Abstract
Despite best hopes of social and urban transformation, Johannesburg’s middle-class suburbs have remained largely inaccessible to lower income and more marginalised communities. This article examines the everyday practices and repertoires of action by resident associations in Johannesburg, demonstrating their ability to moderate more progressive state impulses and other land use changes. It argues that resident associations have become the custodians of middle-class visions and aesthetics and carry out the boundary work and symbolic violence that maintains and defends suburban borders.
Keywords
Introduction
The city of Johannesburg remains highly segregated with poorer and generally black residents located in old townships and informal settlements on the periphery, whilst wealthier residents often referred to as the ‘middle classes’ live in the older ‘white’ suburbs. Unlike many other African contexts where there has only recently been a congregation of the middle classes into suburban spaces (Mercer, 2020), Johannesburg’s suburbs, as home to the elite, have been in existence since the inception of the city (Beavon, 2003). Originally designed as low density, single household sub with excellent spatial amenities, they remain sites with the best access to jobs, economic opportunities, schooling and safety amongst other advantages. These suburbs have experienced significant transformation in their racial constitution but remain essentially unchanged in their socio-economic profile, with limited land use change (Crankshaw, 2008; Kracker Selzer and Heller, 2010; Todes et al., 2020). Poorer residents on the periphery still experience the longest, most expensive and most dangerous commutes to jobs, good schools and urban services and the poorest living conditions. Many of the middle-class neighbourhoods have seceded from the rest of the city, enclosing and fortifying themselves through fences and gates, or by enforcing access control through private security companies (Dirsuweit and Wafer, 2016; Landman and Badenhorst, 2012). They have also often fought and successfully won against state and formal private-sector driven interventions that threaten their nature. Resident associations (RAs) have been at the forefront of both the enclosures and the defence against what have been seen as undesirable changes. However, few scholars (Clarno, 2013; Monaco, 2008) in the South African or even African context have engaged with the spatial authority and power that many RAs have in shaping their neighbourhoods, resisting state plans and formal changes to the built environment.
RAs in this context are voluntary associations for specific spatial areas and can consist of just one suburb or the combination of a few adjacent areas that feel they share certain characteristics or interests. They are generally formally designated as they have executive boards, voted for by local residents, and often have constitutions and a ‘mandate’ from the residents representing their views on a number of platforms. I argue that RAs, in Johannesburg, have become the custodians of suburban identities and ideologies and undertake the daily boundary work and perpetrate symbolic violence to enforce the suburban borders. As such, the article examines RAs’ boundary work and how it operates, looking at what is mobilised and by whom, and offers a granular analysis of the day-to-day work of RAs and their defence against incursions from racialised and classed ‘other’. It also details how RAs have been legitimised to perpetrate symbolic violence and how this mode of violence operates at the micro-level of the neighbourhood and within current modes of civic participation.
In addition, the piece responds to the call by Lamont et al. (2001: 854) to understand ‘the connection between objective boundaries and symbolic boundaries’ and to Edgell et al.’s (2020) claim that there is little work demonstrating the interaction between symbolic and social boundaries. This study not only considers this interface but adds a highly geographical and spatial response, looking specifically at mapped intra-urban boundaries. In this case, RAs use the borders that exist on official documentation, and maps to define the limits of specific neighbourhoods, but raises them from mere lines on a page to active moments of secession and delimitation or the ‘splintering off’ of these neighbourhoods (Graham and Marvin, 2001). I add to the literature on boundary work from a spatial perspective, since unlike other disciplines, geography has not engaged much with this work (Mercer, 2020), which is especially surprising in South African Geography and the Global South, where boundaries and racialised borders have been part of the landscape for a very long time and seem to be growing in importance (Mercer, 2020). Since the growth of the middle class, the rise of elite spaces and politics, and the secession of wealthier residents in many African countries, analysing the modes by which boundaries are wrought, maintained and defended is becoming more imperative when seeking to understand the role of governance and how it shapes cities on the continent (Buire, 2014; Graham and Marvin, 2001).
The article is a ‘mosaic’ or composite where I have drawn fragments and insights from a variety of research projects conducted over a long period of time (2011–2018). These have included two studies on the Transit-oriented Corridors of Freedom that looked at the Norwood-Orange Grove node (Appelbaum, 2017), and Melville: the Global Suburbanism project that undertook studies of Fleurhof (Rubin and Harris, 2018), Parkhurst (Rubin, 2020) and Emmarentia (Todes et al., 2020). The research consisted of interviews, surveys, document and websites reviews, and examination of the minutes and recordings of RA meetings, as well as secondary sources such as Peens’ (2016) study on Empire and Perth Roads. The case studies were chosen as they all surface the importance, power and strategies of the suburban RAs but also typify many of the activities of RAs across the city. Emmarentia and Parkhurst RAs provide some of the main insights of the article, both because the most is known about them but also because they have been very successful over a sustained period of time in maintaining the aesthetics and identity of their neighbourhoods. The other sites are used comparatively and relationally to demonstrate, highlight and contrast against the actions of these RAs. The article begins with a discussion of boundary work, which is the key organising thread, before examining the history of RAs on the continent and in SA and then moving onto a description of the RAs’ repertoires of action and analysis of how this boundary work operates and what it means.
