In the mirror, Isee myselftherewhere I am not, in an unreal, virtualspace that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself,that enables me to see myselftherewhere I am absent:such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality,where it exerts a sort ofcounteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground ofthis virtualspace thatis on the otherside ofthe glass, Icome back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it hasto passthrough this virtual point which is over there (Foucault 1986 [1967]: 24).

The mirror is an actual existing object, yet when I look at myself in the mirror, I see myself in a place that actually doesn't exist, namely in a mirrored image of the reality. This tricky relation between the real and the unreal is for Foucault characteristic of all heterotopias, making them places of powerful illusions and fantasies. Linking my reading of Foucault with the ethnography of the mall, this means that, first of all, like the mirror, which is an actual existing object, the mall is a materially existing urban place that people go to. Urban dwellers integrate the Maputo Shopping into diverse shopping circuits, giving the mall a distinct, yet milieu-dependent, role in their everyday spatial practices. Secondly, Foucault says that the mirror has the power to turn the actors' own existence more real, because from the mirror, they can look at themselves, and see how they or their world 'really' is. This is also the case for the mall: the mall as mirror renders the urbanites' own reality more visible to them, they can see themselves from a new perspective (through the mirror), and hence they become more aware of their reality. As the guard explained above, the mall as a mirror ref lects and makes visible to Mozambicans and tourists the achievements of the country, like the recovery from civil war and socialist times with empty shelves, being now a nation where at least the better-offs are able to participate in global consumer culture. Hence, looking at the mall is like looking into a mirror; it makes you aware of where the nation is actually standing, as if it were the embodiment of the mall managers' and politicians' discourses of modernisation and national progress. Yet it also renders visible, it materialises a further aspect of Mozambican reality: in the eyes of many users, the building and Guebuza Square is concrete proof that the rumours of corruption and the links between the legal and the illegal, between Guebuza and Bachir, are real. The mall hence makes socially visible the otherwise hidden social relations ruling the economy and politics, and at the same time unmasks what seems to be visible reality as an illusion. Not least, because of this mirror-like capacity the mall becomes formed in relation to all these other realms of urban life.

The third aspect of the mall as mirror is that there is something fundamentally unreal about the mirror, as it projects the actors' real selves onto a virtual space "on the other side of the glass", which is an "unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface" (ibid: 17), a place where the actor are actually absent, but the mirror makes them believe that they are there, in this other world 'inside' the mirror. Translating this to the mall, it means that the mall enables urban dwellers to project themselves into a virtual, unreal world, which mirrors the real world but, like a utopia, can also suspend and overturn in. Because of this capacity, mirrors, shopping malls and other heterotopias have one fundamental effect on human beings: they spark their imagination. Heterotopias invite actors to ref lect on their place in the world, make them more aware of what their reality is like and at the same time inviting them to imagine alternative ways of being in a utopic world.

Nelinha, the 16-year old school girl from Polana Caniço, walked past the large mansions hidden behind high walls in Sommerschield II on her way to school every day, and sometimes she saw the residents driving past her, sitting behind the darkened windows of their luxury cars. On some days after school, she used to go to Maputo Shopping, either with school friends, or alone to stroll around (*passear*), or to visit relatives working at a shop in the mall. She and her friends would walk around, stare at the windows and also stare at the Indian elite. At the mall, for once the elite are not hidden behind walls or car windows but share the same public space and can hence be observed, studied and judged.

Barbara: How did you feel when you were there? Nelinha: Uneasy. Because there were only (pause) big people (*gente grande*). I felt very small. I justwalked pastthem, my eyes fixed on the floor … I just watched, from the outside [of the shops], but Icouldn't enter to buy anything. See, my parents(pause) they are poor. So there is alwayslack ofsomething (Nelinha, resident of Polana Caniço,November 2010).

Being in this space together with *gente grande* (euphemism for wealthy and powerful people) felt uncomfortable to her, not least because the high prices and her empty pockets made her feel excluded. This provoked her ref lections about her own reality, making her aware of her own social position, the poverty of her parents and the many unsatisfied desires. The mall has an extraordinary relationship to reality, according to Nelinha. It is a fantastic place which renders visible her inner dreams, it is a paradise of abundance where everything she desires is available, the only thing lacking is money:

It is something from a dif ferent world and exaggerated. It seems as if you were in a world of dreams, as you see everything, everything that you want. You think: "If I had money, Icould simply take this, and that and that."When you get out ofthe mall, itfeels asif you were having a shock. Asif inside it was …  You enter and something changes there inside, andwhen you get out, you breathe, and you notice howyou returned to the normal life (Nelinha, resident of Polana Caniço, August 2012).

For Nelinha, being at the mall was a deeply transformative, almost religious experience, which she found extraordinary and, like an experience of liminality (Turner 1991 [1969]), made her feel different once she left the building and returned to the busy streets and to real life. When I asked her whether she felt better or worse after the visit at the mall, Nelinha explained:

There is always the feeling of deception, but nevertheless, I usually feel much better, because I think … I can still dream, I still have the capacity to achieve what I want. This is the spirit you feel when you get out: "I see things which I cannot buy and neither my parents can buy it for me." So I think I will study now with even more ef fort to be able to give to my children what I was not able to have (Nelinha, resident of Polana Caniço, August 2012).

Observing the wealthy provokes ref lection on Nelinha's own place in society; it triggers her imagination about her own future, her plans to study in order to move out of

poverty. Because she is young, she reasons, she can still dream about her future. The visit to the mall and walking through the world of the wealthy did not so much leave her feeling deceived about life, but rather motivated her to study harder. "One day I will come back, one day I will shop here" she thought (Nelinha, November 2010).

### *Where Minorities become Majorities*

In the neoliberal, post-socialist context of Mozambique, the Indian milieus occupy an ambivalent, tension-laden position. After the abolishment of the socialist *homen novo* ideology, citizenship became relatively undefined and a 'f loating signifier', a symbol with no fixed meaning. Many Indians fear becoming the new 'outsiders' (Sumich 2013: 114). At Maputo Shopping, though, they distinctly claim their space in the city and in urban society. In contrast to other spaces where they are a small minority, here they dominate the place, especially on Sundays, which does not always lead to an easy conviviality. For members of the Indian milieus, going to the mall is mainly about being together with members of their own milieu, while paying little attention to others.

On a Sunday in August 2012, I observed an Indian family, probably a mother, her husband and their daughter, sitting at a table in the middle of Guebuza Square for about 40 minutes, and they were, just like me, the anthropologist, observing the crowd. They performed 'civil inattention' (Goffman 1963) towards members of African milieus and barely looked at them, while they openly gazed at mall users from their own religious and ethnic background. They commented to each other about them, apparently without worrying that the observed could see that they were being gossiped about. They greeted and were greeted by other Indians and Muslims. In interviews, Indian users of the mall told me that they have a heightened awareness of being observed and being gossiped about at the mall by members of their own milieus. Senhor Ismail, 60-year old Indian resident of Sommerschield II, claimed that: "I don't' like the ambience very much … It's full of people, and there is a lot of gossip, a lot of talking (laughing)" (Senhor Ismail, resident of Sommerschield II, October 2010). For him, Maputo Shopping is not an anonymous place; here he sees and is seen by others who belong to his own social world, encounters which contribute to constituting this very same social world. This exposure to the Muslim-Indian public and the related gossip is experienced by him and others as social pressure to conform to certain morals and values, which is why he presented the mall as a place that he did not like.

The social closure enacted through looks and civil inattention provokes critique from urban majorities who have become the minority at the mall. Many non-Indian interviewees told me that they feel uncomfortable at the mall on Sundays afternoon and prefer to frequent it on other days when the Indian presence is less.

Diogo: On theweekendsthe mall becomesfull of Indians.  Barbara: And why do they prefer to go during the week? Diogo: I don't know, because it's less full.

Historically, the term *monhé* was applied to Swahili and African Muslim chiefs in the 19th century. In the 20th century, the Portuguese used the term to refer to Muslim Indians and people of Indian descent (Bonate 2007b: 139). Nowadays in Maputo, *monhé*

is used by urban dwellers to refer to members of Indian milieus of diverse origins. It has, however, a clearly derogatory tone, and it invokes stereotypes about the allegedly racist attitudes of Indian milieus which held an intermediary position during colonialism. In such moments of competition over urban spaces, when the Indian milieus, which otherwise constitute a minority, become a dominant majority in the Sunday mall, urban dwellers reactivate such colonial stereotypes about the allegedly racist attitudes of these milieus. They critique the Indian milieus' dominance with reference to the past system of racial hierarchy.

Twenty-year old Jacinta, a student living in the Casas Brancas section of Polana Caniço, often travels to Nelspruit to buy clothes which she sells in Maputo. In an interview about her experiences of South African cities, she told me that she sometimes felt unwelcome in restaurants with predominantly white customers in South Africa They would attend her because she was a client, but she felt that they did not actually want her there. When asked about whether spaces like this also exist in Maputo, she compared it to an experience at the Maputo Shopping Centre.

I remember that once at the Maputo Shopping, I was entering the mall with friends. Some *monhés* came and blocked our passage because they wanted to enter first. This created confusion, we almost fought. We felt as if they wanted to enter first because they are *monhés* andwe are black. But this doesn't exist here. If they are not happy, they should return to India …Here you have to learn to live togetherwith blacks because it's a country of blacks. But it does not exist a lot here, I don't feel it of ten (Samira, about 20-year-old resident of Casas Brancas, August 2012).

In Samira's narrative, Maputo Shopping becomes constructed as a place where racial hierarchies from colonialism can, especially on Sunday afternoon, return to the city. The sociality at the mall provides glimpses into the problematic past, a past which instances of encounters can bring back to reality in this heterotopic space. Like a history book, the mall as heterotopia makes her aware of the urban past, it renders the colonial heritage of the city more visible to her, while also increasing her awareness that these times are over, that she is now also a full citizen, and that she can claim her right to be in this space by literally entering the door first.

### *Heterotopic Relation between Malls and Domestic Work*

Approaching malls as heterotopias unravels how malls are entangled with other spheres of urban life, one of them being the labour entanglements existing in the realm of domestic work. When Olívia and I were strolling around the games arcade, Olívia drew my attention to an Indian-Muslim family, consisting of a woman in *hijab* and head scarf, her husband and a couple of their children, who were accompanied by a woman in a uniform with an apron. The woman in the apron was a domestic worker looking after the youngest child, a toddler. Olívia became angry at this sight and explained to me that it was despicable of this employer to make her domestic worker wear a uniform at the mall. She exclaimed with moral outrage: "They want her to use these clothes in order to mark difference, in order to show the difference to the public" (Oívia, August 2012). I asked how she believed the domestic worker felt in this situation. The domestic worker must be unhappy, she explained, as aprons are only supposed to be worn inside the house and were inappropriate for the mall. Olívia felt

negatively affected by the situation and disapproved strongly of the behaviour of the *patrão* (employer). For Olívia, denying the domestic worker the right to present herself as an urban citizen with decent clothes in this space of public life was an act of discrimination by the Indian employer. Later on the same day, on our way to the supermarket, we walked past another Indian family accompanied by a domestic worker. Olívia exclaimed: "Look, again, they force the domestic worker to wear work clothes in public to mark difference" (Olívia, August 2012). Only then she explained to me that she had looked for a job as a domestic worker recently herself. She was hence not only feeling pity for the domestic worker, but she imagined herself in her role, hence seeing herself where she was not (Foucault 1986 [1967]: 24).

At Maputo Shopping, the mall as a mirror makes urban dwellers more aware of the reality of urban society, its hierarchies and their social position in it. For Olívia, the mall makes visible the way employers treat their domestic workers, that they oblige them to wear uniform to mark social difference in public. This visibility of relations, which are usually lived in the intimate spaces of the home, renders the urban elites subject to critique and they become objects of moral judgement. The optical illusion of the mirror makes Olívia see herself in the role of the domestic worker, exposing her to the harsh reality which seems even harsher in the public of the mall. Maputo Shopping hence becomes a *heterotopia of illusion*, which exposes otherwise hidden aspects of urban reality, even exaggerates them, and also exposes "every real space … as still more illusory" (ibid: 27). The mall makes visible what is usually not acknowledged, namely, that the elite's lifestyles are deeply entangled with the lifeworlds of poorer milieus in the city, and domestic workers are needed to make their lives work, even on a family outing. What is often seen as an urban reality, namely, that urban elites can live enclaved lives disconnected from others in the city, is exposed as an illusion at the mall.

