Book Launch: The Chaos Precinct: Johannesburg as a Port City (Tanya Zack)

Date and time
6 March 2026 from 5:15pm to 8pm GMT

Location
Common Ground, UCL Institute of Advanced Studies

Book Launch: The Chaos Precinct: Johannesburg as a Port City (Jacana, Johannesburg)

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.

Order the Book: The QR code below will direct you to an offer from the publisher for delivery of the book to your door.

This event is in collaboration with the UCL Urban Laboratory.

Meet the author

Tanya Zack is a South African urban planner and writer 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.

To discuss the book, which Tanya Zack will first present, we have invited the following panel:

Professor Laura 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 book and journal articles.

Dr Beacon Mbiba (Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development, Oxford Brookes University) 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.

Professor Jennifer Robinson (Professor of Human 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).

The panel will be chaired by Prof Claire Mercer (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).

Registration

This event is free and open to all, but registration is required via Eventbrite.

More about this event

Established in 2005, the UCL Urban Laboratory investigates, proposes and disseminates critical solutions to a wide range of social, physical and technological urban and built environment issues, with a focus on the grand challenges of our time.

The Urban Salon is a London-based forum for architecture, cities, and international urbanism.