Urban Threat Figurations. Boundary-Making in and across Unequal Neighborhoods

Soul City and Mindalore

Soul City and Mindalore are adjacent neighborhoods in the West Rand of Johannesburg and are quite different in terms of socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity and urban morphology. According to the 2011 census, the population of the two districts is comparable: Mindalore has 5,132 inhabitants and Soul City 5,670. However, Soul City has a much higher population density because Soul City covers only a quarter of the area of Mindalore. The two neighborhoods are geographically separated (or connected) by a tailings dump wasteland from local gold mines. Mindalore is a lower middle-class^[1] neighborhood with a strong White^[2] Afrikaner identity, although a substantial number of Black middle-class families have been moving in recently. The neighborhood consists mainly of single family houses and most inhabitants own their own house. There is not much public life – in the sense of public encounters – in Mindalore beside two bars; one frequented by Blacks and the other by Whites. There are a number of churches, but no restaurants and very few shopping opportunities. Besides the churches and the two bars there are no leisure services. Life there depends on having access to a car, which is typical for South African suburbs. Soul City is a typical informal settlement, where Black South Africans and African migrants live. The land belongs to the municipality and families either own their huts or rent them from others. Soul City is dotted by many Spazashops (informal small supermarkets), Shabeens (informal bars), and countless churches and two soccer fields. Beyond that there are no other leisure services.

As these brief descriptions of the two neighborhoods show, Soul City and Mindalore can be described as residentially segregated, which means that resident groups are spatially separated along social boundaries. The two crucial dimensions of differentiation are race and economic status or class, which is in line with the dominant representations of social inequality in South Africa (Locatelli & Nugent 2009: 6, Alexander 2013, Owen 2016: 366, Mabasa 2019). In Mindalore, 63 % of the population is White and 32 % Black, in contrast to Soul City with 98.24 % Black residents and only 0.05 % White.^[3] The economic situation of the residents in each neighborhood can only be estimated because no statistical data is available on this level of analysis. However, there is data for the comparative level of the ward^[4], with Mindalore being in the more prosperous Ward 9. While Ward 9 has an unemployment rate of 4.8 %, it is 23.3 % in Ward 16 where Soul City is located. In Ward 9 only 0.4 % of the households lack running water in their homes, 1.3 % do not have a flush toilet, 6.6 % of residents live in informal dwellings and food insecurity is rare. In Ward 16 most of the households (60.6 %) do not have access to running water on the property, 58.6 % do not have a flush toilet, 61.9 % live in shacks and 7.8 % stated that they do not have enough money for food.^[5] These indicators of inequality on the ward level are amplified on the neighborhood level.

At first glance, it is certainly appropriate to state that Mindalore and Soul City are two very unequal neighborhoods segregated along the lines of race and economic status. But, as I will argue in this article, a closer look based on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork reveals a too holistic interpretation of how people in the neighborhoods experience their daily lives and the relations or entanglements that exist across the ‘dividing lines.’ Instead of presuming from a bird’s eye perspective the relevance of spatial segregation on the everyday lives of the residents, I will use the concept of figurations as introduced by Norbert Elias as a more contextual and dynamic lens through which a multiplicity of relationships between the two neighborhoods can be revealed. This approach allows for an analysis of bonding and boundary-making processes in the neighborhoods by focusing on the relevance of emic categorizations. By looking at the dynamic of inter- and intra-group relations in three different “figurative fields” (Hüttermann 2018: 158, own translation), each with its own distinct logic, a much more mosaic-like and complex picture of neighborhood relations emerges than if we simply accept the broad analytical brush of residential segregation. For urban research on Johannesburg and South Africa in general, this means interrogating the master narrative of the universal dominance of race and class. As I will show, the concept of figurations is a useful analytical tool for studying shifting boundaries and fluid categorizations even in contexts in which boundaries seem to be cemented by deep historical, ethnic, political and socio-economic cleavages, like in “(post)apartheid” (Hook 2013) South Africa. For global segregation research, the figurative lens means challenging empirically the widely accepted thesis that residential segregation is equivalent to social segregation and instead shifting the focus to the dynamic interactions between residentially segregated neighborhoods.

In the next section, taking Johannesburg as a starting point, I will discuss segregation research and the empirical and epistemological shortcomings that result from the equation of residential and social segregation. Instead of just following this common assumption, the relationship between the two forms of segregation should be revisited empirically. One tool for such an analysis is the concept of figurations, that I introduce in section 4. This concept can help capture empirically and analytically the diversity of relationships in and across residentially segregated neighborhoods. I will illustrate this in section 5 by means of three empirical examples in which different figurations emerge around different threats: 1) victim-perpetrator figuration around the threat of criminality, 2) Black-White figuration around the threat of losing Afrikaner identity, and 3) locals-externals figuration around the threat of environmental pollution and health. In the concluding section, I will describe my findings, discussing the analytical potential of the figuration concept for neighborhood research, and briefly discussing the political dimensions that are connected to epistemological observation tools.

This structure will address the following central question: How can the dynamics of relational intra- and inter-group processes in and across unequal and diverse, residentially segregated neighborhoods be described empirically and analytically? Or put slightly differently: How can urban research analytically grasp social change at the neighborhood level?

Studying Segregation

Johannesburg is one of the most residentially segregated cities in the world. The spatial separateness of residential areas is organized around race and class (Harrison & Todes 2020: 79–82; Rocha Franco 2019: 291).^[6] The significance of race is rooted in the legacy of apartheid, which has ended as a formal political rational but nevertheless continues to exist. Especially in big cities like Johannesburg, the “segregationist, apartheid city planning” (Czeglédy 2004: 65) created a highly segregated materiality through “sociospatial engineering” (Jürgens, Gnad, & Bähr 2003: 56) that still persists as “apartheid geography” (Katumba, Cheruiyot, & Mushongera 2019: 96). The importance of class is revealed in the extreme economic inequality illustrated by a very high Gini coefficient (an income-based coefficient of 0.63 in 2014 according to the World-Bank index^[7] and a wealth-based coefficient of 0.9–0.95 for 2011 (Orthofer 2016: 17)). This is reflected in the urban landscape in the prominence of gated communities and highly economically segregated residential areas in South African cities, which occupy the top position worldwide in terms of inequality (UN-Habitat 2016: 75). Scholarship on residential segregation agrees that present-day Johannesburg is a “divided city” (Beall et al. 2002) characterized by “increasing urban social polarization” (ibid.: 62) and a “city of extremes” (Murray 2011) where the “sociospatial inequalities that divide the city along race and class lines seem so much the same” (ibid: XIX) as in the apartheid city.

