or so an international body of scholarship on the city has turned for inspiration to, but also begun to critique, the writing of Michel de Certeau (1984) and Walter Benjamin (1982). It has returned to these writers as a way of trying to name neglected urban spatialities and to invent new ones, to unearth emergent city figures to connect that which has been held apart, to draw out the city’s theatricality, its improvisations, its ironies (see Amin & Thrift 2002). De Certeau’s key insight was that people use cities by constructing who they are, producing a narrative of identity. They make a sentence or a story of particular places in the city, and the city is not available as an overview – the city is the way that it is walked.
Much of an earlier terminology of location and mobility – vocabularies of the nomad, the decentred, the marginalised, the deterritorialised, border, migrant and exile – was, by contrast, seldom attached to specific places and people, representing instead ideas of rootlessness and flux that seemed as much the result of ungrounded theory as its putative subject (Solnit 2000). Benjamin’s figure of the flâneur (the aesthetic bohemian, drifting through the city like a film director) invites us to ‘read the city from its street-level intimations, to encounter the city as lived complexity, to seek alternative narratives and maps based on wandering’ (Amin & Thrift 2002, p 11).
For Zygmunt Baumann (1996) the figures which populate the Western metropolis, in addition to the flâneur, include the tourist (for whom the city is a spectacle), the player (who knows the rules of various urban games), the vagabond or vagrant (who moves at the borders of the establishment through the practices of transgression) and the commuter (who treats the city as a place you enter, park, work and leave – an autopolis). Interestingly, he fails to include the figure of the sex worker and, like most theorists of the city, he seems uninterested in what a gender-related city consciousness – the experience of the flâneuse, among other figures – would look like.
African cities suggest a number of other figures, which could be read back into European cities as well: one would be the figure of the sâpeur – the figure of spatial transition, operating in the interstices of large cultures, participating in a cult of appearance, especially expensive clothing; a mobile individual who, following Janet MacGaffey and Remi Bazenguissa-Ganga (2000), creates ramifying networks extending through time, space and multiple cultures as he circulates between countries, pulling off coups in otherwise invisible spaces in and between cities. Others, as we will see below, include the figure of the migrant worker, the aging white man, the illegal immigrant and the hustler.
Urban theorists, though, often tend to overstate the city as a space of flow, human interaction and proximate reflexivity. Although the figure of the flâneur draws important links between space, language and subjectivity, it leaves us with the question of whether the contemporary city based on an endless spread and multiple connections, is best grasped through the trope of wandering/wondering – or requires other imaginary means (Amin & Thrift 2002, p 14). The invocation of the flâneur in urban theory can underestimate the extent to which striating openness and flow are a whole series of rules, conventions and institutions of regulation and control, a biopolitics (p 26).4
In the case of Johannesburg, Michael Titlestad (2004) is correct in his observation that the city has been characterised less by practices of flânerie and drifting than by a set of divisions contrived by law, surveillance and threat, hostile to errant and nomadic meaning, to improvised selves and versions of social hope (p 29). Yet, as Amin and Thrift warn, we need to be careful about how we analyse space:
The city allows for juxtapositions at all kinds of levels – the meeting in the street, the rich and poor areas cheek by jowl, the lack of control of public spaces and so on. All kinds of forces may conspire to nullify these juxtapositions … the fact remains that the city, through these juxtapositions, is also a great generator of novelty (pp 40-41).
Jennifer Robinson, in her more recent work (2004), foregrounds a set of tensions emerging from two competing approaches, by practitioners and academics alike, to reading the city. South African urban studies, Robinson argues, is tossed between a left Marxist critique, which caricatures the present city in the resonant binaries of the past, and a form of post-structuralism which insists on seeing spaces and identities as profoundly uncertain, and always subject to dislocation (p 271). Yet at this moment in the remaking of the city of Johannesburg, both intellectually and in our political imaginations, Robinson argues, ‘something more is demanded of us’. That ‘something more’ requires, in her view, that we pay closer attention to the moment when ‘something is made’ (p 271). The challenge, she argues, is to find a view of the past through the lens of the post-apartheid present rather than through a ‘persistent apartheid optic’ (p 275). The city here, as elsewhere, both fragments and brings together (p 280).
In what follows I draw out some of the imaginary infrastructures which are constructing the city of the present. Infrastructures are most often understood in physical terms as reticulated systems of roads and grids in specific ensembles. Abdoumaliq Simone (2004) uses the term to refer to people in the city, to the ‘ability of residents to engage complex combinations of objects, spaces, persons and practices’, to form ‘conjunctions which become an infrastructure – a platform for reproducing life in the city’ (pp 1-2). I explore the imaginary infrastructures which surface in fiction – metropolitan maps, each of which tracks emerging selves in the city. The infrastructures I have chosen are the street, the café, the suburb and the campus.
The street
Phaswane Mpe’s novel Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2000) explores, via a modality of pedestrian enunciation, the inner-city quarter of Hillbrow, in Johannesburg.5 Mpe’s second-person narrator describes how to cross this part of the city:
Your own and cousin’s soles hit the pavements of the Hillbrow streets. You cross Twist, walk past the Bible Centred Church. Caroline makes a curve just after the Church and becomes the lane of Edith Cavell Street, which takes you downtown; or, more precisely, to Wolmarans at the edge of the city. Edith Cavell runs parallel to Twist. Enclosed within the lane that runs from Wolmarans to Clarendon Place (which becomes Louis Botha a few streets on) is a small, almost negligible triangle of a park. On the other side of the park, just across Clarendon Place, is Hillbrow Police Station, in which you take only minimal interest. Crossing the park, you walk alongside the police station, still in Clarendon Place. A very short distance later, you join Kotze Street. In Kotze you turn right to face the west (p 10).
Mpe offers a revised inventory of the city, composing a path along its streets, both tracking and breaching historical constructions of city space. Built sites symbolise specific practices, demarcate racial identities in particular ways and, in turn, determine how one walks.6 Thus one might feel oneself to be at the ‘edge of the city’, ‘enclosed within the lane’, ‘walking alongside’, or ‘facing west’, depending on where one is – a complex combination of built structure and felt identity.
Significantly, Refentše, the narrator, takes ‘only minimal interest’ in the Hillbrow Police Station, one of the most notorious sites of apartheid police repression in the city. Street names, too, mark the trace of colonial and apartheid epistemologies and practices, but these proper names also, as De Certeau notes (1984, p 104), make themselves available to the diverse meanings given to them by passers by in the now, detach themselves from the places they were supposed to define and serve as imaginary meeting points on itineraries. These words operate in the nature of an emptying out and wearing away of their primary role, as De Certeau sees them, and insinuate other routes into the functionalist order of movement (p105).
Throughout Mpe’s novel the streets are marked by ‘incidents’; things happen with greater intensity or regularity in certain streets, and the situation of the danger spots is a matter of great contention (‘the notorious Esselen’, ‘the notorious Quartz’ (p 6)). The coming of what Mpe calls ‘black internationals’ into Hillbrow invokes the streets and their names as ‘receptacles for other routes’. If Mpe
