Detachment and attachment: towards enclaved materialities

This section lays out the core conceptual terrain through which the contributions to this special issue approached enclaving, detachment and attachment. Rather than treating enclaves as a self-evident or exclusively African phenomenon, we situate current debates on African enclaving within a longer and comparative genealogy of urban scholarship that has addressed fortified spaces, segregation and security across diverse urban contexts. Seminal work from Latin America and North America – most notably Caldeira’s analyses of fortified enclaves (Reference Caldeira and Low1999; Reference Caldeira2000) alongside studies of fortress urbanism and securitized citizenship by Low (Reference Low1997; Reference Low2004) and Mitchell (Reference Mitchell2005) – provides an important point of reference for understanding how material forms of enclosure reorganize urban space, social relations and subjectivities. These bodies of work do not serve as templates to be replicated in African contexts, but as heuristic entry points for thinking comparatively about enclaving as a spatial, political and affective process. From this perspective, gated communities and fortified developments are not treated as the empirical limit of enclaving but as a historical, visible expression of broader processes of detachment and attachment that unfold across multiple material and imaginative registers in contemporary African cities.

As urban geographers Waldman and Ghertner summed up:

In addition, the imposition of spatial, material and, crucially, non-material forms of separation and detachment have been integral to how the middle classes (both aspiring and accomplished) have attempted to generate ‘some form of order, control and uniformity [to engage the] potentially dangerous chaos of the city’ (Nielsen et al. Reference Nielsen, Sumich and Bertelsen2021: 894).

Further, Waldman and Ghertner go on to map what they see as a particular form of human subject being formed around processes of enclaving. The imagery of the enclave also forms an enclaved subject:

Mirroring other studies of urban areas that underscore a fragmented form of personhood inhabiting these cities, Waldman and Ghertner (Reference Waldman and Ghertner2023) underline the emergence of what they term ‘secessionary selves’ and ‘forms of privatised personhood’ as characterizing these cities. Crucially, the argument also intersects with and builds on how verticality, the visual and security–political orientations reshape the urban landscape – for instance, in Nairobi, through the work of Goodman (Reference Goodman2020) and Smith (Reference Smith2015; Reference Smith2017). More generally, their arguments also reflect earlier work that has proposed the notion of the ‘SUV mode of citizenship’ (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2005) as characterizing large-scale urban orders and their dynamics of zoning, sequestration, hierarchization and individuation.

The conceptual imagery proposed by Waldman and Ghertner, Mitchell, Goodman and Smith resonates strongly with the kind of fortress-like urbanism that is found not only in contexts in the global North (see Low Reference Low1997; Reference Low2004) but also in often racialized and gendered enclaves in the global South – for instance, in Latin America (see, for example, Alves Reference Alves2018; Caldeira Reference Caldeira and Low1999; Reference Caldeira2000) and in Asia and Africa (Datta and Shaban Reference Datta and Shaban2016; Kuldova and Varghese Reference Kuldova and Varghese2017). A case in point here is all the connected yet fragmented racialized zones of detachment in South Africa (see, for example, Schuermans Reference Schuermans2016; Herbert and Murray Reference Herbert and Murray2015). As Waldman and Ghertner (Reference Waldman and Ghertner2023: 285) argue, enclaving also comprises a form of neocolonial pastiche revolving around whiteness: ‘[t]o live in the zone where Euro-American expats live, or to share the spatial freedoms they are understood to enjoy, becomes the dream that luxury townships pitch to buyers’. Thus, in contexts where the legacies of colonial planning continue to mark stark class and ethnic hierarchies, colonial nostalgia and the elevation of a Victorian pastiche – a kind of architectural heteroglossia that mixes modern materials with colonial textures and insignia – are common sales strategies. In an earlier work commenting on ‘an English-cricket themed enclave’ near Delhi, Waldman et al. reproduce the selling points used for this enclave: it is ‘set [in] an idyllic environment to suit everyone … prime locations overlook the cricket ground. In the time-honoured style of the classic English village … imagine dining in the tavern … “by invitation only”’ (Waldman et al. Reference Waldman, Silk and Andrews2017: 184–5). As Mercer (Reference Mercer2024: 8) has pointed out in an incisive work on suburbia in Africa: ‘In former British colonies such as Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, for example, suburbs were planned as exclusive residential enclaves for Europeans, and continue to be seen as relatively exclusive, well-serviced residential zones.’ Similar arguments about racialized colonial pastiches – including how the ‘invitation’ relates to racialized subjects – can also be made on the African continent and in its many ready-made enclaved urban developments, replete with colonial, neocolonial and/or apartheid-nostalgic features – as Hook and Vrdoljak (Reference Hook and Vrdoljak2002), Murray (Reference Murray2015) and others have shown for South Africa (see also Maraire, this issue). Furthermore, as Waldman and Ghertner (Reference Waldman and Ghertner2023: 284) stress: ‘The gated high-rise thus must be understood as part of enclaving of gendered agency that portrays safety as a lifestyle choice and the consumption of privatised spaces as the idealised expression of sexual and gender freedom.’

