Vernacular regeneration: low-income housing, private policing and urban transformation in inner-city Johannesburg

Urban regeneration is currently taking place in inner-city Johannesburg.

This book presents an alternative, multi-layered account for reading the process of urban change and renewal.

The provision of social and affordable housing and the spread of private security are explored through the lenses of neoliberal urbanism, gentrification, the privatisation of public space and revanchist policing.

This book interrogates these concepts and challenges their assumptions based on new qualitative and ethnographic evidence emerging out of Johannesburg.

Dated concepts in critical urban studies are re-evaluated and the book calls for an alternative, adaptable approach, focusing on how we develop a vocabulary and creative understanding of urban regeneration.