IN-PERSON Barcelona Livable Cities. Section A

Abstract

Johannesburg is a city like no other—fragmented, layered, and suspended between its historical memory as a ‘city of gold’ and its precarious future as a ‘world-class African city.’ At the same time, Johannesburg is a microcosm of cities worldwide, grappling with tensions between wealth and poverty, power and dispossession, and livability and decay. This paper explores Johannesburg as the ‘incomplete city,’ caught in temporal suspension between the vestiges of apartheid and a precarious neocolonial present. Drawing on journalistic texts (2021–2024) from The Daily Maverick, South Africa’s only openly accessible investigative news source, this pilot study applies a Critical Psychosocial Studies framework to interrogate the city’s psyche—how its ruptures, both symbolic and material, expose symptoms of the urban unconscious. This framework attends to the interweaving of psyche and society and the tensions reflected in urban precarity. Using a Lacanian lens, the analysis applies the concept of the lamella—a liminal layer that simultaneously holds and fragments the city’s surface—alongside Berlant’s present tense, which captures the affective atmosphere of unresolved tension and contradiction. The analysis reveals the interplay and tensions between decay and sustainability in Johannesburg’s fabric. Narratives expose the precarious promises of recovery amidst persistent inequalities, as sustainability emerges as a master signifier, stitching together contradictions of renewal and collapse. How might we sustain livability while bearing these contradictions, inviting new ways of understanding and engaging with the urban present?