Cars, capital and disorder in Ivan Vladislavic’s The Exploded View and Portrait with Keys

Abstract

There is a substantial corpus of criticism on the epistemology of walking in recent writing by Ivan Vladislavic. This article expands upon the literature through a focus on the ways in which The Exploded View and Portrait with Keys engage with and pressurise the socio-spatial dominance of car driving in Johannesburg. It maintains that while car-use radically organises space and place in the city, this hegemony is tested by alternate forms of mobility. As Vladislavic’s work suggests, disorderly and apparently liminal urban modalities and movements disrupt orderly expressions of urban capital aligned with car-driving.