Capitalism, city, apartheid in the twenty-first century

This paper unfolds in three parts. The first section argues that there has been an innovation in the rights of private property, especially in the area of residential property. Starting in the 1960s, though only really coming into its own in the 1980s, the rights of private property have been grafted onto a regime of communal ownership. Thus, during the very period of capitalist ascendancy, historically non-capitalist forms of sociability were being elaborated from within the holy ark of capitalism itself, the relation of private property. The second part shows that the condominium or sectional-title estate is transforming urban landscapes across the globe, generating novel urban constellations that are frequently imagined and lived as non-suburbs. Effectively, the growth of townhouses is associated with the decline of the traditional suburb as an urban phenomenon. The third part of this essay focuses on a South African case study, where condominiums (or townhouses under sectional title) have become important sites of uncanny, post-apartheid community. Using the example of Roodepoort, this paper argues that body corporates are elaborating domains of post-apartheid sociality that are largely unrecognisable and even uncomfortable from the dominant, normative tropes of post-apartheid life: non-racialism, cosmopolitanism, constitutionalism.