Zooming out from research on Johannesburg and South Africa and looking at international discussions on segregation, parallels become clear. The emerging image of Johannesburg as a highly segregated and divided city is very much in line with findings from other world regions like the United States (“divergent social worlds” (Peterson & Krivo 2010)), Brazil (“city of walls” (Caldeira 1992)), Germany (“polarized cities” (Kronauer & Siebel 2013, own translation)) or India (“fractal urbanism” (Bharathi, Malghan, Mishra, & Rahman 2021) for example. The images evoked by such vivid titles point to the underlying assumption that residential segregation and social segregation are conflated.^[8] The existence of social groups and group boundaries is seen as a result of residential segregation. But such research is subject to groupist thinking (see Brubaker 2004) not necessarily fed by empirical observations but rather by the epistemological assumption that segregation research deals “with the relationshiplessness of monadic group milieus” (Hüttermann 2018: 259, own translation). The possibility of diverse social contacts, encounters or entanglements across segregated neighborhoods is not included in these analyses. The fact that segregation research around the world shares this basic assumption may not be surprising, because the common epistemological starting point lies in American research on segregation particularly in Chicago. The very specific experience of segregation in this city became the blueprint for the study of segregation worldwide (Garrido 2021: 25, Netto et al. 2015: 1084).

Overcoming the Residential Segregation = Social Segregation Thesis

The “original idea of segregation as ‘restrictions on interaction’” (Netto et al. 2015: 1084) is a feature of much research on segregation. Most of this research is guided by one or both of the following two lines of reasoning, sometimes explicitly, often implicitly: (1) the physical-materialist explanation or (2) the idea of “territorial stigmatization” (Wacquant 2007). An example of the first is the anthology Residential Segregation in Comparative Perspective edited by Fujita and Maloutas (2012), whose contributions investigate segregation in eleven cities in different regions of the world. In their introduction, the editors emphasize the need to study segregation “as the uneven spatial distribution of all social groups in the city … [because this is] a prerequisite to understand socially or spatially more localized phenomena and trends” (Maloutas & Fujita 2012: 7). Here, residential segregation is linked to spatialized social phenomena, implicitly emphasizing spatial boundaries for the social. A physical-materialist image functions as an explanation for this claimed link, which argues with apparently naturally given facts and thus naturalizes the social. Peterson and Krivo (2010) even consider social space to be congruent with physical space when they argue that spatial segregation limits the opportunities for “potential contacts” (Peterson & Krivo 2010: 130), making social segregation or isolation more likely (see also Krivo et al. 2013). Domínguez et al. follow the same line of thought with their claim that diversity in a neighborhood “favors interaction and the formation of social networks between different social groups. Living in proximity facilitates contact and interaction” (Domínguez et al. 2012: 224). However, they do point out that a decrease in residential segregation does not automatically lead to an increase in interactions and that there are other factors to consider. This is where the second line of argument based on social factors comes into play. Basically, these approaches follow the same idea that Wacquant called “territorial stigmatization” (Wacquant 2007) describing the segregated neighborhoods in post-industrial countries that carry a stigma due to their advanced marginality, which significantly inhibits contact with the rest of society. Musterd et al. (2017) similarly argue that social inequality manifests itself spatially as segregation and is accompanied by “the fear that rising (spatial) inequality can lead to social unrest, rioting, increased crime, and a decrease in trust between separated societal groups” (Musterd et al. 2017: 1062–63). Stigma therefore goes hand in hand with alienation and creates social distance, which is expressed in low social trust. In his discussion of the effects of diversity, Uslaner (2012) argues that social differences do not undermine trust per se, but only in the form of segregation. “Living in segregated neighborhoods reinforces in-group trust at the expense of out-group (generalized) trust,” (Uslaner 2012: 36). This causes segregation, mediated by mistrust, to result in limited contact and thus to social isolation. These two main theoretical arguments can often be found as implicit assumptions. For example, the editors of the volume Race, Space, and Exclusion (Adelman & Mele 2015) on racial segregation in the United States state in their introduction that the different contributions focus on “the social and economic isolating effects of residential segregation” (ebd.: 12), without explicating the connection between different forms of segregation.

The research based on this line of argumentation is not fundamentally wrong because of its (implicit) assumptions. The problem with “the classic thesis of social isolation in urban studies” (Sampson 2019: 17) is that it has an empirical and epistemological blindspot, because it pre-structures the gaze and the analysis without naming this specific adjustment of perspective as such. As a result, these studies suffer from a groupist short-circuit: residential segregation is equated with social groups and their boundaries. This “spatial reductionism” (Netto et al. 2015: 1085) might be appropriate in some empirical cases, but not necessarily. Although segregation is “endowed with symbolic or group-making power” (Garrido 2021: 33) it is important to consider that (local) group formation processes are not exhausted in boundary-drawing processes of segregation. Therefore, segregation research should not rely simply on the validity of this basic assumption but should challenge it empirically. Examining relationships across segregated neighborhoods reveals the shortcomings of a perspective that identifies segregated units with social groups. Looking at these trans-relationships allows us to overcome not only an empirical blindspot, but also the epistemic blindness associated with it. This enables research to develop a deeper understanding of what segregation means for the everyday practices of people living in apparently segregated neighborhoods.

