Its streets and office spaces, suburbs and parks, once manicured and controlled, have taken on the character of most cities in the developing world – fluid, messy, contested, violent. Middle class residents have secured themselves behind electric fences, guardhouses and patrols. Ethnic enclaves nestle in the shadows of corporate headquarters. Townships are invaded by the tourist gaze. The casino economy has taken hold. The city has become more fragmented, more polarized and more diverse than ever before. On the other hand, it has become a city for the first time. Its leaders struggle to find out what this means. 

In this book, Lindsay Bremner, Chair of Architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand frames a view of this rapidly transforming city and explores the new identities, bonds and intimacies forming in the midst of or in between the new rigidities and spatial enclosures of the emerging Johannesburg. 

The book captures a moment in the city’s history – a wild, dynamic, unsettled moment, when the city was moving in many directions all at once and when a myriad of countervailing trajectories criss-crossed its terrain. It interrogates how and why people were configuring the city in new ways and whether more hybrid conceptions of society and space were becoming evident. Moving between people, institutions, space and architecture, it interrogates what it means to belong to a postmodern society and live in a post-colonial city.