Situating Urban Atmospheres

Johannesburg has been a deeply unequal city since its conception. For the majority of the twentieth century, it was carefully divided up by urban planners, supplementing the country's repressive legal fabric with its own built structures of segregation. Suburban walls protected the privileged white minority, while infrastructural barriers like highways, railways, and power lines were arranged to restrict the movement of its Black majority to exurban townships and mining hostels. Despite the legal end of apartheid, this fundamental pattern of racial division has been sustained by new atmospheric forms of control and containment. Not always tangible, these atmospherics are potentially no less damaging, no less noxious in their effects on the ordinary life of the city. But they are also more mobile and demand new interpretive strategies, new ways of sensing the city.

In this StoryMap, we attempt to trace the city's atmospherics as they circulate across and through the space. Moving through a number of sites in the inner urban core, around some of the city's exclusive residential suburbs, we end at what is arguably their historical sourcepoint, the mines. Such forms of atmospheric order are often hard to describe, let alone situate on the map. They may be meteorological or toxicological. They creep across territorial boundaries, seep into the material and bodily life of the city, and even undo distinctions between the environmental and the social. They are also emotional, personal, and, as such, rarely ever uniform. This StoryMap is conditioned, therefore, by the shifting, contested forms that pattern Johannesburg's urban atmospherics, the disconnections as well as the common circulations.

Similarly, as a repository for our collective thinking, we try to recognise the ways in which these Storymaps are also shaped by our own stand-points, principally as white academics from Germany, the UK, and South Africa respectively. Using a combination of site-writing, spatial annotation, and informal photography, each of which help stage our situated perspectives, we try to pursue a critical but also necessarily subjective record of those less than legible features that structure Johannesburg. The results on display here are determined as much by our own urban imaginaries and relative sense of corporeal (in)vulnerability as the atmospherics that govern the city itself. As a work-in-progress, we leave open its findings, revising our claims as we attune ourselves further to the city.

We begin in the historic centre of the city in the  Johannesburg CBD , invested on a small parcel of surplus land in 1886 to serve the mining industry quickly growing at its border. Today, the fortified complexes that house banks and mining companies meld into surrounding, informal spaces, creating an uneasy tension between 'public' and 'private' space.

We then visit  Constitution Hill , where post-apartheid South Africa has sought to work through its violent past in spatial terms. It is central to the city but also somehow outside of it, serving a symbolic national, democratic order more than a strictly urban one.

Moving to  Hillbrow , we witness a space transformed demographically and culturally since the end of apartheid. No longer an enclave for the white upper-classes, it serves as a meeting point for the diverse constituents from across the African continent that have come to call the inner-city home.

The  Northern Suburbs  of the city around Sandton offer a very different residential picture - marked by extreme securitisation of private housing as well as public areas.

Our movement around the city draws a full circle in the mining areas of the  Western Rand , as we return to the material conditions that brought the city into being. We see how toxic fallout from a century of extraction continues to shape communities around the mines.

Hanna Baumann is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Global Prosperity, part of University College London’s Bartlett School of the Built Environment. Her research is concerned with the way the (built) environment can perpetuate marginalisation and enable participation in cities, with a focus on displacement and contestation around infrastructure and heritage projects.

Ed Charlton is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at LSE Cities, London School of Economics. He has published widely on Johannesburg's urban culture and is interested principally in non-fictional modes of visual and textual representation.

Jill Weintroub is a Life in the City Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wits School of Governance, University of the Witwatersrand and Faculty of Humanities, University of Pretoria. She is interested in the digital humanities and the poetics of mapping, and how these might intersect with or disrupt historical narrative and urban and planning disciplines.

Some suggestions for further reading:

• Bremner, Lindsay. (2011) Writing the City into Being: Essays on Johannesburg 1998 – 2008. Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books.
• Charlton, Ed. (2017)  Melancholy Mapping: a 'Dispatcher's Eye' and the Locations of Loss in Johannesburg . Thesis Eleven 141(1): 14-30.
• Gandy, Matthew. (2017)  Urban Atmospheres.  Cultural Geographies 24(3): 353–374.
• Gevisser, Mark. (2014) Lost and Found in Johannesburg: a Memoir. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
• Kratz, Corrine, Jill Weintroub & Noëleen Murray. (2019)  Urban secrets? Affinities and Anthropologies of South African Cities.  Anthropology Southern Africa 42(1): 1-13.
• Le Marcis, Frederic. (2004)  The Suffering Body of the City.  Public Culture 16(3): 453-77.
• Murray, Martin. (2008) Taming the Disorderly City: The Spatial Landscape of Johannesburg after Apartheid. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Nuttall, Sarah & Achille Mbembe, eds. (2008) Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Todes, Alison, Chris Wray, Graeme Gotz & Phillip Harrison, eds. (2014) Changing Space, Changing City: Johannesburg After Apartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
• Tomlinson, Richard, Robert A. Beauregard, Lindsay Bremner & Xolela Mangcu, eds. (2003) Emerging Johannesburg: Perspectives on the Postapartheid City. New York: Routledge.
• Vale, Peter & Noëleen Murray. (2017)  Johannesburg: Colonial Anchor, African Performer . Thesis Eleven. 141(1): 3-13.