Research from the Global South can, as Garrido (2021) has shown, be very helpful for overcoming the classic thesis of segregation research. Neighborhoods in cities in the Global South provide powerful empirical examples of trans-relationships. For example, slums are by no means completely isolated, but on the contrary strongly connected to other neighborhoods, mainly through labor (ebd.: 29). Taking empirical cases from the Global South helps us broaden our understanding of the meaning of segregation and develop a “conceptual apparatus that is both broad enough and pliable enough to encompass cases of segregation around the world” (ebd.: 35). For Johannesburg, for example, this is exemplified in the explorative segregation studies of Heer (2019) and Ballard, Jones, & Ngwenya (2021), which do not follow the mainstream of segregation research. In her study about Johannesburg and Maputo, Heer argues against the common narrative of southern cities as cities of walls (Caldeira 1992) or divided cities (Beall et al. 2002). She shows that they are also cities of entanglements (Heer 2019) by focusing on two very unequal neighborhoods (the township Alexandra and the adjacent suburb Linbro Park) and their multiple entanglements, such as the private working relationships created by domestic workers, religious spaces or shopping malls. Ballard, Jones and Ngwenya (2021) focus on work relations between the township Diepsloot and the adjacent upper-class gated community Steyn City. Referring to the ongoing discussion on the impact of gated communities, which ranges from fundamental criticism for being apartheid-like to praise for the trickle-down effect of greater economic power, the authors show that relationships exist that, while highly exploitive, benefit both sides.

These studies show in concrete terms what it means for everyday life to reside in segregated neighborhoods by focusing on different bonding and boundary-making processes and demonstrate the existence of various relations across segregated areas. However, this research is analytically underdeveloped, as shown by the fact that the simple existence of relationships is presented as the result. Capturing these entanglements analytically and theoretically is the gap in the current conceptual apparatus that I propose to address by means of the concept of figurations.

Figurations

The concept of figurations was first introduced by Norbert Elias in 1939, evolving out of his work on social change in the civilizing process (Elias 2000[1939]). Elias later elaborated on the notion of figurations in his joint study with Scotson on the dynamics of a neighborhood constellation in England (Elias & Scotson 1994[1965]). Subsequently, figurational analysis or process sociology was further developed by Elias and others and applied to a variety of different research areas (for an overview see Gabriel & Mennell 2011b). Strangely enough, apart from the concept of the established and the outsider,^[9] figurational analysis hasn’t been applied to other neighborhood constellations. I argue that a central advantage of the concept of figuration is that, as opposed to the segregation perspective, it does not assume an initial disconnect but emphasizes the interdependencies, the entanglements of people in adjacent neighborhoods. Thus it can contribute to broadening the focus of segregation research in the sense of it being a “sensitizing concept” (Blumer 1954: 7).

For Elias, figurations are the basic form of sociality. Society is neither “an abstraction of attributes of individuals existing without a society, nor a ‘system’ or ‘totality’ beyond individuals, but the network of interdependencies formed by individuals” (Elias 2000[1939]: 482). Out of these interdependencies, social groups and group constellations are formed as emergent social phenomena that compose the social structure, but in a dynamic rather than static sense, because figurations have a “tendency to change” (ebd.: 483). A figurational analysis thus focuses on the formation and configuration of groups, inter- and intra-group dynamics, and the description of social changes that are temporal, situational, field-specific or due to different levels of society (i. e. micro, meso, macro). To understand these dynamics, identifying processes of bonding and boundary-making is crucial, such as how individuals perceive others “as belonging to the same group and include one another within the group boundaries which they establish when saying ‘we’ […], while at the same time excluding other human beings whom they perceive as belonging to another group and to whom they collectively refer as ‘they’” (Elias 1994[1965]: XXXVII). These processes of bonding and boundary-making are expressions of the power balance of the figuration. Group relations are always informed by power, and figurational analyses therefore reveal the (shifting) “power ratio between groups” (Loyal 2011: 188; see also Arnason 1987: 433, Featherstone 1987: 203).

In my own field research, I found two especially relevant, linked manifestations of figurations and their powerful group boundaries: moralization through moral boundary-making, and spatialization.^[10] Moral boundaries “are drawn on the basis of moral character” (Lamont, Schmalzbauer, Waller, & Weber 1996: 34) and are used to differentiate between a moral ‘us’ and a “moral ‘other’” (Yang et al. 2007: 1529). The self-identification of a group and its members is normally shaped by a morally positive image, whereas on the “other side of the moral divide” (Morone 1997: 999) the members of the other group and their behavior are seen as morally bad, as the “immoral others” (ibid: 1016). Elias refers to the “pars pro toto distortion” (Elias & Scotson 1994[1965]: XIX) meaning that for the other group the worst and most anomic behavior is ascribed to the group as a whole, while the own group “tends to be modeled on its exemplary, most ‘nomic’ or norm-setting section” (ibid). Through this distortion one can always find proof for the Manichean perspective that legitimizes both the moral boundary and the implied moral superiority. To ensure this Manicheism there is a contact taboo established and kept alive “by means of social control” (ibid.: XVI) like gossiping or excluding offenders but also through “collective fantasies” (Loyal 2011: 189) that adorn the wickedness of the others and thus warn passionately against “infectious contacts” (ibid.). Moral boundaries can also be based on other categories of social membership. For Elias, for example, race-based group relationships “are simply established-outsider relationships of a particular type” (Elias & Scotson 1994[1965]: XXX) and Andrew Sayer has elaborated compellingly on the moral aspects of class relations (Sayer 2005). The power relations that are expressed in moral terms also find a manifestation through spatializations that are also morally loaded. Placement practices form the spaces of the figuration and offer possibilities for the individuals and groups to place themselves and others by differentiating zones of security, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ neighborhoods, work spaces, recreational spaces etc. (cf. Hüttermann 2018: 15). The group dynamic of the figuration is translated into spatial equivalencies through “relational place-making” (Pierce et al. 2011) practices. For Bourdieu, physical space functions as a “metaphor of social space” (Bourdieu 2018: 107) with sociality inscribed into spatial materiality, as demonstrated in the notion of ‘bad places.’

