This paper reflects on the discussions of a collective of academics in and around Johannesburg, Africa’s iconic city built on the extractive capital of gold mining. Captured aptly in William Kentridge’s art film Johannesburg: Second Greatest City after Paris (1989), the city is brought into an imaginary relationship with a romanticised Parisian experience. This comparison is taken up through an endeavour to read, re-read, imagine and re-imagine Johannesburg in relation to visions of the French capital contained in the writings in Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project with its “convolutes” of the Parisian arcades of the nineteenth century. The authors locate these discussions within debates addressed to urban anthropology in South Africa now, delving into the theories, methods and insights presented in a scholarly meeting and associated city tour held in 2017, and through the papers submitted for this special issue. This essay considers how an authorial collaboration comprising an anthropologist, historian and an architect might contribute differently to debates current in the spatial disciplines and anthropology, and how such a multi-disciplinary reading of a seminal text about a European city might resonate with our location in Southern Africa.

本文反映了约翰内斯堡及其周围的一群学者的讨论，约翰内斯堡是非洲的标志性城市，建在金矿的开采首都上。威廉·肯特里奇（William Kentridge）的艺术电影《约翰内斯堡：仅次于巴黎的第二大城市》（1989年）被恰当地捕捉了，这座城市以一种浪漫的巴黎式体验进入了一种虚构的关系。通过比较阅读，重新阅读，想象和重新想象约翰内斯堡，与沃尔特·本杰明（Walter Benjamin）的“街机项目”（Arcades Project）中的法国首都愿景相关，进行了这种比较。以及19世纪巴黎拱廊的“漩涡”。作者将这些讨论放在现在针对南非城市人类学的辩论中，深入研究2017年学术会议和相关城市之旅中提出的理论，方法和见解，并通过针对该特刊提交的论文进行研究。本文考虑了由人类学家，历史学家和建筑师组成的作者合作如何对当前空间学科和人类学的辩论做出不同的贡献，以及对欧洲城市开创性文本的这种多学科解读如何与我们在欧洲的位置产生共鸣。非洲南部。