A similar argument about the attraction of the enclave, but crucially as a point from which to ambivalently attempt to re-engage your peers and relatives, is made by Lockwood in an analysis of Nairobi (Lockwood Reference Lockwood2023). He points out that the enclave is attractive for forms of protection and, ‘when asked for help, [inhabitants of enclaved compounds] draw back, anxious to protect their newfound wealth. The urban enclave’s impersonal space was attractive for precisely this reason’ (ibid.: 492). Thus, there are some instances where African urban material does not conform to a secessionary form of selfhood, as pointed out by Lockwood – namely, the particular forms of attachment and detachment assumed in our case studies from Accra, Maputo and Johannesburg. Rather, attachment and detachment muddy the waters, undercutting the possibility of the emergence of a secessionary selfhood in a pure form. Rather, we argue that the notions of detachment and attachment in our material reflect various registers for generating, negating or negotiating forms of enclaving and are therefore integral to multiform expressions of aspiration. This is also in line with some other recent research on enclaving from the African continent, such as Green’s (Reference Green2023) work on Zimbabwe, in which she maps and analyses how Baptist Zimbabweans not only manoeuvre in urban space – alternating, for instance, between different spatial routes through the city for (self-perceived) protection. Crucially, Green shows that, while informed by Christian cosmology, such ‘mobile enclave-making’ transforms relations between selves and others, meaning that ‘middle-class residents of Zimbabwe’s capital city, Harare, are trained into rhythms of self- and property-protection’ (ibid.: 31). What Green describes for Harare may be replicated for middle-class residents’ organization of life in African urban settings across the continent, and find resonance in distinct urban practices – practices that clearly relate to the dynamics of attachment and detachment.

Furthermore, we would like to add that the work undertaken by, for instance, Green and Manuel (see also Sumich and Manuel, this issue) underlines the global city character of urban African configurations – a form promoting flexible and fluid identities that are also open to forms of attachment. Importantly, as also highlighted by Hunt et al. (Reference Hunt, Batumike, Cirhuza, Mugoli and Mukungilwa2024) in a work on madness, violence and the urban based on material from Congo, attachment is seen as crucial to grapple with forms of destruction, death and relationality – not merely as related to (erstwhile domains of) love (see also Stoler Reference Stoler2006). This latter analysis stresses that attachment is not only a relevant aspect of everyday lives and aspirations but is also present in contexts that are often merely seen as harsh or characterized by multiple forms of violence. It must be reckoned with analytically if we are to make sense of such realities, whether enclaved or otherwise.