To better understand the empirical and analytical nature of figurations, their relationship to micro-interaction situations and social structure must be clarified. Figurations are enacted and (re)actualized in concrete situations, but extend beyond them at the same time because they are always linked to other situations and figurations. They are intertwined with social structure, which in turn can be described as an overarching figuration. Thus, as indicated above, figurations exist on various geographic scales and scopes of society: micro-figurations in concrete interactions; meso-figurations at the neighborhood level; and macro-figurations such as gender, class, or race relations as socio-structural figurations. The other dimension of variation is its temporality, which can be placed on a continuum between ephemeral and long-lasting figurations. Following Elias, people who “sit around a table and play cards together” (Elias 2012[1970]: 125) form as much of a figuration as do the “inhabitants of a village, a city or a nation” (ibid. 126), because their “actions are interdependent” (ibid 125). The first case is a short-term, ephemeral figuration that exists only during the concrete situation. In the second case, the interdependencies are much more long-term and embrace different situations as well as different figurative fields. The two dimensions of scale and temporality often correlate with each other, but not necessarily. It is important to keep in mind that figurations are dynamic group relationships and not static descriptions of society, a dynamic lens on social structure. Society is in ongoing motion through the constant “figurational flow“ (Elias 2012[1970]: 156) and consists of different figurative fields. The tendency is that the more fields are homologous to each other, the more durable the particular figuration is (for example the historic apartheid race figuration). The social structure is thus composed of various figurations, one or some of which can be dominant in the sense of being trans-field, and others are more field-specific. The bonding of social structure and concrete situations is thus mediated via figurations in the sense of a “loose coupling” (Goffman 1983: 11, Luhmann 2000: 397–401). This means that there is no simple rule of clear correspondence between different figurations and concrete interactional situations. Applied to the case study here, it means that instead of presuming the relevancy of certain group-relations such as race, class, or gender, figurational analysis seeks to capture the transformations and translations that help to understand the various forms of bonding and boundary-making and the “categories that ‘take on force’ or explanatory significance” (Loyal 2011: 188) in a specific constellation of actors.

The advantage of figurational analysis over other approaches can be seen in its unique nexus of 1) being a dynamic perspective of 2) mostly multi-layered group relations and 3) their change or stability. It is not about narratives, discourses, frames or the like, but about inter-group relations. This means putting the changing interdependencies of human actors at the center of the research process. The proposed form of figurational analysis differs from analyses that mainly apply a “long-term perspective” (Gabriel & Mennell 2011a: 16) and leaving out ephemeral phenomena. This, however, eliminates a great potential for analysis, as the dynamics of short-term and often rapid change is thus difficult to grasp. The interplay of enduring and ephemeral figurations is thus lost from view and in turn their role in processes of stabilization or change. In this respect, figuration research itself often tends towards a too static understanding of social processes, which it actually wants to avoid (cf. Elias 2005: 373). Figuration analysis should explore “not only stable, but also dynamic, conflictual figurations” and must “go beyond Elias with Elias” (Hüttermann 2018: 8, own translation; cf. Arnason 1987: 429) and, it should be added, it should also go beyond a large part of figuration research in order to fulfill its purpose of being a truly dynamic perspective that also includes ephemeral forms of social change.

An example for how such a dynamic perspective might be applied is to focus on threats, as these contribute to the emergence of ephemeral figurations (which can then turn into or inscribe and transform long-term ones). Therefore, I propose the use of the term threat figuration to refer to a specific form of conflict figuration that is characterized by its emergence out of a perceived threat. Threats are always moments of conflictual interaction (cf. Strauss 1978, chapter 9). Threat figurations, however, are characterized by the fact that a threat initiates a figuration process that confronts a threatened ‘we’ against a threatening ‘they’. The threat perception does not have to be shared by both sides; it is sufficient for one side to feel threatened, the other is drawn to a greater or lesser extent into the unfolding dynamic. This subtype of conflict figuration draws on considerations subsumed under the idea of the productivity of threats (cf. Frie & Nieswand 2017, Dieterich, Nieswand, & Martinez (forthcoming)). Their productive potential is based on their idiosyncratic dynamic, which derives from the interaction of threat diagnoses, mobilizations, coping strategies, and reflections (Frie et al. 2018: 6). The nexus of these four dimensions is the productive engine of threats, which can reconfigure or “re-order” (ibid.) existing sociality, for example in terms of inter-group relations.

The perspective on figuration processes through the lens of threats and boundary-making processes proposed here cannot, of course, do justice to the full complexity and multifaceted quality of inter-group relations in neighborhoods (and elsewhere). Nonetheless, it is an important and valuable component – one analytical tool amongst others – for developing a deeper understanding of inter-group relations across segregated neighborhoods, by offering the possibility to focus intensively on the dynamic aspects i. e. on social change through processes of re-ordering that result out of perceived threats – and their immanent productive potential. The three empirical examples below will illustrate that threats are a productive social force able to re-configure residents in a variety of ways, resulting in the formation of different threat figurations.

Threat Figurations – Neighborly Bonding and Boundary-Making

The following analysis of what I call threat figurations is based on a total of eight months of ethnographic fieldwork from November 2019-February 2020, March-April 2021 and August-September 2021. The empirical core of my work includes participant observation and 29 semi-structured interviews with residents of the two studied neighborhoods. In addition, I annotated a myriad of informal conversations in my field notes, followed various discussions in online groups (WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook), and analyzed reporting in the local newspaper, the Krugersdorp News. I accompanied residents in their day-to-day activities, went on patrol with the neighborhood watch, participated in various public events such as football matches, festivals or election campaigning, attended church services, and went to school classes. I approached as many diverse groups of residents as possible, including (elected) community leaders and ordinary residents, established residents (some who have lived there their entire lives) and newcomers, involved and relatively isolated ones, with different religious affiliations (Dutch Reformed Church, Pentecostal churches, practitioners of more traditional religions and atheists), people working in a variety of occupations (blue-collar worker, government employees, entrepreneurs, doctors and lawyers) with diverse statuses ((self-)employed, part-time workers low-income earners or unemployed), politically engaged (mainly in the ANC, EFF, and DA parties) and politically disillusioned, with different political positions, of different genders, classes, and races, and different age groups in an attempt to observe and experience as diverse as possible perspectives on the multilayered inter- and intra-group relationships.

