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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Post-apartheid Townships:Hyper-ghettos or Emerging Suburbs?
| Panel |
34. Post-apartheid: ethnographies of the South African transition
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| Paper ID | 505 |
| Author(s) |
Bank, Leslie
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | In her recent book on Ordinary Cities, the geographer Jenny Robinson (2005) laments the current state of urban studies, arguing that classic Eurocentric narratives of the city still dominate the field. She suggests that current writing on the city is obsessed with ‘global cities’ and pays little attention to ‘ordinary’ cities, except as places with development problems and challenges. Robinson calls for a reworking of the field of urban studies to ensure that new perspectives and understandings of urbanism are generated outside of the West, and that the field becomes more explicitly comparative in focus. Our paper respond to this call by offering, on the one hand, a detailed ethnography of urbanism and social change in an ‘ordinary’ South African city, while on the other exploring aspects of a comparative framework for the analysis of post-apartheid urban change.
On the latter issue, the paper engages the work of Loic Waquant (1998; 2002) on urban de-industrialisation in America and the shift from what he calls the ‘communal’ to the ‘hyper- ghetto’ - a process of ‘de-civilisation’. He argued that: ‘social relations in the hyper ghetto now have a distinctly carceral cast: fear and danger pervade public space; interpersonal relations are riven with suspicion and distrust, feeding mutual avoidance and retraction into ones private defended space; violence is the prevalent means of upholding respect, regulating encounters, and controlling territory; and relations with official authorities are suffused with animosity and diffidence – patterns familiar to students of social disorder in the contemporary US prison’. This account resonate with some descriptions of township life in South Africa today. But how far can the comparison be drawn, and what insights are evoked?
In this paper, we ask whether these old apartheid housing estates are indeed becoming ‘vibrant new suburbs’, as imagined in post-apartheid urban and housing policy, or whether they better resemble ‘hype-ghettos’ with their own particular social dynamics, but shaped by the same general processes of de-industrialisation, social exclusion, criminalisation and welfare dependency.
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