### **Greenstone Shopping Centre**

The Greenstone Shopping Centre is a regional mall situated on a hill in north-eastern Johannesburg, next to Edenvale and Modderfontein. Until a few years ago, this land formed part of a belt of green veld which became transformed into the spatial expressions of privately driven city building. The new area referred to as Greenstone is made up of secured business parks, warehouse complexes, shopping malls, townhouse complexes and gated residential communities with free-standing houses. The Greenstone Shopping Centre itself constitutes the centre, so to speak, of this new edge city officially called 'Greenstone Hill'. In contrast to the Maputo Shopping Centre, which is spatially integrated into the city centre, Greenstone Mall corresponds more to the type of suburban malls, as it is located in an area of urban sprawl, it is difficult to reach on foot, and it has inward-oriented architecture.

The inside of the mall consists of one long alley surrounded by shops and restaurants on two storeys. The mall is divided into two parts by a large main square with restaurants, movie theatre, and a large glass front leading to an artificial green area outside. This area has an artificial grass f loor where users can sit down, with playground equipment for children and a fountain. One can see the blue sky if looking upwards, but the square is surrounded by multi-storey car parks in grey cement. With its 85,000 square metres Greenstone Mall is a third larger than Maputo Shopping. It

has the facilities typical of a South African regional mall, with national retailers (Game, Edgars etc.), of which some seek to attract better-paid suburbanites (Pick n Pay, Woolworths), and some cheaper shops like Mr Price and PQ Clothing cater for the youth and people in search of lower prices. There are also a few boutique stores which do not belong to a chain. They moved here from the town centre of Edenvale which was the commercial centre for the larger area till the mall opened. The mall has leisure facilities like a movie theatre, a couple of restaurants, an indoor playground for children and even a licensed gambling venue. The shops and facilities cater largely for families with mid-range incomes; it is neither as fancy as the famous Sandton City mall nor is it oriented towards low-budget customers like some malls in the townships.

From the hill one has a nice view onto the high-rise buildings of the lower-lying Johannesburg CBD and the surrounding suburbs. John, a design architect who was engaged in many mall projects in Johannesburg and elsewhere explained to me that the builders probably did not take advantage of this view onto the cityscape because the inward-oriented architecture draws mallgoers attention to the appearance of and sociability with other mallgoers, which is more enjoyable than looking at the cityscape: "I believe that people enjoy seeing people. They interact with people in the way they pass each other, in the way they see each other dressed. There is a far stronger attraction to that than looking at a nice view" (John, October 2012).

Unlike the Maputo Shopping Centre where the boundaries between inside and outside are gradual and where there is a certain tolerance by the security personnel of informal traders at the entrance, the Greenstone Shopping Centre is tightly controlled and there is no room for economic activities apart from the formal. In contrast to the Maputo Shopping Centre where Guebuza Square is used by many pedestrians as a shortcut through the city, Greenstone Mall is not located on any existing pedestrian routes and is therefore only entered by people who specifically want to come to the mall. In contrast to Maputo Shopping where one can observe occasional beggars in Guebuza Square and poorly dressed children running up and down the escalators, at Greenstone Mall, the presence of visibly destitute people is exceptionally rare. The entry to the parking area is guarded by security booms and often security personnel stand at the boom and control the cars. The boom signals clearly that one is entering a space controlled by private ownership and private security companies. Heterotopias are contingent on such mechanisms of opening and closing, not least because they distinguish them clearly as different from spaces of ordinary life (Foucault 1986 [1967]: 26).

Greenstone Shopping Centre is owned by the Sasol Pension Fund, Sasol being a large South African company in the mining/energy sector. Sasol hence owns several malls in the country, not least because "large regional shopping centres perform better than any other segment of the property market in South Africa" (John, design architect, October 2012). During apartheid there were, however, also political reason for investing in malls: shopping malls in South Africa became a target for real estate investors because sanctions prohibited them from investing abroad (Marais 2001: 123). Sasol, nowadays a transnational company, was founded as a public corporation tightly linked to the apartheid modernist project and was privatised in 1979. The company has grown to what it is today as a result of subsidies and protection by the apartheid state and the cheap cost of African labour during apartheid. The profits generated at the mall will be used to pay the pensions of Sasol's workforce, a workforce which is still made up mostly of male, often Afrikaner, employees. Many mallgoers do not know

#### 248 Cities of Entanglements

who or what the owner of the mall is, and hence the history and politics behind Sasol's surplus capital and the complex ways in which the money spent by the consumer in the mall f lows back to the pension pay-outs of Sasol employees remain uncommented on in the city, a reality hidden behind the shiny façade. This stands in contrast to Maputo Shopping where the economic powers behind the mall are constantly commented on by urban dwellers.

### Abundance, Pollution and Exclusion

In the representations of Greenstone Mall, at least three different discourses are involved: there is (1) the narrative created by the marketing branch of the management in the promotional material which represents the mall as a space full of abundance, even nature and social relations; (2) there is a counter-discourse by environmental activists which blame the property developers for destroying nature, and (3) there is the discourse employed by the architects and planners of malls which portrays them as totally planned and calculated institutions with invisible walls which keep the poor away.

"Simply sensational shopping", was the slogan of the mall management on the Greenstone Mall website in 2013, and they promised that the mall offers "something for everyone" (Greenstone Shopping Centre 2013).8 Here you can buy "everything you need" for school at the stationery retailer CNA and customers can "eat as much as you like" for R75 at the Breakfast Buffet at the Cape Town Fish Market restaurant. In these website texts, marked by the extensive use of adjectives and superlatives (like 'trendy' fashions, 'exquisite' gifts, 'fabulous' home furnishing, 'fantastic' food outlets), the mall management portrayed the mall as a space of endlessly available goods. Yet the website promised more than mere consumption: it claimed that the mall is "a delightful oasis to those seeking a respite from it all", portraying Greenstone Mall as a secure oasis of abundance, to which urban dwellers can retreat from busy, stressful and chaotic city life. The introductory text on the website in 2013 announced that the mall was opened in 2007 "much to the delight of communities from Edenvale and surrounding areas". The reference to 'communities' indicates that the management want the mall to be seen not as an anonymous commodified space, but as a 'warm' and 'welcoming' place where the local 'communities' meet. With that they emphasise the rootedness of the mall, the connection to the locality and meaningful social relations. The logo of the mall consists of the name 'Greenstone' against a backdrop of two lines which allude to hills, probably representing Greenstone Hill on which the mall is located.

In the book *The Urban Revolution,* Henri Lefebvre pointed out that nature becomes one of the key problems in an urbanising world. What has once been abundant – space, water, air – becomes scarce, yet in advertisement, nature becomes fetishized. While nature is actually shrinking in the city, signs of nature and the natural are "multiplying, replacing and supplanting real 'nature'. These signs are mass-produced and sold. A tree, a f lower, a branch, a scent, or a word can become signs of absence: of an illusory and fictive presence" (Lefebvre 2003 [1970]: 27).

The fetishization of 'nature' in the naming of the mall as 'Greenstone' as well as its logo becomes particularly clear when juxtaposing it to the second representation

<sup>8</sup>  The following analysis is based on texts on the website as it was in April 2013 (Greenstone Shopping Centre 2013) aswell as promotional pamphletscollected during fieldwork in 2012.

of the mall upheld by environmental activists. Peter (ca. 65), is a resident of nearby Modderfontein whose parents moved from England to South Africa many decades ago in order to work for the dynamite company AECI. The company AECI was given about 4000 hectares of land by the Kruger government, land which then served as a safety buffer zone between the dynamite factory and the residential areas of Johannesburg. AECI constructed a workers' town, Modderfontein, for the European artisans (for more details see Behrens 2005). What used to be workers' houses separated according to their country of origin ('ethnic villages') has been transformed in the last few decades into aff luent gated communities and retirement villages where many of the former AECI employees live. In the early 2000s, AECI's property arm Heartland Properties, began to transform the former buffer zone, which was no longer needed because technologies had changed, into highly profitable urban land by pushing for its rezoning, putting in urban infrastructure like sewage in place, and selling it. The first large piece of land, 320 hectares, is where Greenstone Shopping Centre, as well as many strip malls and gated communities, were built.

The rapid transformation of green veld into the Greenstone area was not welcomed by some long-term residents of Modderfontein like Peter, not least because environmental pollution has become a major problem. The Modderfontein area contains a system of dams and a nature conservation area (Modderfontein Nature Reserve) with wetlands and a lake zoned as open land. These are areas which are not supposed to be built on. Since the Greenstone edge city has been built, the dams have suffered from severe pollution. Political activists, residents and politicians blame Heartland for this; apparently the bulk sewage infrastructure put in by Heartland before selling the Greenstone land for development was not large enough to carry the high density living.

Peter hence founded a small organisation lobbying to protect Modderfontein's nature. He remembers nostalgically his childhood days spent playing on the dams:

Before allthis happened,whenwewere kids,we played and learntto swim here,safely, and we fished and it was also a place where frogs and much more lived (Newsletter by Peter,November 2013,sent through Linbro Park Community Google Group).

Peter blames AECI and Heartland for selfish, profit-oriented practices which led to the pollution of rivers and dams, now "filled with sewerage, mountains of ash, trash, paint, oil and millions of golf balls" (Newsletter by Peter, November 2013, sent through Linbro Park Community Google Group). In 2013, AECI sold the second large piece of land, 1600 hectares, to the Chinese developer Shanghai Zendai for 1.06 billion rand. The Chinese company was planning to build a new Sandton-like city (Scott 2015, Ballard et al. 2017). The transaction was one of South Africa's largest single foreign direct investments. The sale was received very critically be the local activists as they fear that the Chinese will not be interested in ecological rehabilitation of the waterways.

Greenstone Mall and its representations as a place of abundance situated on Greenstone Hill upheld in its advertisements, or as a place where nature has been destroyed, a representation upheld by environmental activists, would appear to be an embodiment of Lefebvre's nature–urban relation. At the same time as nature becomes scare, which the environmental activists criticise, the "ideological naturalization becomes obsessive" (Lefebvre 2003 [1970]: 27). In contrast to Maputo where the counter-discourse that Maputo Shopping is a place of money laundering is very popular and even

inf luences shopping practices, in Johannesburg the counter-discourse of environmental destruction is little known beyond residents of Modderfontein who read the local newspapers.

In academia, malls are often portrayed as 'enclaves' and this also corresponds closely to the ways in which practitioners like John, a mall designer, represent malls, namely, as totally planned and calculated institutions with invisible walls which keep the poor away. John had been involved in many retail projects over his career. When developing a mall, he explained to me, "you want to create a machine which is going to draw as much money out of the surrounding population as possible" (John, design architect, October 2012). Shopping mall experts like him have developed a whole science of shopping including calculating walking distances, choosing certain colours and materials and avoiding others, choosing the lighting and the arrangement of shops and goods in such a way as to create an environment that seduces the urban dweller to consume maximally and to feel at ease (Chebat and Morrin 2007, Helten 2007: 247).

While urban dwellers appropriate spaces and imbue them with meanings, mall designers regard malls in abstract numbers, such as the internal rate of return (IRR) or foot traffic statistics. Despite this appraisal of the mall in abstract terms, John, like other mall planners, is also highly aware of the social relevance of malls. "It becomes a social heart of the city, for those who can afford" (John, design architect, October 2012). Yet he emphasised that the first motive for mall designers is to create profits, and the social characteristics are only of secondary importance. Mall investors and mall designers see urban dwellers primarily as consumers with spending power.

In the 1980s many malls had 'themes', yet this architecture of fantasy and escapism became widely criticised by architects in South Africa and elsewhere and was eventually replaced by what John calls 'international modernism', which is almost "Zen-like where less is more", a functional architecture with f lat and monochromatic materials, usually working with rectilinear forms avoiding curves (John, design architect, October 2012).9 This architecture of disconnection from cultural references makes sense in the post-apartheid city, according to John:

It has become this non-architecture, an architecture that is a statement of disconnection from the realities of people's traditional heritage. Which is just as bad and disconnected asthe theme architecture. The reason for that is, I think, what they call the rainbow nation. There are many dif ferent ethnic groups that make up South Africa. There is the fear that by selecting one ethnic group you are going to drive away others (John, design architect, October 2012).