In addition, the focus on the enclaved subject and its multiple material forms also resonates with more long-term and multidimensional work on the broad horizon of pro-social African practices used to create and generate kin and thus circumvent (material or immaterial) forms of enclaving that would threaten to sever or weaken ties. In fact, such pro-social or pro-human practices in African scholarship have been related to experimentation, and fundamental openness is characteristic of the continent. Francis Nyamnjoh has been vocal in this sense and has, in numerous ways, emphasized how Africans – through a form of incompleteness – may be seen as ‘frontier beings’ (Nyamnjoh Reference Nyamnjoh2017). Such ‘frontierness’ and experimentation resonate well with the new urban forms emerging in Africa – forms that are often captured by the conceptual apparatuses and spaces of experimentation provided by Afropolitanism (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2020 [2010]), Africanity (see, for example, Diagne and Amselle Reference Diagne and Amselle2020 [2018]), Afrofuturism (see, for example, Goldstone and Obarrio Reference Goldstone and Obarrio2017) and other experimental forms of being, becoming and conviviality (see, for example, Ofosu-Kusi and Matsuda Reference Ofosu-Kusi and Matsuda2020), which perceive the world relationally and help characterize the continent, including its urban domains (see also Mkhwanazi and Manderson Reference Mkhwanazi and Manderson2020).

We would also like to point out that a task such as the one we have given ourselves – to map and understand the material and immaterial forms that detachment, intimacy and aspiration may assume within the context of enclaving – should also include, or at least acknowledge, the importance of the arts. Literary fiction, audiovisual material (such as films) and other art forms, including those that are categorized as belonging to the performative domain, are all key to assessing how these dynamics unfold and, indeed, become materialized – as shown in the brilliant ethnographic film Maputo: ethnography of a divided city (Tvedten et al. Reference Tvedten, Ribeiro, Graça and Bertelsen2018) or as portrayed in works of fiction that capture – as well as generate – visions of the city. An example of the latter would be the anthology Accra Noir (Danquah Reference Danquah2021), a cornucopia of short stories from specific sites within Accra that together comprise an array of uniquely situated understandings of not only the city and its spaces but also the variety of ways in which its widely different urbanites navigate the different and dangerous ideals of detachment and intimacy that permeate their relations to others, both significant and insignificant.

Enclaving and the new African urbanities

Historically, research on African cities has often focused on studying the city itself, whereas ethnographic and sociological studies have focused holistically on small-scale societies and contexts (Southall Reference Southall, Southall, Nas and Ansari1985). For example, some anthropological studies of Africa after World War Two focused on certain groups in specific urban contexts (Mayer Reference Mayer1961; Mitchell Reference Mitchell1956; Reference Mitchell1969) and associational life in African cities (Wilson and Mafeje Reference Wilson and Mafeje1963; Little Reference Little1965). In some scholarship at the end of the last century, African urban contexts were cast as laboratories for radical social and political change within a colonial or postcolonial context (Wallerstein Reference Wallerstein1966; Gugler and Flanagan Reference Gugler and Flanagan1978). In recent decades, however – and often heavily informed by discourses of modernization and development – the approach to research on African urban formations was one characterized by lack, maldevelopment/failure, danger or an absence of planning – in this, it reflected research in other areas on the continent. This was perhaps most infamously summed up by Rem Koolhaas’s reading, in both film and text, of Lagos as a form of pathological urbanity (Koolhaas Reference Koolhaas, Enwezor, Basualdo, Bauer, Ghez, Maharaj, Nash and Zaya2002; for a critique, see Gandy Reference Gandy2005; Reference Gandy2006).

Such a Euro-American and often neocolonial vision of African urban chaos and lack has been pointed out as problematically predominant, perhaps most explicitly by Nuttall and Mbembe (Reference Nuttall and Mbembe2008) in their exceptionally thorough book on Johannesburg. There, they write that the African urban, in some form, is commonly conceptualized as ‘an emblem of irresolvable crisis’ (ibid.: 5). Indeed, in recent studies of African cities, the hegemonic tropes and discourses of failure are prominent. For instance, in Stephanie Newell’s keen analysis of urban life in Lagos, a critique of the mediated notions of dirt and refuse assumes centre stage in analysing the social and political metabolism of that particular urban order (Newell Reference Newell2020).