Boundary work, symbolic violence and democratic participation
Coming largely out of sociological and anthropological traditions, boundary work considers the range of practices, actions, activities, rituals and signs that groups use to designate between ‘us’ and ‘them’. According to Lamont and Molnár (2002: 169), ‘Symbolic boundaries . . . separate people into groups and generate feelings of similarity and group membership’. Much of the thinking began with Durkheim’s (1965) classic text concerning the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’ where the distinction offers ‘a cosmology, i.e., a general interpretation of how the world is organized and how its elements relate to one another and to the sacred’ (Lamont et al., 2001: 850). Such a cosmology provides a set of organising principles in which all actions, people, and their status and position are defined in relation to the sacred, limiting and structuring actions and daily practices. For Durkheim (1956), these shared but relational rules constructed internal bonds that forged a sense of community. Weber (1956), however, took a contrary view seeing symbolic boundaries as the lines drawn between groups competing over resources and justifying their monopolisation. Higher status and cultural and economic ‘superiority’ are used to justify such domination and to maintain a hierarchical relationship with those who do not fit into the entitled group (Lamont et al., 2001).
Bourdieu and Passerson (1970) building on earlier work considered the interaction between educational credentials and class construction, setting off a vast interest in the relationship between culture and inequality. Over the past few decades, the idea of symbolic boundaries has been extended in numerous directions: social and collective identity; ethnicity, intersectionality and inequality; communal and national identities; and spatial boundaries (Lamont and Fournier, 1992; Lamont and Molnár, 2002). For this piece, the more important strands that have evolved have looked at the social-psychological questions of self and other and the nature of ‘boundary work’. First used to draw lines between what is and what is not ‘science’, the idea of boundary work has been picked up to consider how groups construct and maintain identities relative to others. For the identity to operate, there is what Lamont et al. (2001: 853) refer to as ‘a dialectic interplay of processes of internal and external definition’. This means that community or group members must have some sense of shared identity and belonging, based on a set of criteria, which is also recognisable to those outside. The external recognition legitimatises and stabilises the ‘insider’ identity, but there is also a normative dimension, with those ‘inside’ seen positively when measured against the external groups and their characteristics. External groups are often identified relationally, lacking specific identifying features or seen as ‘polluting’ or somehow destructive. The rituals, acts and signifiers of difference and of cohesive identity have been key areas of interest for those considering studies of ethnicity and minority identity (Pattillo, 2007), who have been trying to understand ‘how boundary work is accomplished’ (Lamont et al., 2001: 853).
However, theorists also argue that symbolic boundaries translate into social boundaries. Tilly (2004: 214) notes that ‘Social boundaries interrupt, divide, circumscribe, or segregate distributions of population or activity within social fields’. They operate as ‘objectified forms of social differences manifested in unequal access to an unequal distribution of resources . . . and social opportunities’ (Lamont and Molnár, 2002: 168). Thus symbolic boundaries have substantial impacts on the lives of different community groups when they become material and objective boundaries that are difficult to cross (Edgell et al., 2020). These boundaries are generally not policed with overt force but covert power by which inequality is maintained and social difference is normalised, an idea termed symbolic violence. Thapar-Björkert et al. (2016) note that this is a form of violence, channelled through symbolic forms of communication and operates in such a way that normative beliefs about privilege and subordination are internalised. However, both the power relations and practices are masked and naturalised as simply the ‘order of things’ (
The nature of political participation is deeply entangled with ideas of entitlement and symbolic violence. This can be seen when considering the nature of civic engagement in state processes in SA. Overall state-led public participation in South Africa has been subject to severe critique from a number of quarters. The general sentiment is that despite the slew of legislative imperatives to force state engagement, the nature of the engagement is often insufficient and the bodies designed as interfaces between the state and communities are seen to be largely ineffectual. In urban areas, outside of the requirements of ward level committees, communities and neighbourhoods are also supposed to be able to access and influence the state’s plans through the Integrated Development Plan on an annual basis. There is also the requirement for consultation on any plan or programme that will have a direct impact on their lives and spaces. However, these too have been extremely limited. Thus the ‘invited’ (Cornwall, 2017) spaces of engagement are largely seen as unsuccessful in terms of influencing decision-making. When engagements do take place, there is often a sense that they have been ‘captured’ by middle-class interests and are unavailable to poorer people and more marginalised communities, such as migrants and homeless residents (Appelbaum, 2017). Litigation, unlike other contexts, has been a realm of success and action for both the middle class and the poor. RAs create their own spaces of engagement, a set of invented spaces, but as will be shown these are in ways that often dominate and exclude other actors, including the state (Bénit-Gbaffou, 2008).
