Knowing the City: South African Urban Scholarship from Apartheid to Democracy by Sophie Oldfield et.al. [New]

ISBN: 9781869145538 / 1869145534 - Knowing the City: South African Urban Scholarship from Apartheid to Democracy, edited by Sophie Oldfield, Anna Selmeczi & Clive Barnett. Published by UKZN Press, 2024. Softcover. New. 520 pp.

South African cities are marked by the legacies of past practices, inscribed in fixed spatial patterns. They therefore play a pivotal role in shaping the possibilities and limits of changing imperatives of transition, transformation, development and sustainability. 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. Knowing the City departs from this prominence of urban issues, which explains why South African urban scholarship has been a key reference point nationally and in urban studies elsewhere.

The book draws together 65 urban scholars of South African cities of different generations, from various regions and from diverse universities. The 76 essays of the volume 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.

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