Configurations of a southern place: a postcolonial, southern urban inquiry into place-making in Norwood, Johannesburg.

Abstract

Place theory in geography has largely been a northern scholarly endeavor. Yet there is much to learn about place-making in global south cities. Southern urban scholars argue that understanding cities of and from the vantage point of global south, significantly expands urban scholarship in a way that northern-derived theory cannot do. My research experiments with two growing bodies of literature to study the making of a southern place. Drawing from postcolonial and southern urban theory, I use a process of theory unbundling (Lawhon and Le Roux, 2020) to provincialize relational place-making (Pierce, Martin and Murray, 2011). My empirical case studies the spatial practices and logics of place-making by people who live and work in the streets and public spaces in Johannesburg, South Africa. In experimenting with theory unbundling as a tool to dislocate northern-derived theory, I find that relational place-making cannot travel south as is, because, how power and democracy is conceptualized in northern literature is empirically different in a southern place. The negotiatory tactics of how public space is shared but also claimed for private gain, and how marginalized people’s behaviors are monitored and controlled, foregrounds what I call the staying power from being in place, and that place-making depends far more on what is permissible than what is lawful. I use and expand on an existing southern urban concept, ‘permissions’ (Lawhon, Pierce and Makina, 2017), to understand place-making when it falls in the liminal space between state law and order and unlawful, unregulated spatial practices. Through these findings I make room in urban scholarship to further research spatial practices and logics that occur outside of the operating systems of the modern state - underpinned by democratic values attached to private property and a rights-based approach to accessing the city.