Download or read book Alexandra written by Noor Nieftagodien and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2008-11-01 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexandra: A History is a social and political history of one of South Africa’s oldest townships. It begins with the founding of Alexandra as a freehold township in 1912 and traces its growth as a centre of black working-class life through the early years before the Nationalist government, through the struggles of the apartheid era and into the present day. Declared as a location for ‘natives and coloureds’, Alexandra became home to a diverse population where stand owners, tenants, squatters, hostel-dwellers, workers and migrants from every corner of the country converged to make a new life for themselves near the economic hub of Johannesburg. The stories of ordinary people are at the core of the township’s history. Based on numerous life-history interviews with residents and previously unexamined archive sources, the book portrays in vivid detail the daily struggles and tribulations of the people of Alexandra. A significant focus is the rich history of political resistance, in which political organisations and civic movements organised bus boycotts, anti-removal and anti-pass campaigns, and mobilised for housing and a better life for the township’s residents. But the book also tells the stories of daily life, of the making of urban cultures and of the infamous Spoilers and Msomi gangs. Over weekends Alexandra came alive as soccer matches, church services and shebeens vie for the attention of residents. Alexandra: A History highlights the social complexities of the township, which at times caused tension between different segments of the population. Above all else, despite a long history of hardship and adversity, the community spirit of the people of Alexandra, expressed in a fiercely loyal love of their township home, has repeatedly triumphed and endured.
Download or read book Participatory Theatre and the Urban Everyday in South Africa written by Alexandra Halligey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-12-06 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores theatre and performance as participatory research practices for exploring the everyday of the city. Taking an inner-city suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa as its central case study, the book considers how theatre and performance might be both useful practical tools in considering the everyday city, as well as conceptual lenses for understanding it. The author establishes an understanding of space as ever evolving and formed through the ongoing relationship between things, human and non-human, and considers how theatre and performance offer useful paradigms for learning about and working with city spaces. As ephemeral, embodied, material artistic practices, theatre and performance mirror the nature of everyday life. The book discusses theatre and performance games and placemaking processes as offering valuable ways of discovering daily acts of place-making and providing insights that more conventional research methods may not allow. Yet the book also considers how seeing daily city life as a kind of performance, a kind of theatre in its own right, helps to further understandings of city spaces as ever evolving through complex webs of relationships. This book will be of interest to academics, academic practitioners and post-graduate students in the fields of theatre and performance studies, urban studies and cultural geography.
Download or read book South African urban imaginaries cases from Johannesburg written by Richard Ballard and published by GCRO. This book was released on 2022-06-01 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do government officials, elected politicians, powerful economic actors and ordinary people think and talk about the urban geography of South Africa? How do they describe and represent change that is happening in cities, towns and villages? Do they consider these changes to be good or bad? How do they think such places should change? What do they do to try to bring about the changes they desire? Competing answers to these questions have been at the centre of South Africa’s urban development. Through the 19th and 20th centuries, white minority governments straddled quite contradictory imaginaries about who could build lives for themselves in urban areas and on what terms. Ordinary people held their own urban imaginaries that were quite different to those of white minority governments, and were core to the fight for democracy. In the democratic era, a range of official and popular imaginaries offer diverse visions on how South Africans should be transformed. In an earlier collection produced under the GCRO Spatial Imaginaries project, we explored the sometimes contradictory nature of post-apartheid urban visions with, for example, with some promoting the creation of new urban settlements on greenfield sites, and others attempting to densify and diversify long urbanised spaces. Research Report 13, South African urban imaginaries: Cases from Johannesburg, is a second edited collection under the Spatial Imaginaries project, and it uses a series of cases from Johannesburg that illustrate the interactions between urban imaginaries and the material city. These cases include: the depiction of central business districts in film as spaces of aspiration; the way in which the imaginaries of developers in Hillbrow were shaped by the lives of those living there; the imaginaries of Alexandra Renewal Project practitioners; the way in which residents of Brixton understand diversity; and the construction of two new bridges across the M1 to better connect Sandton and Alexandra.
Download or read book The Memories of My Life in Alexandra Township I Know written by Rose Mmatšatši Rakoma Llale and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2013-09-27 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book "The Memories of My Life in Alexandra Township I Know" is about my life entwined into three parts: my childhood to adulthood life, living in the poverty-stricken, gangster prone and notorious Alexandra Township and also living during the apartheid era. The book also talks about the famous Putco bus boycott, whereby all bus commuters boycotted the Putco buses, and decided to walk to work from Alexandra Township to town (Johannesburg). The setting first begins in Alexandra Township during the year 1943 and ends during the year 1961 after the forced removal by the then apartheid regime. This book will engage you and keep you glued to it, since it is actually an autobiography about one lady's perseverance and determination throughout the challenges that she had to overcome living with a family of 9 siblings and self-employed parents, who did their best for all of their children - through giving them love, caring, education and support, irrespective of the challenges of living during the apartheid era. All these memories shall forever be engraved into Rose's head, as she lived through them, and persevered through her determination and God's Grace!