Today’s figurations in the examined neighborhoods are on the one hand embedded in contemporary and historic figurations found across all of South Africa, on the other hand on specific local historical figurations. In South Africa, the ruler-oppressed figuration between the minority of White and the majority of Black people was the dominant constellation during apartheid (1948–1994). This was an established-outsider figuration of a very specific kind, which is what this designation is meant to mark. What was special about the apartheid figuration, was that a) racial domination was translated into class domination, b) on the basis of legal regime that created c) an astonishingly high degree of homologous figurative fields. This homology ranged across fields as diverse as work, housing, leisure, sport, love, flirting, friendship, and politics. Even though it has been rightly pointed out that alternative non-racialized figurations, like sport, for example (Jarvie 1992), have always existed, and became ever more prominent in the 1980s, it must also be stated that the apartheid figuration still prevails in many fields even today, almost 30 years after the official political and legal end of apartheid. The “(post)apartheid present” (Hook 2013: 14) carries with it an ambivalence between break and continuity and points to the persistent potency of the apartheid figuration. This can also be seen in the example of the neighborhood constellations being presented here. Mindalore, the middle-class neighborhood, was a Whites-only area during apartheid. Since the early 2000s this has been changing, and Black middle-class families have started to move in. Soul City, the informal settlement, came into existence around 1996 and has grown over the years. On the one hand, Soul City and Mindalore form an established-outsider figuration with Mindalore being the powerful and long-standing middle class (still largely White) part and Soul City the powerless, more recently founded and poor Black informal settlement. This applies to housing and residential segregation as much as it does to the field of work: a few residents from Soul City work in low paying jobs in Mindalore, sometimes as day laborers on construction sites, sometimes as domestic workers or gardeners, and are thus dependent and exploited. However, the relationship is not exhausted in this established-outsider figuration comprising different homologous figurative fields. For example, the field of politics: Some parties, like the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and the Democratic Alliance (DA) include members from both neighborhoods. DA members from Soul City campaigned in Mindalore because they claim that the members in Mindalore needed their help. Another interesting example is the church Agape Love Ministries in Mindalore, which tried explicitly to recruit members from Soul City and could mark a certain degree of success, although the Pastor admitted that it was difficult to bring people from different class backgrounds together. Finally, despite a general tendency towards school segregation, a few pupils from Soul City attend Lewisham Primary School with children from Mindalore.

What these examples show is that beyond the homologous fields, there are also fields with other figurations. In the following section I analyze three threat figurations forming three different figurative fields that operate with distinct logics and thus reveal the complexity of the relations: 1) a victim-perpetrator figuration around the threat of criminality; 2) a Black-White figuration around the threat of losing Afrikaner identity and 3) a locals-externals figuration around the threat of environmental pollution and health. I have chosen to focus on these three examples for analytical reasons, each of them exemplifying a different logic for configuring neighborhood groups. Thus, the following collage illustrates varying modalities of group boundary-making processes, each a different facet of social change in the long-lasting national apartheid figuration on the neighborhood level. The first figuration of victims vs. perpetrator clusters around class differences and opposes the residents of Soul City with those of Mindalore, irrespective of skin color. Although a perpetrator is still imagined as being poor and Black, the middle-class victims are not racialized anymore. The second figuration arranges, on the contrary, the groups in Mindalore racially, the Afrikaner against the Black middle-class families, and thus shows the stability of the apartheid figuration, although this racist figuration is no longer hegemonic and increasingly challenged by a non-racist one. The third figuration pools residents of both neighborhoods together, local activists in confrontation with an outside mining company and politicians. This is the most unambiguous example of a post-apartheid figuration.

Victim-Perpetrator Figuration

The threat of criminality is omnipresent and a central point of reference for ordering the neighborhood. Most people I spoke to in Mindalore employed a private security company and had erected walls and fences around their house, armed additionally with either barbed wire or an electric fence. Some residents of Mindalore were organized in a neighborhood watch that has merged into the Community Police Forum 9 (CPF).^[11] Finally, residents are organized by street in WhatsApp or Telegram groups to inform one another – as a CPF member explained to me – if “there’s a suspicious guy, describing the clothes he’s wearing, you know. And then maybe someone would drive by and check what they are doing”. The residents of Soul City are also organized against potential crime: people blow whistles in case of threat or emergency, and community members respond. The fact that the two adjacent neighborhoods have two completely independent security structures and would never even think of calling the other for help clearly indicates their segregation in the figurative field of criminality.

A wasteland of, among other things, old mine tailings dumped years ago divides Mindalore and Soul City and is perceived as a problematic place that enables criminality. The houses closest to this open area are often referred to as the ‘frontline’. These would be “attacked” particularly often, according to Martha, who lives there, which is why the neighborhood watch has its origins there. In an attempt to ensure even more security, some ‘frontline’ residents mow the grass in the wasteland and trim the bushes and trees so that they do not provide hiding places for potential perpetrators. Pete, a resident of Mindalore and a CPF9 volunteer for nine years, explained to me that most perpetrators run away in the direction of Soul City after committing a crime. He also showed me the opening of underground pipe in the bushes on the fringe of Mindalore and explained that while its actual purpose was flood prevention, criminals would use it as an escape route because the next opening was in Soul City. He told me that because of these tunnels, the CPF patrollers and the police would often act in vain, any burglars having gone underground to escape straight to Soul City. His assumption was that most of the criminals came from Soul City or at least had accomplices there.

The question of culpability, that is, who can be held responsible for a criminal act, is often answered with a reference to Soul City by Mindalorians. Siyabonga, a Black resident of Mindalore and a high school teacher in Soweto, had never been to Soul City, but “each time I drive past that place I always suspect that maybe some of my things they stole are somewhere here.” This, he said, was his spontaneous reaction, even though he knew that the thieves could just as well have come from elsewhere. Tevin, a White resident of Mindalore and janitor in a local church, explicitly grouped the residents of Mindalore together, no matter their skin color, and contrasted them with the shack dwellers in informal settlements. The problem was not his Black neighbors in Mindalore, who were “decent people, but the skunk, the poor ones.” These suspicions and the accompanying disinclination towards the residents of Soul City were also expressed in the fact that most of the residents of Mindalore avoided Soul City explicitly and had often never actually been there. When I spoke to them about my research there, the spontaneous reaction was often one of sincere concern that I, as a White person, could not go to Soul City alone but only in the company of a Black person. Martha, for example, insisted several times that I “should never, never go alone into Soul City!” because it was too dangerous. Sarah, a Black former resident of Soul City had to promise her to accompany me every time (which was neither practical nor necessary).

