Place Naming as Black Place-making in Johannesburg’s Informal Settlements

Abstract Informal settlements in South Africa exist on the periphery of formal town planning and expose the complex navigations of place-making, agency, and survival. However, these settlements are engaged in their own practices of landscape inscription through acts of place naming and place-making as a means of reclaiming land and solidifying identities of people and places. This paper explores place naming processes within three informal settlements in the south of Johannesburg to understand how this serves as place-making. We use a narrative as theory and method to analyse the interviews conducted with three people from Kokotela (Lakeview), Narens Farm, and Phumlamqashi informal settlements in the south of Johannesburg. Our analysis illuminates liberating and agentic practices of place-making. We suggest that in place of the putative helplessness that characterises much scholarship on informal settlements, research should attend to practices of self-making and refusal that are always present in these spaces. Narrative is a productive form of surfacing how people dream themselves into being through geographic narrativization.