A dissertation submitted to the School of Language, Literature and Media, Faculty of Humanities for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, March 2017 / Although the burgeoning fields of linguistic and semiotic landscapes (LL and SL) studies provide extensive coverage of urban settings around the globe, it lacks a focus on urban development and the associated phenomenons such as gentrification, with the notable exception of Lou (2016). This dissertation looks at the neighbourhood of Marshalltown, located in the inner city of Johannesburg. Marshalltown is known as the mining district because of its proximity to the original goldmines that sparked the growth of the city. The neighbourhood’s SL has radically shifted from a place of urban decay to a trendy neighbourhood since the late 1990s, after urban development efforts financed by the private sector made the area stand out from the rest of the inner city. The developers working in Marshalltown have purposefully filled it with signs indexing the mining heritage its businesses which tend to cater to the middle-to-upper-classes, thus excluding poorer residents which make up most of the inner city’s population.
Against this backdrop, the dissertation aims to answer the following three research questions: 1) How is Marshalltown constructed as a space of heritage, both in its materiality and in its representation in a corpus of media texts? 2) Considering that heritage entails a selection process from a more general historic field, which sections of history are curated in Marshalltown’s SL, which are silenced, and what are the implications for the narratives displayed in the context of post-apartheid South Africa? 3) How is Marshalltown’s urban environment experienced by social actors in a context of globalized trends in urban design which rely on heritage and authenticity to market formerly ignored city centres?
The data for this study consists of a corpus of 25 media articles from various outlets, 255 photographs of Marshalltown and its vicinity, ethnographic field notes written between 2012 and 2016, as well as interviews with developers, heritage architect, a deputy director of immovable heritage at the City of Johannesburg, shop owners and people who work in the area.
This dissertation aims to contribute to the young field of SL studies, while bringing forth Scollon and Scollon’s (2003) methodological toolkit of geosemiotic which allows for an analysis of signs in place and how people interact with them to draw a pertinent analysis of the construction of place. Geosemiotics is coupled with specific themes for each analytical chapter which brings forth a new way of analysing a SL. Those themes are 1) the language of urban development which drawing on Markus and Cameron (2002) helps analyse the representation of city neighbourhoods; 2) heritage, which brings a temporal perspective to SL studies that I call a chronoscape; 3) authenticity, which brings a visual analysis addition to the recent debate on the topic within sociolinguistics scholarship (Coupland 2003, Bucholtz 2003 and Eckert 2003) and its focus on the discursive construction of what counts as authentic.
This study argues that Marshalltown’s post-apartheid SL is carefully designed by a majority of (white) developers wanting to give the area a heritage feel, borrowing from the mining history of the city; thus anchoring a European influenced heritage within their own interpretation of what an African city should look like. The heritage feel of Marshalltown is part of a broader plan to reclaim the city, which means changing the image it acquired previously during an era of urban decay as a dangerous no-go area, into an attractive tourism-friendly urban space. Those changes are achieved by inserting development efforts into the market for authentic urban lifestyle which Marshalltown can provide thanks to its preserved history. The neighbourhood stands out from the rest of the inner city by being privately controlled and maintained thus distancing itself from the popular discourse of inner city Johannesburg and instead developers redesign it as an ideal space for consumption. / XL2018
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/24555 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Baro, Gilles Jean Bernard |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | Online resource (319 leaves), application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document, application/pdf |
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