<sup>9</sup>  Some of the financially most successful malls in the country, according to John, are themed malls, as their interior design does not demand adjustment to changing fashions. Other shopping malls tend to have a very short lifespan, as ways of lighting, types of shop front and fashion in design materials change quickly, and hence af ter a mere seven to ten years the finish of the mall is outdated. Investors either have to re-invest in order to keep up with newer malls or the mall will enter a downward spiral inwhich the high-end stores andwealthy customerswill leave and value storeslike factory outletswill enter (John, design architect, October 2012). All over Johannesburg there are indeed half-empty malls which have losttheir appeal and struggle to survive.Designed ascommercialspaces, appropriation for other usesis difficult, apart from fitnesscentres and outletstores(Parlette and Cowen 2011).

In contrast to apartheid where many shopping centres were reserved for white people, nowadays many different 'ethnic groups' interact at the mall. In terms of class, however, mall developers do not want to be as inclusive, but mall planners often purposely design barriers for poor people:

That is a wonderful transition that has happened. The only barrier in the design of shopping centres is the barrier to poor people. You try to keep them out in many respects. And that's done in a subtle way. If you ask any of the developers, they will not be as honest asI. They willsay: "No, the shopping centres are completely open to all levels of society." Whilstthatistrue in the ef fectthatthere is no physical barrier,the centres are designed to suit those that have money (John, design architect, October 2012).

According to John, the upper classes feel uncomfortable and unsafe in the co-presence of the very poor "because they perhaps are not as refined in manners and their methodology of dealing with each other. They are loud, they are maybe aggressive, they may be dirty", as John explained. The lower classes will also have feelings of insecurity "because they do not have as much as those who have more." In order to keep a mall profitable, a 'line' against the very poor needs to be drawn. Poor people driving away the rich at malls is the "biggest social reason for failure in South Africa" (John, design architect, October 2012).

In township malls the expenditure per capita is lower and customers who arrive by public transport (minibus taxi) stay longer in a mall than people arriving by car. Therefore, the malls and hallways in township malls are designed to be wider in order to accommodate greater numbers of people. At a mall like Greenstone, John explained, designers avoid wide hallways, as large open spaces can appear empty and anonymous. Designers rather try to create pedestrian congestion, especially in front of shops, in order to force people to enter them. Details like the number of toilets, the standard of the fittings in the toilets and the walking distance to the toilets can be used to inf luence consumer behaviour, such as how much time customers spend at the mall. Pedestrians are not preferred costumers as they have very low incomes, but taxi ranks – for people who can at least afford to pay the minibus taxi – are often integrated into the parking areas of South African malls. The taxi ranks, however, need to be positioned wisely, John explained, as car owners get uncomfortable if crowds of people with big packets walk past their newly leased cars which could get scratched.

For the selection of stores the notion of 'comparative shopping' is important for mall designers and marketing specialists: the various clothing stores are often positioned relatively close to each other so that customers have more options. The choice of the main supermarket ('anchor store') of the right size is crucial, as different supermarket chains appealed to different customers. The desire to keep the poor out is also the reason why many shopping malls do not provide many benches or other free seating areas apart from restaurants where mallgoers are obliged to order something: "As soon as you provide too much of those facilities, you allow the poor to occupy your spaces, which drives away the rich" (John, design architect, October 2012). Representations of malls by their designers often do not correspond to the way users actually appropriate malls, however. Approaching malls as entangled spaces of heterotopia entails multiple logics and is constituted by irresolvable tensions and contradictions, like the one between the advertisement of the mall as 'Greenstone' and its destruction

of nature, and the contradiction between the fantasy of exclusion of the poor and the messier reality.

### Shopping Routines in Johannesburg

The notion of enclave emphasises the disconnection and closure of a space. Foucault's notion of heterotopia, however, draws our attention to their entanglements with other spaces, and to systems of opening and closing which not only isolate heterotopias, but also "make them penetrable" (Foucault 1986 [1967]: 26). Shopping malls only come into being as spaces with social relevance by virtue of their connections and exchanges between inside and outside. Malls, like Greenstone Mall, can only create profit on the condition that urban dwellers integrate them into their shopping and leisure circuits and prove willing to cross the boundaries between home and mall, between public space and the privately owned space of public life, and often also between social worlds. Any ethnography of malls hence needs to explore how urban dwellers integrate the mall into their everyday urban trajectories.

### *Suburban Mall Routines*

HERE'S one thing that no other city in the country can of fer like Johannesburg does: shopping … shopping for Africa. From the upmarket Sandton Shopping Centre and Nelson Mandela Square to the fun Oriental Plaza and not-to-be-missed Rosebank Flea Market, Joburg is a shopper's paradise (Official website of the City of Johannesburg 2013).

Johannesburg has an elaborate and diversified shopping landscape. There are large, regional malls like Greenstone, strip malls without an entertainment character, old, deserted malls which lost customers because newer, fancier malls were constructed close by (e.g. Rosettenville Junction); new malls which cater for specific lifestyles like the middle-class youth (The Zone@Rosebank) or the commercial design scene (Design Quarter). Shopping malls constitute the central spaces in the shopping and leisure circuits of aff luent urban dwellers like the property owners in the suburb of Linbro Park. It was not always like this. Before the construction of the Greenstone edge city, the aff luent Linbro Park residents used to shop in Edenvale, a separate town on the East Rand belonging to the neighbouring municipality Ekurhuleni which has become drawn into the polynuclear conurbation of the Johannesburg city region.

Nowthewhole area hasjust filled [with newsuburbs and malls]. I have been around 20 yearsin Edenvale, Ican see the changes, I am becoming one of those 'remember when' (laughs) (Laura, 45-year-old resident of Edenvale,working in Linbro Park, May 2012).

With the construction of the new neighbourhood Greenstone Hill, with its malls and townhouse complexes, shopping circuits shifted away from Edenvale's town centre. Only a few local businesses, often family-run stores owned by ethnic minorities like Indians, Greeks, Portuguese, Italians or Jews, were able to survive (see also Hyslop 2005: 8).

Till the 1970s, suburbs mostly had a residential function and suburbanites commuted by car to the Johannesburg city centre for work, leisure and shopping. With the

edge city developments, these spatial practices started to change. For the majority of middle-class shoppers from the northern suburbs the CBD is no longer of importance, as on their way to the city centre they pass several malls with the same items found in the centre of any first-world city (Beavon 2000: 3). Also, members of the Linbro Park property owning milieu seldom venture into the CBD, and some even get lost on the streets of the CBD if they have to pick someone up from the long-distance bus station or show visiting family members around.

In order to grasp cityscapes and the way urban dwellers live in and constitute cities ethnographically, there is a need to replace conceptions of space as absolute, bounded territories with relational perspectives (Harvey 2006: 121, 133). In absolute terms, the mall is located at a distance of about five kilometres from the suburb Linbro Park, which takes about ten minutes by car. In relative terms, Greenstone Mall is 'just around the corner' for property owners in Linbro Park, in terms of how they describe it. Many of them visit the mall daily or at least a couple of times a week in order to buy groceries, go to the bank, visit the gym or eat out. For the property owners and many other milieus in Johannesburg, shopping malls have become the preferred site for leisure and consumption activities (see also Van Eeden 2006: 39). Today, urbanites even venture to shopping malls to visit movie theatres, bars, nightclubs and children's play parks.

Johannesburg's post-Fordist, postmodern shopping-scape depends on automobility (Czeglédy 2004). Since crime increased in Linbro Park in the 1990s, residents no longer even walk within the suburb, but drive to visit neighbours or attend community meetings. The drive from Linbro Park to Greenstone takes ten minutes if there is no traffic; in Johannesburg, where suburbanites are used to commuting long distances, these five kilometres constitute a short drive. Some of the tenants living in Linbro Park take much longer drives of up to 35 kilometres to areas to the east, like to Benoni and Boksburg, where groceries are cheaper. "The closer you get to Johannesburg's central areas, the more expensive the shops get" (Liz, 55-year-old resident of Linbro Park, June 2012).

Anna, tenant in Linbro Park, used to live with her brother who was a property owner and worked at a bank in Greenstone Mall. She usually took the backroads to the mall, as the highway was often packed with traffic. Every day she drove through the same entrance and parked her car in the same section which she chose carefully because of its proximity to her workplace as well as the supermarket (Anna, April 2012). In order to find her car again in the large, concrete jungle of the car park, she remembered landmarks like the name of a bar written on the concrete wall, after which she knew she had to turn left to return to her car. Because the many parking areas and the several entrances all look alike, users of the mall depend on way-finding devices (Lynch 1960: 3), mainly the fronts of restaurants and stores, in order to avoid getting lost.

Property owners in Linbro Park explain that they go to Greenstone because it is practical, and not because they seek out a specific public. "It's convenient and quiet" Claudia, about 30 years old, living in nearby Edenvale and working in Linbro Park, explained to me (Claudia, March 2012). Rachel, resident of Linbro Park, liked Greenstone because "it is big, open, there is everything you want, it has banks, and it is in the area" (Rachel, May 2012). Sixty-five-year-old Sarah, also a property owner in Linbro Park, works as manager of a shop at a nearby mall. She describes Greenstone Mall as a 'working class' mall, by which she does not refer to blue-collar workers, but to

the work-related rhythm of quietness and business which characterise the mall. The mall becomes busy at lunch time when employees working nearby meet friends or colleagues at the mall, it gets busy after work in the evenings when employees come to buy milk and bread, and on the weekends when families and couples come here for leisure and their weekly shopping. Unlike Sandton City and other high-end malls where the elite who do not depend on office hours mingle on weekdays, she pointed out to me, Greenstone Mall is quiet during the week.

Elderly people from surrounding suburbs frequent the mall. Nearby old age homes organise transport for their pensioners who spend some hours in the morning at the mall, shopping, strolling around and sitting at restaurants, till the transport fetches them again. Laura, a 45-year-old resident of Edenvale working in Linbro Park, explained to me: "My mother stays at a retirement home in the area. Monday, they go to Greenstone, Wednesday, they go somewhere else, Friday I think they go to Riebeek mall" (Laura, May 2012). In the mornings, mothers come with their toddlers to the mall to meet their friends after they have dropped the older children off at school. In the afternoons, teenagers come on romantic dates, drinking milkshakes together until they are fetched by their parents. For the children of Linbro Park property owners who are now in their twenties, however, Greenstone Mall does not form part of their leisure circuits, as they associate it with 'family' and prefer to go to the movies, restaurants and bars in more fashionable malls in Bedfordview, Sandton or Rosebank. Unlike the Maputo Shopping Centre where users tend to socialise at the mall in larger groups of up to ten people, the frequency of Greenstone is more individualised. Customers walk around alone, in groups of two or as nuclear families, ref lecting the more individualised social structure of the city. The walking speed at Greenstone Mall generally tends to be higher than at Maputo Shopping. During the week visitors tend to walk at a fast pace with a clear aim. The Mozambican strolling around (*passear*) at a slow pace for the sake of enjoying the public and the architecture is rather rare. On the weekends many Greenstone users' walking speed is more relaxed, but their attention tends to be on the shops and the goods on display and not so much on other mallgoers. The shopping mall is hence integrated in the diverse everyday practices and spatial routines of urbanites living in surrounding suburbs like Linbro Park. Malls hence emerge as deeply contextual and relational spaces, constituted by the way Johannesburg residents use the mall within the rhythms of their everyday life.

