ABSTRACT
The adaptive nature of the security and urban management practices which have developed in Hillbrow illustrate how a form of domestication has taken place. Drawing on American models of inner-city upgrading and heavily influenced by consultants with direct experience in American cities, the City of Johannesburg inaugurated several high-profile regeneration initiatives in the early 2000s. As private security has been introduced in the Ekhaya Neighbourhood, a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to policing and public space management has come into force. As in other City Improvement Districts areas in South Africa, and cities across the globe where private policing has extended into the public realm, populations of homeless people, young unemployed men and people engaged in informal economic activity have come to be the focus of policing efforts. There are therefore new, revanchist forms of exclusion emerging in the inner-city as new community relations and forms of associational life are being established.
