Precarious Gentrification: Dreading the Night While 'Taking Back] the City' in Johannesburg

Chrystel Oloukoi

'Why study the night? Nothing happens at night here', said the first resident of the Maboneng Precinct that I met when conducting my fieldwork. Many others asked the same or similar questions. What raised my interest in Johannesburg's nocturnal spaces was the widespread idea that they were mostly deserted spaces, supposedly because of a fear of crime. At the same time, marketing images of the city were riddled with nightscapes, revealing a paradox between repulsiveness and attractiveness towards nocturnal spaces. From that starting question about deserted spaces at night to that startled question that I encountered many times ('Why study the night?'), my research was guided by the feeling that nights actually had a lot to tell us about Johannesburg.

Until recently, cities at night had been notoriously understudied. A daytime approach has been dominant in the study of both urban activities and geographies of everyday life (van Liempt et al. 2015). Yet, when night falls, we are often faced with very different cities that deserve their own reading (Hornberger 2008). This is particularly the case in inner-city Johannesburg, where night spaces, at the exclusion of the commodified, enclosed, secured and private spaces of the clubs, are uniformly dreaded and avoided by middle- and high-income populations due to fears of criminality. In the middle- and upper-class imagination, the inner city at night is considered the emblematic space where crime unfolds. At the same time, both inner-city spaces and night-time itself arouse an ambivalent feeling of fear and desire, fear but desire (Oloukoï 2016b).

In the lower-class neighbourhood of Jeppestown, which has been undergoing a process of gentrification since 2008, in the gentrified space being renamed Maboneng (Nevin 2014; Oloukoï and Guinard 2016) the night emerges as the main point of tension between the lower-class residents and the new upper-class residents. This class phenomenon is also heavily racialised in a context where the lower classes of the urban centre of Johannesburg are predominantly black, while the suburban middle and upper classes that try to 'take back the city', supposedly against crime, are predominantly white (Bremner 2010; Murray 2011). This class and racial phenomenon, the two being to a large extent intermingled in South Africa (Seekings 2008; Seekings and Nattrass 2008), brings out the symbolic importance of nocturnal spaces. While the process of gentrification is undeniable during the day, it is affected by dynamics of retreat and contraction at night, demonstrating the fact that gentrification is temporal as well as spatial.

In this chapter, I argue that the night has an ambivalent status in the context of Johannesburg's gentrified inner-city spaces. Being a time-space over which the new residents' claim over space is less tangible and less controlled, the night reveals the precariousness of the gentrification process. On the other hand, precisely because of the challenges they pose, nocturnal urban spaces are being targeted as the main focus of a new and ongoing gentrification phase in Maboneng (Oloukoï and Guinard 2016).

The night-time economy refers to a transformation of urban nightscapes in a context of heightened competition between cities, with the promotion of city centres as 'sites of mass consumption at night' and 'a proliferation of leisure, entertainment and drinking spaces ... [which] are increasingly corporatized and monopolized' (Gallan 2015, 556). Turning away from the consequences of that shift to the night-time economy in terms of spatial fragmentation and exclusion at night, I analyse in this chapter the origins of that shift and what leads to the identification of night spaces as the main stakes in the reconquest of the city by a cosmopolitan, young, middle-class and mostly white new elite. If the impacts of the night-time economy on class relations are well documented, the relationship of the night to race appears under-examined in this scholarship (Talbot 2004, 2007; May and Chaplin 2008; May 2014), especially seen in the light of the post-apartheid cities of South Africa. Through the use of various ethnographic methods, participant observation, semi-structured interviews and urban walks (Anderson 2004; Evans and Jones 2011; Oloukoï 2016a) conducted from January to April 2015, I argue that the destabilising impact of the night on the gentrification process in Maboneng has turned nocturnal spaces into an urban frontier; no longer being at the margins of the gentrification process, they have ended up constituting its core.

My analysis is threefold. First, I give a brief overview of the gentrification process in Maboneng and how it differs from other contexts. Then, I insist on the place the night occupies in a series of discourses and images produced by the developers or the residents to legitimise the existence of the Maboneng Precinct. Finally, I move to explore the dynamics that belie the developers' and residents' self-legitimising...