Mobility, Access and the Value of the Mabopane Station Precinct

Although mobility shapes the material landscape, for the majority of ordinary people, their movements are structured by space. For this reason, ordinary people bear the bodily and financial costs of commuting to the metropolitan core areas from their peripheries. In particular, the city’s core areas and peripheries are shaped by privatisation, racism and other forces of change, each driving urban change in particular, complementary ways (Pierce and Lawhon, 2018; Czegledy, 2004). That said, there are interpretations that the city’s core areas are multiple and shifting, with their peripheries being unstable and indeterminable. In this sense, the city’s peripheries do not always coincide with the spatial distribution of marginality and deprivation (Pieterse, 2019). Howe’s (2021) idea of popular centralities through popular agency may in some ways be seen to transcend these diverging accounts of the city’s uneven spatial structure. This paper uses the case of the Mabopane Station precinct in northern Tshwane to give content to this transcending idea of popular centralities. With respect to popular agency, Coe and Jordhus-Lier’s (2010) forms of agency (resilience, reworking and resistance) are useful for further analysing the resilience of the residents and commuters of northern Tshwane. The paper demonstrates some of the ways through which popular centralities are constituted—how movement becomes space; and also that it is in specific places (which are always constituted by the local and the elsewhere) where resilience is exercised in ways that perpetuate and even overcome peripherality. In this sense, the paper treats a social and cultural context seriously, highlighting ordinary people’s cautious uses of and intuitive, creative reuses of peripheral spaces as they turn some of them into urbanisms of self-realisation.