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Paper short abstract:

Secret shopping centres of Johannesburg's 'chaos precinct' offer consumer delights and proposals for transformation while producing layers of concealment and exposure. Their rogue architectural devices respond to the peculiar contestations in this post-colonial African inner-city neighbourhood.

Paper long abstract:

"Chaos spilled out into plain view like secrets of the urban unconscious." (Muschamp: 2000, np)

Johannesburg is an intense wholesale centre for sub-Saharan Africa - with billions of Rands' worth of fast fashion sold annually in the traditional CBD. This vast low-end globalised trade has pioneered a retail phenomenon that pulsates from informalised spaces. Modernist buildings that have outlived their usefulness as office space have become a carcass for maximising trade space and exposure - with mini retail outlets and coffeeshops transforming dormant interior corridors into lively internal streets.

This compressed urban environment is produced through an adapative, labyrynthine artchitecture in which goods can be furntiture, walls can be shops and a landing might reveal an archipelago of micro spaces teeming with shoes, bags or jeans.

Drawing on the first socio-spatial mapping of these innovative architectures, this paper examines the logics of display and concealment that service this shopping hub. It incorporates survey findings of 400 shoppers and 300 retailers and a number of in depth interviews.

The paper engages with Benjamin's musings on the architectures and social positioning of Parisian arcades, to interrogate the enigmatic architectures in this area. It explores the multiplex gaze and the spatial responses that at once lure customers and simultaneously shield spaces against criminals and police. These include both block-long and micro arcades lined with cupboard-sized shops. Like Benjamin's Parisian architectures, these 21st century subversive shopping centres are created through appropriation and adaptation premised on consumption. But they are irregular, rogue Afropolitan architectures.