Governing for urban inclusion?: a critical analysis of the City of Johannesburg migrant help-desk

Abstract

Globally, right wing populist regimes with violently anti-migrant agendas are coming to power and imposing increasingly authoritarian mechanisms of governing populations. Rapid urbanisation in sub-Saharan Africa in particular has put a spotlight on the role of cities in migration and how municipalities handle tensions between incomers, integration with local communities and the needs of expanding numbers of poor and peripheral residents. Johannesburg, synonymous with migration since its beginnings in the 1890s gold rush, is the only city in the country to have designed and implemented an urban migration policy. It is a striking example of a post-apartheid liminal city in which mobility is a marker of precarity or poverty for citizen and migrant alike. I set out to understand what the creation and operation of the City of Johannesburg migration policy and Migrant Help-desk reveals about the city government’s vision in/exclusion. The study was conceived from asking how and why state institutions in post-colonies decide who to in/exclude from their jurisdictions through governing urban migration. Critical assessments of municipal policy in Johannesburg have mainly focused on local economic, planning and infrastructure issues. Migration scholars have mainly focused on the everyday lives of migrants. I look at a social policy from the perspective of the everyday work-life of government officials. Through analysing official documentation, while drawing on experiences and perspectives of the political principal and officials working in the City of Johannesburg Migration Sub Unit, I explored the municipal imagination of an inclusive urban society. I approached the research from a critical activist perspective, questioning the assumptions government makes towards migration and the conceptions employed to ‘manage’ mobility. My argument rests on how the policy and office conceptualises the righteous citizen/abject other and how the Help-desk both illuminates these ideas and helps to enact them. I show how increasingly exclusivist discourses are becoming hegemonic yet also contain tensions and contradictions, suggesting the possibility for imagining an emancipatory urbanism