Urbanities,
Vol. 3 • No 1 • May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
95
second half of the twentieth century. Quite importantly, Bank does not try, as too often is the case
of iconoclasts, to discredit previous research in an anachronistic critique of the past generation of
scholars. Instead, he aptly softens the opposition between two groups, identified by his
predecessors, the traditional (rural)
Red
people and the modern
School
people to show the
changes which are happening among them during
the considered
period of time.
The book starts with a very extensive presentation of the author’s point of view and
position towards the existing ethnographies of the place he chooses to study and more general
theoretical positions in urban anthropology. Then Bank describes what he calls the ‘political
mood’ in the city after the urban riots that took place in 1952 and discusses how these events and
moods affected the urban landscape. The results were the erection of Duncan Village, a new
township on which he focuses his attention, which took place throughout the rest of the century.
Political measures to control better the place as well as the transfer of entire populations
transformed the urban fabric as well as the former social and gender roles. Bank speaks of a
feminist city going back to patriarchy. A full reversal of the situation occurred when, in the
1980s, young residents took control of the site and made what the author calls ‘apartheid
modernism’ implode. As a result, the township turned into a slum under the new cultural style
called ‘the comrades’, which was introduced by young men choosing to live in shacks. The
analysis then addresses specific places and the changes that affected them. For example, Bank
examines ‘single-sex hostels’ made into family housing, matrifocal households transformed into
hetero-patriarchal township houses and backyard shacks occupied by migrants now being
occupied by single women, showing how the old and new users make up the reputation of places.
And this is how the book ends: Duncan village has become a ‘dishonoured urban
locality’. It is hard to find clear causes for its decay: Bank speaks of ‘fractured urbanism’,
sticking to his refusal of considering people as mere victims of macro factors but rather as agents
of their lives. One can only applaud such an empirical and
emic
approach. However the reason
Bank gives for introducing the concept of fractured urbanism is purely rhetorical and could be
used to develop any argument, including ‘a more complex understanding of the space of the
post-apartheid township as socially compact, culturally complex and internally diverse’ (p. 241).
Regrettably, this kind of rhetoric is not infrequent in ‘Home, spaces, street styles’ — perhaps a
mere sign of the times. Similarly, on a theoretical level, the discussion constantly complies with