Furthermore, as Tomás (Reference Tomás2022) points out in a refreshing new take on Luandan urban formations and urban thought in general, too much research on African cities has drawn its points of view from either the so-called Chicago School or the so-called Los Angeles School of urban studies. Instead, Tomás underlines the importance of avoiding template global North explanatory apparatuses when approaching African cities and of questioning the arguments of the ‘hard exceptionality’ of African cities, which, he argues, smuggles a form of functionalism into their analyses:

Reflecting both Tomás’s argument for a non-functionalist approach to cities and Macamo’s insistence on how intimacy and detachment are imbricated, and also taking into account the excellent and original work on African urbanity coming out of the African Centre for Cities in Cape Town (see, for example, Bekker et al. Reference Bekker, Croese and Pieterse2021; Parnell and Pieterse Reference Parnell and Pieterse2014; Pieterse and Simone Reference Pieterse and Simone2013; Simone and Pieterse Reference Simone and Pieterse2017), the contributions in this special issue move – albeit in different ways – in directions that provide a view of urban formations and dimensions on the continent that not only allows for nuance but also locates dimensions other than the one characterized by failure and doom. By mapping the processes of detachment and attachment, we contribute to research that sees African urbanity not only from the perspectives of the margins, as we believe that the complex dynamics surrounding enclaving allow us to capture key dimensions of contemporary African urbanity. By mediating insides and outsides of imagined, desired, planned or already materially built forms that cordon off certain urban resources, enclaving presents particular challenges to collectivity, individuality and intimacy (see also Nielsen Reference Nielsen2023). Below, we note a few important trends relevant to enclaving and its dynamics of detachment and attachment.

First, as African urbanity spreads across the continent – for instance, through what is commonly termed ‘urban sprawl’ (see, for example, Yiran et al. Reference Yiran, Ablo, Asem and Owusu2020) – the lifeworlds of Africans are changing in both rural and urban settings. This also means that the scale of the urban area in Africa is undergoing transformation, and what we used to think of as rural is becoming urbanized in some ways. A new strand of literature is paying increasing attention to such emerging zones of indistinction between rural and urban areas, including the key work of Archambault. In a number of works, she has demonstrated the importance of an attentiveness to such peri- or para-urban zones in her analyses from Mozambique, also demonstrating the transformations of the social, including detachment and attachment, that this change entails (see, for example, Archambault Reference Archambault2017; Reference Archambault2018; Reference Archambault2021).

Second, beyond the spatial expansion of the urban and its seeping into domains hitherto thought of as rural (Ablo and Bertelsen Reference Ablo and Bertelsen2022), there are also qualitative changes to the composition of the urban – not least through large-scale and small-scale experimentation. At a basic level, this concerns the many forms of enclaving unfolding beyond fortressed cities, such as the novel mini enclaves in Maputo’s high-density bairros, and transforming the social topography and formats of the relationality of the enclaves (see Bertelsen Reference Bertelsen2021). Such street-level experimentation shows, we believe, that an imaginary or logic of enclaving is also transforming the fabric of the African urban beyond the hyper-visual, glitzy, fortressed gated communities and private cities being constructed (as well as conjured through speculative plans) across the continent. Taking their cue from Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities, in their book Kinshasa: tales of the invisible city, De Boeck and Plissart (Reference De Boeck and Plissart2014 [2004]) highlight how an urban formation is replete with the ‘local production of zones of desire, expectation and hope’. As De Boeck has shown more generally, such desires also materialize in plans that border the phantasmagoric, such as the ‘Cité du Fleuve’ plans rolled out in Kinshasa (De Boeck Reference De Boeck2011). More recently, in a related yet distinctly different vein, Smith has also re-centred the ‘underneaths’ of high-rise buildings in Nairobi, as well as speculation about their collapse being grounded in their fakeness (Smith Reference Smith2023). Smith’s incisive analysis of fake buildings indexes the intimate relations between the material and the speculative, the infrastructure and the opaque economies at work – dynamics central to some of our analyses of enclaving in this special issue (Ablo and Overå, Yekple and Gastrow in this issue).

