Böcker av Martin J. Murray

Martin J. Murray offers a groundbreaking guide to the multiplicity, heterogeneity, and complexity of contemporary global urbanism. He identifies and traces four distinct pathways that characterize cities today.

Despite the end of white minority rule and the transition to parliamentary democracy, Johannesburg remains haunted by its tortured history of racial segregation and burdened by enduring inequalities in income, opportunities for stable work, and access to decent housing. Under these circumstances, Johannesburg has become one of the most dangerous cities in the world, where the yawning gap between the 'haves' and 'have-nots' has fueled a turn toward redistribution through crime. While wealthy residents have retreated into heavily fortified gated communities and upscale security estates, the less affluent have sought refuge in retrofitting their private homes into safe houses, closing off public streets, and hiring the services of private security companies to protect their suburban neighborhoods. Panic City is an exploration of urban fear and its impact on the city's evolving siege architecture, the transformation of policing, and obsession with security that has fueled unprecedented private consumption of 'protection services.' Martin Murray analyzes the symbiotic relationship between public law enforcement agencies, private security companies, and neighborhood associations, wherein buyers and sellers of security have reinvented ways of maintaining outdated segregation practices that define the urban poor as suspects.

In postapartheid Johannesburg, tensions of race and class manifest themselves starkly in struggles over "rights to the city." Real-estate developers and the very poor fight for control of space as the municipal administration steps aside, almost...

A powerful critique of urban development in greater Johannesburg since the end of apartheid in 1994.