Forced Migrants in the New Johannesburg: Towards a Local Government Response

This collection comes from the Forced Migration Studies Programme (FMSP) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, ably edited by FMSP acting director Loren Landau. As might be expected, the numerous, short contributions illustrate the multiple challenges faced by the city of Johannesburg, NGOs and broader South African society in welcoming, accommodating and indeed actively integrating (or not) forced migrants into the community. Gotz explains how such challenges have tended to be amplified or 'over-determined' by the historical legacy of apartheid, marked by 'contradictory imperatives', including a prevailing assumption that 'the shortest route to urban economic development will always appear to be "exclusion" of the poor', p. 27. Most articles draw on carefully gathered data from a joint Wits- Tufts survey of South Africans and forced migrants in Johannesburg, conducted in February and March 2003.