Mosselson, A; (2015) Vernacular Regeneration: low-income housing, private security and urban transformation in inner-city Johannesburg. Doctoral thesis , UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The thesis examines the process of urban regeneration currently underway in inner-city Johannesburg, paying particular attention to the roles social and private housing developers and privatised security services are playing in shaping the area. It also examines the lived reality of regeneration and focuses on the experiences of tenants living in newly-renovated residential buildings. It is based on a qualitative study involving interviews with various actors involved in regeneration and housing provision, including government officials, employees of agencies financing housing projects, housing providers, security and urban management personnel and tenants. It also draws on ethnographic accounts derived in the course of fieldwork. The thesis demonstrates the duality of the goals and agendas which the regeneration process is attempting to fulfil, and concludes that it is a contradictory, vernacular process. It shows how housing providers attempt to meet the demands of a market-based approach to housing and regeneration as well as respond to the social concerns and requirements which define the area. Drawing on the work of Lefebvre and Bourdieu, the thesis expands on the concepts ‘spatial habitus’ and ‘spatial capital’ to give theoretical structure to the discussion and demonstrate the mutually- determining relationship between habitus and space. Moving from the discursive realm to everyday reality, the effects urban management and security practices are having on the area and the ways people experience it are analysed. Urban management is also shown to be serving dual purposes, making the area safer but resulting in differential access to security and new boundaries of exclusion. Lastly, the significance of regeneration is analysed from tenants’ perspectives, accounting for the variety of ways it both facilitates as well as hinders their rights to the city and experiences of urban citizenship, making it a transformative and developmental but also exclusionary and restricted, and thus vernacular, process.

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