Paved with Gold: Unsettlement and the Buffer Zone in Johannesburg, South Africa

This dissertation examines the post-apartheid political terrain of the “buffer zone” in Johannesburg, South Africa. Buffer zones—peripheral zones of the city marked by mining, industry, or infrastructural barriers—were sites of gold mining in the late 19th and early 20th century. By the mid 20th century, the seemingly barren mine dumps and nearby industrial areas were utilized by the apartheid government to spatially enforce segregation—creating buffers between areas zoned for different racially and ethnically defined populations. In post-apartheid Johannesburg, the buffer zone remains a key site of governance, but now through the stated aim of undoing the racial and economic barriers of the apartheid regime by constructing a more equitable world-class city. This narrative of urban development, rather than urban governance, however, is undermined by forced evictions, corruption, violence, and xenophobia. I argue in the dissertation that rather than the buffer zone being a site in which an anticipated post-apartheid city is being constructed, the buffer zone contains the residues of previous era’s failed urban development plans, marking the futures imagined with each of the nation’s political and economic transitions. I make this argument through close attention to the infrastructure—men’s worker hostels, factories, occupied buildings, and men’s clothing outfitters—that compose this unique part of the city. In the dissertation I also considers how residents of the buffer zone living under multiple waves of uncertainty navigate their daily lives, tend to the past, and build images of the future that are otherwise./nThe analytical focus of the dissertation centers on the neighborhood of Jeppestown, particularly one street, MacIntyre Street, that is dense with the remains of pre-apartheid and apartheid infrastructure. From the area’s founding as a prospective residential neighborhood for middle- class gold miners at the turn of the 20th century to its more recent past as the proposed site for new low-income housing developments to alleviate the inner-city housing crisis, the history of this buffer zone has never been settled and its future is always being re-imagined. The dissertation explores the openness of the buffer zone’s past and future by juxtaposing distinct spaces and infrastructures that exist side-by-side on the street. By underlining the anticipatory nature of development and infrastructure, I contend that the past and its imagined futures return to impact contemporary politics, as both a set of obstacles and liberatory possibilities. Through engagement with residents, workers, factory owners, shop keepers, city planners, and developers, the dissertation tells the story of a city’s buffer zone built on uncertainty and speculation. The dissertation is based on 18 months of fieldwork in Jeppestown and archival research at the University of Witwatersrand Historical Papers archive as well as the private archives of the Johannesburg Development Agency and the department of City Transformation. A brief note begins the dissertation and two interludes divide the two halves. These short pieces of writing, accompanied by photographs taken by my research collaborator, Angel Khumalo, speak to a set of themes meant to compliment the larger argument: collaboration, methodology, visuality, speculation, and techniques for predicting the future and distributing pressure. The first half of the dissertation attends to the historical contingencies that produced the buffer zone, tracing the waves of future-oriented development that hinged on the booms and busts of the gold mining industry and the rise of apartheid policies. The second half of the dissertation continues to explore the buffer zone from the epistemological view of the infrastructures that compose it. Thinking with infrastructure enables multiple temporalities to be examined at once: the past when these structures were constructed, present states of ruination, and possible futures. In this second section of the dissertation, I consider the residues of development projects that remain in the buffer zone despite being viewed as outdated or out of time by current development standards, industry, and spatial framework plans./nThrough this analysis, the dissertation argues that conceptualizing the buffer zone offers a way of excavating the multiple temporalities of urban development projects to understand how the consequences of these projects unfold in the present. Gentrification, redevelopment, real estate speculation, and housing crises are occurring in cities across the globe and they are more often than not occurring in tandem with deepening segregation, rising economic inequality, and increased xenophobic sentiments. I unite histories of transition with studies of urban infrastructure and racial capitalism to examine the historical and material conditions by which urban planning agendas and shifting government investment patterns have collaboratively shaped the city of Johannesburg since its founding in 1886. The dissertation focuses on sites that are remnants of apartheid or pre-apartheid infrastructure to argue that the buffer zone shows the city’s present as a palimpsest of its past transitions and anticipated political futures.

Advisor: Ferme, Mariane
Cohen, Lawrence