Thinking through Peripheries: Structural Spatial Inequality in Johannesburg

In response to calls for formulating urban theories grounded in the everyday realities of space, this dissertation explores inequality and spatial structure in Johannesburg, South Africa. The research undertakes a multi-scalar analysis ranging from the urban region to the individual resident, in order to understand the reproduction of structural spatial inequality in greater Johannesburg. In doing so, it employs established tools from the social sciences and built environment analytical procedures, as well as an innovative smartphone application developed within the framework of the project to map mobility patterns of study participants. This method aims to gain insight into the specificity of their daily lives as they relate to the overall urban whole. This approach is therefore interdisciplinary in its range as well as transdisciplinary in its implementation. It builds on the theoretical base of postcolonialism, planetary urbanization, and the Lefebvrian understanding of the production of space. Furthermore, this broad palette of tools demonstrates the interstices between everyday processes and the urban outcomes of unequal territories. Operating on the premise that global processes of capital accumulation are equally as important to the shaping of urban regions as the movement and interactions of their residents, the primary research question of the dissertation is twofold: How is structural spatial inequality reproduced across the territory of greater Johannesburg? And what approaches to urban development could begin to create alternative spaces amongst this deeply ingrained pattern? Decreasing in scale with each chapter, and simultaneously considering the past and present, it asks a further series of specific research questions: (1) What kinds of urbanization processes contributed to the territorial formation of greater Johannesburg from a historical perspective? (2) Which processes can be identified in the contemporary urban region and, in addition, in which terms can they be described and mapped? (3) How can underprivileged processes of urbanization be compared and contrasted in concrete spaces, especially when they have developed divergent trajectories? (4) How can the everyday lives of the underprivileged be related back to the structural spatial inequality of the urban region? After investigating these questions across four chapters, the final chapter seeks to evaluate this accumulated knowledge, asking: (5) Can moments of the urban commons potentially begin to shift the discourse on development in Johannesburg? Based on these findings, this dissertation contributes to the contemporary discourse on centrality and inequality in urban studies.