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Full Description
South African cities are marked by the legacies of past practices, inscribed in fixed spatial patterns. They therefore play a pivotal role in shaping the possibilities and limits of changing imperatives of transition, transformation, development and sustainability. From the late 1970s, the 'urban' has been presented as both a key scene for visions of the reform of apartheid and as a site for the potentially revolutionary transformation of South African society. Knowing the City departs from this prominence of urban issues, which explains why South African urban scholarship has been a key reference point nationally and in urban studies elsewhere. The book draws together 65 urban scholars of South African cities of different generations, from various regions and from diverse universities. The 76 essays of the volume are products of a series of workshops and interviews; each piece emerges from different modes of dialogue and writing work developed through these interactions. The aim of the collection is not to offer an authoritative historical survey of the field but to (re-)open and facilitate genuine dialogues about the theories and practices of both social inquiry and urban transformation as deeply lived commitments of multiple generations of scholars in South Africa and beyond.
There are two guiding premises of Knowing the City. First, in South African and global southern urban scholarship, more conventional registers of scholarly expertise and critique are deeply interwoven with practices of engaging beyond academia in the form of, for instance, activism, consultancy and co-production. Second, knowledge about South Africa has not been and is still not produced only in South Africa but across more stretched-out geographies. Just as importantly, knowledge about and conceptualisations drawn from South Africa have been and continue to be ascribed more general (that is, more-than-local) significance. What the project's dialogical research process revealed is that, aside from being located geographically, socially and politically, urbanists' field of practice is embodied, personal and relational. The book reassesses the geographies and commitments of South African urban studies and, paying attention to scholars' distinctive forms of engagement and the problem spaces that have shaped it, tells a novel story about the generation of ideas and (knowledge) practices in urban studies, and in social sciences more broadly.
Contents
Abbreviations and acronyms
List of Authors
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
Locating South African Urban Scholarship:
Geographies, Commitments and Problem Spaces
A Provincial Life
PART I: NAVIGATING IN
Introduction
'Come, Sit for a While'
An Expired ID
Library Card
A Register of Detainees
Situated Theorising
A Stone from Loon Road
A Playing Card in the World
Piecing Together the Big Picture
Bridging Choppy Waters
'Let Them Use the Supermarket'
The 'Room in the Elephant'?
Journeys, Layers
Formative Joburg Threads
The Art of the Possible
From the City's Supposed 'Edge'
Guides, Old and New
The Gauteng A-Z
Re-piecing the Map
Public Bench
A Particular Past
A Place of Discomfort
Through My Hands
PART II: ENGAGING WITH
Introduction
Normative and Analytical
Planning Imperatives
Trials and Errors Claire
Practices of Care
Narrating the Self
Critical Urban Work, Retreat
or Revival?
Research-Policy Collaborations
In the City and Its Shadows
Propositional Instincts
Storytelling
Researching in the Midst
A Global Circuit of Knowing
The Black Box of Planning
Letters of Love
A Clipboard in Hand
Evading Conclusion
Touring the City
From Law to the Local State
Born of Political Necessity
Working in the Non-State
Making
Writing at Sea
A Practice, an Object
Transforming Teaching and Curricula
Theory, Knowing Friend
PART III: THINKING FROM
Introduction
A Sense of Correspondence
The Origins of 'Urban Value
Commitments'
Reactivating Histories (of Places)
Crafting a Tale of Writing
'Theorising From'
Body, Home and Land
Double-Rooted
Defying All Odd
A Personal Journey
Tenacity, Courage and Faith
Politics in Writing
An Unminted Urbanist
Non-Metropolitan Marxisms
The Quest for Southern Urban Theory
Learning from Below
From Blank to Desire Lines
Something to Compare
Entering the Global Urban
Being in the South
Through the Unfamiliar
Journeying with Theory
Writing Collaboration
A Change of Form
Living Through These Feelings
SF and Other Worldly Learnings
being otherwise: thinking future-fully
Incompleteness at the Crossroads
Conclusion
References
