Taming The Disorderly City: The Spatial Landscape Of Johannesburg After Apartheid

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As befits a city of its size and significance, Johannesburg is the setting for much contemporary research in urban studies. Geographers join sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and others in building this literature, alongside work on African cities generally.

Martin Murray, a sociologist by training but a geographer at heart, has been at the forefront of the boom in Johannesburg studies and African urban studies as a whole.

This is the kind of book one gets excited about reading from the first page onward. Running Shoes A chief reason for that is the propulsive energy and enthusiasm of Murray's engaging writing. Murray argues for seeing Johannesburg after apartheid as a city that remains "divided against itself" (p. 4).

He has three interwoven claims for post-apartheid Johannesburg: that the regeneration process and the road to ruin are "two sides of the same coin" (p. 4); that it ...
... is very difficult to alter the urban landscape when it is physically so wedded to political-economic segregation and inequality; and that reliance on market mechanisms exacerbates the divisions of the city.

Murray's four lines of argument around these claims might be described as emphasizing economic geography, socio-cultural aesthetics and discourse, urban governance, and the professional practice of urban planning. After a brief introduction, he lays out his case through eight theoretically engaged and empirically rich chapters.

The content relies on a broad understanding of relevant literatures and on field research. Womens Shoes Murray mixes data sources well, from interviews, detailed site visits to informal settlements, conversations with activists and residents, and news accounts.

Although they are the most theoretical ones in the book, chapters one and two make effective use of contemporary Johannesburg as their backdrop. Chapter one is an impassioned plea for social justice and the expansion of rights to the city for the majority of excluded citizens. Chapter two articulates how "ruin and regeneration [are] ... intertwined" (p. 39), with close attention to architecture and the built environment. The underlying efforts to fix Johannesburg, posed against its unfixable flexibility, occupy chapter three, with a particular focus on the city center. The chapter has a very geographical narrative of planning and governance inadequacies running through it.

Chapter four takes as its emphasis the lives of the "disposable people at the periurban fringe" (p. 90). It is the first of four much more narrative driven chapters, and for me it marks a turning point in the book toward a more absorbing read. It is built around the phenomenon of land invasions and the clashes of squatters with both legal and governmental forces in the post-apartheid era.

Murray's observant research allows both a broad survey of periurban settlements and a respectful portrait of the everyday lives and vernacular architecture in them.

The next three chapters target the central city. Chapter five shows how ghettoization and gentrification emerge together with the neoliberal era's emphasis on real estate capitalism. The steady deterioration of the building stock is paired with the bizarre phenomenon of sneaky entrepreneurs hijacking rental properties.

Chapter six highlights the life struggles of the increasing numbers of homeless people in the central city. It is a hard chapter to read without becoming angry at the world that has let this happen. The anger only builds with chapter seven's analysis of corporate redevelopment and gentrification - both public and private strategies rest on removals and relocations in imposing order on the untamed masses.

The book's final chapter takes this trend to its logical conclusion: the deaths of homeless people in the face of banal indifference, in a city overcome by heartlessness. The phrase with which Murray ends the book, "a decent urban life" (p. 236), is both an impossibility for far too many residents of Johannesburg and the insistent demand behind his story here.

In sum, this is a very strong book. It is ideally suited for use in urban geography and Africa geography courses. Western world students will find it a tough book, not because of its writing (which is excellent) but because of the demands it makes on one's conscience.