Knowing the City

South African cities are marked by the legacies of racialized dispossession that were inscribed in colonial and apartheid spatial patterns. 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. Cities therefore play a pivotal role in shaping the possibilities and limits of changing imperatives of transition, transformation, development, and sustainability. The contributions to Knowing the City are products of a series of workshops and interviews; each piece emerges from different modes of dialogue and writing work developed through these interactions. The aim of the collection is not to offer an authoritative historical survey of the field but to (re)open and facilitate genuine dialogues about the theories and practices of both social inquiry and urban transformation as deeply lived commitments of multiple generations of scholars in South Africa and beyond. This book reassesses the geographies and commitments of South African urban studies. Paying attention to scholars’ distinctive forms of engagement and the problem spaces that have shaped them, it tells a novel story about the generation of ideas and (knowledge) practices in urban studies and in social sciences more broadly.