Johannesburg needn’t be Fear City

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Johannesburg needn’t be Fear City: The crisis in which the city finds itself reflects the failings of capitalism, but there is an antidote to dystopian urbanism.

Xenophobic politicians such as Herman Mashaba regularly claim that its streets have been overrun by hordes of dangerous “foreigners”. In the aftermath of a wave of power and water cuts during the height of winter in 2021, the newspaper published a widely circulated article saying that the “collapse” of Johannesburg was the prelude to a coming downfall of South Africa.

In this reading the city has become a stark Manichean space, divided between desperate and unruly residents and the threatened enclaves of wealth. These dark visions combine colonial anxieties about impoverished Black people with the harsh futures imagined in dystopias like This idea of the fallen city simplifies a far more complex reality. Johannesburg is certainly an environment of extreme crime and violence, but also survival and innovation.

Instead of the “glorious homes” imagined by boosterish journalists, the enclaves of the super rich are often the locations of major political and financial mayhem. The Guptas orchestrated their empire of crime from behind the high walls of their compound in the suburb of Saxonwold. Since the city began as a frenzied mining camp after the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand, it has embodied the worst aspects of global capitalism and extractive greed. , Thomas Pynchon describes the early city as a “hell” of “chronic phthisis” – the tuberculosis caused by unregulated mining pollution – and “shopkeeper avarice”. It is a city ruled by the profit motive and the desperate measures people will go to for it.

But it is also expressed in how the discussion around the city often focuses on fear and building enclaves, rather than addressing the material roots of social dysfunction. It fuels the contradictory belief that it is possible to have a city balkanised into enclaves and still retain the semblance of an organised urban life.

 

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What a load of unmitigated rubbish. Was this written by an undergrad wanting to impress a tutor?

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Your foreigners are turning our beautiful cities in horror movies

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