Download or read book Townships as Attraction written by Manfred Rolfes and published by Universitätsverlag Potsdam. This book was released on 2009 with total page 65 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Since the end of the Apartheid, international tourism in South Africa has increasingly gained importance for the national economy. The centre of this PKS issue's attention is a particular form of tourism: township tourism, i.e. guided tours to the residential areas of the black population. About 300,000 tourists per year visit the townships of Cape Town. The tours are also called cultural, social, or reality tours. The different aspects of township tourism in Cape Town were the subject of a geographic field study, which was undertaken during a student research project of Potsdam University in 2007. The text presents the empirical results of the field study, and demonstrates how townships are constructed as spaces of tourism."--Publisher's description.
Download or read book Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid written by Belinda Bozzoli and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a compelling study of the origins and trajectory of a legendary black uprising against apartheid - the Alexandra Rebellion of 1986. Using insights from the literature on collective action and social movements, it delves deep into the rebellion's inner workings. It examines how the residents of Alexandra - a poverty-stricken, segregated township in Johannesburg - manipulated and overturned the meanings of space, time and power in their sequestered world; how they used political theatre to convey, stage and dramatise their struggle; and how young and old residents generated differing ideologies and tactics, giving rise to a distinct form of generational politics. Theatres of Struggle asks the reader to enter into the world of the rebels, and to confront the moral complexity and social duress they experienced as they invented new social forms and violently attacked old ones.
Download or read book Sustainable Urban Tourism in Sub Saharan Africa written by Llewellyn Leonard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-27 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates urban tourism development in Sub-Saharan Africa, highlighting the challenges and risks involved, but also showcasing the potential benefits. Whilst much is written on Africa’s rural environments, little has been written about the tourism potential of the vast natural, cultural and historical resources in the continent’s urban areas. Yet these opportunities also come with considerable environmental, social and political challenges. This book interrogates the interactions between urban risks, tourism and sustainable development in Sub-Saharan African urban spaces. It addresses the underlying issues of governance, power, ownership, collaboration, justice, community empowerment and policies that influence tourism decision-making at local, national and regional levels. Interrogating the intricate relationships between tourism stakeholders, this book ultimately reflects on how urban risk can be mitigated, and how sustainable urban tourism can be harnessed for development. The important insights in this book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners across Tourism, Geography, Urban Development, and African Studies.
Download or read book Born a Crime written by Trevor Noah and published by One World. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • More than one million copies sold! A “brilliant” (Lupita Nyong’o, Time), “poignant” (Entertainment Weekly), “soul-nourishing” (USA Today) memoir about coming of age during the twilight of apartheid “Noah’s childhood stories are told with all the hilarity and intellect that characterizes his comedy, while illuminating a dark and brutal period in South Africa’s history that must never be forgotten.”—Esquire Winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor and an NAACP Image Award • Named one of the best books of the year by The New York Time, USA Today, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Esquire, Newsday, and Booklist Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa’s tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle. Born a Crime is the story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist. It is also the story of that young man’s relationship with his fearless, rebellious, and fervently religious mother—his teammate, a woman determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life. The stories collected here are by turns hilarious, dramatic, and deeply affecting. Whether subsisting on caterpillars for dinner during hard times, being thrown from a moving car during an attempted kidnapping, or just trying to survive the life-and-death pitfalls of dating in high school, Trevor illuminates his curious world with an incisive wit and unflinching honesty. His stories weave together to form a moving and searingly funny portrait of a boy making his way through a damaged world in a dangerous time, armed only with a keen sense of humor and a mother’s unconventional, unconditional love.
Download or read book Threads of Solidarity written by Iris Berger and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1992-04-22 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " . . . enables us to deepen our understanding of the organization of working women." —International Journal of African Historical Studies " . . . an impressive piece of scholarship." —American Journal of Sociology Virtually ignored by labor historians are the black and white women in South African industries. Drawing on comparative labor history and feminist theory, this important study traces the history of women as industrial workers and trade unionists in South Africa during most of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Afropolis written by Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum and published by Jacana Media. This book was released on 2012 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metropolises often evoke images of flashy high-rise buildings, permanent background noise, backed-up cars and people moving quickly in all directions in their masses. New York, Tokyo, London, Sao Paulo. But what about Cairo?
Download or read book Township Politics Civic Struggles for a New South Africa written by Mzwanele Mayekiso and published by UJ Press. This book was released on 2023-02-24 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This insider’s account of an extraordinary period of national political transition is also a primer on a new radical philosophy, the street–smart Marxism that developed in South Africa’s sprawling townships between 1985 and 1995 and rendered them ungovernable for the apartheid state. Mzwanele Mayekiso, a young leader of the “civics”—as South Africa’s popular community organizations are called—spent almost three years in prison as a result of the civics’ militant organizing. Here, he interlaces his personal story with caustic assessments of apartheid’s hand–picked township leaders, with rebuttals of armchair academics, and with impassioned but self–critical analyses of the civics’ struggles and tactics. He ends with a vision of an international urban social movement that, he argues, must be a crucial component of any emancipatory project.
