Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the everyday lives of migrant women living in inner-city Johannesburg as refugees and economic migrants. Through the twin frames of informality and mobility, it shows how they disrupt common understandings of governance and informality in Johannesburg.

Paper long abstract:

This paper uses empirical data, based on five years of ethnographic research on women from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Nigeria and Zimbabwe living in inner-city Johannesburg as refugees and economic migrants. Specifically, it looks to shed light on commonly used policy and theoretical concepts - urban governance and informality. It explores these concepts through the lived experiences of migrant women in Johannesburg - a population that lives in the city's interstices - 'between and betwixt' a romanticized past and an imagined future elsewhere. In this limbo location, women's everyday lives and relationships unveil a world that has a profound effect on the city they live in. Their lives show us how significant they are in shaping the actions of state agents, and overturning common understandings of urban governance as a state-led project. As we follow them through the city's streets, the boundaries between legality and illegality, formal and informal, official and unofficial city collapse, rendering these categories inaccurate descriptors of the city or their lives. Migrant women compel us to rethink the twin frames that have for so long shaped how we plan and govern cities: the legal versus illegal city, the formal versus informal city, the visible versus invisible city.