Clearing Space: Postapartheid liberalism and the evolution of spatial segregation in Johannesburg’s new urban enclaves

Abstract

This study is based on 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Dainfern Golf & Residential Estate and among gated community industry professionals in Johannesburg, South Africa. It is broadly concerned with how the hard edges of political economy relate to affect, examining the attachments that residents of gated communities cultivate in order to create belonging, community, and citizenship, as well as the anodyne environments that shield them from the unpredictability of the outside world. My focus on elites offers a complementary account of a city that has been (understandably) documented primarily from the perspective of the urban disenfranchised. The goal is not to vindicate these elites but rather to demystify the political field on which the future of the city will be decided from the perspective of those commanding capital. I push beyond explanations that easily recourse to fear of crime, and polemic accounts that claim a continuation of apartheid, to critique the new and uneasy kinds of liberalism, sovereignty, belonging, and citizenship that elites craft to make lives for themselves, even as those imperil the realization of a just city.

“Clearing” is intended in two senses. It refers, first, to the physical and bureaucratic work that goes into making room for new development. And second, it draws on Heidegger’s notion of the clearing (Lichtung) in order to understand new urban enclaves as attempts—successful or not—at creating the conditions for appropriate cultivation of the self. After providing three case studies related to how history is used, forgotten, or managed in the making of new urban enclaves, I move onto an analysis of what I call anaesthesis. Anaesthesis describes the various processes by which residents, developers, and others try to control their exposure to what they find to be an overwhelming city. It is also invested in the proper cultivation of subjectivity. As with medical anaesthesis, however, it comes with various potential risks. The latter half of the dissertation examines two charity initiatives through which residents attempts to reach beyond the gates. Through two case studies I provide, first, a critique of gift exchange, charity, and gratitude as the bases for a viable social, and second, an account of how proposed practices of care and generosity serve to entrench inequality. The elites I study do not, in the end, appear to wield insurmountable power, as throughout the dissertation I show how their best-laid plans often fail. Throughout the dissertation, I advocate for an approach to both fieldwork and writing characterized by what I have called “cringe” as a way to manage the difficult personal, ethical, and political quandaries involved in studying up.