This brings into dialogue questions of entitlement and status, and symbolic violence. The capturing of the political spaces is not just a process of ‘exclusion from without’ (Harrits, 2011: 238). Rather people or groups include themselves in the politics and control over their spaces when and where they believe they are entitled and justified to do so, and in so doing remove, ignore or silence others, removing their interests and their physical presence from the spaces that they defend and using the symbolic language of documentation and mapping to put their interests forward. Empowerment and freedom of the politically active and privileged group is partly constituted by the symbolic (and social) boundaries drawn against the less active and less privileged groups, which on the other hand seem to be driven away from politics exactly by the elements of democracy that the active groups excel in and have the skills to navigate. As Harrits (2011: 253) put it ‘political practices can entail both mechanisms of empowerment and mechanisms of domination, and that democratic participation therefore can point towards freedom, at the same time as it carries traces of exclusion and violence’.
RAs, as will be demonstrated in the next few sections, carry out the everyday practices of maintaining and defending borders based on the legitimation that they are the voice of residents and are entitled to defend these spaces. In so doing, they utilise their expertise, resources and capacity to push their voices forward, privileging their view above others and silencing other views in both invited and invented spaces of engagement.
RAs and boundary work: history and context
To provide some context regarding RAs and boundary work, it is important to note that few studies have focused on RAs in the wealthier or relatively better off suburbs and neighbourhoods of South Africa’s major metros (Clarno, 2013; Monaco, 2008) or African cities, although they have existed since colonial times. This is despite two important impulses in current urban debates: (1) the contemporary recognition that the micro-scale of the suburb and the neighbourhood are an important site of political engagement and the ‘considerable energy that local people are putting into politics at the local level’ (Dauda, 2006: 291); and (2) the attention that these very local organisations have received elsewhere in the Global South. The Indian literature on Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs) is vast (Arabindoo, 2005; Harriss, 2006; Tawa Lama-Rewal, 2007) and draws attention to ‘the dominant presence of middle class associations’ (Kamath and Vijayabaskar, 2014), who often, in cahoots with the courts, act against poorer residents.
RAs in Africa have a slightly different politics and at times have emerged as a response to the neglect of colonial or post-colonial rulers, who were ineffective in meeting the infrastructural or other needs of better off indigenous communities. Their contemporary development has been as a consequence of a weak and oftentimes absent state. These organisations, known as ‘hometown associations’ in Nigeria, and Neighbourhood Associations in Kenya (Echessa, 2010) and Zimbabwe, are groupings of networked, often professional individuals, with mutual interests who voluntarily choose to work together to meet the needs of their spatially designated community (Musekiwa and Chatiza, 2015: 368). Mapuva (2011: 2) also describes RAs ‘as a conduit through which residents can contribute to good and transparent governance within their local authorities’ or as watchdogs of government, holding them to account.
In South Africa, the history of RAs has not been subject to systematic study, but we can see that they have been influential in shaping the city from early on. In Johannesburg as early as 1919, Parnell and Beavon (1996: 17) report on a ‘vigilance committee’ and deputation of suburban residents who objected to the Diepkloof Housing Scheme. The RAs were seen as powerful urban actors and Parnell and Beavon speculate that ‘the [Johannesburg City] Council was intimidated by the white conservative residents in the vicinity of the proposed development’. In slightly later periods, Monaco (2008) discusses how ‘civics’, the generalised name given to organisations situated and driven by civil society, including RAs, had long histories of political involvement. ‘[Civics] emerged as an internal counterpart to the liberation movement when the ANC was banned within South Africa [in black and coloured areas]’ (Monaco, 2008: 17). In white areas, ratepayers’ associations dabbled in local politics ‘sometimes running candidates in local government elections . . . [and] took part in the formal representative system by participating in local transitional councils’ (Monaco, 2008: 17, 18). Alternatively, in some cities such Pietermaritzburg, a Msunduzi ratepayers’ association ‘tended to carry out some of the functions now allocated to ward committees’ and act as a parallel apparatus of governance (Piper and Nadvi, 2010: 221).
Over time many of these RAs have moved away from playing in the party political arena and have instead become more parochial in their activities, concerned with the day-to-day needs of their communities. However, their appearance in the SA transition and post-apartheid literature is sparse and often appears in ways that echo the past: where the interests of ratepayers associations were pitted against more developmental ideals (cf. Saff, 1996). RAs have also consistently argued that their property rights have been prejudiced against and they have not been adequately consulted.
Currently, there are estimated to be almost 30 RAs across Johannesburg, mostly located in the wealthier Northern Suburbs of the city (JAG. N.D.) and in March 2019, 400 residents from these RAs met to discuss banding together to establish a non-profit organisation called ‘JUST for Residents’. This organisation was intended to become the collective voice of RAs and to fight against city policies that they disagreed with. These included the newly passed Inclusionary Housing Policy and the City’s new Land Use Management Policy as well as the forthcoming Nodal Review. These are all concerned with reshaping the City of Johannesburg’s apartheid geography, ensuring spatial, social and economic inclusion of poorer people into spaces that they have previously not had access to. Interestingly, however, since the initial meeting nothing more has happened, but it does point to the continued desire for RAs to protect their boundaries against the perceived incursion of poorer and ‘undesirable’ groups into their neighbourhoods. Although this initiative has not come to fruition, numerous other courses of action have been undertaken over the years to fend off such ‘invasions’. These repertoires of action are discussed below.
