Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis

Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis is a pioneering effort to insert South Africa’s largest city into urban theory, on its own terms. Johannesburg is Africa’s premier metropolis. Yet theories of urbanization have cast it as an emblem of irresolvable crisis, the spatial embodiment of unequal economic relations & segregationist policies, & a city that responds to but does not contribute to modernity on the global scale. Complicating & contesting such characterizations, the contributors to this collection reassess classic theories of metropolitan modernity as they explore the experience of “city-ness” & urban life in post-apartheid South Africa. They portray Johannesburg as a polycentric & international city with a hybrid history that continually permeates the present. Turning its back on rigid rationalities of planning & racial separation, Johannesburg has become a place of intermingling & improvisation, a city that is fast developing its own brand of cosmopolitan culture.
The volume’s essays include an investigation of representation & self-stylization in the city, an ethnographic examination of friction zones and practices of social reproduction in inner-city Johannesburg, & a discussion of the economic & literary relationship between Johannesburg & Maputo, Mozambique’s capital. One contributor considers how Johannesburg’s cosmopolitan sociability enabled the anticolonial projects of Mohandas Ghandi & Nelson Mandela. Journalists, artists, architects, writers, & scholars bring contemporary Johannesburg to life in ten short pieces, including reflections on music & megamalls, nightlife, built spaces, & life for foreigners in the city.
Arjun Appadurai, Carol A. Breckenridge, L. Bremner, D. Bunn, Fred de Vries, Nsizwa Dlamini, Mark Gevisser, Stefan Helgesson, Julia Hornberger, Jonathan Hyslop, Grace Khunou, Frédéric Le Marcis, Xavier Livermon, John Matshikiza, Achille Mbembe, Robert Muponde, Sarah Nuttall, Tom Od