Book Launch
Organiser: Prof Alan Mabin (University of the Witwatersrand)
This event will launch the books "Knowing the City" and "The Infrastructures of Security" as well as the theme issue of Transformation on "Public Housing and its Roles in Social Transformation" with contributions from authors and editors.
Friday October 25, 12:30–13:30, A1, John Moffat Building
Alan Mabin (ed.). (2023). Transformation. Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, No. 112. Theme: Public housing and its roles in social transformation.
This theme issue of Transformation focuses on past, present and potential future public housing in the context of highly unequal societies. The authors of the articles understand public housing to be a broad category stretching from various types of direct state supply, through indirect state subsidized action, to public management and maintenance of housing in different types of tenure from rental to title. The geographical and geopolitical focus is South Africa, placed into the context of African and global experiences. The papers also demonstrate results of leaving housing to private provision and markets.The articles in this issue arise from a project initiated by the late Bill Freund (6 July 1944 – 17 August 2020). Authors present will include Deborah Potts (Kings College London), Sarah Charlton (Wits), and Alan Mabin (Wits)
Oldfield, Sophie, Selmeczi, Anna & Barnett, Clive (eds.). (2024). Knowing the City. South African Urban Scholarship from Apartheid to Democracy. Durban: UKZN Press.
South African cities are marked by the legacies of past practices, inscribed in fixed spatial patterns. They therefore play a pivotal role in shaping the possibilities and limits of changing imperatives of transition, transformation, development and sustainability. From the late 1970s, the ‘urban’ has been presented as both a key scene for visions of the reform of apartheid and as a site for the potentially revolutionary transformation of South African society. Knowing the City departs from this prominence of urban issues, which explains why South African urban scholarship has been a key reference point nationally and in urban studies elsewhere.
Murray, Martin (2022). The Infrastructures of Security: Technologies of Risk Management in Johannesburg. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
In The Infrastructures of Security, author Martin J. Murray concentrates on not only the turn toward technological solutions to managing the risk of crime through digital (and software-based) surveillance and automated information systems, but also the introduction of somewhat bizarre and fly-by-night experimental “answers” to perceived risk and danger. Digitalized surveillance is significant for two reasons: first, it enables monitoring to take place across wide "geographical distances with little time delay"; and second, it allows for the active sorting, identification, and "tracking of bodies, behaviors, and characteristics of subject populations on a continuous, real-time basis." These new software-based surveillance technologies represent monitoring, tracking, and information gathering without walls, towers, or guards.