Rosebank, an upmarket suburb in Johannesburg, attracts residents and visitors with the promise of security, affluence, leisure and global connectivity. Once a racialized enclave during apartheid, Rosebank is today racially diverse and cosmopolitan, yet it remains exclusive. Drawing on the concept of enclaving, we argue that Rosebank is a site of ‘cosmopolitan enclaving’, an ongoing process through which post-apartheid racial inclusion is reworked into class-based differentiation, and one that produces new forms of urban exclusion in contemporary Africa. Using ethnographic research, we trace how this exclusivity emerges through everyday practices of consumption, security, surveillance and mobility. Focusing on intimacy and detachment, we show how belonging appears among those able to perform cosmopolitan competence, while detachment is sustained through architecture, security infrastructures and asymmetrical mobility. Rosebank makes visible how older spatial hierarchies persist in altered forms, now articulated through lifestyle, capital and mobility rather than race. Cosmopolitan enclaving thus illuminates how exclusion in contemporary African cities is increasingly produced through forms of curated openness that rely on and reproduce inequalities.

Many scholars have argued that the explosive growth of gated communities in African cities results from the soaring inequalities and insecurities unleashed by the adoption of neoliberalism. Based on our analysis of Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, we demonstrate how gated communities are the latest attempt in a long-term social engineering project that aims to use the built environment to create the desired urban subject. We then trace how utopian ambition and aspiration bring such projects into being and how lack of resources and faulty management exacerbate internal tensions that cause them to fall apart. We argue that it is not only the lack of cultural knowledge or the ‘one size fits all’ authoritarian imposition of modernizing plans that causes these projects to fail. Instead, through the case study of Mozambique, we trace the ways in which seemingly exclusionary spatial forms, such as a gated community, draw upon the legacies of former utopian projects.

In the economically depressed coastal villages and small towns of the Eastern Cape, violent community activism is instigated against young jobless men who commit petty crimes, and who use illicit synthetic stimulants (crystal methamphetamine) and sedatives such as methaqualone mixed with marijuana. Labelled as ‘parasites’ (amaphara), they are cast out of the towns, rejected by their families, subjected to tortuous punishment, and have their status as initiated men revoked. In response to forced eviction from the towns to the villages, they gather in ‘secret places’ (enyobeni) – derelict buildings located on the outskirts of residential settlements, hidden away from the public gaze. In the enyobeni they recreate the imaginary world of the South African prison number gang by performing rituals, using secret language and signs, adhering to gang rules, and invoking the spirits of the original gang leaders. Engendering sociality, care and respect, these social formations reject the policing of addiction and the stigma of being amaphara.

Given plastics accumulation across the earth’s stratigraphy, climate scientists refer to the latest stage of the Anthropocene as the plasticene. Confounding conventional analyses of plastics through the lens of their unruly afterlives, this article shifts the focus to an iconic plastic object critically important to weathering the uncertainties of Anthropocene times. Large-scale plastic water tanks are vital to managing the compound stressors of climate change, state decline and rising corporate power across West Africa, as in many parts of the global South. Developing the concept of the ‘Patchy Plasticene’ via collaborative and digital ethnography, our research examines these commonplace industrial commodities from the vantage point of artisans specializing in plastic repair in Ghana’s fastest growing city, Tamale. As opposed to viewing plastic as a threat to urban habitability, artisanal work reveals a more possibilistic ontology. Tapping into regional histories of metal working and wider trajectories of plastic circulation, artisanal knowledge practices harness plastic’s durability and polymer chemistry to manage climate stress and counter prevailing political economies. By centring artisans’ innovations and distinctive ‘plastic sensorium’, the African plasticene emerges not as the apotheosis of waste and wasted lives but as a more liveable and enlivened configuration ameliorating the contradictions of late industrialism.