The residents of Soul City were well aware of this avoidance behavior (cf. Goffman 1971: 32, Hüttermann 2018: 266), and perceived it very differently, as exemplified by Joshua’s and Dikeledi’s remarks. Joshua, a local pastor and politician from Soul City, took issue with the claim that Soul City was criminal and criticized it as the perception of outsiders. He argued that those who accuse the residents of Soul City of crimes spread fear among people from other places that discouraged them from coming to Soul City. The problem for him was that the residents from Mindalore and elsewhere look down on people living in shacks, not even considering them human. Instead, he argued, they think shack dwellers are all “like animals.” He felt that the Mindalorians stigmatized the residents of Soul City, which hurt him personally and made contacts between the two neighborhoods more difficult. Dikeledi, a long-time resident of Soul City had another perspective. She worked for a White lady in Mindalore as a domestic worker. She was very angry with her former employer because she treated Dikeledi in a very racist manner, even forcing her to use separate dishes and cutlery from those the White family used. Dikeledi went on to complain about residents of Mindalore in general: “They don’t like us, because they know that people from Soul City steal, they hate us. It’s true that people from Soul City steal in Mindalore. We are rude, we are thieves, they cannot treat us in a nice way.” When I asked her about herself she replied she is definitely not a thief but that you cannot see if someone is a thief or not. Paradoxically, she thought it was safer in terms of personal security to suspect all Soul City residents of being criminals. Elias called the underlying mechanism behind this paradox a “double-bind” (Elias 1994[1965]: XXXI): some of the stigmatized accept the stigmatization and increasingly act as the stigmatizers accuse them of acting, affirming the moral devaluation. This, in turn, confirms the stigmatizers in their stigmatization. The double-bind is thus a self-reinforcing effect of the interdependencies of the practices and identities of the two neighborhood groups.

The threat of crime led to a division of residents along neighborhood lines, which was also a class cleavage. The established, middle-class residents of Mindalore blamed the outsider, the working class community of Soul City, for the threat of criminality, and drew a clear-cut moral boundary. They perceived Soul City as a breeding ground for criminality that threatened their families and property. People in Mindalore saw the connection between structural inequalities and crime (“everybody needs to eat”) but in their view, these factors did not mitigate the negative perception. Instead of denouncing structural problems, the criminals were represented as “folk-devils” (Morrison 2019: 37) or moral others.

Black-White Figuration about Losing Afrikaner Identity

Despite middle class unity on issues of crime, race plays an important role in other contexts. This can be seen in the contested and changing figurative field that emerged in Mindalore around a threatened Afrikaner identity. The neighborhood was established in the 1950s as a Whites-only settlement. In the 2000s in-migration of Black families increased while many White families moved away and elderly residents died. Mindalore has become a racially mixed “grey area” as one resident put it. The changing composition of the local population created tensions around the question of how to relate to these changes. While several of the older residents accepted the transformation and engaged in re-making the figurational bonds and boundaries in the neighborhood, others tried to maintain the racial boundaries and feared the loss of their Afrikaner identity.

A ‘bastion of the Boers’ and a very important anchor point for Afrikaner identity were the local church congregations, like the NG Kerk Mindalore (Dutch Reformed Church). This Protestant-Calvinist church was founded in 1971 and served as a community organization for the Afrikaner of Mindalore. Church services were held in Afrikaans, the community hall was used for community-based and cultural activities, and the congregation consisted almost exclusively of Afrikaners. However, it was important for Pastor Henrico to point out the openness of the congregation in conversation with him. He mentioned explicitly a “mixed couple” that I later met in church services and the church’s 50th anniversary celebration several times. The church also had a partnership with the mainly Black Methodist Church in Witpoortjie, which was manifested, for example, in joint church services. In addition, an offshoot of the Black Pentecostal ‘Upper Room Fellowship Ministries’ in Mindalore rented the church hall on Sundays after the home congregation’s service for their own worship service. The pastors of both churches formed the ‘Roodepoort Pastors Fraternity’ with two other local pastors and held regular meetings. Makhado, the Black pastor of the ‘Upper Room Fellowship Ministries’ saw the relationship between Black and White pastors in Mindalore as “healthy […] [because] there is no skin pigmentation thing, no we are just brothers and sisters socializing.” This he thought was also true for residents of Mindalore in general: “they live together, they are brothers and sisters.” Henrico, the White pastor of the NG Kerk, also emphasized the positive relationships emerging from the mixing of residents because “we are all children of God,” regardless of skin color. Tevin, the church janitor, got along very well with his Black neighbors. He described them as nice and “decent people” with whom he had absolutely no problem. Martha and Ruan, who bought their house in Mindalore in 1984, also spoke of the demographic changes, noting that there were only five White households left in their street but that they had no reason to complain because they got along very well with all their neighbors. Martha said that her grandson often played with the Black neighbor’s kids and that she always welcomed all the children to her pool. Sometimes she even collected them from the street because, according to her, it was too dangerous for them to play outside. Üllrich, a retired Afrikaner from Mindalore, emphasized shared pragmatic interests, such as watching each other’s properties when somebody was on holiday, as an aspect that connected new and old neighbors. He claimed that they got along well, but also admitted that they did not have much contact beyond the neighborhood watch commitments.

These examples illustrate the active re-ordering of the old apartheid figuration and the multiple entanglements across racial boundaries. The re-making of bonds and boundaries is informed by morally grounded discourses on inclusivity, which are based on different orders of justification (Boltanski & Thévenot 2006), such as Christian universalism, motherly care for all the ‘children of the neighborhood,’ or the solidarity of property owners against criminals. However, these entanglements cannot hide the fact that these are limited phenomena: they are mainly about good neighborly coexistence and do not include intensive friendship relationships, love relationships, or coming together in a church community. Thus, the figurative field of personal relationships is still sorted by race in Mindalore, even if the entanglements mentioned are a step in the direction of figurative change, especially compared to the highly segregated apartheid figuration of the past.

