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  • Cities of Entanglements: social life in Johannesburg and Maputo through ethnographic comparison by Barbara Heer
  • Paul Jenkins (bio)
Barbara Heer (2019) Cities of Entanglements: social life in Johannesburg and Maputo through ethnographic comparison. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag

This recent 2019 publication is based on the author's PhD dissertation in anthropology at the University of Basel (completed in 2015). It provides a refreshing, grounded, approach to understanding socio-spatial difference and yet engagement in urban areas in Sub-Saharan Africa. In so doing it critiques other work stressing primarily the impact of inequality on exclusion, and demonstrates how city dwellers' lives are 'entangled' in much more complex ways than when seen only through the lenses of spatial separation and social difference. As such it is an important marker for new approaches to understanding the dwelt realities of emerging African urbanism and urbanity in the context of extremely rapid urbanisation.

The book's objective, in the author's words, is to present '… a comparative ethnography of entangled everyday lives in two contemporary African cities which challenges existing approaches that analyse these sites through the lens of segregation' (Introduction, p11). The fieldwork was undertaken between 2010 and 2012 in two adjoining but very different suburbs of northern Johannesburg (Alexandra and Linbro Park), and two 'bairros' in Maputo (Polana Canico and Sommerschield II)–totally around seven months in each city across three separate periods. Not only are the neighbourhoods extremely different, the cities are also, and the way this is handled is through 'thick' contextualisation as well as focus on a limited number of themes and sites. [End Page 147]

This approach–as explained in the Postscript, which explicates the methodology in some detail–started as comparative urban study with focus on urban public space, but evolved after the initial orientation fieldwork into a study of 'public lives', based on how urban residents act through the quotidian, via a more detailed neighbourhood study. This was the focus of the second, primary, fieldwork which engaged with urban citizens' lifeworlds in two adjacent but spatially very different urban neighbourhoods in each city–permitting an unpacking of difference yet engagement. This fieldwork was implemented with local research assistants and participatory 'immersion' (ie beyond participatory observation), mapping and interviews using snowball techniques, as well as analysis/ reflection through diaries (of the researcher and other subjects of the research). That subsequently led to a third iteration of the research, based on emerging themes and 'spaces of encounter', specifically in religious buildings and shopping malls–which became the focus of a tertiary period of fieldwork. In each case the theoretical context for the study also evolved, together with the researcher's deepening understanding of the context.

The outcome is a thoughtful, grounded and inductive approach to urban comparative studies, which is not only well embedded in theory, but with the methodologies clearly presented and self-critiqued vis-à-vis praxis of urban research. In so doing the book challenges more deductive positivist approaches to comparative socio-spatial studies and argues for investigation which 'leaves room for the specificity of each city, yet also speaks about cities in general' (Postscript p302). It thus strives for a balance between the often 'exoticised' spatial analysis of African urbanism, yet the simplification that potentially occurs through treating all urban socio-spatial praxis as 'ordinary'.

The above evolution of methodological approach is reflected in the book structure. Chapter one introduces some of the foundation literature which led to the study in the first place, and includes the explanation of some of the key intellectual concepts utilised. It also introduces the spatial 'subjects' of the two cities with brief contextualising histories–and then outlines the book structure. Chapter two presents what the author calls a 'classical' neighbourhood study of Alexandra in northeast Johannesburg–quite a unique place in that city's history in many ways, especially as a long-standing 'black' township. It discusses insider and outsider 'belonging' through urban conviviality and provides a lead into [End Page 148] the idea of entanglement in public space. This concept is more explicitly the focus of chapter three, based in the adjoining 'white' neighbourhood of Linbro Park, focussing here on the life stories of domestic workers and...

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