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- Convenor:
-
Sarah-Jane Cooper-Knock
(University of Edinburgh)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Duduzile Sakhelene Ndlovu
- Stream:
- Environment and Geography
- Location:
- David Hume, LG.10
- Sessions:
- Thursday 13 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores urban marginality and the politics of everyday life on the urban margins. It asks who is shaping the terms of urban inclusion and exclusion and how they are being questioned or confirmed; resisted or reinforced. It welcomes comparative papers that include South Africa.
Long Abstract:
This panel interrogates the nature of urban marginality in contemporary South Africa and the politics of everyday life on the urban margins. It explores who is shaping the terms of inclusion and exclusion in urban areas and how they are being questioned or confirmed; resisted or reinforced. It welcomes papers addressing these questions in comparative perspective within, and beyond, South Africa.
The panel critically engages with the parameters and meaning of 'the urban margins', asking whether this a useful term of engagement for exploring the varied relationships of power that shape urban life:
- We know that societies have often relied, in diverse ways, upon those who they exclude and oppress. What does this mean for the utility of 'marginality' as a concept? Is such reliance shifting with changes in the labour market and political landscape?
- Can we successfully resist 'marginality' becoming singular and, therefore, unable to capture intersectionality? Can we prevent it becoming a negative demarcation that is defined solely in terms of lack?
- How does the idea of 'marginality' interact with other concepts, like that of the 'periphery'? Are both equally spatial and relational? Are there directions one can take us that the other cannot?
NB: We ask panelists to reflect on their citation practices, seeing these as indicative of the conversations in which they are involved. We invite panelists to think about the diversity of voices they are engaging with in their paper and how they might seek out new voices with which to engage.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 13 June, 2019, -Sarah Charlton (University of the Witwatersrand)
Paper short abstract:
Diverse forms of housing delivery are shaping the edges of African cities, driven by multiple actors and varying logics. Spatial contradictions and tensions can ensue. Selected cases from South Africa and Ethiopia show the significance of complex provenances for everyday life on the periphery.
Paper long abstract:
Diverse forms of housing delivery are shaping the edges of African cities, contributing significant growth or change to these urban peripheries. Beyond speculative private residential development, housing and land is being supplied through state policy, traditional authorities and political parties, as well as private sector developers and individuals. Relationships between these various actors can be complex. Further, a range of logics can underlie geographically peripheral developments, including aspirations for home ownership; access to a basic urban foothold with relatively low barriers to entry; the ongoing demands of spatial and governance histories and legacies; political ambitions and real estate profits. From this mix of drivers and motivations spatial contradictions or tensions can ensue. Even in cases where the state is driving housing delivery at scale, developments can be at odds with other state spatial plans and logics. The results of such disconnects are significant for residents living in peripheral areas and impact on the extent of their marginalisation or incorporation into city life. Using fieldwork from the multi-site and multi-city Living the Urban Peripheries research project in South Africa and Ethiopia, including key informant interviews, this paper explores drivers, relationships and logics in housing delivery in selected localities in EThekwini, Gauteng (SA), and Addis Ababa(Ethiopia), and the ways in which these inform or contest wider spatial plans and logics. The paper argues that understanding and explaining this provenance is important in considering the experiences of everyday life on the periphery.
Jennifer Houghton (University of Sheffield) Alison Todes (University of the Witwatersrand)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores relationships between peripherality and marginality in South African cities through focusing on people's experiences in accessing work and livelihoods in peripheral areas experiencing economic growth and decline: northern eThekwini and Ekangala/Bronkhorstspruit, Tshwane.
Paper long abstract:
The relationship between peripherality and marginality in cities has been much debated, with an emerging sense that both these concepts and their relationships should be understood as complex, dynamic and shifting. The periphery of cities can be characterised by both growth and decline. South African cities have changing, varied peripheries which have been shaped inter alia by apartheid policies and their aftermath; shifting municipal boundaries of the post-apartheid era; auto-construction; peri-urbanisation; and state and private sector investment in infrastructure, housing and economic development. These conditions and dynamics have implications for relationships between peripherality and marginality. This paper uses both quantitative and qualitative data to explore these relationships by focusing on people's experiences in accessing work and livelihoods in two urban peripheries in South Africa: the eThekwini north area, where infrastructure investment and growth has been occurring around the development of a new airport, industry, retail, housing and road infrastructure; and the Ekangala/Bronkhorstspruit area on the edge of Tshwane which has experienced complex patterns of industrial growth and decline alongside housing development post-apartheid. In Ekangala/Bronkhorstspruit, the findings suggest economic decline, high unemployment and associated socio-economic marginalisation but this is differentiated within the communities and spaces within the case study area. In Northern eThekwini, there is evidence of high unemployment and a skills mismatch. More limited employment for local low-income people has been generated than anticipated. As in Ekangala/Bronkhorstspruit, experiences are differentiated across the case study area, further complicated by the impacts of people moving into and within the urban periphery.
Sarita Jarmack (University of Amsterdam)
Paper short abstract:
Galleries and art studios are now a main part of Johannesburg's inner-city revitalization, but as the 'core' art world resides in the suburbs, this paper examines how the inner-city peripheral is understood and utilized in a South African contemporary art scene.
Paper long abstract:
This paper seeks to examine how the inner-city peripheral is imagined in relation to a more 'core' art scene located in the suburbs of Johannesburg. I draw on ethnographic material collected in 2017 with gallerists and artists as residents in the peripheral of Johannesburg's Central Business District developing area. To rejuvenate this post-industrial area of the inner city, the city's development agencies assisted in property tax incentives to lure private property investors, which gave way to the start of initiatives such as the Maboneng Precinct in 2008. This is a privately controlled property development that aimed to facilitate a creative industry, a trending approach in making a 'good city' that invokes the "creative class" in processes of urban revitalization. These initiatives aim to attract middle- and upper-class suburbanites back into an area that is otherwise understood to be affected by economic stagnation of predominantly black inner-city communities. In this paper, I highlight the relationship between the art world and the city's development plans to ask what does it mean to be a representative of the edge of the art world in the inner city of Johannesburg? Moreover, I focus on how the politics of the peripheral as a space of promoting, displaying, creating, categorization of emerging (black) artists point to certain privileges in the South African art industry.
Sarah-Jane Cooper-Knock (University of Edinburgh) Emma Monama (University of Hamburg)
Paper short abstract:
Our work explores the politics of difference within Orange Farm - a space that is both geographically, politically and economically on the urban margins. In doing so, we challenge oversights in the current literature on xenophobia in South Africa.
Paper long abstract:
Our work seeks to understand the politics of difference in Orange Farm - a space on the geographic, political and economic margins of urban South Africa.
We did so in an effort to re-embed discussions of xenophobia into broader explorations of being and belonging in the country. For, whilst there is undoubtedly a rich literature on xenophobia in South Africa, this research remains overly focused on spectacular acts of violence between 'foreigners' and 'South Africans'. By exploring the notion of difference more broadly, we were able to look at the everyday negotiation of belonging in Orange Farm and to unsettle the categories such as 'migrant' and 'local'.
'Difference' is a useful analytical entry point, we argue, because unlike the concept of marginality, it is not always and already hierarchical.
By engaging with the idea of 'difference' we were able to gain a critical distance from the concept of marginality. In doing so, we could more effectively explore: What does it mean to be marginalised? How can this term help us to uncover and analyse people's lived experiences? In what ways does the existing literature draw our attention to particular forms of marginality at the exclusion of others?