ABSTRACT
When, in late 1999, the City of Johannesburg ordered the forced removal of informal street traders from the area surrounding what is now the Metro Mall traders market in order to facilitate construction of the new municipal market, it precipitated violent protests between informal traders and Metro police. This chapter explores the assertion that the geography of state power after apartheid functions through a series of 'fractured and overlapping' coalescences. Informal trading in Johannesburg, as in many other cities in the global South as long been associated with urban disorder and anxiety. The chapter argues that the Metro Mall represents not simply an attempt to discipline urban space, but to deliberately implicate informal traders into a relationship with the post-apartheid state - that is, into civil society. It focuses on one specific example of the 'mutual imaginations' of state and citizen in the physical manifestation of the Metro Mall municipal market in Johannesburg.
