Capitalism, city, apartheid in the twenty-first century

Abstract

This paper unfolds in three parts. The first section argues that there has been an innovation in the rights of private property, especially in the area of residential property. Starting in the 1960s, though only really coming into its own in the 1980s, the rights of private property have been grafted onto a regime of communal ownership. Thus, during the very period of capitalist ascendancy, historically non-capitalist forms of sociability were being elaborated from within the holy ark of capitalism itself, the relation of private property. The second part shows that the condominium or sectional-title estate is transforming urban landscapes across the globe, generating novel urban constellations that are frequently imagined and lived as non-suburbs. Effectively, the growth of townhouses is associated with the decline of the traditional suburb as an urban phenomenon. The third part of this essay focuses on a South African case study, where condominiums (or townhouses under sectional title) have become important sites of uncanny, post-apartheid community. Using the example of Roodepoort, this paper argues that body corporates are elaborating domains of post-apartheid sociality that are largely unrecognisable and even uncomfortable from the dominant, normative tropes of post-apartheid life: non-racialism, cosmopolitanism, constitutionalism.

Keywords:

• capitalism
• Roodepoort

Notes

1. The shopping mall, that temple of high capitalist consumerism, too has an unexpected socialist provenance. In 1956, Victor Gruen, an Austrian socialist and former student of the modernist designer Peter Behrens who had moved to the US in 1938, invented the shopping mall. He designed Southdale Shopping Mall to recreate in America the experience of the European arcade. Gruen enclosed shops and department stores in an air-conditioned mall with the intention of realising a utopian experiment in master-planned, mixed-use community, complete with housing, schools, a medical centre, even a park and lake. People would come together to shop, drink coffee and socialise in otherwise alienated American suburbs. Coffee shops and other communal places would become, he hoped, animated by people discussing the major ideas of the day (Hardwick 2004).

2. Before them was Glenanil and all those suburbs with Glen in the name: Glenvista, Glendower and so on.

3. I suspect that this sentiment goes a long way to explaining why the suburb is barely treated in the South African literature. In Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (Mbembe and Nuttall 2009), a collection of essays on the city that was first published as a special edition of the journal Public Culture (2004, volume 16, issue 3), the topic scores a brief mention in an essay on literatures of the city. In Blank—: Architecture, Apartheid and After (Judin and Vladislavić 1998), the book associated with the very successful exhibition on South African architecture, there is no discussion of the suburb as an urban form at all. There is no mention, for example that “House Martiennsen,” built by the architect for himself in 1942 and one of the first major statements of modern movement architecture in South Africa is situated in Greenside, an area in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg. Yet surely the relationship of the house to the suburb is one of its key tensions?

4. We might call them quarters, derived from the French “quartier,” to distinguish them from suburbs but also to allude to their more communal organisation.

5. The name of the complex has been changed to protect the identities of the inhabitants of the complex. Castra, like the complex’s real name, refers to a star in the Capricorn constellation.

6. Wendy houses have their own history, beginning as dolls’ houses in Edwardian England for aristocratic families. Lutyens created a full, large dolls’ house for Queen Mary (wife of King George V), complete with furniture in minute detail, all to scale. Even the doors of the Wendy House opened and closed. Rich families called in carpenters to build small but habitable miniature houses in their gardens – called Wendy houses after Peter Pan and Wendy. At some point in the 1960s/1970s, a local South African firm started making prefabricated dolls’ houses that became storerooms for garden equipment and overflow goods. These degenerated into pre-made stores. They still retained the name Wendy house, from the “age of respectability.”