### *Township Shopping Circuits*

Greenstone Shopping Centre are just one space among many that urban dwellers weave into their shopping circuits. The shopping circuits Alexandra residents engage in in their everyday life look quite different from the shopping routines of the Linbro Park suburbanites. The retail facilities as well as physical access to them still ref lect apartheid inequalities, yet there is also considerable change. During apartheid, shopping malls were predominantly frequented by white milieus. The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (1953) gave the local state as well as private enterprises the right to reserve their publicly accessible facilities for specific racial groups. Petty apartheid separated everyday lives and spatial practices on a micro-geographical level (Houssay-Holzschuch and Teppo 2009: 355). Poverty and lack of transport also restricted the possibilities of participating in the mall landscape, which started to emerge from the 1970s on. Township dwellers' shopping circuits continued to take them to the CBD

and the informal shops in the township (Tomlinson and Larsen 2003: 48). Larger retail developments were forbidden in townships during apartheid and up to 1994 townships only had small, informal retail businesses (*spaza* shops) (Ligthelm 2012: 37, Tomlinson and Larsen 2003: 49). Still today township dwellers buy small quantities of the groceries they require daily like milk and bread at these shops. The Pan Africa commercial area, based in the industrial area of Wynberg at the entrance to Alexandra, has served Alexandra as a retail and transport hub for decades. The small supermarkets and butcheries have the reputation of being very cheap, so that domestic workers living in the nearby suburbs like Linbro Park come to shop here. Since the 1990s, the spending power of township residents has increased significantly. National retailers have thus become interested in expanding into these untapped markets, not least because suburban areas have become saturated (Ligthelm 2012: 37). Like many other townships in the last few years Alexandra has also received its own shopping malls. In 2009, Pan Africa Shopping Mall was opened, in relation to the urban renewal initiative, the Alexandra Renewal Project (ARP). The Pan Africa Mall is seen by many as a sign of the development of the township and a symbol for the growing inclusion into the aff luent consumption world of Johannesburg. In comparison to Greenstone Mall, however, many see Pan Africa Mall as quite ordinary. Bertha, resident of River Park, explained her comparative experience of the two places like this: "The first time I entered Greenstone, I was like 'wow'. And when I enter Pan Africa I am like "ok, this is simply a mall" (Bertha, June 2012).

The shopping landscape has become diversified for Alexandra's residents. Many Alexandra residents continue to go to the CBD where small, often immigrant-owned shops offer low prices. Many of the women interviewed compare prizes across the different supermarkets available in the Pan Africa area and buy goods where they are cheapest. For township shopping rhythms, time is an important factor.  Shopping rhythms by households with multiple income sources, though, depend on more complex rhythms. Bertha, 30 years old and living with her sister in River Park, used go shopping on the first, the tenth and the twentieth of the month. On the first day of the month, she receives child grants, on the tenth she receives the rent from their tenants (she and her siblings owns property in River Park), and on the twentieth her sister gets her salary. As many households can only afford to shop once they receive the grants, the rhythms of the malls they frequent are entangled with the rhythms of grant pay-outs.

Based on the interviews and observations I could distinguish at least four different types of mallgoer from Alexandra at Greenstone Mall. The first type are members of aspiring middle-class milieus who own a car and have adopted similar shopping practices to suburban milieus, except that they continue to live in the township, often for financial reasons. They drive to Greenstone or another mall almost daily to buy groceries, and malls have become a firm part of their leisure and shopping circuits. The second type of mallgoer from Alexandra is people who shop for 'specials', so people who only go to the mall because of a specific sale. These members of poorer milieus hear about sales and specials on the TV, in newspapers or pamphlets, and go to buy in large quantities. The third type of visitor is the young township dwellers who go to Greenstone for what they call 'window shopping' (see below). with or without money in their pockets they go to the mall as a leisure activity, to look at goods or people, similar to

the Mozambican *passear* (strolling around). On Saturdays in particular I used to bump into acquaintances from Alexandra at Greenstone Mall who were there for 'window shopping', in the company of their romantic partners or friends. The fourth type of township mallgoer from Alexandra is the workers who are employed at the Greenstone Mall or at nearby malls and spend their lunch breaks there.

Greenstone is also about five kilometres away from Alexandra, yet for township dwellers, it is more complicated to get there than for suburbanites who own a car. Alexandra's convenient location in the midst of the northern suburbs puts it in the proximity of many malls in the surrounding areas, like Balfour Park, Norwood and Greenstone, but it is complicated to get there by public transport and relatively expensive. In order to save transport money, many River Park residents, the part of Alexandra situated closest to the N3, prefer to walk to Greenstone. There are no sidewalks, which means that pedestrians walk along dangerous roads. Apart from speeding cars, criminals are also major obstacles on the walk from River Park to Greenstone. Muggers waiting on the pedestrian bridge across the N3 highway are well aware of when people receive their social grants or salaries and mug workers and mallgoers on their way. Some workers, therefore, avoid the bridge and directly walk or run across the N3 highway, which is obviously very dangerous. In addition, trails have emerged along the highway where pedestrians often walk. The concrete jungle, where usually only cars speed by, has become appropriated by urban dwellers, making the city the product of many builders (Lynch 1960: 1). On the one hand, this shows that Greenstone Mall is indeed characterised by many barriers, limiting its accessibility for people with no car and little income. On the other hand, it shows the importance of acknowledging that despite these barriers, at least some township dwellers regularly venture to Greenstone Mall, weaving it into their shopping and leisure circuits. Because of urbanites' agency, exemplified by the trails along the highway, a mall sitting on a distant hill like Greenstone becomes entangled with township spaces.

### Heterotopia of Compensation

Shopping malls as heterotopias have, in relation to the rest of the spaces, a function (Foucault 1986 [1967]: 27). Maputo Shopping Centre has the function of illusion: for its users, the mall dismantles reality as illusory, it renders visible things which are otherwise invisible, and it sparks imagination. The Greenstone Shopping Centre, in contrast, has the function of compensation. As an entangled heterotopia, the mall compensates for what urban dwellers find is lacking in other urban spaces. Such heterotopias of compensation create "a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours [the rest of the spaces] is messy, ill constructed and jumbled" (ibid: 27, 21). Heterotopias as counter-spaces are real places "situated outside all other spaces destined to efface, to neutralize, to compensate or purify the spaces they oppose" (Boyer 2009: 54). Greenstone Shopping Centre is such a heterotopia of compensation in relation to the troubled, cramped shack living, the danger of chance encounters with strangers in public streets and the deep inequality felt in domestic work relations.

### *Safe Chance Encounters*

Many of the Linbro Park property owners have become regular customers at stores in Greenstone Mall and the surrounding strip malls. Interactions between customers and shop employees are in general informal and friendly; after few visits they acknowledge that they know each other, and the relationship becomes more personal. Greeting rituals (Hello, how are you?") often transform into brief conversations about the weather and many soon ask for each other's names and remember them. When I accompanied Regula, a 30-year old Swiss tenant living in Linbro Park, to the gym on Greenstone Hill, I noticed that she greeted the gym employees by name and vice versa. Gabriel, the 23-year old son of a property-owning family in Linbro Park, works out every day at the fancy Virgin Active gym at Stoneridge (one of the strip malls at Greenstone) and often eats there at the Fruit & Veg City supermarket with his best friend.

The managers are all Portuguese and Greek boys, they know us. And they always put extra pasta for our bowls. They are the best(Gabriel, 23-year-old son of a property-owning family in Linbro Park, May 2012).

Becoming a regular customer at a bar, restaurant, shop or gym meant for them that urban anonymity became transformed into acquaintanceship. Although the supermarket chain Fruit & Veg City has multiple stores across the city of Johannesburg, the branch at Stoneridge takes on a different meaning for Gabriel because of his casual social relations to the managers. Many young people drive across town to a specific franchised branch of News Café, a bar popular among middle-class youth and young professionals. Although the food and drink served at News Café in Sandton are identical to the News Café branch in Bedfordview, customers may have become friends with the manager and other customers, social relations which give the otherwise anonymous franchised bars a distinct identity. Through the construction of social relations as well as memories attached to spaces, apparently identical franchised branches become lived spaces with distinct place identities. Such forms of appropriation are easily overlooked, as they do not leave traces nor are they visible to outsiders.

Linbro Park residents go to Greenstone mostly with the intention to shop and less for leisure, but nevertheless social relations with other customers become enacted at the mall in ephemeral situations of interaction. As explained in chapter 4, with the end of apartheid and conf licts about competing future visions for Linbro Park, the active, leisure-based associational life in the suburb has diminished since the 1980s. Victorian sports have ceased to be a key realm for the construction of neighbour relations and nowadays it is through the internet and in activities related to security governance that residents build up at least some neighbour sociability. The mall is one of the very few urban places where neighbours from Linbro Park can bump into each other by chance. Neighbours may have very little to do with each other in everyday life, but serendipitous encounters at the mall help to keep up the relations, and to remind each other of the neighbourliness, so that these relations can more easily be reactivated in case one needs help from a neighbour, for example because a horse has strayed or a burglary has taken place.

Laura was living with her family in Edenvale and working at the King's School which belongs to the charismatic church LRC in Linbro Park. For her, the mall has a bit of the character of a town centre where: "You often meet somebody that you know. From church, from school, your neighbour. You don't even get to see your neighbour usually, but when you see them it's in the mall (laughs) or driving past" (Laura, May 2012). So not only neighbour but also church relations are fostered through chance encounters at the mall. This social relevance of Greenstone Shopping Centre for the strengthening of religious ties is even mentioned in sermons at the LRC Church in Linbro Park. At one church service, a volunteer said:

Yesterday Iwentto Greenstone Shopping Centre,to go to a shop, justto buy something. But then I only came out two hours later. I bumped into people from the church, we wentto have cof fee. You can't go to the mallwithout meeting anybody from the church (volunteer,church service LRC Church, September 2012).

The church not only provides spiritual guidance but also creates a warm, sociable environment, which stretches beyond the church into other urban spaces like the mall and which is strengthened through chance encounters. Apart from the mall, the possibilities for chance encounters have become very limited in Johannesburg where suburbanites rarely walk on public streets, moving around largely in their cars. Chance encounters with strangers in public settings like streets are mainly seen as threatening by suburbanites: they suspect the stranger may be a criminal aiming to hijack their car or to grab their handbag. In relation to these other urban spaces, where chance encounters are dangerous and avoided, the tightly secured and orderly spaces of shopping malls with their franchised gyms and restaurants become heterotopias of compensation. Here suburbanites can enjoy the serendipity of urban public life, mingle safely among strangers, build friendly acquaintanceships without any responsibilities, and keep up the feeling of belonging to certain 'communities', like the church or the neighbourhood, without actively investing much time in them.

### *Escape from the Shack*

Surprisingly, this enjoying of safe encounters, compensating for experiences in other urban realms, also shows up in narratives by mallgoers from Alexandra, the big difference being, however, that Alexandra residents need to cross social and spatial boundaries to get to the mall. While the mall in Alexandra, the Pan Africa Mall, is in their view a space belonging to the township lifeworlds, Greenstone is experienced as a social space determined by different public orders, populated by other milieus than they ones they share everyday life with, and with a different sense of place. Bertha, 30-year-old resident of River Park, considers Greenstone to be tidier, quieter and less tiring than the bustling Pan Africa commercial area with its many informal traders on the street.

[Pan Africa] It'scheap and it's less, but it looks untidy. When you get out from the mall, you can't even move yourtrolley from there to there, because everyone is making noise, everyone is selling. When I come back, I have this huge headache (Bertha, resident of River Park, June 2012).

At Greenstone Mall, Bertha and others believe, customers are expected not to shout or to run. At the end of the month when workers receive their salaries the supermarkets at Pan Africa commercial area become very busy, a time which many customers experience as stressful, not least because they have to remain aware of pickpockets. There are cameras in shops, but they cannot capture who steals from whom in the pushing and shoving. Greenstone, on the other hand, Bertha explains, "is open", and hence you can "do your shopping peacefully" and "feel free" (Bertha, June 2012). Being 'free' here does not refer to the idea that one is able to purchase whatever one likes, but rather to the safe sense of place, to being able to let one's guard down. Because of the tight security at the mall, mallgoers are protected from encountering "people that you didn't even want to meet" (Letsatsi, resident of River Park, June 2012), like pickpockets. At Greenstone, you could lose your purse, and because of the mutual visibility in the open hallways, there is more social control, and someone would give it back to you, Bertha explained.

You can throw something, maybe a purse,someone willsay: "Sorry mam, you lost your things." You can learn and understand. A person can see a person. But in Alexander, someone would pick it up and take it. I would also do that (Bertha, resident of River Park, June 2012).

