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Book Launch: The Chaos Precinct: Johannesburg as a Port City
06 March 2026, 5:15 pm–8:00 pm
Join the Urban Salon for the launch of a new book by Tanya Zack, "The Chaos Precinct: Johannesburg as a Port City", exploring the cross-continental trade flows that have shaped central Johannesburg’s Ethiopian Quarter.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Organiser
-
Jennifer Robinson
Location
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IAS Common GroundG11, ground floor, South WingUCL, Gower St, LondonWC1E 6BTUnited Kingdom
About the book
The Chaos Precinct: Johannesburg as a Port City (Jacana Press) by Tanya Zack
Set in Johannesburg’s ‘Jeppe’ precinct, and at times in Ethiopia, this book reveals how this inner-city district (sometimes called Little Addis) has been remade through the ingenuity, labour, and networks of primarily Ethiopian migrant traders. It shows how a place widely dismissed as decayed has in fact become a thriving inland port city: a major hub in Africa’s fast-fashion economy, a transnational trading network, and a dense ecosystem of micro-entrepreneurship. Through careful scholarship, immersive narrative, and decades of on-the-ground engagement, the book uncovers the hidden architectures, economic systems, and social worlds that sustain this bustling entrepôt.
It does more than describe a neighbourhood. It opens a window onto globalisation from below, revealing how goods, money, ideas, and people circulate across continents through informal yet highly organised channels. It captures how migrant communities create opportunity amid uncertainty, how buildings are reinvented to serve new economies, and how cities evolve in unexpected and innovative ways.
About the event
To discuss the book, which Tanya Zack will first present, we have invited the following panel, who will each bring their different perspectives - Laura Hammond knows well the context where many of the Ethiopian traders and entrepreneurs in the precinct come from (and who Tanya followed from Johannesburg to Addis Ababa); Beacon Mbiba is renowned for his study of Zimbabwean traders who make up a large proportion of the cross-border trade in the precinct, and Jennifer Robinson has studied the wider Johannesburg context which has been fundamentally transformed by the people and events discussed in the book. Chaired by Claire Mercer.
This Urban Salon event is co-sponsored by the UCL Urban Laboratory.
Image: Pan Africa Mall, Johannesburg (old Jeppe street). Ossewa, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
About the Speakers
Tanya Zack
Urban planner and writer
Tanya Zack is a South African whose work has focused on urban regeneration, contemporary migration, informal work, urban policy and affordable housing. Her writing in Wake Up This Is Joburg (Duke University Press, 2022) has been lauded for being amongst the freshest and most original material on an African city. It was included in the longlist of the 2024 Sunday Times/Exclusive Books Literary Awards. The products of her professional practice in Johannesburg's inner city, including an inner-city transformation policy, and a study of cross border shopping, are recognised as ground-breaking interventions. She grew up in a near inner-city suburb.
More about Tanya ZackLaura Hammond
Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research and Knowledge Exchange and Professor of Development Studies at SOAS
She has been conducting research on conflict, food security, refugees, migration and diasporas in and from the Horn of Africa since the early 1990s. She is the author of ‘This Place Will Become Home: Refugee Repatriation to Ethiopia’ (Cornell University Press: 2004), editor (with Christopher Cramer and Johan Pottier) of Researching Violence in Africa: Ethical and Methodological Challenges [Brill 2011] and several books and journal articles.
More about Laura HammondBeacon Mbiba
Senior Lecturer in Urban Planning and International Development at Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development, Oxford Brookes University
Dr Beacon Mbiba is a scholar of urban studies and international development. Beacon is a leading writer on Zimbabwean urban planning and development, including markets, housing and diaspora, with key articles Current research interests include better data to understand African urbanisation, peri-urbanisation, land transformations, accumulation by dispossession, diaspora-led development and integration of new migrants to the United Kingdom.
More about Beacon MbibaJennifer Robinson
Chair of Human Geography at Geography, UCL
Jennifer is author of Ordinary Cities (Routledge, 2006) and Comparative Urbanism: Tactics for Global Urban Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2022). She has researched and published on urban development politics in Johannesburg for over two decades. Her current collaborative ERC funded research, focuses on the transnational circuits shaping large scale urban developments in three African contexts (Accra, Ghana; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Lilongwe, Malawi).
More about Jennifer RobinsonClaire Mercer
Professor of Human Geography at Geography, LSE
Claire's early work developed postcolonial approaches to civil society and diaspora (Development and the African Diaspora, Bloomsbury, 2009) and more recently she has focussed on the significance of property to middle class reproduction in suburban Dar es Salaam, in her book, The suburban frontier: middle class construction in Dar es Salaam (University of California Press, 2024).
More about Claire Mercer