The features of the boundary work: repertoires of action
To provide some background to suburbs and RAs in Johannesburg, suburbs are formally called townships and their borders are clearly set out in the City’s land use schemes and cadastral maps. This is due to the City’s history where many of the suburbs, including Parkhurst and Emmerentia, which are discussed below, were pieces of land that were privately bought and developed when the City was first established in the mid-1880s. As such, a patchwork of suburbs emerged, each one with clearly designated boundaries that have been captured on a succession of cadastral maps over time. All neighbourhoods have clear delimitations, which adds to their sense of identity and makes governance by the RAs relatively simple as they know exactly who does and who does not live within their authority. The suburbs under discussion in this article are older suburbs and were originally designated as ‘white’ residential areas under apartheid, which meant high levels of amenity and very low densities. Post-apartheid these neighbourhoods have seen some changes in their racial profile but have remained home to higher income residents due to the property prices. They have all faced some commercialisation, mainly along their high streets, and consistently have to engage with applications for greater commercialisation and densification by private developers and state-driven programmes. The RAs have varying histories, some going back decades due to the specificities of their land titles, whilst others have been in existence for some time but have only recently become more active, such as the cases of Parkhurst in the face of increased pressure for intensified land use and others responding to the City’s Transit-oriented Development (ToD) plans.
The following section traces the boundary work that RAs engage in: their day-to-day activities of monitoring formal applications and built environment changes in suburbs like Emmarentia and Parkhurst, as well as their responses to more specific interventions such as the densification and intensification proposals of the ToD Corridors of Freedom and private-public partnerships intended to develop affordable accommodation in Fleurhof and Paterson Park in Norwood. These cases offer insights into the spatial and ideological ‘threats’ to these areas and the work that the RAs do to maintain distances and defend their territories.
Co-operation, mutual reliance and domination
Parkhurst and Emmarentia are two of the older suburbs in Johannesburg, dating to the early 20th century and the 1930s respectively. Parkhurst has been residential in character since its establishment, whilst Emmarentia was originally farmland, which still influences its contemporary character. Through negotiation with the local government the highly active Parkhurst Residents’ and Business Owners’ Association (PRABOA) and Emmarentia Residents’ Association (ERA) have been able to control formal development in their suburbs. Changes in Emmarentia have largely been house renovations, extensions, increased security measures in the form of higher walls and electric gates. Unlike Parkhurst and Greenside, both of which are very close by, it has not significantly densified or been commercialised with restaurants, bars and nightclubs along its main roads (Brugman-Richards, personal communication, 2012; City of Johannesburg (CoJ), 2014). Conversely, Parkhurst has seen a significant change in land use along its two high streets (Rubin, 2020).
In both suburbs, the RAs have executive committee members who are dedicated to monitoring all new applications and buildings in their areas (Peens, 2016). In Emmarentia, committee members utilise the resident approved Precinct Plan to monitor and adjudicate applications. They also use the provisions in the title deeds for properties that were all part of the original farmstead, which specify what changes can occur and require that certain changes be approved by the Louw Geldenhuys Trust, established by the original farm owners. They have insisted that, unlike other suburbs, cluster homes/townhouses as well as businesses may only be applied for and built along the main road. All new developments in the rest of the suburb must be residential and adhere to predefined building heights, floor area ratios and densities. Since both the CoJ and the Trust have limited capacity, the ERA acts on their behalf, granting necessary approvals when applications are made to the CoJ (Abrahams, personal communication, 2013; ERA, 2011). All applications for change in Emmarentia submitted to the CoJ’s building plans section must be endorsed by the Trust before CoJ approval. Similarly, PRABOA also has a building and planning portfolio and the members also approve all applications against the approved Regional Spatial Development Framework, with which they were involved (PRABOA, 2014).
Previous research has also revealed that ERA committee members travel through the suburb with the CoJ’s building inspector pointing out illegal constructions and land use. They have proven to be an organisation not to be trifled with, and have refused plans that do not comply with the title deed provisions or the Precinct Plan, forced changes in plans and ordered the stoppage of illegal construction. PRABOA and ERA also utilise some of the state’s ‘invited spaces’. They regularly attend planning tribunal and planning hearings when their areas are affected and speak on behalf of their residents’ interests. As will be shown later, there is a strong sense that they have both the right to do so and the expectation that when utilising these spaces, their inputs will be taken into account.
ERA and PRABOA work closely with the City and provide the scrutiny and attention to their suburbs that are simply not possible for state officials who have large areas of responsibility and a diverse mandate. RAs are far better able to focus and surveil their areas, and in effect become ‘state-like’ in their ability to sanction and regulate developments. Clarno (2013) has identified this as the ‘rescaling’ of the state with a ‘fix’ at the highly localised level. It should also be recognised that RAs offer important capacity that the City simply does not have, constructing a situation of mutual benefit but also one in which the RAs’ voice becomes the reference point for the City.
