Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
such it draws new arrivals from across the continent and beyond; a far cry from the Jo-
hannesburgofold,with its history asanexploitative white mining city oreventhemore
recentcrime-riddenJo'burg.Forsome,astheseatoftheattackagainstapartheid,chiefly
by black residents, but also by some whites, Jozi is now seen by some to be making a
real attempt to be a city representative of the “Rainbow Nation.” Its representations of
space reveal how town planners and property developers are attempting at one level to
construct a modern multicultural and egalitarian city through vast new shopping malls,
cosmopolitan entertainment and eating areas, all of which attempt to give a substantial
nodtoblackAfricaninclusion.ChiefculturalattractionssuchastheApartheidMuseum,
the Hector Peiterson Museum, and Mandela House in Soweto, and Soccer City in Nas-
rec (between Soweto and Johannesburg) forward Jozi's struggle history in movingly un-
compromising ways.
Yetinspiteoftheemergenceofthismoreoptimisticdiscourse,Johannesburgremains
substantially a racially excluding and divided city, just as it was in the apartheid era.
Clearly this claim is nothing new, and as such the purpose of looking at this nearly
twenty years after the fall of apartheid must be to explore critically whether there has
been any change in the context by which space is conceptualized and drawn upon in
the making of privilege. This paper begins answering this question by focusing on the
everyday lives of Johannesburg residents.
Conceptualizing Place
The identity of a place is formed out of social interrelations, and a proportion
of those interrelations—larger or smaller, depending on the time and on the
place—will stretch beyond that “place” itself. (Massey 1994, 115)
Contemporary geographical understandings of place stress how the grounded locales of
everyday life are continuously produced by a range of social, economic, and cultural
processes which range from the very local to the global (Lefebvre 1991; Massey 1994;
Cresswell 2004). Identities of places are far from fixed, but are continuously construc-
ted by social interactions and relations which intersect at that particular location. I have
argued elsewhere that places are where encounters happen, and through these encoun-
ters, important connections are made between the identity of place and constructions of
personal subjectivities (Leonard 2010). As we are “always multiple and contradictory
subjects, inhabitants of a diversity of communities … constructed by a variety of dis-
courses, and precariously and temporarily sutured at the intersection of those positions”
(Mouffe 1988, 44), we bring multiplicity to places and with this help in turn to produce
themultiplicityofplace(Massey1994).Theseprocessescannotbeunderstoodtherefore
