Reinventing urban South Africa through global-Africanisation: The case of Johannesburg

Abstract

Globalisation and Africanisation remain largely polarised and diametrically opposed to each other between the global and the local in much of the literature focusing on urban restructuring in South Africa in the 1990s. This polarisation has rendered invisible the in-between spaces of glocalisation which yield to new signs of urbanity, and the innovative sites of collaboration and contestation in the act of defining a new urban hood in South Africa. This paper seeks to go beyond the polar-opposite way of thinking about globalisation and Africanisation. It explores the glocal encounter between the two discourses by looking at how the local is created within the discursive terms of global culture and vice versa as well as the material crossovers, within and between the two discursive categories. The thrust of argument in the paper is that the post-apartheid reconstruction process has been driven by a new political culture of global-Africanisation whereby local aspirations and global orientations and vice versa, are now discursively accepted as co-determinants in the creation of South African urban identities.