Nnana10, field assistant from River Park, was living a life in limbo, sometimes working part-time in a coffee shop or as a domestic worker in Linbro Park, sometimes living at 'home' in a rural area where life was cheaper and where the shack was larger than the one her mother rented in River Park. In 2012 she considered her life to be difficult and felt that she lacked perspectives for her future. The lack of private space in the small shack she shared with her family was often difficult for her, especially when she was angry or stressed. In order to avoid fighting at home, she sometimes escaped to the mall, where she could calm down. "And when I come back, I am better again" (Nnana, June 2012). For Nnana, being at the mall was like entering a dream world, which compensated for the world outside and enabled her to forget about the intricacies of everyday life. Window shopping was for her a form of escapism and a ritualistic cleansing experience which she even compared to going to church. Entering the mall without money could be 'painful' for Nnana, as she explained to me, but this would not hinder her from enjoying being there.

Nnana and many other township dwellers live in conditions of high density with a lack of private space. This situation can cause anxiety and stress, which many township dwellers experience as pathological (see chapter 2). Privacy and private space are constantly contested privileges in Alexandra. For these township women, escaping to Greenstone compensates for the continuous invasion of their personal space taking place in dense township living. As a heterotopia of compensation, Greenstone is a more orderly, quieter and safer space than the bustling commercial centre of Pan Africa, allowing township dwellers to let their guard down and feel 'free'. For these moments, the mall as heterotopia neutralises the hardship of everyday life, it provides an escape into an illusionary world where everything is inverted: density turns into openness, lack turns into abundance, sorrow turns into carefreeness, at least for a couple of moments. Also managing to look good and to receive compliments, albeit with simple clothes (Aceska and Heer 2019), can give a sense of victory and achievement,

<sup>10</sup>  InHeer (2017) I referred toNnana as Sbongile for reasons of anonymisation. Because she desired so, I use in this publication her actual name.

providing an instantaneous compensation for the harsh reality of urban inequality where you can only lose because you were born in the wrong neighbourhood, went to the wrong schools, and you have the wrong passport, or none at all.

### Domestic Workers: Glimpses of Freedom

Rita was a domestic worker living and working in Linbro Park in 2012, and she sometimes frequented Greenstone Mall to which she drove in her *skorokoro* (Sesotho word used to refer to dilapidated old cars). She used to buy her groceries at the cheaper supermarkets in Alexandra, in the Pan Africa commercial area, but sometimes she ventured to Greenstone just for leisure and window shopping. She would enjoy having a coffee at one of the restaurants and observing the other visitors who had more money than her, she told me. While mixing with these people from all races she would feel 'free', but also a bit isolated, especially as she was generally short of money. For Rita, this 'freedom' was not possible in Linbro Park. She and many other workers living in domestic quarters in Linbro Park experience a 'lack of freedom' in the suburb, not least because their landlords, who are at the same time their employers, impose house rules like forbidding visitors or having their children live with them (see chapter 3). Many also experience a 'lack of freedom of speech', by which domestic workers meant in interviews that in the asymmetric relation of dependence it is very hard to speak up to their employers. So for Rita, the freedom of mixing with aff luent suburbanites at the mall was linked to her experience of a 'lack of freedom' whilst living in a white neighbourhood, entangled in a dependent, paternalistic relationship with the property owners. Hence, for her and others, the mall offered alternative, new forms of encounters between township dwellers and suburbanites beyond what she was used to within the realm of domestic work. Here, she enjoyed moments of togetherness, of solidarity, even hints of feelings of equality with white women, compensating for the structural inequality shaping her interactions with her employers in Linbro Park.

Nnana's mother worked for a property-owning family in Linbro Park for decades, while she and her sister grew up with relatives at 'home' in a rural area. Sometimes they came to stay with her mother for a couple of weeks, and they played with the children of the property owners.

I started meeting white people when I used to visit my mam, when she used to live in Linbro Park. Iwouldfind other kidsthere,thewhite kids, andwe played together. That's howI have metwhitesfor the first time.  They are not so bad, like we have been told, you know (laughing) (Nnana, resident in River Park, June 2012).

At the time of the research, Nnana sometimes stayed for a couple of weeks in her mother's shack in River Park, and for the rest of the year she lived in a township in her rural 'home'. Her encounters with whites had become reduced to the workplace – she was sometimes employed as a day-worker for property owners and family businesses in Linbro Park – and to the Greenstone shopping mall. While her experiences at the workplace were often rather negative, as she found the work overly taxing, badly paid and she often felt poorly treated, her narratives about encounters at the mall were more positive. When I accompanied Nnana to the affordable clothing store PQ at Greenstone, she repeatedly drew my attention to white customers, as she found their pres-

ence quite remarkable. Other interviewees from River Park mentioned that they were positively surprised to see white people in the low-cost shops at the mall, because they shared the stereotype that all whites are wealthy. Looking for bargains side by side at PQ and knowing that 'the other' was also concerned about affordable prices, produced positive feelings, and what I call *shopping solidarity.* In situations of shopping solidarity, social boundaries become crossed and ephemeral feelings of equality and togetherness based on these similar shopping concerns, namely finding bargains, emerge.

When I enter a shop today in Alexandra mall, I find a woman, when I go to Greenstone mall, I find a mother doing the shopping. I am like "Madam, this is so expensive, how food costs too much." And then we talk about it (Bertha, resident of River Park, June 2012).

Bertha does not refer to a racial category in this narrative, but from the fact that she addresses the stranger with 'Madam', a term used in domestic work relations, it can be deduced that she has a woman from an aff luent suburban milieu in mind. Apart from sharing concerns about money, their similar roles and concerns as mothers may lead to shopping solidarity, and hence provoke an instantaneous sense of fellow feeling among female strangers who share concerns regarding the care of their dependants and households. The women would make use of those moments of standing side by side at a shelf checking prices to start a friendly conversation, commenting on the goods that the other was scrutinising, complaining together about the rising grocery prices or recommending that the other buy a certain piece of clothing. Sometimes men would start talking to Nnana in shops and ask for her opinion about a gift they were buying for their girlfriend or wife. These short interactions constituted an key part of the pleasurable experience at the mall: "You get to meet different people from different places, you know, you get to know different people, how they operate" (Nnana, June 2012). She would first compliment the person with a simple 'hello' and from the tone of voice in the response, whether it was friendly or disinterested, she would decide whether to start a conversation or to walk away. Rejected encounters often became recounted in negative terms in the interviews, interpreted as a re-enactment of racial boundaries. Basani, a 26-year-old woman living with her boyfriend in the same yard as Nnana in River Park, remembers one negative experience with a white man at the mall.  She asked why and he responded: "You are too close, I need air." She then talked with her friend in Xitsonga and the white man got angry, complaining that they were insulting him. In the interview she speculated about his intentions, wondering whether he was thinking that she as a black woman wanted to steal his money and was therefore standing so close to him in the queue. But she also recounted positive experiences across racial boundaries at the mall, for example a white man who wanted her advice when he was buying clothes for his baby (Basani, resident of River Park, June 2012).

When I asked Bertha whether it made a difference if these mall users she would brief ly chat to at the mall were black or white, she responded that only a minority of them would still have 'empty knowledge' (a euphemism for racism).

Forsome people, they still have that thing of 'we arewhite and they are blacks'. But normally, people change. Some of them change because of the religion [LRC Church]; they have learned that we need to love one another. They have learned that, now, they are white, but they still need domestic workers, and they are black. So they need to learn to love, because those people, they are keeping their children, and those people, they are cooking for them,so they need to learn. And look at the garden boy, it's a black guy (Bertha, resident of River Park, June 2012).

In this quote Bertha links her experiences with white people at the mall to the discourse of the LRC charismatic church (see chapter 6), which she had frequented for a couple of years. She links the need for whites to become less racist to the everyday realities of interactions in the workplace and the often-unacknowledged dependency of white women on their domestic workers and gardeners for child rearing, cooking and security. Living apart yet shopping together at the mall thus enables these women to create sociabilities and ways of belonging which move beyond the old racial categories, even though these become easily reactivated in encounters experienced as negative. The mall becomes a stage where chance encounters across social boundaries can take place, chance encounters imbued with considerable symbolic meaning derived from their heterotopic relationships with other urban realms like domestic work, urban religion and street life.

### **Conclusion**

Whether the mall constitutes a normal place or not, a part of everyday routine or rather of rupture, varies across urban milieus and lifestyles and is, hence, less determined by the architecture of the space than by the place urban dwellers accord the mall in their everyday lives. For the residents of aff luent areas, both in Maputo and Johannesburg, the respective mall has a firm place in their daily routines, they go there regularly to shop and to stroll around; it constitutes a familiar ground where they feel comfortable and know how to act. For the residents of poorer areas, again in both cities, the malls hold an extraordinary place in their urban lives, the visits are special occasions, the urbanites need to cross social and spatial boundaries to get to the mall where they constitute a minority. Going to the mall is something which they have to learn; the mall may become familiar, more or less known to them, but not entirely normal.

At the beginning of my research I told the DA politician, Thomas, about my plans to do research on encounters between suburbanites and township dwellers at the Greenstone Shopping Mall, and he reacted with surprise, because, as he pointed out, people from Alexandra do not shop at Greenstone. When I talked to a domestic worker in Linbro Park about the politician's reaction, she responded: "They [people from Alex] do shop at Greenstone! Not all of them, some go to Pan, but they do!" She wanted to know whether the person who had told me the contrary was black or white. When I said that he was white, she said. "Ah, some white people think we can't go shopping where they go because they think we can't afford. But even with a little money we can go there and shop" (Agnes, domestic worker in Linbro Park and resident of River Park, April 2012).

I remembered this conversation when the ethnographic analysis of Maputo Shopping revealed the extent to which Indian mallgoers more or less politely ignore the

presence of African customers, while observing people from their own milieu. While interviewees from the poor neighbourhood of Polana Caniço in Maputo and Alexandra in Johannesburg told many stories about encounters with urban elites at the mall, in interviews with the urban elites few such stories came up. They paid little attention to mall users who did not belong to their own social world; for them it was rather encounters with members of their own milieus that created the sociability they talked about in interviews. When I asked Sarah, a resident of Linbro Park who managed a shop at Greenstone, whether residents from Alexandra frequented the mall, she responded: "I think they do, because (laughs) I know they have an awful lot of problems there with security" (Sarah, property owner in Linbro Park, May 2012). Referring to Alexandra's residents as security threats at the mall, she denied them recognition (Honneth 2003) as fellow consumers, making them socially invisible. Such social invisibility of marginalised mallgoers in the eyes of the dominating group has also been observed elsewhere. Van Leeuwen, in her ethnography of middle-class lifeworlds and malls in Jakarta, describes how the middle classes were 'blind' to the presence of beggars at the mall:

The ability to overlook people unless they complied visually with middle-class standards of dress and appearance seemed an innate quality of the peoplewho did comply with this dress code. I never saw, for instance, children take notice of beggars, street children orscavengers, except when forced to, that is, when approached whilst in a car. Itseemed asif they simply did not exist, asif they did not form part of the socialconfiguration of the moment (Leeuwen 2011:168).

Mall builders and mall architects like John portray malls as exclusionary spaces where the poor are made to feel uncomfortable on purpose, so that the wealthy feel safe and consume maximally. Mall designers believe that they can use architecture to attract or repel groups of customers and seduce them to consume. This conception of malls as abstract spaces, as containers that determine agency, is intentional. It is not an innocent representation but an ideology serving their capitalist strategy: they want potential investors to trust them that malls are perfectly designed money-making machines, and hence invest capital in their projects.

