As indicated in the opening editorial chapter, this compendium of studies of Johannesburg by architects, planners, urban theorists, and practitioners aims to synthesize and deepen previous analyses of “materialities, subjectivities, and spatial transformation” in the city and its region (2). Focusing on the period from 1996, the year of the first post-apartheid municipal elections, to 2013, after the most recent census (2011), provided empirical confirmation of new trends, such as densification, and revised old ones, such as the expansion of peripheral settlement that began decades ago. The volume also assesses the remarkable range of geographical, historical, imaginative, and speculative writing on Johannesburg that has appeared in the last fifteen years. Indeed, the best essays in the volume demonstrate not only that policy, planning, and spatial practices shape subjective perceptions of Johannesburg, but also that the versions of the city experienced and imagined by individuals and collectivities influence and sometimes impede the implementation of planning objectives.

The editors divide the volume into three sections devoted first to macro trends in society and economics, planned as well as informal settlement, mobility, and immobilization; second, to middle-level studies of city districts, including less well-known zones such as the southern suburbs and the northwestern edge, as well as thoroughly studied places like Soweto or Yeoville; and third, to short notes on newsworthy institutions such as the Central Methodist Church, which housed refugees for fifteen years until closing under pressure in early 2015, or spaces associated with particular ethnic groups such as Chinese or Ethiopians. While some contributions in the macro group tend to reproduce planning agendas without systematically examining their shortcomings, the strongest chapters temper summaries of government plans with critical scrutiny of the ways in which discourse shaped the data, whether at the level of formal terms or of subjective responses to survey questions, such as the perception of inequity in service delivery or benefits apparently accruing to elites or outsiders. Although these chapters are not primarily concerned with the city imagined in literature or film, readers of RAL will appreciate those analyses that balance policy evaluation with critical attention to the assumptions embedded in the language of planning.

While Maryna Storie’s chapter on “changes in the natural landscape” misses the thoroughly constructed nature of Johannesburg’s landscapes and the important historical research on this matter by Jeremy Foster and others, David Everatt’s analysis of poverty and inequality tackles not only broad demographic trends, contrasting the reduction of absolute poverty by social grants with the rise of inequality between rich and poor, but also examining the hidden impact on planning of the anachronistic use of anti-apartheid terms such as deprivation rather than post-apartheid inequality. In contrast to Sarah Charlton’s rather narrow construction of public housing as state-funded houses on the periphery, which excludes the more numerous and more desirable public-private renovation of existing structures in the inner city, Marie Huckzermeyer, Aly Karam, and Miriam Maina lay out the shifting meanings of “informal settlement” in order to provide a more complex analysis of settlements that are often embedded in the backyards of formal districts (a return to an early twentieth-century pattern) and thus to critique the overemphasis on occupations of supposedly empty land that has dominated more recent discussion.

The best chapters in the mid-scale section are likewise those that are attentive to potential conflicts or contradictions hidden in planning discourse and those that take account of the long historical view. Three chapters coauthored by Philip Harrison, who has worked as a planner and as an academic, are particularly noteworthy. The chapters on Soweto, cowritten by Kirsten Harrison, and on Alexandra, with Adrian Masson and Luke Sinwell, take in not only the long history of anti-apartheid struggle, which these black townships represent, but also the spatial and class differentiation that has been enabled by post-apartheid funding and that now highlights the gaps between...