Taking the initiative: making the gap
ERA and PRABOA offer insights into ongoing hybridisations of governance; however, other RAs have been roused to action when they have been faced with specific interventions, such as the densification plans for the Corridors of Freedom (Todes et al., 2020). They were not content to just rely on the state’s participatory process in order to be heard. Instead they constructed numerous other sites and initiatives off the back of the City’s engagements to try to ensure that they and their communities would not be sidelined. These organisations are often quite dismissive of state processes: in the Empire-Perth Corridor, the community, which constituted mostly of Melville 1 middle-class residents, objected to the official engagements and that the City had already made their decisions. ‘It really felt as though they were just ticking boxes and saying we have done our bit and now you must be happy’ (Schaerer, 2014 quoted in Peens, 2016: 99). Norwood residents were equally unhappy with the plans for their suburb, especially the intention to convert the municipally owned Paterson Park into a mixed use, mixed income development, including low income and affordable housing.
Dissatisfied with the substance and processes of engagement, and seeing them as no more than compliance-led governance, the residents of Melville and surrounds embarked on their own plan. They established a ‘Task Team’, which included RAs from the affected nearby areas. The ward councillor contacted specific residents with a variety of skills including in law, architecture and planning, to be part of the task team and challenge the City’s proposals. They chose as their first activity to ‘draft a report that outlined in detail what was wrong with the process and the flaws in the content’ to ‘fight knowledge with knowledge’ (Peens, 2016: 112). They produced a report that critiqued the proposed Strategic Area Framework (SAF) and offered a series of alternative proposals, and requested a revised participatory process and an amendment to the professional team of consultants who were conducting the engagement and the SAF design. The Task Team took on many of the roles usually assigned to the RAs and in effect became an umbrella organisation. The individual RAs remained important as lines of communication between their residents, the Task Team and the City. The use of alternative maps and documents became the symbolic mode, which communicated the RAs’ and the Task Team’s dominance over the spaces in question and did so in such a way that it largely stopped further debate and discussion.
A similar sequence of events occurred in Norwood, where they too were presented with an area SAF designed by a private consulting firm, which included the upgraded Paterson Park Development. The local residents were deeply upset by the proposals for Paterson Park and the Norwood Orchards Residents’ Association (NORA) led the charge against the City, convincing their constituents to send over 650 complaints and letters of opposition to the CoJ (Appelbaum, 2017). Their objections were so vociferous that eventually, as a way to appease them, the Johannesburg Development Agency reconsidered and along with a team of urban designers, residents and stakeholders co-produced a plan for the Grant Avenue High street and surrounds. In contrast to the Empire-Perth case, this was not a counter-plan, but rather a joint effort with the City’s direct involvement. Although a more cynical reading of the situation might see the offer of a co-produced neighbourhood plan as a strategic gesture intended to ameliorate tensions with residents.
In an entirely different project, the suburb of Fleurhof had an even more limited participatory process than the other two sites but curiously was met with less resistance. The suburb is comprised of two parts, an older upper working class and low-middle income community, and then a recently developed massive (15,000 and growing unit) mixed income, mixed use, housing development which has been a PPP (Rubin and Harris, 2018). When first developing the area, residents attended a meeting with their local ward councillor and representatives of the developer. Although similarly to Norwood and Melville, the residents complained about being presented with what amounted to a fait accompli, but the local Ward Councillor quelled any and all opposition and informed them that, ‘whether you like it or not, it’s going to happen . . . and they really had little choice but to accept it’ (Dewes, personal communication, 2014).
Building alliances: taking the opportunity for unusual bedfellows
Aside from co-operation, adaptation and negotiation, the RAs under discussion also found ways to build partnerships and form coalitions to further their interests. In Orange Grove, the City through their agency, the Johannesburg Property Company (JPC), bought a series of properties along Louis Botha, one of the ToD Corridors. Ostensibly, the plan was to buy the properties in preparation for some undefined form of affordable housing, which was a key aspect of the Corridors project. However, the JPC chose to operate through intermediaries and did not reveal its plan to purchase properties, arguing that they wanted to avoid land speculation. However, the intentional opacity fuelled uncertainty and angered residents. NORA fired off hundreds of letters of opposition and threatened legal action.
On the other hand, the Orange Grove Residents’ Association (OGRA) acted strategically and chose to build an alliance: OGRA consistently co-operated with the CoJ’s consultants and the JPC hired OGRA Chairperson Roger Chadwick as consultant. Chadwick had been leading the opposition to property acquisitions. Effectively, the City was able to nullify OGRA’s opposition by bringing them in-house, while OGRA felt able to achieve their neighbourhood vision from within the City’s structures.