These friendly relations between White and Black neighbors do not preclude problems related to the changed structure of the local population. These ranged from subtle forms of maintaining local hegemony to fearful rejection of the new neighbors. Clifford, a Black South African in his 50s who works for a government agency and moved to Mindalore in 2006, pointed out a hidden but nevertheless very effective mechanism by means of which the established Afrikaner population cemented their hegemonic status. When he showed me the new cemetery established at some distance but still clearly visible from his house, he stated that he did not like it there at all. However, he could not influence its location because he had only ever attended one community meeting where such decisions are made. The problem at these meetings, he explained, was that the majority of the attendees were Afrikaners and so they spoke Afrikaans in the meetings. He learned Afrikaans at school, but he always felt an inner resistance to the language, as it is the “language of the oppressors” and he himself had fought against the apartheid state. This indirect mechanism helped the Afrikaners maintain their group hegemony by excluding Black people through language. Officially, the meetings were open to all. And since Afrikaans was a compulsory subject in school, it could be argued that at least older people should all be able to speak the language and thus be able to participate in the meetings if they wanted to.

In order to reconstruct why some Afrikaners, especially older ones, bemoan their local loss of hegemony, one has to look at the historical threat discourses about cultural extinction with regard to Afrikaner identity, which was also a central reason for the establishment of the apartheid figuration. Among the older Afrikaners of Mindalore, many expressed in conversations with me a certain uneasiness and anxiety concerning their group, their collective identity and the future expression of Afrikaner culture. They were afraid that their culture, heritage, and language could die out or be destroyed. At the national level, this is related to the takeover of power by the Black ANC, and at the neighborhood level, to the subsequent in-migration of new Black neighbors. Mark, who recently moved out of Mindalore, had a very pessimistic view about the cohabitation of White and Black families, namely that they could not be trusted. He himself had had a Black neighbor in Mindalore with whom he had no contact, and he had had no interest in changing this situation. He decided to move to a White community project in the Karoo. For Giniel, who moved to Mindalore in 2002 and was a member of the NG Kerk, the aggression against Afrikaners, as a cultural group, started with changing the street names and dismantling old monuments – in Mindalore as well as across the country. In doing so, “they got into the Whites’ minds.” This has led to a perception of ‘them’ “taking away the Afrikaner cultural heritage.” His friend Edwin went on to explain the negative effects of these weakening ties between individuals and their cultural heritage: “When you start losing your culture you start losing who you are as a person, as an entity.” The lay theory behind these statements conceives the individual as a part of a collective whole, which only makes sense as a part of something bigger, like culture. The fears of extinction find their culmination in the topos of farm murders^[12], which were perceived as very threatening because they were seen as part of an ongoing genocide against Whites people. The worries expressed by Giniel and Edwin are that not only their culture and identity could be erased through re-naming streets and removing monuments but that they themselves, their bodies, could be eliminated and erased physically. Some Afrikaners in Mindalore have therefore joined the Boerelegioen, a right-wing survivalist organization that promotes the military defense of White people. When Edwin explained to me the need for such an organization, he claimed that “we are prepping for a war” and this war “is going to be a Black on White thing.”

The threat scenarios evolving around Afrikaner identity and the in-migration of Black neighbors create a figuration of internal division within Mindalore that is connected to the post-apartheid transformation of cities and the accompanying residential desegregation processes, especially in middle-class neighborhoods. The old racist figuration based on the differences of skin color and the juxtaposition of ‘Whites against Blacks’ still exists for some of the residents in Mindalore. Other White residents condemn the old racial moral order and a ‘Whites-only’ mentality. They referred instead to the moral good of neighborliness, like the Christian love of the neighbor, care for children or landowner solidarity. They emphasized that they had a good relationship with their Black neighbors and cared for one another.^[13] The old racist figuration that distinguishes between established Whites and Black outsiders, had been shaken up in Mindalore and is in a state of change. It is no longer the hegemonic figuration as it was in apartheid but is contested by an alternative figuration that builds on a middle class morality of neighborliness rather than race.

Locals-Externals Figuration around Environmental Pollution and Health

Johannesburg as a city came into existence when the largest gold deposits in the world were found there in 1886. Mindalore and Soul City are built over the ‘main reef,’ so there is an entire underground world of gold mining beneath them. This subterranean mining has effects on the surface. The legacy of gold is an ambivalent one. Besides providing for wealth and jobs, mining brings to the surface toxic byproducts, such as uranium and heavy metals. These are concentrated in the soil of the tailing dams, from which they are dispersed by wind and rain into the greater environment. Additionally, the landscape is scattered with basins of acidic mine water that often flood when it rains so that the contaminated water runs into the water system. Soul City and Mindalore are surrounded by mine residue deposits and such mining basins. Some parts of Soul City are literally built on an old tailing dam and some houses in Mindalore are built of bricks made from the soil of a tailing dam. Radioactive, toxic and acidic substances enter the environment of the two neighborhoods via the air and the water and get into the houses, the gardens, the ground water, in the food chain and eventually in the bodies of the residents. Residents of both neighborhoods – but especially people in Soul City – are highly exposed to these harmful substances and many complain about respiratory problems and eye and skin irritations. It is highly likely that long-term effects like cancer or kidney damage can result from this exposure (Harvard Law Clinic 2016: 70 ff).

The discourse about environmental pollution and concomitant threat to individual and collective health has mobilized residents and led to the emergence of local environmental activism. These civil society activities involved people from both Mindalore and Soul City, with the latter coming mainly from the most affected and oldest part of Soul City named Tudor Shaft. The residents of the two neighborhoods were joined by an environmental NGO, the Federation for a Sustainable Environment (FEO). The FEO entered the stage in 2004/2005 because residents of Tudor Shaft alerted them that their shacks had been built on top of the dump material of the Tudor Mine. The following years were characterized by a wide range of activities that bonded the participating residents in the face of an external threat. For them, the responsibility for the pollution and the associated health hazards clearly lay with the mining company Mintails Mining SA (Pty) Ltd. Their strategy was therefore to approach various legal and political institutions for help and to generate media attention in order to force those responsible to rehabilitate the environment and relocate the (most) affected residents. Appeals were made to the South African Human Rights Commission, arguing that their human right to a clean environment had been violated, the National Nuclear Regulatory Authority, a public body charged with protecting the public and the environment from nuclear harm, and the Supreme Court of South Africa, among others. In their arguments, the activists relied in particular on the National Environmental Management Act, under which mining companies are financially responsible for the “rehabilitation and management of negative environmental impacts” (National Environmental Management Act 1998: 6) of mining and must therefore retain the appropriate financial resources for this purpose. Mintails did not comply with this stipulation, in part a result of negligence on the part of politicians. And since the company has been in liquidation since 2018 it is likely that the estimated cost of R460-million for the environmental rehabilitation of the area (Liefferink 2020) will have to be carried by others. In the case of derelict and ownerless mines, of which there are about 6000 in South Africa^[14], the Department of Mineral Resources is ultimately responsible for rehabilitation, of which about 10 are carried out annually^[15]. The activists’ goal of holding Mintails accountable and thus ensuring environmental rehabilitation is de facto impossible, and it is equally unlikely that it will be carried out by state authorities in the foreseeable future.