This ideology of malls as tightly controlled, secluded spaces of the wealthy has impacted on academics' views on shopping malls. Portraying malls as enclaves of the elites, disconnected from urban realities and hence like a foreign body in the organically grown urban tapestry, ref lects the ideology of mall builders, of how they want their malls to be seen by potential investors. The lived reality of malls, however, is much more entangled, multiple and contradictory. The representations of the malls by their marketing specialists are inf luential: so, the portrayal of Maputo Shopping as entry point to global modernity, where the city becomes connected to the synchronicity of global time, and the narrative that Greenstone Mall is a safe place for rejuvenation and abundance where customers can f lee the bustling city life. These hegemonic images of the malls, however, become contested by counter-representations of these spaces, upheld by mallgoers as critical citizens: in Maputo, there is the image that Maputo Shopping is a place of money laundering, where the hidden relations between the political and the economic become manifested in Guebuza Square. In Johannesburg, environmental activists criticise the destruction of nature and pollution the Greenstone Mall and surrounding gated communities have brought to this urban area. Malls are hence anything but uniform, uncontested urban spaces; rather there are multiple and competing ways of conceiving malls. Although the mall management and mall builders have the most resources and the power to spread their definitions of what malls are – through marketing activities and professional knowledge – they do not have total control over who uses their malls, how urbanites use them and how they conceive them.

Seeing malls as enclaves is a limiting, partial perspective on these urban spaces. Rather than emphasising disconnection and disembedding from the local context, the ethnography of the two malls drew attention to the way urban dwellers integrate the malls into their shopping circuits and everyday routines, in ways which ref lect and constitute their milieu membership. Urban dwellers embed the malls through their ways of appropriating and using them within the local context, giving them a local 'f lair', like the Mozambican way of rearranging tables and chairs constantly in line with the changing group composition of families and friends spending time together at Guebuza Square. Malls need to be understood as relational spaces, constituted by the spatial practices of their users, and receiving their meanings only from their relationship to other urban spaces. Understanding malls as heterotopias places these multiple relations to other urban spaces at the centre of the ethnographic analysis; malls as social spaces cannot be understood only in terms of themselves.

Maputo Shopping, on the one hand, can be seen as a *heterotopic mirror,* making the urban dwellers more aware of what urban reality looks like and of their place in society, yet at the same time it also inspires them to imagine a different life, not least because here the lives of urban elites, otherwise hidden behind walls, become visible to them. As a mirror, the mall renders the invisible visible, and makes reality intelligible, like the hidden relations between political and economic power, between the legal and the illegal. The mirror enables the mall users to look at the city from a mirrored angle and makes intelligible where the city is heading in the future: an urban development driven by the interests of capital in which gentrification will expel Nelinha and other mallgoers from Polana Caniço to peri-urban areas.

Greenstone Mall, on the other hand, emerges as a *heterotopia of compensation*. Suburbanites, and less often township dwellers, venture here to replace the danger of stranger interactions in public spaces with the safe sociability of shopping side by side in the orderly, quiet, spacious mall. The mall is a utopian world, yet also a real place, where township dwellers can pretend to be aff luent, where they can f lee to from their small shacks and enjoy the glitz and glamour, where interactions with white women evoke hopes and dreams about a transforming world. For suburbanites it compensates for the lack of urban joys in their other spaces of everyday life, like the tightly secured, walled homes, the lonely cars, the streets, where strangers are always a threat and where chance encounters are a problem. The mall promises safe mingling in anonymous crowds, with ephemeral encounters with acquaintances, neighbours and distantly known fellow churchgoers, which is a sociability distinct from the denser social ties and even social control enacted by the Indian elite at Maputo Shopping.

These distinct meanings of the two shopping malls under scrutiny – *heterotopic mirror* versus *heterotopia of compensation* – are also ref lected in the relationship between the mall and domestic work in the two cities. In Maputo, the mall turns the social relations between Indian elites and their domestic workers visible, and hence invites

critique and moral outrage from mallgoers at this essentially colonial relationship perpetuated in the postcolonial city. In Johannesburg, the mall offers an alternative, new form of interaction between township dwellers and suburbanites beyond the domestic work relationship. Here, domestic workers are freed from the asymmetric, paternalistic relations and can enjoy moments of togetherness, of solidarity and maybe even feelings of equality with white women, instances which compensate for the structural inequality shaping their domestic worker relationships outside the mall. In both cities, in both malls, the stock of knowledge and memories of encounters in domestic work relations in suburban homes distinctly shape the way in which encounters at the mall become interpreted and experienced. Because of such heterotopic relations between the mall and domestic work and between other diverse spaces of urban life, be they places of private or public life, our understanding of cities can only be enhanced if we focus on the entanglements of spaces and people.

©Barbara Heer, Maputo Shopping, 2011

©Barbara Heer, Greenstone, 2012

©Barbara Heer, N3 highway, 2011

©Barbara Heer, River Park, 2015

## **Closing Remarks**  Urban Entanglements as Blind Fields

Maputo, and even more to the point, Johannesburg, have long been and continue to be treated in the academic literature as *divided cities*, characterised by divisions resulting from a legacy of segregation inherited from colonialism and apartheid, as well as experiencing new forms of segregation invoked by neoliberal city building and the anxieties of urban elites around crime. That these two forms of segregation exist and shape Maputo and Johannesburg is uncontested, and the ethnography thus presented reaffirms this. The chapters have even focused on extreme cases of spatial segregation, namely, an urban area divided into an aff luent suburb and a poor township in Johannesburg, and an urban area divided into a wealthy elite neighbourhood and a poor *bairro* in Maputo. What the book fundamentally questions, however, is the idea that these spatial segregations are accompanied by absence or at least irrelevance of the social relations crossing these spatial boundaries, like the notions of *divided city*  and *cities of walls* seem to imply.

Although the urbanites lead different lives in these adjacent yet separate neighbourhoods, their lives are fundamentally entangled in many ways: through the politics of land in the changing urban areas, through the mutual dependency in the sphere of domestic work, through relations formed by praying together and charity in religious spaces, and through the new forms of sociality emerging in shopping malls. Obviously, there are many more ways in which these urbanites are connected, some involving direct interactions, others related to larger social processes like globalisation and digitalisation. It is impossible to "recognise, let alone to take up and respond to, all those threads by which any individual, or any place, is connected to the world" (Massey 2006: 93). *Cities of entanglements* hence emerges as an analytical perspective, rather than as a type of city.

The shift from *divided cities* to *cities of entanglements* also entails a shift in the theory of space, namely, moving from understanding space as a container to a relational and processual approach. The way how we think about space is "of fundamental importance" (ibid: 90). Spaces in Maputo and Johannesburg only come into being as real urban spaces when urban dwellers integrate them in their everyday routines, when they link them through their spatial practices that take them across the city. It is also impossible to grasp the power of spatial and social boundaries without following urban dwellers who try to cross them, without analysing what happens at the intersections. If we understand neighbourhoods, malls and churches not only in terms of themselves but also in relation to other spaces, we can grasp what makes them urban, namely, their meanings, functions and connections to each other and to the broader urban society.

*Cities of entanglement* understands space as always in the making, never finished and never *whole*, and, based on Lefebvre (1996 [1974]), it assumes that space becomes constituted through the interplay of three dimensions, namely *material, conceived* and *lived space*. In terms of *material spaces*, the possibilities for urban encounters are deeply shaped by the allocation of places across the urban geography, the transport possibilities urbanites have, walls and access restrictions, but also practical aspects of urban life, like household care, food, consumption and work. Space thus raises one of the key social, political and ethical questions, namely: How we are going to live together? It is through space that we are confronted with the existence of others (Massey 2006: 92). Because of the increasing scarcity of well-located urban land residents from adjacent neighbourhoods become entangled. By driving wedges into material space, urban elites aim to disentangle themselves. The politics of neighbourhood space is therefore a key realm where urbanites attempt to shape their city according to their own visions.  In the *politics of loss* in Johannesburg and the *politics of proximity* in Maputo, urban dwellers aim to inf luence these material conditions for living together and living apart by trying to keep the *others* out. This manifests in Johannesburg in the opposition to public housing by property owners, and in Maputo in the elite residents' attempts to erect a road closure. The ethnography, though, also shows that wealthy suburbanites fail to realise their fantasies of secluded lives in the fast-changing cities: cities which are drawing them more into multiplex relatedness than into accepting the defence of their walls.

In terms of *lived space*, urban entanglements have a fundamental impact on subjectivities, on the constitution of urban milieus, and on the way people see their own social position in urban society. Urban milieus do not precede the entanglements between them; it is rather through entanglements that urban milieus become constituted. The book shows that in these cities recovering from segregation and confronted with neoliberalism, public spaces are not the most central in organising urban life. It is in spaces of encounters – homes, places of prayer and malls – where entanglements across spatial divides and social distance become shaped, that urban society in the making can be observed. In suburban homes, patron–client relations between employers and domestic workers create a precarious balance between proximity and distance, exploitation and mutual support. In religious formations, urbanites deal with inequality by forming paternalistic ties, a form of entanglement which allows for positive feelings, if at the cost of hidden tensions. Paternalistic ties lie at the foundation of sociality, emerging in these spaces characterised by inequality. While religious spaces like charismatic churches or local mosques promise new, prophetic communities of equal believers, they are urban spaces shaped by the same structural inequalities as the rest of the city; hopes for encounters and change are met with disappointment. Shopping malls in Maputo and Johannesburg are not merely spaces of meaningless consumption and sites of exclusion and control; they are appropriated by urban dwellers in diverse, often subtle ways and transformed into spaces of urban public life where lives become entangled through chance encounters, competition and fantasies.

Space is always shaped by a contemporaneous multiplicity of processes (Massey 2006: 92), which reveals itself in the ethnography by the co-presence of multiple actors

with diverse and diverging interests, visions (hence *conceived space*) and strategies for the future of neighbourhoods. The interplay between these multiple actors is fundamentally shaped by power differentials between them, be they aff luent and poor urban dwellers, property developers, mall designers, politicians, activists, academics and the like. Looking back on colonial and apartheid urban planning, both Maputo and Johannesburg have become shaped by the desire of powerful actors to separate, to keep apart. Nevertheless, both societies were based on the exploitation of African labour by colonial enterprises and by colonial households, and hence always entailed fundamental entanglements and interdependencies between the colonial citizens and subjects (Mamdani 1996). Domestic work in Maputo and Johannesburg today is probably the urban sphere where there has been most continuity since the colonial past, because in these intimate interactions colonial patterns become relatively easily repeated. Despite the omnipresence of domestic employees working and, in the case of Johannesburg's suburbs, living in aff luent neighbourhoods, this urban reality is seldom recognised and remains invisible. Entanglements can hence be seen as what Lefebvre calls *blind fields*: we tend to see urban spaces incompletely, we tend to have a "a blind spot on the retina", we are blind and do not even know it (Lefebvre 2003 [1970]: 29). According to Lefebvre, blind fields emerge when one epoch (in the *Urban Revolution* he talks about the replacement of the industrial epoch by the urban epoch) becomes replaced with another, and one tries to understand the new epoch with the ways of seeing developed in the old epoch:

What does our blindnesslook like?We focus attentively on the newfield,the urban, but we see it with eyes, with concepts, that were shaped by the practices and theories of industrialization, with a fragmentary analytictool that was designed during the industrial period and is therefore *reductive* of the emerging reality. We no longer see that reality; we resist it, turn away from it,struggle against it, prevent its birth and development. The urban (urban space, urban landscape)remains unseen. *We* still don'tsee it. Is itsimply that our eye has been shaped (misshaped) by the earlierlandscape so itcan no longersee a newspace?(ibid: 29, italicsin original)

The metaphors and typologies used to speak about segregated cities, like divided city, suburb–township*, bairro–cidade,* originate from a different period; in Southern African cities the periods of colonialism and apartheid. Looking at these cities today through these terms creates *blind fields*, things we do not see because they lie outside our perspective, of what is epistemologically imaginable to us, and what the past epoch did not want to see. The fact that entanglements remain often unseen and invisible is not only about a lack of knowledge or education, not only a question of a *wrong lens* for looking at the urban. It is also about refusing to see, about pretending not to see (ibid: 31) and, hence, about power and ideology.

