Suchergebnisse

African hair braiding on Bree Street offers a glimpse into how immigration, black female sexuality and shifts in urban retail economies provide important economic and cultural resources to urban residents and users. As both ontology and epistemology, black hair braiding practices recalibrate local economies, spaces, and aesthetic codes, and thus co-constitute emergent urban identities and a way of knowing the city. The intimate, networked, and fractal nature of black hair braiding spaces disrupts the rigid colonial spatial orders of the city and its architecture. As an epistemology, braiding disrupts the grand narrative of Johannesburg in 'crisis', while also disrupting the colonizing and gendered structure of urban studies itself.

This dissertation explores the representation of urban renewal in `post'-apartheid Johannesburg and the co-constitution of subjectivities therein. It is particularly concerned with how regimes of representation, embodied in public art projects, were enlisted in the construction of national identity and the expansion of neo-liberal capitalist accumulation in the inner city. By focusing on these representational practices, this study hopes to make a contribution to a broader understanding of how regimes of representation constitute a new domain of politics in post-apartheid Johannesburg.

Politics and Community-Based Research: Perspectives from Yeoville Studio, Johannesburg offers a substantive and compelling analysis for a diverse readership interested in urban politics, community mapping and the built environment. The book draws on a critical reflection of Yeoville Studio, a research project conducted by Wits University academics from a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds, together with community partners and postgraduate students. A collection of vignettes portraying people and places in Yeoville interwoven with theoretically analytical chapters, it explores the politics of community research at a neighbourhood scale in its multiple facets, and will resonate with similar contested and complex neighbourhoods across the world. The mix of analysis, vignettes, photographs, architectural design and graphics builds the discussion in engaging, rich and integrated ways, to capture the many participatory approaches taken to this city-community studio.