Decoding dispossession: Eviction and urban regeneration in Johannesburg's dark buildings

In January 2012 the residents of an inner‐city tenement building in Doornfontein, Johannesburg, were evicted on a court order. The building was situated in a post‐industrial neighbourhood in which thousands of South Africans and foreign nationals, many blind or disabled, live in unlawfully occupied buildings without access to water, basic sanitation, electricity and waste management services. Such buildings are known in policy discourse as ‘bad buildings’, and informally as ‘dark buildings’, invoking both a sense of developmental failure and spiritual insecurity. In this paper I analyse how urban renewal policies created social divisions and alliances not only among the residents of Chambers, which were channelled along nationalist lines, but also between the able‐bodied and disabled, and produced new social alliances. In particular, I document how a group of blind Zimbabweans experienced threats of violence and accusations of betrayal, as they were offered alternate accommodation by the evicting company because of their disability. I argue here that the pressures of private‐sector housing developments intersected with the insecurities and divisions of inner‐city social spaces and also fostered new alliances. Following the work of Deleuze and Guattari, I invoke the concept of ‘decoding dispossession’, proposing that ongoing evictions and dispossessions are characterized by simultaneous movements of ‘decoding and deterritorialization’ and ‘overcoding‐reterritorialization’.