It is no coincidence that claims to recognise the fundamental connectedness of urban worlds have been raised by urban dwellers living in both Alexandra and Polana Caniço, urbanites who usually stand on the less powerful side of the entanglements. There was for example Thabo Mopasi, field assistant from Alexandra, pointing out how Sandton City mall was built by workers living in the township. Senhora Aurora from Casas Brancas in Polana Caniço raised the issue that the elites living in Sommerschield II who wanted to close off the road are those who come to ask for their votes during

election campaigns. There was the waiter Alfonso working at Café Sol in Sommerschield II, who asked rhetorically how he and others would get to work if there was a road closure. Especially blind towards entanglements are the more powerful urban dwellers. The aff luent majorities at the malls, be they the Indian elite in Maputo or the suburbanites in Greenstone, exclude the present poorer minorities from their social formation by never looking at them and not becoming aware that they are there, too. The property owners engage in manifold practices that render their domestic workers socially invisible, for example by prohibiting them from hosting family in their rooms or by closing down and controlling the shebeens, their spaces of leisure and public life. There was the property owner Mandy, who explained that she knew most people in Linbro Park but merely listed the names of other white property owners to illustrate this. The property owners' emic notion of 'divided community' referred to a conf lict between more business-oriented property owners and those who wanted to keep the area purely residential, and not, as one might think, to a division between property owners and tenants, or employers and domestic workers. Being blind to or not seeing entanglements is not a state but a process, which demands many social practices of invisibilisation. Urban elites like to conceive of their lifeworld as homogeneous and disconnected from the surrounding city; many of their practices aim at disentangling them from others or at least allowing them to believe that they are disentangled. Their segregationist practices are nevertheless confronted with resistance expressed in diverse forms, ranging from violent acts to subtle forms of appropriation. In Maputo, residents from nearby Polana Caniço resisted the road closure and rose up to take the newly constructed barrier down. Domestic workers gossip or take unauthorised breaks as hidden forms of resistance.  The change of perspective from *divided cities* or *cities of walls* to *cities of entanglement* is thus also a change from not only looking at the city from the perspective of urban elites who desire to withdraw themselves from connectedness to also looking at the city from the perspective of the urban poor for whom connectedness is an indisputable urban reality, and also a way of surviving socially and economically in a city marked by inequality.

(In)visibility and recognition or denial of entangledness has a fundamentally moral and ethical dimension. When explaining that the Sommerschield II elite come to ask for their votes, Senhora Aurora made a political claim; not only are the politicians accountable to them, but they also stand in a dependency relationship with each other, and they are hence responsible towards each other. In Linbro Park, when domestic workers refer to their employers in familial terms like 'aunty', they make claims that the employers have a responsibility towards them, which goes beyond the mere payment of a salary. In both cases, this invocation of responsibility by less powerful urbanites succeeded. The elite in Sommerschield II gave up their desire for a road closure. In Linbro Park, some property owners have sold up and moved away but still continue to support their former domestic workers, for example by employing them in the households of their children who remained in the city, or by building a house for their employee in her rural home. When urban elites, politicians or other powerful actors try to keep entanglements invisible, this is also deeply political. It serves to ignore the less powerful urbanites' claims to the right to the city or to the neigh-

bourhood. It allows the elite to live in aff luence in a poor city with little guilt, and it helps to suppress feelings of responsibility for others beyond gift-giving. Because this is what the recognition of entangledness is about: it is a recognition that we stand in relationships with others, that our actions have an impact on others, and that we therefore have a responsibility towards them. This entails a very different ethics from the ethics of neoliberalism, which claims that actors are only responsible for their own well-being and maximising their own profits, even at the expense of others and at the expense of nature. It also demands a different ethics to the one invoked by the Linbro Park property owner Kacy, who said that "people like to group together", claiming that the desire to be with like-minded people is a legitimate reason for segregation. Instead, what we need is an ethics and "politics of interrelation; a politics which, rather than claiming rights for a rapidly multiplying set of identities, concerns itself more with challenging, and taking responsibility for, the form of the relationships through which those identities are constructed, in which we are individually and collectively positioned and through which society more broadly is constituted" (Massey 2000: 246). Taking responsibility for others, even though I may not know them, may have never met them and may not have an immediate link to them, is the ethics we need in order to create an urban world where it is possible to live together in difference and where urban dwellers work together to reduce structural inequalities. How we deal with and shape our entangled positions in the contemporary world is the key ethical and political question of our times.

## **Postscript: Entangled Comparers** Experiencing Cities through Comparative Ethnography

In urban studies, comparisons are *en vogue*. In her seminal book *Ordinary Cities* (2006a), the geographer Jennifer Robinson prepared the ground for comparative urbanism by claiming that cities should be compared beyond the North–South divide, and that comparisons should be key tools for postcolonial urban theorising from the South. This should enable urban studies to move beyond being a discipline largely rooted in the Northern experience and deprovincialising urban theory (Huffschmid and Wildner 2013, Lemanski 2012, 2014, McFarlane 2010, Nijman 2007, Parnell and Robinson 2012, Robinson 2006b, 2013). In scholarly debates on South African cities and on Lusophone cities, repeated calls for comparisons have been raised. Urbanists working on South Africa have argued that comparing South African cities with others is crucial in order to move beyond framing them as exceptions and special cases (Mbembe and Nuttall 2008, Parnell 1997). As regards Mozambique, researchers observe a 'Lusophone exceptionalism' which has been criticised for inhibiting comparative gestures between Lusophone and other African countries (Pitcher 2002: 9‐10). Comparisons hence promise to disrupt boundaries of knowledge and research, to *think* Johannesburg and Maputo through elsewhere (Robinson 2016b) and to generate new understandings of the urban based on the diversity of cities and urban milieus. This book situates itself in this field of comparative urbanism.

Besides reclaiming space for comparisons, Robinson significantly advanced the debate on the politics of comparative theory building. By developing new typologies of comparisons based on expansive literature reviews, she pushed for new and experimental ways of doing comparisons and engaging with complex questions of epistemology around comparison (Robinson 2011, 2016a, 2016b). She proposes to

… reimagine comparisons as involving the broad practice of thinking cities/the urban through elsewhere (another case, a wider context, existing theoretical imaginations derived from other contexts, connections to other places), in order to better understand outcomes and to contribute to broader conceptualizations and conversations about (aspects of) the urban (Robinson 2016b: 3).

While the literature on comparative urbanism is constantly growing, making it literally a new turn in urban studies, the epistemological and methodological logistics of doing comparisons continue to be challenging and hamper the application of these new ideas (Lees 2012, Lemanski 2014: 2945). This is not least because discussions focus on the pol-

itics of theory building through comparison but also on comparative empirical research itself (Gough 2013), by which I mean the process of data collection and analysis through which urban comparisons come into being. This is a serious lacuna in the debate for at least two reasons: Firstly, focusing the debates on comparison in theory building and the abstract work of comparative arguments rather than on how comparative data become constituted, removes comparative urbanism from the urban dwellers' and researchers' lived experience of cities into the realm of philosophy. Secondly, the lack of concise, intelligible formulations of the way such new ways of doing comparisons may look in practical terms inhibits students from entering the field of comparative urbanism, in ways which go beyond solely making references to the debate as an expression of one's commitment to a more global urban study. This understanding of urban comparisons as a political and theoretical orientation, rather than as a way of undertaking empirical research, finds its culmination in Robinson's article with the telling title 'Thinking cities through elsewhere' (Robinson 2016b). Here, she would appear to claim that comparative urbanism does not necessarily need to be based on actual empirical comparative research but that, in her view, "perhaps the most useful comparative tactic in urban studies is the case study, brought into creative conversation with a wider literature" (ibid: 18). While writing their single case studies, comparative urbanists should read across contexts, improving their own analysis and theorising based on other people's written cases. I will call such an understanding of comparison *thinking cities through elsewhere,* as comparison here refers to intellectual endeavour, enacted while sitting at a desk. In this postscript I make a case for a much broader understanding of comparison, namely, as *experiencing cities through elsewhere.* Through comparative ethnography the researcher becomes involved, hence entangled, with at least two places and strives to develop an analytical framework and a form of description which speak about both cases. As this postscript will show, comparative ethnography hence entails not only *thinking* but also *experiencing* cities through elsewhere, as through comparative ethnography the ethnographer becomes deeply involved with the spaces and the people she researches. In comparative ethnography, the actor who conducts the comparison, the comparer, is not a detached analyser but an involved person, shaping and shaped by the experiences she has in diverse urban contexts. Instead of understanding comparison as a form of analysis conducted at home, maybe even sitting in an armchair, I approach comparative ethnography as a circular process in which the mind, and even the body of the ethnographer, is involved in constant comparisons along the way. In this postscript I make transparent to the reader the process of fieldwork and analysis on which this book was based. It focuses on the processes before the text was written up and introduces some of the intricacies of conducting fieldwork in two places as a single ethnographer. From the point of view of how knowledge is formed, I contend that there is a substantial difference between *thinking* and *experiencing* cities through elsewhere.

### **Plurality of Comparisons**

In order to approach ethnography comparatively, it is important to start thinking about comparisons as being always in the plural and not in the singular. Multiple comparisons take place in the field, in the data analysis and in the writing. The plurality also refers to the written-up text, as out of a single comparative research project diverse

forms of written-up comparisons can result. Thinking about comparisons in the plural, not in the singular, also makes us aware of the multiple ways in which comparison is understood, be it in different disciplines, different schools of thought, or even in everyday life. In conversations about malls in Maputo, urban dwellers repeatedly told me things like "You can't compare the Maputo Shopping Centre to Mandela Square in Sandton". What they meant by this was not that it is impossible to describe differences and similarities between the two malls but rather that the two are very different from each other, and that they regarded Mandela Square as superior in terms of architecture, the way goods are displayed, the range of brands sold and suchlike. In everyday use, to compare means to claim that two things are similar (Handler 2009: 627) and claiming that they are not 'comparable' also means that as shopping malls they are in a different league. This points to two things: first, that what people mean when they speak about comparison can differ greatly, and second, that there is a diversity of comparative practices even in everyday life and within research projects.

The table below presents an overview of some of the comparative practices as they may be encountered during an ethnographic research project. *Comparison as social practice* means that comparison is first and foremost a social and cognitive everyday practice, not an academic method. Humans always compare, whether intentionally or not (Strauss and Quinn 1997). According to phenomenology, actors possess a stock of knowledge from past experiences, which they relate (compare) to a current situation, and which thus shapes their actions (Emirbayer and Mische 1998: 971, Schütz and Luckmann 1973). *Comparison as data analysis* refers to the fact that academics compare constantly during data analysis, even in non-comparative research projects. The scientific development of concepts and codes is based on comparison (Kant 1969 [1980], Strauss and Corbin 1990). In the grounded theory approach, for example, the coding of data moves constantly between pieces of data and the searching for codes which grasp several pieces of data (ibid).

Table: Overview ofcomparative practices during an ethnographicresearch project

*Implicit or invisible comparisons* refers to the fact that ethnographers often make comparisons between field and home during the research process, and often also between reality and personal normative ideals. In such invisible comparisons, one's home culture is "the constant hidden references in relation to which the unknown culture can be described as different" (Caldeira 2000: 7). Because such invisible and implicit comparisons can have a great impact on our analysis, as well as on ethnographies based in one context, ref lection about such comparative practices is relevant for the whole discipline and not just for comparative ethnographers.

By *armchair comparison* I refer to the 19th century armchair anthropologists like Edward Tylor who, sitting in an armchair, constructed comparisons based on data collected by others (see below). Today, this refers to comparative practices where comparison is understood as distinct and separate from ethnography, as a form of analytical anthropology which brings together data or cases developed and written by others so as to construct comparative conclusions. *Life project comparisons* refers to anthropologists like Marilyn Strathern, who conduct comparisons based on data which they themselves have collected in different places over the course of their career. Armchair comparison and life project comparisons both happen *af ter* the fieldwork was conducted. This differs from *team comparisons*, larger research projects in which several ethnographers work on a similar topic in multiple places at the same time, in which comparisons emerge through mutual visits, workshops and co-authorship. In comparative team projects as well as in *single-researcher comparative ethnography*, in which one researcher conducts fieldwork in two or more places and writes about the data herself, the comparative perspective is present from the beginning when writing the proposal. In terms of the way comparative knowledge is formed these are relevant differences. In order to expand our grasp of the diversity of comparative practices, it is important to look at the history of anthropology, as the use of comparison as a method has changed considerably over time.

