ABSTRACT

Urban regeneration is currently taking place in inner-city Johannesburg. This book presents an alternative, multi-layered account for reading the process of urban change and renewal.

The provision of social and affordable housing and the spread of private security are explored through the lenses of neoliberal urbanism, gentrification, the privatisation of public space and revanchist policing. This book interrogates these concepts and challenges their assumptions based on new qualitative and ethnographic evidence emerging out of Johannesburg. Dated concepts in Critical Urban Studies are re-evaluated and the book calls for an alternative, adaptable approach, focusing on how we develop a vocabulary and creative understanding of urban regeneration.

This book is an outstanding contribution to theoretical and comparative approaches to understanding cities and processes of urban change. It offers practical insights and experiences which will be of considerable use to practitioners, policy-makers and urban planning students.

chapter 1|37 pages

Thinking with and through Johannesburg

chapter 2|24 pages

An overburdened process

The competing agendas, imperatives and outcomes of inner-city regeneration

chapter 3|25 pages

The contradictory praxis of regeneration

chapter 4|37 pages

Urban management and security

Private policing, atmospheres of control and everyday practices

chapter 5|18 pages

Ambiguous experiences of regeneration

Spatial capital, agency and living in-between

chapter 6|16 pages

The space that regeneration makes

Regulation, security and everyday life 1

chapter 7|15 pages

Conclusion

Towards a vernacular theorisation of urban change