In terms of establishing social relationships across the neighborhoods, however, it can be noted that environmental activism has played a central role. According to Mariette, chief executive officer of the FEO, relationships between residents of Soul City and Mindalore that did not exist previously developed through “joint activities, including workshops, conferences, [and] forums.” Sarah, a Black former resident of Tudor Shaft and a former FEO employee, introduced me to Martha, a White resident of Mindalore. They knew each other from their shared environmental activism. After Martha invited us to sit in her living room, the two of them chatted at length, exchanging news about how Sarah’s mother and Martha’s husband were doing, about their common past, and about various environmental research projects that were being carried out at that time. Giniel from Mindalore showed me the area and also parts of Soul City. He gained his knowledge about the place through tours with Mariette in the context of their environmental advocacy activities. He showed me where they had stood on one of the hills in Tudor Shaft, and “the Geiger-counter […] went crazy,” because of the highly radioactive soil. Susan, who as a former Soul City councilor (Ward 16) was also involved in environmental activism, spoke highly of Mark, the Mindalorian who moved away because he did not want Black people as neighbors. In response to my critical inquiry about that issue, she explained that he had always supported the concerns of Soul City’s Black population at various meetings regarding environmental activism, often against other White residents.

What these different examples show is that environmental activism was an experience that transcended the profound differences and inequalities of race or class. The environmental threat and how it was dealt with locally created its own figuration, which has, in turn, changed over the years. Living together in the same place and being threatened by the same polluted environment enabled mobilization processes that brought together activists from Mindalore and Soul City. They, as locals, fought for a common cause, their rights, health and the environment, against external actors, like Mintails and outside politicians, denouncing their irresponsible behavior. Over the years, this threat has lost its momentum and its mobilization potential, even if the initial problem remains unchanged, the threat figuration is slowly dissolving. What remains are personal relationships.

Studying Neighborhoods through Threat Figurations

While figurative fields in the two studied neighborhoods, such as partnerships, friendships, school or religion, are relatively homologous and show little change from the apartheid figuration, the three threat figurations discussed exemplify the multilayered and dynamic relationships in and across the neighborhoods and, thus, social change. Looking at the figurative fields around the different threats enables us to see the diverse forms of bonding and boundary-making and the various relevant categorizations. This shows both change and stability in relation to the long-lasting figuration that dominated apartheid. The threat of crime figuration, built on existing class differences between the two neighborhoods, is a long-lasting modulation of the apartheid figuration in that the race of the perpetrators matters while it is irrelevant for the middle class victims of crime. The threatened identity figuration is a perpetuation of the apartheid figuration and is itself long-lasting having survived the end of official apartheid in the early 1990s. The contesting neighborliness figuration started as an ephemeral phenomenon with neighbors having increasingly positive cross-racial encounters, but appears to be inscribing itself increasingly into group relations, thus acquiring a long-lasting quality. The threatened health figuration, finally, has the most ephemeral character, dissolving after a few years of activism. However, it should not be underestimated that the lasting relationships that developed might form the basis for future figurations.

Returning to the initial question of the analytical description of social change regarding group relations at the neighborhood level, the three examples open a window to observe different forms of intertwining national and local figurations as well as the interplay of ephemeral and long-lasting forms of figurative change and stability and thus reveal the local modalities of (post)apartheid instead of seeing Johannesburg only from above as a static city segregated by race and class. By applying a figurative lens, this case study from the Global South makes it possible to go beyond the epistemological blindness of global segregation research and re-conceptualize segregation in a more relational manner (cf. Fiel 2021). As an analytical tool, the concept of figurations is a useful complement for segregation research, because it opens up an alternative perspective on segregation with a more nuanced and dynamic understanding of diverse neighborhood relations across segregational boundaries, contributing to the understanding of urban inequality beyond the “tale of urban segregation” (Kuppinger 2004: 5). That said, the figurational perspective alone also has limitations, as demonstrated, for example, in its inability to identify large-scale urban patterns of social inequality, and must thus be applied in combination with other analytical and methodological tools.

Far from the dominant reading of figurations as a teleological endeavor with the eventual goal of social control and political engagement in the future (cf. Dunne 2009), the proposed interpretation applies the concept in a sensitizing way to shed light not only on long-term but also ephemeral forms of social change. By focusing on entangled developments of different temporal, geographical and societal scope, urban scholars are able to develop a more complex understanding of social change than that of movements between two static conditions. Besides the epistemological relevance, this also has implications at the political level. In this respect it is important to consider the interaction of “cognitive tools” in everyday life or politics and scientific “schemes of thinking” (Boltanski, Honneth, & Celikates 2014: 564), because they affect each other mutually. On the neighborhood level we can see a correspondence of the segregation approach with what tends to be a pessimistic view of the possibilities of overcoming divisions. By contrast, the figurational lens reveals to see a more nuanced and positive image by directing our gaze to potentialities for affiliation, solidarity and contact points between different groups. On what is closer to the truth, the case of South Africa shows that the constant reminder of segregation research of the flaws and shortcomings of democracy in South Africa and other countries needs to be complemented by something like a figurational analysis to identify the potential for positive change in diverse and multifaceted societies. This is not only true for South African cities but for segregated diverse and unequal neighborhoods around the world.