Extracting Value: How Retail Relates to Inequality in South African Townships

Abstract

African cities are sometimes described in terms of frontiers—even as the last frontier for contemporary capitalism (Mbembe 2021). In this vein, research in South Africa has, for example, engaged with how investment is shaping the politics and planning of urban development and urban infrastructure (Robinson et al. 2022; Harrison & Croese 2023). In Johannesburg, capital interests seek to extract value according to international developmental models, in concert with local political interests and objectives. However, in doing so, they encounter forms of “urbanization from below” (Derickson 2015; Hart 2018) that are generating new opportunities for people to access resources and opportunities in surprising or transversal ways (Howe 2022; Zack 2022). This contribution examines the frontiers created when capital “hits the ground” (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2019) in relation to “township economies” (Charman et al. 2020) in Johannesburg. Projects like shopping malls, for example, typically constructed at the edge of former apartheid townships and informal settlements (Ligthelm 2008; SACN 2010), serve as new extractive frontiers, primarily financed by embedded local and national actors such as pension funds. They are doubly destructive where they are conjoined with the local state’s regulatory practices that exclude micro-retails and informal traders from economic participation. The sites discussed in our contribution—Diepsloot, Ivory Park, and Orange Farm—reveal the complex social and spatial dynamics of urban inequality, well as how local actors have different experiences of and responses to the presence of retail centers extracting value in their neighborhoods.