Third, the large-scale experimentation of private new developments is also integral to a shift in the role of sovereignty or statecraft. As Moser et al. (Reference Moser, Côté-Roy and Korah2022) show, there are around seventy entirely new cities currently being built on the continent – many of these with financial support from what they term ‘uncharted foreign actors’, but, crucially, often with ties to both foreign states and African elites. This development resonates with Easterling’s (Reference Easterling2005; Reference Easterling2014) assertion that, for urban transformation more generally, the built environment is a materialization of power in its most concrete sense. Easterling points out that infrastructure provides the rules of the game for the unfolding of social, political and other forms of relationality – including attachment and detachment. Thus, state power is built not only into the dynamics of zoning and (more or less opaque) urban planning process but also into the roads, gravel, cables, signalling towers and cement, increasingly transforming the planet into an urbanized one (see also Archambault Reference Archambault2024). Such attentiveness to the imbrications of political citizenship, sovereignty and forms of urban enclaving has also been made apparent on the African continent (Bekker and Therborn Reference Bekker and Therborn2012) – and not least demonstrated in the groundbreaking work of Appel in her incisive analysis of the oil industry in Equatorial Guinea (Appel Reference Appel2012; Reference Appel2019), as well as in a recent analysis of smart city experiments on the continent (Odendaal Reference Odendaal2023). Furthermore, Claudia Gastrow has documented how urban spatial forms of inclusion and exclusion are integral to the rehashing of (urban) citizenship in Luanda. Crucially, she underlines how such transformations and urban developments are fundamentally fuelled by particular postcolonial politics (and, in this case, presidential power) – again underscoring particular African dynamics of enclaving, which are irreducible to explanations solely emphasizing the impact of generic neoliberal urban development (Gastrow Reference Gastrow2017; Reference Gastrow2020; Reference Gastrow2024; see also Schubert Reference Schubert2017: 47 on ‘New Luanda’ for a similar argument).

Thus, it is crucial that in an analysis of enclaving, attachment and detachment – the forms of statecraft involved – are identified, as well as the way in which the transformation of major cities into pastiches of various forms of enclaves also involves a transformation of the postcolonial state itself – not least due to the involvement of many postcolonial elites in the development of such enclaves (see, for example, Sumich and Manuel, this issue) or in the transformation of the urban fabric into securitized zones or enclaves, the latter replete with processes of inclusion and exclusion (see, for example, Glück Reference Glück2017).

In our special issue, we reflect in various ways on all these large-scale transformations of the African urban and how they impact forms (imagined or materialized) of enclaving. This means, first, that we take seriously, as researchers, the aspiration displayed in spaces sometimes cast as marginalized (see, for instance, Bertelsen and Nassone, this issue). Second, we recognize that the African urban spaces we map and analyse conform to a type of global city that promotes flexible or fluid identities. These cities may benefit from being read materially and discursively – as in Ato Quayson’s analysis of a single street in Accra, where play with language, fleeting forms of relationality, and intense reading of signs, together with ‘Others’, form central parts of an understanding of the city (Quayson Reference Quayson2014). In this way, Quayson’s work has several clear similarities with Simone’s tone-setting work, where the city also has a clear post-material feel: rather than reading, for example, African cities as lacking infrastructure, Simone emphasizes how the people make up the infrastructure that makes these cities work (Simone Reference Simone2004; Reference Simone2019; see also De Boeck and Plissart Reference De Boeck and Plissart2014 [2004]).

To some extent, similar readings have been made for Maputo, Accra and Johannesburg, which we will draw on and develop further here. For Maputo, for instance, in his delineation of the close and intimate relations between housing and colonial and postcolonial politics, Morton (Reference Morton2019) has shown how aspiration – for citizenship and humanity, well-being and wealth – takes concrete shape, both visibly and clandestinely in various enclaved sections of the city. Jason Sumich extends this argument, showing how contemporary enclave urbanism in Maputo may not be read as simple reflections of real estate speculation or neoliberal urban capitalism, but rather as contemporary materializations or resuscitations of utopian aspirations that continue to linger, premised on time:

Drawing on the metropolis of Johannesburg – a city that has vast connections with Maputo, both historically and contemporarily (Heer Reference Heer2019; First Reference First1983) – Nuttall and Mbembe (Reference Nuttall and Mbembe2008) stress both the machinations of race and capital fundamental to the emergence of the city and the cracks (if not the fundamental openness) of its urban order. Such cracks and possibilities for experimentation are also emphasized by Wilhelm-Solomon in his work on dilapidated buildings that are occupied in downtown Johannesburg. While recognizing that such places are structured by forms of exclusion, extermination and structural violence, Wilhelm-Solomon, instead of underlining fragmentation and individuation, holds that these are generative of the social in a sense that he calls the ‘the ruinous vitalism of the urban form’ (Wilhelm-Solomon Reference Wilhelm-Solomon2017: 374; see also Masango and Mkhwanazi and Bertelsen and Nassone, this issue). In their work on Accra, both Grant (Reference Grant2009) and Quayson (Reference Quayson2014) show how, broadly, sociality, generativity and connectivity – dynamics inherent to processes of detachment and attachment – are fundamental to understanding the city, both as a historically open-ended and cosmopolitan site of relations spanning space, time and the Atlantic Ocean through migratory patterns (Grant Reference Grant2009) and as a place where relationality and humanity unfold and are engaged at the street level, a street that is also an urban palimpsest on several levels (Quayson Reference Quayson2014).

In sum, by underlining some of the work undertaken in the three African cities we focus on here, we want to showcase not merely that Africa has been – and still is – a global site for profound urban experimentation and a laboratory for the future in general terms (see also Goldstone and Obarrio Reference Goldstone and Obarrio2017). This is, after all, a point already made in a range of important research over the last two decades, including by Simone (Reference Simone2004), Pieterse (Reference Pieterse2008; Pieterse and Simone Reference Pieterse and Simone2013), Nuttall and Mbembe (Reference Nuttall and Mbembe2008), Grant (Reference Grant2009) and Myers (Reference Myers2011). While building on these insights, we instead stress that such diverse and, arguably, currently intensified forms of urban experimentation centring around multiple forms of enclaving provide rich sites in which to rethink the conditions for and dynamics surrounding detachment and intimacy within the African urban context as a whole. How can one approach these new African urban formations, and how do they relate to, implicate or reflect particular forms of aspiration or desire?

Enclaving beyond the gate and the wall: the contributions

As the above sections have highlighted, one might do worse than observe global urban dynamics from Africa. For here, cutting-edge, large- and small-scale urbanization in the form of enclaving meets a vast array of experimentation in how these material urban forms are to be inhabited, understood, moved between, contested and negotiated. In this special issue, we focus on these latter dynamics precisely in order to provide a corrective to those approaches that do not see beyond the gate and the wall of the enclave and proceed to make assumptions about enclaves on that basis. Instead, we argue, as an increasingly common African urban form (material and immaterial), the enclave is key to understanding how forms of detachment and attachment are reshaped and fuel contemporary African urban forms of being and becoming, of relating and distancing. Our contributions do this in distinct ways.

Ablo and Overå analyse the motivations for housing investment and residents’ material and social experiences in a new urban development, the Appolonia City of Light. They argue that the aspiration to live in an enclaved private city is driven by complex relationships, processes and imagined futures. Living in a privatized city is an aspiration for comfortable living and upward mobility – a detachment from the highly congested, noisy and infrastructurally and administratively cumbersome housing situation in Accra. However, the imaged space is different from the lived place, as the article shows that residents’ expectations of service delivery and security are unmet as the private city cannot ‘control’ the infrastructural and institutional context of Accra.

Bertelsen and Nassone identify urban practices oriented around care, empathy and mutuality as key forms of negotiating intimacy and detachment. Here, they explore such practices in Maputo, mainly in the guise of texts adorning crowded minibuses and privately owned cars. While often leading to laughter, comments or discussions among passengers and passers-by, these moving names, slogans or warnings are also acknowledged to communicate aspirations for novel forms of sociality, an attack on inter-human separation and lack of empathy, and, finally, an expression of a desire to generate affective room for love, care and mutuality. By mapping the visually affective drawing, Bertelsen and Nassone argue for the anthropological usefulness of generating understandings of African urban spaces that evade single-mindedly emphasizing the ever increasing atomization of collectives or that project necropolitics as being the hegemonic urban be-all and end-all. They also show how this type of textual and interpretative practice actively and critically engages temporality, including descriptions that project the end of the future.

