Navigating urban encounters: an infrastructural perspective on violence in Johannesburg’s taxi industry

ABSTRACT

The introduction of app-based ride-share services in Johannesburg, South Africa has provoked deadly clashes between meter-taxi and e-hailing drivers. While the extreme violence in the taxi industry has a long history, the current escalation of violence is very specific in its spatial manifestation and employment of urban infrastructure. Violent encounters concentrate around particular nodes, such as some of the commuter rail stops. Through the spatial examination of the Sandton, Park Street and Rosebank Gautrain stops, this article sheds light on the infrastructure’s design and role to mediate violent conflict, and drivers’ strategies to engage with the transport infrastructure to navigate the violence. Focusing on Johannesburg’s transport infrastructure allows not only to underline the continuation and blurry divide between violence in conflict and post-conflict urbanism, but moreover provides insights into the role urban infrastructure, from transport networks to cars and mobile phone applications, plays in the renegotiation of identities and belonging in contemporary South African cities.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban conflict
• urban violence
• transport
• infrastructure
• post-apartheid South Africa

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Emma Elfversson, Ivan Gusic and Kristine Höglund, two anonymous reviewers and the participants of the “The spatiality of violence in postwar cities“ workshop for their suggestions. I also thank Erica C. James who commented on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1. Daily Maverick, “Taxify Death.”

2. ENCA, “Uber, Metered Taxi Violence.”

3. Dugard, “Taxi Violence in South Africa.”

4. Reimann and König, “Collective Trauma and Resilience.”

5. Moser and McIlwaine, Violence in Latin America; Winton, “Urban Violence”; and Lahoud, “Post-Traumatic Urbanism.”

6. Murray, City of Extremes; and Murray, “The Quandary of Post-Public Space.”

7. Gida, “South Africa’s Peacebuilding Process.”

8. Cf. Baalen and Höglund, “Wartime Mobilization and Post-War Violence in KwaZulu-Natal,” 6.

9. Ibid.

10. Valentine, “Reflections on geographies of encounter,” 333.

11. Ibid.

12. Bonner and Nieftagodien, Alexandra, 359–83.

13. Rodgers and O’Neill, “Infrastructural Violence,” 401.

14. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 31; and Garland, “History of the Present.”

15. Rodgers and O’Neill, “Infrastructural Violence,” 403.

16. Ibid., 404.

17. Ibid., 406f.

18. Graham, “Cities as Battlespace”; Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism ; and Graham and McFarlane, Infrastructural Lives.

19. Boehmer and Davies, Planned Violence, 9–11.

20. Suhrke and Berdal, The Peace In between, 2; Boyle, “Violence After War”; and Du Toit, “South Africa’s Brittle Peace.”

21. Steenkamp, “Legacy of War,” 256.

22. Baalen and Höglund, “Wartime Mobilization and Post-War Violence in KwaZulu-Natal”; and Beall et al., “Cities and Conflict in Fragile States in the Developing World.”

23. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, “Making Sense of Violence.”

24. Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.”

25. Moser and McIlwaine, “New Frontiers.”

26. Ibid., 333, 336.

27. Abrahams, “Synopsis of Urban Violence.”

28. Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” 122.

29. Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”

30. Larkin, “Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” 357.

31. Amin, “Lively Infrastructure”; Larkin, “Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure”; Appel, Anand and Gupta, “Temporality, Politics, and the Promise of Infrastructure”; and Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?.”

32. Scott, Seeing Like a State.

33. Larkin, “Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” 328.

34. Von Schnitzler, Democracy’s Infrastructure.

35. Ibid., 107.

36. Ibid., 199.

37. Ibid.

38. Keller, Bill. “Deadly Free Market.”

39. Dugard, “Taxi Violence in South Africa”; cf. also Sekhonyane and Dugard, “Violent Legacy”; and Khosa, “Transport and Popular Struggle.”

40. See note 3 above.

41. Bonner and Nieftagodien, Alexandra, 380–3; Dugard, “Taxi Violence in South Africa”; and Sekhonyane and Dugard, “Violent Legacy.”

42. Rasmussen, “Inside the System, Outside the Law”; Klopp and Mithulla, “Politics, policy and paratransit”; and Couto, Tillgren, and Söderbäck, “Workplace Violence in the Road Passenger Transport Sector in Maputo.”

43. Marcano, “E-Hailing and Employment Rights,” 276.

44. Ibid., 277.

45. The Mail&Guardian Online. “BRT Bus Comes under Fire in Soweto.”

46. Including Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth, Pretoria and Johannesburg (the latter two are in the Gauteng Province).

47. Masuabi, “Uber Customers.”

48. Buur, “Horror of the Mob”; and Misago, “Political Economy of Xenophobic Violence.”

49. Misago, “Political Economy of Xenophobic Violence,” 41f.

50. Ibid.

51. @ada_zinhle, Twitter, 9 March 2018.

52. Tessa Munchick, co-founder of The Movement, cited in: Huffington Post South Africa. “No-Go Zones Declared As Attacks On Uber Drivers Intensifies.”

53. Trangoš, “New Spaces of Transport,” 99.

54. Ibid., 98, 121.

55. Government of South Africa, “National Development Plan – 2030,” 14.

56. Whittles, “Uber Drivers Fight Back with Spotters.”

57. Bell and Armytage, “What the Violent “Uber Wars” tell us”; and Hosken, “Sandton Streets Resemble War Zone after Attack on Uber Drivers.”

58. Van Zyl, “How Metered Taxis “Blocked” Uber from JHB Station.”

59. de Greef, “Driving for Uber When You Can’t Afford a Car.”

60. Comaroff and Comaroff, “Occult Economies”; and “Policing Culture, Cultural Policing.”

61. Trangoš, “New Spaces of Transport,” 112–4.

62. Rodgers and O’Neill, “Infrastructural Violence,” 402.

63. Ibid.

64. Appel, Anand and Gupta, “Temporality, Politics, and the Promise of Infrastructure,” 3.

65. Amin, “Lively Infrastructure,” 137.

66. Pullan, “Spatial Discontinuities,” 19.

67. Björkdahl, “Urban Peacebuilding,” 209.

68. Vogel, “Possibilities of Peace Activism,” 432.

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes on contributors

Silvia Danielak

Silvia Danielak is a doctoral student at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she works on issues of urban conflict and peacebuilding and its intersection with disaster recovery and risk reduction.