Metropolitics

Agrarian Fantasy, Settler Colonial Property, and the Making of Industrial Johannesburg

Renugan Raidoo — 2026-01-20T06:00:00Z

Some of the gated estates in and around Johannesburg and Pretoria sell residents a settler colonial fantasy of a bucolic idyll away from the urban condition. But Renugan Raidoo examines the important role agricultural surplus played in mining industrialization, which tells a much more complex story of urban–rural relations.
---- Series: Provincializing the “Real-Estate Turn” “A piece of the past has found its' [sic] way to the future” in all-white majuscule is the first thing one sees on the

- Essays / Africa, South Africa, Global South, Johannesburg, Pretoria, gated communities, rural, colonial urban planning, agriculture, industry, history, apartheid, real-estate turn, real estate

What future for periurban communities: clubbisation or differentiated social dynamics?

Violaine Girard & translated by Oliver Waine — 2011-11-16T09:12:22Z

In La ville émiettée, Éric Charmes describes the phenomenon of “clubbisation” in towns and villages in the outer suburbs, where there is a growing tendency to operate exclusivist policies, with the aim of effecting a social selection of inhabitants. Although Charmes's work raises many issues, it overlooks the diverse range of social and political dynamics that can be found in periurban areas.
The urbanisation of rural areas on the outskirts of cities – an ongoing process in France since the

- Reviews / governance, clubbisation, gated communities, periurban, local authorities, local councillors

Beyond dreams of village life: residential clubs and clubbisation

Éric Charmes & translated by Oliver Waine — 2011-10-26T05:00:00Z

At a time of increasing “metropolisation” and ever greater pressure on mobility, how can neighbourhood attachments be explained? These phenomena, far from being contradictory, would in fact appear to be two sides of the same coin. What's more, although city-dwellers remain attached to the neighbourhood in which they live, these attachments are changing, too. Using analyses developed in his recent work La ville émiettée (“The Fragmented City”), published by Presses Universitaires de France, Éric

- Essays / clubbisation, gated communities, periurban, mobility, local attachment