Focusing on gated and pseudo-gated communities that have emerged on the outskirts of Accra, Yekple delves into the resulting loss of agricultural land and the detachment of people from their livelihoods. She draws on a relational place-making perspective to shed light on the livelihood changes of residents in the local community where gated and pseudo-gated communities are located. Empirically, real estate housing projects built on Western-style or ‘fantasy’ designs in formerly rural areas reconfigure the socio-spatial fabric of peri-urban areas and set in motion a detachment process that disengages people from their agricultural lands and livelihoods. Whether material or social, the transformation of place is the product of changing spatial interactions, experiences and social relations that link people to a specific spatial domain.

Gastrow takes on high-end real estate developments that have shaped Africa’s urbanscapes. Drawing on extended interviews with South African investors in urban real estate development and management in Africa, this study investigates how imaginations of risk and attempts to control it shape investment. Faced with what they viewed as highly risky investment terrains, investors tried to recreate the financial environments they were familiar with through de-risking practices that sought to enclave projects from the geographies in which they were located. The result was an investment in high-end real estate that was thought to be more controllable, calculable and, most of all, profitable. Enclaving is not just an increasing characteristic of African urbanscapes but also an underlying logic of the formal financial practices that produce them.

Maraire addresses issues of detachment and attachment by examining the contemporary production of luxury residential real estate advertising in the affluent suburbs of Johannesburg. The article depicts how the work of real estate agents not only facilitates financial transactions but also stages reconfigurations and ideological properties of suburban landscapes and a skewed property sector. Along with analysing the visual and textual representations of advertisements, Maraire examines how estate agents cultivate polished, albeit contested, representations of properties for sale. The staging of properties produces associations with intimate relationships, nature, material nostalgia, and ‘live, work, play’ lifestyles. The properties are also seemingly detached from a highly racialized and unequal property market, and many residents’ current anxieties relate to crime, water shortages and electricity crises. This aestheticization of everyday materials harkens back to past ideals, inherently structured socio-spatially by colonial and apartheid segregation policies, while simultaneously signalling new futures for urban dwellings.

Masango and Mkhwanazi examine detachment in the walled city of Johannesburg, framed as visible and invisible, physical and mental, concrete and abstract. They examine concerns about danger and safety, which are important considerations for the middle class when deciding where and how to live. Over the years, artists and writers have pondered Johannesburg’s allure and given weight to its generative capacity as a place of creativity and consciousness where even crime is inspiring and inextricable from the fabric of its existence. In Rosebank, new walls are being built daily to detach people from crime. For an older generation that remembers Rosebank in its apartheid and early democracy years, when it was quieter, less racially diverse, and more of a suburban area than a leisure and consumption destination, this change is viewed with concern. In contrast, for the younger generation, these changes are perceived as opening up spaces of possibility. In an increasingly neoliberal world, where enclaving is encouraged through the development of shopping malls, expensive housing and costly cultural and recreational activities, it is unsurprising that youth aspirations in South Africa are seemingly assimilating to this norm without question or protest. Johannesburg’s golden yet troubled history shows how the city has shaped contestations of belonging, specifically concerning race and class. These contestations provide the key to understanding Rosebank’s enduring legacy and status as an aspirational, youthful and unproblematic space envisaged as being more accessible than nearby Sandton.

Finally, Sumich and Manuel analyse attachment and detachment in Maputo, Mozambique, emphasizing how gated communities are the latest attempt at a social engineering project using the built environment to create a desired urban subject. They trace how utopian ambition and popular aspirations bring these projects into being and how a lack of resources and faulty management exacerbate internal tensions that cause them to fall apart. It is argued that the lack of cultural knowledge or the ‘one size fits all’ authoritarian imposition of a modernizing plan does not necessarily cause these projects to fail. Instead, in a postcolonial order characterized by a conflation between people, nation and state, the failure of such projects is linked to the fact that the right to the city and to citizenship is not the result of the autonomous individual but rather comes through a project of transformative sovereignty.