The CoJ also brought the residents and RAs of Melville and the close by suburbs and the University of Johannesburg (UJ) into a loose alliance. The RAs and the University had been at loggerheads for years over a number of issues but particularly student accommodation. When the original SAF came out with its proposed densification plans, the communities were at first suspicious that UJ was behind the call in the proposal for an additional 28,000 beds in their vicinity. However, the proposal did not originate from UJ and in fact UJ was not comfortable with the City’s proposals; they too objected to the lack of consultation. As a consequence, they reinforced the Melville residents’ Task Team’s position by writing letters of support to the City and agreeing with the Task Team’s critique (Peens, 2016). The previous relationship between the institution and the residents had been antagonistic, but joining forces was tactical and they were better able to address the shortcomings of both the process and the content of the proposed SAF. These alliances supported existing strategies of boundary work and allied the RAs with groups of similar status.
Outcomes of the various modes
The outcomes of these various modes of engagement are uneven. However, what is clear is that there are some ‘successes’. The Norwood, Melville and Fleurhof RAs through their various tactics were able to influence the City’s proposed designs. Fleurhof residents effectively changed the layout and landscape of the settlement so that there was a buffer of ‘gap’ housing and bonded housing between people who were seen as poor and beneficiaries of the public housing programme and the pre-existing community.
In the cases of Melville, the residents, Task Team and RAs were able to influence the process and outcome. Through their engagement with the CoJ, they were able to insist that the consulting team bring an urban designer on board to design the SAFs and to also reduce the planned densities for their areas: moving from ‘blanket densification’ to more targeted densification along the ToD Corridors in their areas.
In Norwood and Orange Grove, Paterson Park, which was intended to have large numbers of low income housing, the ratio and design were reconsidered so that there were fewer affordable houses and at lower densities. OGRA accomplished this change through its ability to co-operate and work from within the CoJ. NORA also boasted on their website, Lovenorwood, ‘We had submitted comments on the plan . . . and most were taken into account in the final document . . . a. Stepping down heights towards low density erven; b. Retention of mature landscaping bordering lower density erven; c. Planting of screening landscaping on the boundary’ (Norwood Orchards Residents Association (NORA), 2018: webpage). All of which were then included in the Norwood-Orange Grove Precinct Plan and meant that older homes would be ‘screened’ from the sight of lower income developments. ERA and PRABOA, through their actions, have also been able to maintain the character of their suburbs, by stopping certain types of developments, controlling building and regulating what is allowed.
RAs are able to affect their landscapes and are influential in shaping where and what kind of change can occur. Largely unable to stop change completely, they ensure that their spaces maintain their identities and mediate it so that it does not threaten their spatial visions, aesthetic or way of life. Outside of the ability to change the design, the engagements described above have also managed to change some of the procedural aspects of formal government participatory processes. The power to do so should not be underestimated; being able to influence a process or procedure may in effect be more important than being able to influence material change. In the case of the Corridors of Freedom, the expectation by the CoJ that residents would simply accept the CoF’s SAFs and the accompanying participatory process was shaken (Peens, 2016). The tactics of the Empire-Perth Task Team and the aggression of the Norwood and Orange Grove RAs pushed the CoJ to reconsider the public participation process, both during the CoF design process but also afterwards. The way that the RAs were able to take over or establish their own sites of engagement, as well as the plans and layouts that were either redesigned or amended by the RAs, also demonstrate the symbolic landscapes upon which the conflict between the CoJ and the RAs were fought and the symbolic violence that the RAs were able to perpetrate.
What lies behind the boundary work
The previous sections indicated the various repertoires of action, in effect the boundary work and symbolic violence that the RAs have undertaken: direct control, using invited spaces, constructing alliances, compromise and negotiation. The RAs also move between these modes, responding as the occasion demands and as opportunities arise. Almost all of these modes have some degree of success and are inherently bound up in the suburban identities and ideologies that motivate the boundary work. In the next section, I discuss the ideologies and drivers of this boundary work.
RAs as custodians of the spatial imaginary
RAs have become the keepers, custodians of suburban ideologies in defence against change and ‘the other’ that it may bring. This is particularly in light of the perception that the state in its many incarnations, but particularly local government in Johannesburg, is seen to not represent the views or needs of suburban residents. In broad strokes local government is seen as failing in its duty of care and that there is a break in the social contract between the state and its citizens (Appelbaum, 2017). As mentioned earlier, there is a sentiment that, in many cases, poorer people and their rights are protected at the expense of property owners and ratepayers. One resident further argued that it was only in extremis that anything would be done: ‘If we had to wait for the government nothing would have happened until some [people] got murdered’ (Zilibokwe, Personal communication, 2016) and that the City was just ‘leaving everything to rot’ (Parkhurst Anonymous, Personal communication, 2017). The consequence has been in some cases an attempt to retreat and disengage aspects of the state.
Loadshedding of power in the 2012–2014 period led to the decision that since the state could not be relied upon to fulfil its duties, then the RAs should become self-dependent and autonomous by going off-grid in terms of water and power provision (Labushagne, Personal communication, 2017). Even the Melville residents alluded to the lack of capacity and its inability to manage the city as a key argument for why they developed their own report and plan for their area.