### Positivist Roots

Comparison in the humanities and the social sciences has historically been imported from the natural sciences and was therefore grounded in positivism (Schriewer 2003: 14). By positivism, I refer to the scientific paradigm (Kuhn 2012 [1963]) that emerged from the natural sciences, which assumes that there is an objective reality and context-independent data. Positivist approaches to comparison in anthropology go back to Tylor. His cultural evolutionism encompassed a theory about universal laws developed on the basis of the systematic comparison of cultural forms (Tylor 1889). At that time, comparison was seen as central to the expansion of knowledge that the new sciences and imperialism were thought to bring (Melas 2007: 20-22). With his comparisons Tylor aimed to show that there were many similarities among the different 'civilisations' and 'cultures' and that one therefore had to recognise the 'psychic unity of mankind' (Tylor 1889: 44). Analogous to comparative urbanism, which aims to undo hierarchies between cities of the North and South, Tylor also aimed to undo a hierarchy of thinking. With his comparisons he criticised the then prominent distinction between inferior and superior races, arguing that differences exist because of culture, not because of race. Each culture that he drew into his comparisons was at a different stage of cultural evolution, he theorised. Through comparison, he hence introduced a new hierarchy of thinking, namely, between 'primitive cultures' and 'civilisations'. Tylor's comparisons and the theory of evolutionism have received ample critique since then, among other reasons because he totally ignored the context of the data he analysed in his armchair, and because these temporalising comparisons deny the 'primitive cultures' coevalness (Fabian 1983, Melas 2007).

There have been many other comparative anthropologists, for example the diffusionist Friedrich Ratzel and the cultural morphologist Leo Frobenius (1933).1 It is important to note for the current ref lection on comparison that Frobenius' approach was to a certain degree inductive. During his twelve voyages to Africa (1904–1935), Frobenius studied material and immaterial cultural forms across Africa and distinguished them into *Kulturkreise* (culture areas) and *Stile* (styles) (Straube 1990, Streck 2001), which he then compared to each other. So the units of comparison, in this case the different *Kulturkreise* and *Stile*, did not exist at the beginning of his research but rather constituted the key results of the study. This differs from a hypothesis-driven comparison which defines units of comparison from the onset. However, rather than being interested in the specificities of African cultural forms, his aim was to contribute to the grand theories which were in vogue at that time.

Another milestone in the history of comparison in anthropology, which should be seen in as critical terms as the one already mentioned, are the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) by Murdock and his colleagues at Yale. This compendium of world cultures was meant to provide data for cross-cultural comparisons for anyone who wanted to use it. Like Tylor, the HRAF was a negative example in the history of comparison, as there were massive problems with the empirical foundations of the data, not to speak of the decontextualising, mathematical techniques used to identify 'correlations' between cultures and cultural 'universals' (Moore 1993, Yengoyan 2006: 139).

The anthropological critiques of such comparisons are as old as the discipline itself. The cultural relativist, Franz Boas (1896), was one of the first to formulate key concerns about Tylor's comparative method. Boas made an important claim which is still relevant today, namely, that cultures have to be understood first in their own specificity, and only thereafter should comparisons be drawn (Boas 2004, Bohannan and Glazer 1988, Dürr, Kasten and Renner 1992). Although cultural relativists strongly criticised speculative comparisons in the style of Tylor, comparison remained important for the discipline (e.g. Benedict 1946 [1934]). Mead's famous ethnography of Samoa had comparative aspects, as she compared growing up in Samoa with the troubled teenage phase in American society in the 1920s (Mead 1928). Comparing the 'field' and 'home' in explicit terms can contribute to addressing social problems in the anthropologists' own societies, something which Mead and Benedict saw as anthropology's public responsibility (Fox and Gingrich 2002). This public responsibility was appealed to again in discussion regarding the crisis of representation (Marcus and Fischer 1986). Through comparison, anthropology can render the 'home' culture of the anthropologist visible as culturally specific and not as human nature (Handler 2009: 635). Com-

<sup>1</sup> Frobenius collected material and immaterial cultural forms across Africa and ordered them in space with the help of cartography. His *Kulturkreise* are a spatially and temporally ordered typology of culturalforms,which he explained through Ratzel'stheory of dif fusion. Linking the competing theories of dif fusion and evolutionism, Frobenius argued that every culture has an own *paideuma* characterised by an evolutionary process explaining the dif ferences, yet similarities come into being because of dif fusion and contact (Frobenius1933,Haller 2005: 41).

parison therefore has the potential to serve as a tool to expose assumptions and ideologies of the 'home' societies.

More careful, more contextualised and so-called 'controlled' approaches to comparison were developed between the 1940s and 1960s by British structural functionalists, as they moved from comparing 'cultures' to comparing 'societies' (Brettell 2009: 652, Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1987 [1940], Yengoyan 2006: 140). One way of moving beyond the decontextualising HRAF style of comparison was to make 'regional' comparisons, as anthropologists believed that it was easier to compare cultures that were similar, and that by making comparisons on a geographically or culturally limited scale, they could control the number of 'variables' shaping differences and similarities (Eggan 1954, Holý 1987b: 3). The idea of 'controlling variables' is misleading, however, as complexity (and hence the number of 'variables') is related to the detailed nature of research rather than 'objective' similarities between the fields (see also Strathern 1992). In addition, the important factors that shape the topic of study will only be clear at the end of the comparative process and should not assumed at the outset. Last, but not least, what should also be mentioned is that the history of comparative methods also entailed approaches which paid a lot of attention to context, for example the scholars of the Manchester School under Gluckman from whom Robinson draws her inspiration for comparative urbanism, as well as anthropologists working on Melanesia like Sahlins, Strathern and Godelier. There has always been a heterogeneity of comparative methodologies (Fox and Gingrich 2002: 5, Strathern 2002: xiii).

### Crisis of Comparison

Since the 1960s, not least because of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, anthropology has moved away from generalisation towards description and meanings (Geertz 1983, Yengoyan 2006: 141). From the 1970s onwards, key categories like culture became questioned (Abu-Lughod 1991, Lentz 2011, Lentz 2013a). With the shift to theories of practice and agency, culture became deconstructed as a problematic, imprecise category to explain social action (Ortner 2006, Yengoyan 2006: 143). As the units of analysis in cross-cultural analysis were 'cultures', this had severe consequences for comparative anthropology: what were anthropologists actually comparing, if not 'cultures'? The consequences of these shifts have not yet been sufficiently discussed.

In the crisis of representation comparison per se was rarely discussed. The debate tended to focus on ethnographic authority and the critique of the apolitical and ahistorical nature of anthropology (Clifford and Marcus 1986, Marcus and Fischer 1986). The anthropologist John Hutnyk (1990) was one of the few who linked the debate to systematic ref lection on comparison. Hutnyk (1990: 83) pointed out that the crisis of representation made anthropologists acutely aware of the complexities of the cultural realities and the subjective nature of interpretation, so that the comparison of two such interpretations came to be seen as troubling or even impossible. Although he also believed that comparison "thrives on simplicity" (ibid: 94), he did not call for comparison to be abandoned; not least because he argued that every ethnographic description is always comparative even if this is seldom acknowledged (ibid: 82).

Few people shared Hutnyk's claim to continue with comparisons, despite these new challenges. In sum, the crisis of representation made anthropologists turn away from comparison (Hannerz 2010: 547). Many believed that the move towards the use of local concepts inhibited comparison (Yengoyan 2006: 142-143). As the writing cul-

ture debate questioned cultural translation, suggesting that it was embedded in power relations and necessarily imperfect (Asad 1986), so comparison also came to be seen as a colonial, distorting act. Still today, many scholars see comparison as based on an 'imperial ideology' (Zanker and Newbery 2013: 110). A further important critique was that universalist, objectivist comparisons were related to the construction of grand theories, and had therefore to be abolished, together with these totalising theories. Ideas like causality were replaced by meaning, multivocality and relativism (Yengoyan 2006: 142). In retrospect, comparison became seen as a huge fault in rather than a great achievement of the discipline (Gingrich and Thelen 2012: 395).

There were anthropologists who continued to practise comparative methods, but they were those who did not engage with the crisis and largely remained within the positivist framework (e.g. Mace and Pagal 1994). Questions like 'controlling variables' related to the so-called 'Galton's problem' (the apparent 'problem' that cultures are never fully independent from each other) dominated their ref lections. Even in a recent edition of a seminal textbook by Bernard (2015) on methods in cultural anthropology, the cross-cultural method introduced is firmly grounded in positivism and aims to 'test hypotheses' (Ember and Ember 2015). Thinking about comparison in positivist terms with positivist terminology such as testing hypotheses, variables, comparability and causality hence still haunts anthropology, and there is an urgent need to free the discipline from this baggage. The paradigm shift from positivism to interpretivism and constructivism is, however, slowly leading to a new body of comparative anthropology which considers the interpretive turn and the crisis of representation.

### Interpretive, Post-Crisis Comparative Approaches

It is in thematic, often interdisciplinary, fields that calls for comparison have been raised anew in the last few years. Among others, calls for comparisons emerged in the field of transnationalism and in the political anthropology of citizenship, in the debate on the ontological turn and related fields like multi-species anthropology, and in the already mentioned interdisciplinary, geography-dominated field of postcolonial comparative urbanism. Since the crisis of representation, only three anthropological collections (Gingrich and Fox 2002, Holý 1987a, Scheffer and Niewöhner 2010) have systematically explored new styles of comparison which depart from the positivistic comparative methods.

There are at least *four* particularities which appear across these bodies of literature and which can be seen as the shared basis of an emerging field, which I call interpretive, *post-crisis* comparisons, emerging after the postmodernist *crisis* of representation. Firstly, these scholars share the idea that comparisons do not receive the attention they should. Secondly, they argue that comparison is a key tool for deprovincialising and questioning established knowledge. Thirdly, they claim convincingly that new methodologies should not let themselves be limited by ideas like incommensurability, and fourthly, they believe that practices and processes need to be central instead of fixed units.

First of all, across these literatures, there is agreement that anthropology cannot do without comparison, despite its difficulties and shortfalls (Gingrich and Thelen 2012: 398, Strathern 2002). Even extreme relativists are engaged in cultural translation and therefore compare (Fox and Gingrich 2002: 20). If we fail to ref lect on comparison, we fall into the trap of making problematic, implicit and unnoticed comparisons

of self and other, of the exotic and the known (Gingrich and Thelen 2012: 398, Gupta and Ferguson 1997). As the anthropologist Sian Lazar (2012: 353) says so pointedly, with the crisis of representation, the baby (comparison as method) was thrown out with the bathwater (positivism and objectivity). These scholars find this problematic, as the production of anthropological knowledge is based on all sorts of comparisons. The question is less about whether we compare and rather about *"what kind of recognition* [italics in original] scholars give to this basic human activity" (Fox and Gingrich 2002: 20). If anthropology wants to be a self-ref lexive science, comparison needs to be included in methodological and epistemological debates. Thinking about comparison is more than merely ref lecting on a certain method; it also entails ref lecting on anthropological knowledge in general.

Besides these epistemological arguments there is also ample recognition that globalisation and the increasing entangledness of spaces and places across the globe demand comparisons: "These global connections and the heterogeneous local responses to them legitimate a renewed comparative agenda for anthropology and related fields" (ibid: 7). Because of increased global connectedness, it is not only researchers but also practitioners who engage in comparisons, for example there are urban planners working in municipalities and politicians who readily adopt urban policies developed in other cities (Ward 2010). As people across the globe become subjected to similar processes and models, it is necessary to compare how actors engage differently or similarly to them. A very practical argument for renewed comparison is research funding. In countries such as the United Kingdom and Switzerland, research funding institutions increasingly demand interdisciplinarity and collaboration (Lazar 2012: 353).

The second particularity shared across the interpretive, post-crisis approaches is that they find that comparison, even in its positivist version, has a subversive potential and can call existing knowledge and frameworks radically into question. By comparing 'civilised' and 'primitive' cultures, by explaining variations as cultural difference and denying the explanatory value of race and biology, Tylor made a strong political statement against Darwinism and racism (Yengoyan 2006: 140). Through comparison, Strathern (1997) critically investigated concepts like gender and dismantled them as not being culturally neutral but as emanating from the West. Goody (2006) also used comparison to show how concepts about society and history usually take Western societies as starting points. By comparing European civilisation with other histories, he dismantles the claim of the uniqueness of European civilisation and unsettles our understanding of European history.