City of extremes : the spatial politics of Johannesburg / Martin J. Murray.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Murray, Martin J.

Series:

Politics, history, and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Urban policy--South Africa--Johannesburg.

Urban policy.

Sociology, Urban.

Johannesburg (South Africa)--Geography.

Johannesburg (South Africa).

Johannesburg (South Africa)--Race relations.

Sociology, Urban--South Africa--Johannesburg.

Johannesburg (South Africa)--Politics and government.

South Africa--Johannesburg.

Physical Description:

xxix, 470 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2011.

Summary:

City of Extremes is a powerful critique of urban development in greater Johannesburg since the end of apartheid in 1994. Martin J. Murray describes how a loose alliance of city builders-including real estate developers, large-scale property owners, municipal officials, and security specialists-has sought to remake Johannesburg in the upbeat image of a world-class city. By creating new sites or sequestered luxury catering to the comfort, safety, and security of affluent urban residents, the have produced a new spatial dynamic of social exclusion, effectively barricading the mostly black urban poor from full participation in the mainstream of urban life. This partitioning of the cityscape is enabled by an urban planning environment of limited regulation or intervention into the prerogatives of real estate capital.

Combining insights from urban studies, cultural geography, and urban sociology with extensive tensive research in South Africa, Murray reflects on the implications of Johannesburg's dual character as a city of fortified enclaves that proudly displays the ostentatious symbols of global integration and the celebrated "enterprise culture" of neoliberal design, and as the "miasmal city" composed of residual, peripheral, and stigmatized zones characterized by signs of a new kind of marginality. He suggests that the "global cities" paradigm is inadequate to understanding the historical specificity of cities in the Global South, including the colonial mining town turned: postcolonial megacity of Johannesburg. Book jacket.

Contents:

The restless urban landscape : the evolving spatial geography of Johannesburg

The flawed promise of the high-modernist city : city building at the apex of apartheid rule

Hollowing out the center : Johannesburg turned inside out

Worlds apart : the Johannesburg inner city and the making of the outcast ghetto

The splintering metropolis : laissez-faire urbanism and unfettered suburban sprawl

Defensive urbanism after apartheid : spatial partitioning and the new fortification aesthetic

Entrepreneurial urbanism and the private city

Reconciling arcadia and utopia : gated residential estates at the metropolitan edge

Epilogue. putting Johannesburg in its place : the ordinary city.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780822347477

0822347474

9780822347682

0822347687

OCLC:

666878017