Engaging Jeppe’s urban potential through fashion and comics

Abstract

Jeppe in Johannesburg’s downtown area is a dense area of retail trade run by pan-African immigrants, dominated by the Ethiopian diaspora. The area has an unprecedented dynamism and attracts hawkers and private customers from all over Southern Africa. The trade extends up to six floors into the city blocks and has transformed the city more comprehensively than formal initiatives and businesses. Our intention in documenting this trade and its spaces is to contest the lack of official recognition by the City of Johannesburg of the Jeppe area. Through mapping, image making and performative practice, we wanted to document the transformative capacity of its ambivalent spaces to allow for the choice of recognition to be considered.

Our mapping, which took place between July 2009 and the end of 2011 has revealed great spatial intelligence at work in Jeppe, minimizing spatial waste, combining resources supporting the processes around retail with small spaces and the micro-technés of the traders. Our two case studies here look first at the interrelationships between place and fashion in the area, through the competitive and creative practices by which traders and customers alike partake in acts of mutual transformation. In the second study, the genre of comics is used to create new relationships between the researcher and the area’s users and to access deep knowledge of the patterns of use across the area.