PRABOA has gone as far as identifying itself ‘as the fourth tier of Government’ (PRABOA website, undated). The SA Constitution, however, specifies only three spheres of government. In claiming this space, the RA asserts an additional self-constructed layer, which attempts to legitimise the role that they play and the desire to depose local government as the sphere of government closest to the people. It is the RAs that are pursuing residents’ interests and mediating against plans that they disagree with. It is these institutions that not only feel strongly about their spaces but also due to their economically and socially privileged position, feel strongly about the propriety and virtue of their entitlements and their entitlement to execute them. It is seen as entirely defensible to keep out the ‘wrong’ sort of people and to do so utilising the skills at their disposal, especially in the face of a state that is perceived to no longer be acting in their interests. As such, it is the RAs that become the agents of suburban residents and who defend these visions through their skills and resources. In Johannesburg, these RAs are engaged in the process of border and boundary defence, and even though they have not retreated behind enclosed communities or gated estates, they have found modes to withdraw from aspects of the social contract.
The entitlements of rights-bearing citizens
There is another layer of legitimacy that promotes RAs’ sense of entitlement to be the voice of residents and to carry out their actions using the modes of violence that they do. Chatterjee (2004) maintains that the middle classes are seen by the state as legitimate rights-bearing citizens and so are able to access and utilise the formal institutions of the state in order to represent their needs, access resources and influence decisions that affect them. In his dualistic construction of post-colonial society, the middle class and the state exist in mutual recognition of the middle-class’s right to the formal institutions of power. It is the RAs as the custodians of these rights that then enact claims on the state.
The Empire-Perth Task Team, for example, ‘did not make threats in the report, however they made it clear that they understood their rights and were aware of the legislation which requires the project team to conduct participation’ (Peens, 2016: 117). Acknowledging that they knew their rights was a sufficiently powerful threat to bring the CoJ ‘into line’. There is also a more everyday use of the idea of rights and entitlement that underlies RAs’ actions, as demonstrated in the 2018 PRABOA AGM, where the Chair reported, ‘Through perseverance the 5th Street action group drove this matter to the top at CoJ’.
The small snippet tells volumes about the sense of entitlement that the RA and its members hold. They felt quite comfortable to persevere in their actions and they had no hesitation in ‘taking this matter to the top’. This is reinforced by a later comment by Labuschagne, Chair of the PRABOA, who publicly stated that objections and hearings are ‘simply a way to allow you to have access to a process . . . so that is why we do submit objections so we can exert influence on the decision-making process’ (PRABOA AGM, 2017). It is also why members of the executive committee from both RAs make it a point to attend hearings. These are clearly groups for whom there is little fear but much expectation of the state and the sense of entitlement in their right to get their way.
Furthermore, there is a strong sense that residents simply have the right to shape their spaces as they see fit according to their own spatial imaginary. A clear social, ideological vision of what the suburbs should look like, what Purcell (2001) calls a ‘Politics of Space’ often ‘mobilize[d] to preserve a single-family landscape’ (Purcell, 2001). According to Ballard (2005: 66), ‘people’s sense of themselves is highly dependent on their sense of place. This provides a motive as to why people might pursue strategies of boundary maintenance and attempt to regulate access to space by outsiders’. In general, the spaces in which one feels comfortable are those that are congruent with one’s identity. For Bauman, ‘identities may be safe and unproblematic only inside a secure social space: spacing and identity production are two facets of the same process’ (Bauman, 1993: 243). Residents mobilise in ways that defend their identities, aesthetics and lifestyles and do so through processes that effectively defend their boundaries and borders (Bauman, 1993: 243).
The visions across the different case study sites vary. Parkhurst imagines itself as a ‘cosmopolitan village’ and a ‘village-like’ atmosphere: a ‘Real Village Community’: ‘We are neighbours who know each other’s names and greet each other while having breakfast at the local coffee shop on Saturday mornings. Our children play in the streets and local park and we LOVE [sic] our dogs’ (Cabaret, 2012: 20). The desired high street resonates with ideas of international ‘café culture’. Yet despite the reference to an idealised pastoral vision and a cosmopolitan village, there is also the converse high tech image to construct a ‘fibrehood’. A neighbourhood that has fibre to home internet and will in the long run be off the grid and self-reliant in terms of water and power provision. This would construct a literal and symbolic border of who is in and who is out. The ‘wrong’ types of development would threaten this self-consciously constructed image and so are defended against.
Appelbaum (2017) argues that in Norwood, community action was driven by the aspirational vision and ‘to increase property values and personal lifestyles. The type of improvement that these residents are seeking is to make Norwood the “next Parkhurst” . . . by promoting boutique shops and trendy restaurants along [their high street]’. Their actions are also a form of defence against the Paterson Park social housing project. The low income project would allow Louis Botha to ‘creep’ into Norwood, which is ‘already happening’ (Personal communication, McDougall, 2016), where Louis Botha represents and stands in symbolically for the idea of the lower income, working class and ‘Black’ people of Orange Grove. Thus the defence was a racial and class defence against who might come into the area if Paterson Park in its original incarnation was allowed to go ahead.
