Introduction: Imagining the Edgy City

Abstract

The introduction engages urban theories both global and local, including Mumford’s urban scenes, Lefebvre’s structures of enchantment, Weber’s de-enchantment, Certeau’s pedestrian enunciations, Soja’s post-metropolis, Simone’s people as infrastructure, Robinson’s ordinary city, Bremner’s insurgent urbanism, Foster’s socio-nature, Titlestad’s pyscho-geography,Landau‘s tactical cosmopolitan, and Mbembe and Nuttall’s Afropolis to define the edgy city. “Edgy” applies not only to pervasive nervousness about crime, change, and disorder in a divided city, but also to the history of capital speculation on the boundaries of districts, and on property values that have created boom and bust cycles since the gold mining camps of 1886, and which have deepened disparities of wealth and access in present-day urban and peri-urban South Africa.