Vernacular Regeneration: low-income housing, private security and urban transformation in inner-city Johannesburg

The thesis examines the process of urban regeneration currently underway in inner-city Johannesburg, paying particular attention to the roles social and private housing developers and privatised security services are playing in shaping the area. It also examines the lived reality of regeneration and focuses on the experiences of tenants living in newly-renovated residential buildings. It is based on a qualitative study involving interviews with various actors involved in regeneration and housing provision, including government officials, employees of agencies financing housing projects, housing providers, security and urban management personnel and tenants. It also draws on ethnographic accounts derived in the course of fieldwork. The thesis demonstrates the duality of the goals and agendas which the regeneration process is attempting to fulfil, and concludes that it is a contradictory, vernacular process. It shows how housing providers attempt to meet the demands of a market-based approach to housing and regeneration as well as respond to the social concerns and requirements which define the area. Drawing on the work of Lefebvre and Bourdieu, the thesis expands on the concepts ‘spatial habitus’ and ‘spatial capital’ to give theoretical structure to the discussion and demonstrate the mutually- determining relationship between habitus and space. Moving from the discursive realm to everyday reality, the effects urban management and security practices are having on the area and the ways people experience it are analysed. Urban management is also shown to be serving dual purposes, making the area safer but resulting in differential access to security and new boundaries of exclusion. Lastly, the significance of regeneration is analysed from tenants’ perspectives, accounting for the variety of ways it both facilitates as well as hinders their rights to the city and experiences of urban citizenship, making it a transformative and developmental but also exclusionary and restricted, and thus vernacular, process

Habitus, spatial capital and making place: Housing developers and the spatial praxis of Johannesburg’s inner-city regeneration

This paper presents a sociology of housing developers, stressing the contingent, socially and spatially embedded nature of their practices. It complicates prevailing views of developers and demonstrates how urban development is, in fact, a spatial praxis requiring adaptability and capacities to adjust dispositions and practices to suit the particular environments in which it takes place. A growing body of work tries to understand the motivations and practices of property developers. While this has contributed to understandings of developers’ networks, the ways they understand their roles and the ways different national or regional contexts shape approaches, it largely lacks a spatial perspective, and does not account for the contingency, fluidity and adaptability of developers’ actions. Most importantly, it does not theorize how experiences in space shape practices. Developers are still largely presented as powerful actors who are able to exercise domination over space in relatively straight-forward, linear ways. In contrast, in this paper I demonstrate that developers are influenced by competing dynamics and agendas, and actively adapt their strategies and activities in accordance with the demands and realities of particular places. Building on the work of Centner (2008)and Marom (2014), the paper further develops the concepts ‘spatial capital’ and ‘spatial habitus’ and attempts to use them to make sense of the practices of property developers and affordable housing providers working in inner-city Johannesburg

Everyday security: privatized policing, local legitimacy and atmospheres of control

This paper examines the tactics, underpinning logics and forms of legitimacy through which urban security is produced and maintained in a volatile urban environment. I argue that urban security relies on subtle, mundane practices, in addition to the use of force. Drawing on original empirical research carried out in inner-city Johannesburg, the article makes a novel contribution by combining literature from policing and security studies with work on gentrification, ambient power and the privatization of public space. Overall, the article aims to emphasize the ways in which social and spatial realities shape security and policing practices, and broaden our understanding of the rationales, logics and meanings of urban security, particularly in volatile, conflictual urban spaces (mostly, but not exclusively) in the Global South

‘Joburg has its own momentum’:Towards a vernacular theorisation of urban change

This article demonstrates and advocates the importance of theoretical frameworks which allow for nuance and complexity. Moving away from fixed ways of reading and analysing processes of urban renewal (such as gentrification, revanchism, neoliberal urbanism), it seeks to show how a diversity of imperatives and agendas are present and shape moments of urban change and the practices of actors involved in these. Drawing on research conducted in inner-city Johannesburg which focussed on private-sector-led regeneration, housing provision and security, it demonstrates that the process underway is characterised by a multiplicity of goals and practices. Regeneration is formulated within a neoliberal paradigm, yet through creative strategies and interventions is also achieving developmental goals and expanding the provision of affordable, centrally-located housing. The article details the strategies adopted by organisations specialising in financing social and affordable housing and demonstrates the ways in which these emphasise and are helping to achieve the expansion of housing provision to low-income households. It further discusses the habitus of housing providers in the inner-city and shows how these have been influenced by and respond to the developmental challenges and racial transformation which characterise the area. It thus demonstrates that local contexts, concerns and agendas influence the regeneration process and that putatively global processes such as gentrification, revanchism and neoliberal urbanism, whilst still relevant, need to be used in ways which allow for alternative, vernacular narratives and explanations to emerge too

Advancing the teaching of comparative and international education

Many researchers and practitioners in the field of comparative and international education (CIE) also work as educators, teaching CIE courses to cadres of students across various levels. In teaching these courses, CIE educators play a significant role in shaping the field’s future: the perspectives they privilege and the pedagogies they utilize arguably leave lasting impressions on students, who themselves go on to become teachers, researchers, policymakers, international development practitioners, and more. However, scant attention has been paid to the teaching of CIE. This chapter explores the possibilities and potential benefits of linking the teaching of CIE more deeply with both the emerging scholarship on it and the current debates and dilemmas with which the Comparative and International Education Society and CIE journals have engaged in the past few years such as decolonizing development and education. The chapter raises questions about the future of teaching CIE and concludes with a renewed call for additional research on the scholarship of teaching CIE