City of Extremes: The Spatial Politics of Johannesburg

Martin J. Murray is Professor of Urban Planning at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and Adjunct Professor at the Center for African and African-American Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of many books, including Taming the Disorderly City: The Spatial Landscape of Johannesburg after Apartheid and Revolution Deferred: The Painful Birth of Post-Apartheid South Africa.

"Martin J. Murray navigates the slippery interfaces where mega-development, social progress, dystopian dread, racial enclaving, and mobilities of all kinds intersect, revealing both an alarming disposition to Africa's most heterogeneous city and a rough-hewn humanity despite the odds. At each step of the way, Murray is precise and impassioned in this no-holds barred analysis of the lengths politicians, businesspersons, planners, entrepreneurs, and developers will go to hold a city a down."--AbdouMaliq Simone, author of "For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities"

List of Maps viiList of Illustrations ixPreface xiAcknowledgments xxviiAbbreviations xxxiIntroduction. Spatial Politics in the Precarious City 1Part I 23Making Space: City Building and the Production of the Built Enivronment1. The Restless Urban Landscape: The Evolving Spatial Geography of Johannesburg 292. The Flawed Promise of the High-Modernist City: City Building at the Apex of Apartheid Rule 59Part II 83Unraveling Space: Centrifugal Urbanism and the Convulsive City3. Hollowing out the Center: Johannesburg Turned Inside Out 874. Worlds Apart: The Johannesburg Inner City and the Making of the Outcast Ghetto 1375. The Splintering Metropolis: Laissez-faire Urbanism and Unfettered Suburban Sprawl 173Part III 205Fortifying Space: Siege Architecture and Anxious Urbanism6. Defensive Urbanism after Apartheid: Spatial Partitioning and the New Fortification Aesthetic 2137. Entrepreneurial Urbanism and the Private City 2458. Reconciling Arcadia and Utopia: Gated Residential Estates at the Metropolitan Edge 283Epilogue. Putting Johannesburg in Its Place: The Ordinary City 321Appendix 333Notes 337Bibliography 423Index 463