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Date: April 30, 2024 Tue
Time: 2:28 am
Time: 2:28 am
Results for violent crime (johannesburg, south africa)
1 results foundAuthor: Gossman, Christina Title: Urban Resilience in Situations of Chronic Violence Case Study of Johannesburg, South Africa Summary: The Johannesburg of yore was polarized. Whereas in the past it was tainted by the strictures of apartheid, Johannesburg is now striving to be a first-world city. It is the economic hub of sub-Saharan Africa and was site of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Although its origins are steeped in controversy and founded on practices of racial segregation, today it brands itself as integrated and heterogeneous. Yet present day Johannesburg is actually a city of gray areas. It is more cohesive culturally, economically, and racially than in the past, but in many parts of the city this integration is incomplete or precarious. Unity is neither present in all neighborhoods, nor spread equally across all city spaces; and for some residents the aims of social and spatial integration challenge the search for identity and community. It is this disconnect between the physical layout of the city, its polarized workings, and a wide range of individual and collective aspirations that helps fuel the violence that has made Johannesburg famous not only for its gold rush, its man-made forest, and its climate, but also for its high rates of crime and murder. Johannesburg has long been one of the most important cities of Sub-Saharan Africa. Even the decline of the mining industry did not halt its growth. Instead, numerous industries have grown significantly, attracting an increasing number of South Africans from rural provinces as well as foreigners from neighboring African countries. The apartheid era that disenfranchised black South Africans politically and economically, in combination with the country’s increasing rate of urbanization (62% of the population now lives in cities) led this small mining town to become the crime capital of South Africa. Like other cities studied in this project, while the physical layout of Johannesburg is rather straightforward, its spatial organization is more complex and depends largely on distances from and relationships with the state. Distance from the state can be either quantitative or qualitative. Quantitative distance is a mere matter of the physical distance from the city-center and its governing bodies and seems to have minimal effects within the city. Qualitative distance, however, is a matter of affiliation and perception, and has much more bearing on violence within the city. Within Johannesburg, the physical layout does not match the spatial organization, and it is perhaps in areas where the two are most dissonant that violence emerges most prominently. In neighborhoods that are physically proximate to the city-center but have an incredibly far perceived distance from the state in terms of economy, culture, services, or communication, violence is often used as a mechanism to compensate for the gap. The relationship of different parts of the state is a key factor in levels of violence, and is largely wrapped up in the concept of identity. Within Johannesburg, there are homogeneous spaces of people who mostly share a common identity that is unrelated to the state and there are heterogeneous spaces of people with different identities centered around a common tie to the state. This report focuses on the role and interactions between individuals, communities and governmental organizations in producing resilience. Which ones are effective, which ones are destructive? How do actors on the residential, collective and government level see these interactions and does collaboration among them exist? Given the time constraints in the field and the multitude and levels of violence and resilience in Johannesburg, we decided to focus on two neighborhoods that represent neighborhoods with high level of violence as well as a high number of innovative strategies for resilience: Hillbrow, one of Johannesburg's oldest, most transformed, and ever-changing neighborhoods, and Diepsloot, a relatively young, peri-urban informal settlement in the north of Johannesburg. Details: Cambridge, MA: Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2012. 52p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed December 7, 2012 at: http://www.urcvproject.org/uploads/Johannesburg_URCV.pdf Year: 2012 Country: South Africa URL: http://www.urcvproject.org/uploads/Johannesburg_URCV.pdf Shelf Number: 127137 Keywords: Neighborhoods and CrimeUrban AreasUrban ViolenceViolent Crime (Johannesburg, South Africa) |