Extra/ordinary Johannesburg

Johannesburg, South Africa, is often associated with inequality and referred to as the quintessential ‘apartheid city’. This book argues that Johannesburg, part of the highly urbanized Gauteng City-Region, is an ‘ordinary’ space where spatial changes both marginalize and create opportunities for people in their everyday lives.

Relying on more than a decade of empirical research, the book also interrogates the concept of ‘spatial dialectics’ proposed by Henri Lefebvre. Through deep insight into the practices and experiences of everyday life, Lindsay Blair Howe shows how cities and regions like greater Johannesburg are more than just a sum of their parts. Individuals, and the collectives they forge, influence processes of urbanization and capital accumulation. Extra/ordinary Johannesburg reveals how Lefebvre’s assertions about the production of space remain relevant today, where they reach their limits and how theories on the production of space can be further developed by a stronger understanding of this African urban region. What we can learn from how people are able to navigate the urban fabric of centralities, peripheries and the spaces between matter greatly in productively reimagining ways to confront poverty and inequality in urban Africa.