Similarly, in Fleurhof, the proposed affordable housing development was met with some concern from the pre-existing community typified in this letter to the local press: The general motion in Fleurhof is that we don't agree with where these houses are being built and we are worried about the possibility of a harsh decline in our property valuations. The neighbourhood has prided itself in being relatively crime-free. How can we manage that standard and our safety with these developments? I cannot afford a possible security breach here. I have grandchildren and sons to worry about. (quoted in Myburgh, 2013)
Here too there was a racialised and class concern of the PPP with its state provided housing posing some kind of threat to the pre-existing community.
Thus neighbourhoods and suburbs are resonant with the spatial imaginaries and social identities of the people who live there. In all cases, there was a defence against change, either external change such as the affordable housing of Fleurhof or Paterson Park, or an internal defence against unwanted changes to people’s neighbourhoods through various kinds of densification and land use changes. Inherent in the defence is the assumption that the current spatial and aesthetic status quo is better than any change and that changes will inevitably be to the detriment of the existing community. The RAs defend against these incursions with an underlying assumption that they are entitled to do so, and an implicit acceptance by all concerned that they are the legitimate and authentic voices who have the right to speak and be heard (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970). Their norms, voice and their sense of their right to take up spaces of engagement, dominate them and even perceive them to once again be set up precisely for their own use as seen from the head of the PRABOA’s earlier quote (PRABOA AGM, 2017). This is a form of symbolic violence, whereby RAs express their power to exclude and to dominate.
It takes work to do boundary work
Boundary work takes work to be effective. In many middle-class suburbs there is a concentration of people with a range of skills, time and money. Simply put this is where the professional classes reside in Johannesburg. The Empire-Perth Task Team had on board town planners, architects, lawyers; similarly ERA had, at the time of writing, a lawyer and a highly skilled town planner with many years’ experience and long-standing professional relationship with the CoJ. In a PRABOA 2017 AGM meeting, the exco member responsible for town planning noted that a local soccer club had its flood lights blazing late at night affecting the surrounding houses, but in an off-hand manner mentioned that this wouldn’t be a problem to stop, since in the houses that were affected were ‘an advocate, a member of the human rights commission, a CEO of a listed company’ insinuating that they had enough social, political and economic clout to get their way and the necessary skills to do so. Aside from resources, time is also a key factor in the work that is undertaken. It was estimated that ERA exco ‘members collectively dedicate about 600–700 hours of their time a year to carrying out their activities’ (cited in Todes et al., 2020). Peens (2016) argues that not only is it about the necessary skillset but that the CoJ and other entities are far more willing to listen to professionals who are perceived to know what they are talking about rather than lay people. These professionals are fluent in the symbolic languages of domination: they know how to construct their own spaces, be deemed the voices of authority, present themselves as legitimate and deal in symbolic communication that effectively raises their voices above others, and they have the time and resources necessary to do so.
Conclusion
Middle-class suburbanism in Johannesburg is centred closely around a shared and consistent identity, with the desire to sustain and defend the current way of life, aesthetics and demographics. The cadastral borders around Johannesburg suburbs or townships draw boundaries between the residents of these neighbourhoods and everyone else. These official borders are given symbolic importance for residents who want to defend their neighbourhoods from what they see as threats and encroachments. Densification, intensification of land use, changes to demographic and socio-economic groups within these designated areas are clearly seen as both ‘polluting’ and dangerous to the status quo. The official boundaries in concert with the social and symbolic boundaries work to effectively try to keep undesirable, different and the ‘other’ out.
It falls to the RAs to carry out the actual work of maintaining the symbolic and social boundaries and they do so through the utilisation of extensive repertoires of action, much of which has to do with the design and redesign of spaces of engagement, such as the state’s invited spaces, which they dominate and see as sites that they are entitled to use and engage with. Their engagement and partnership with aspects of local government also work from a position of privilege as they become the authority and reference point to which the state must apply in order to grant permission. They also utilise other symbolic modes, sending letters in droves and threatening litigation, which are forms of institutional bullying and intimidation. Since they are comprised of professionals who speak the same language and are deeply implicated in the professional networks and structures, they are also able to utilise the symbols and modes of planning to rebut state plans and to proffer what they see as preferable and better options. In all of these cases, there are implicit forms of symbolic violence, whereby the actual privilege is masked as their entitlement to be the dominant voice and sometimes the only voice is normalised since they are seen as the legitimate representatives of these suburbs and as experts whose opinion counts. This doubling reinforces the sense of normalisation and disguises how other actors, including the state, are if not silenced then certainly muffled. The danger of the boundary work and the symbolic violence that RAs carry out is that it covertly ‘freeze[s] a particular state of the social struggle i.e. given state of the distribution of advantages and obligations’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 476–477) so that the spatial advantages of the suburbs, the privileged access to employment, schools and amenities, remains forever out of reach of the poorest residents and perpetuates the City’s spatial and social inequalities.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