Download or read book The Ghetto in Global History written by Wendy Z. Goldman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-27 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ghetto in Global History explores the stubborn tenacity of ‘the ghetto’ over time. As a concept, policy, and experience, the ghetto has served to maintain social, religious, and racial hierarchies over the past five centuries. Transnational in scope, this book allows readers to draw thought-provoking comparisons across time and space among ghettos that are not usually studied alongside one another. The volume is structured around four main case studies, covering the first ghettos created for Jews in early modern Europe, the Nazis' use of ghettos, the enclosure of African Americans in segregated areas in the United States, and the extreme segregation of blacks in South Africa. The contributors explore issues of discourse, power, and control; examine the internal structures of authority that prevailed; and document the lived experiences of ghetto inhabitants. By discussing ghettos as both tools of control and as sites of resistance, this book offers an unprecedented and fascinating range of interpretations of the meanings of the "ghetto" throughout history. It allows us to trace the circulation of the idea and practice over time and across continents, revealing new linkages between widely disparate settings. Geographically and chronologically wide-ranging, The Ghetto in Global History will prove indispensable reading for all those interested in the history of spatial segregation, power dynamics, and racial and religious relations across the globe.
Download or read book Massive Suburbanization written by K. Murat Guney and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-05-06 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing a systematic overview of large-scale housing projects, Massive Suburbanization investigates the building and rebuilding of urban peripheries on a global scale. Offering a universal inter-referencing point for research on the dynamics of "massive suburbia," this book builds a new discussion pertaining to the problems of the urban periphery, urbanization, and the neoliberal production of space. Conceptual and empirical chapters revisit the classic cases of large-scale suburban building in Canada, the former Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, and the United States and examine the new peripheral estates in China, Egypt, Israel, Morocco, the Philippines, South Africa, and Turkey. The contributors examine a broad variety of cases that speak to the building or redevelopment of large-scale peripheral housing estates, tower neighbourhoods, Grands Ensembles, Groβwohnsiedlungen, and Toplu Konut. Concerned with state and corporate policy for building suburban estates, Massive Suburbanization confronts the politics surrounding local inhabitants and their "right to the suburb."
Download or read book South Africa s Magnifying Glass written by Pieter Kok and published by HSRC Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: South Africa's transformation to democracy has highlighted the need for reliable socio-economic information and analysis to inform the process of meeting our numerous and complex development challenges.
Download or read book Planning and Transformation written by Philip Harrison and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-09-12 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Planning and Transformation provides a comprehensive view of planning under political transition in South Africa, offering an accessible resource for both students and researchers in an international and a local audience. In the years after the 1994 transition to democracy in South Africa, planners believed they would be able to successfully promote a vision of integrated, equitable and sustainable cities, and counter the spatial distortions created by apartheid. This book covers the experience of the planning community, the extent to which their aims were achieved, and the hindering factors. Although some of the factors affecting planning have been context-specific, the nature of South Africa’s transition and its relationship to global dynamics have meant that many of the issues confronting planners in other parts of the world are echoed here. Issues of governance, integration, market competitiveness, sustainability, democracy and values are significant, and the particular nature of the South African experience lends new insights to thinking on these questions, exploring the possibilities of achievement in the planning field.
Download or read book Land Use Management to Support Sustainable Settlements in South Africa written by Verna Nel and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-10-06 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a theoretical and practical foundation needed to change the practice of land use management in Southern Africa. It presents an overview of alternative land use management system for South African municipalities that is economically, socially and environmentally more sustainable than many of the land use schemes in effect at present. Land use management is a component of spatial governance that controls the nature and extent of development to prevent harmful impacts on people and the environment. As the current system with its colonial/modernist planning and regulatory mechanisms were never designed to deal with rapid change, urbanisation and informality, a different form of land development and land use management is necessary. This timely book reflects the culmination of many years of practical experience and research into various aspects of land use management by the authors and studies undertaken by their master’s and doctoral students. The book goes beyond an analysis of the problems and suggests concrete proposals that can be applied throughout Southern Africa based on a rural to urban transect. This book is directed to a broad range of readers interested in spatial planning and land use management. It will be of interest to those in the fields of geography, urban studies, urban design, planning and architecture.
Download or read book Upgrading Informal Settlements in South Africa written by Liza Rose Cirolia and published by Juta and Company (Pty) Ltd. This book was released on 2017-11-10 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than 1.2 million households in South Africa live in informal settlements, without access to adequate shelter, services or secure tenure. There has been a gradual shift to upgrading these informal settlements in recent years, and there have been some innovative experiments. Upgrading Informal Settlements in South Africa: a partnership-based approach examines the successes and challenges of informal settlement upgrading initiatives in South Africa and contextualises these experiences within global debates about informal settlement upgrading and urban transformation. The book discusses: · The South African informal settlement upgrading agenda from local, national and international perspectives · South African ‘city experiences’ with informal housing and upgrading · The role of partnerships, actors and capabilities in pursuing an incremental upgrading agenda · Tools, instruments and methodologies for incremental upgrading · Implications of the upgrading agenda for the transformation of cities The book has been written and edited by a wide range of practitioners and researchers from government, NGOs, the private sector and academia. It covers theory and practice and represents a vast accumulated body of housing experience in South Africa.
