Urban theory has generally cast Johannesburg as a case of irresolvable crisis: a city shaped by unequal economies and segregationist policy, receiving modernity from elsewhere rather than adding anything to it. This collection sets out to write South Africa's largest city into that theory on terms of its own.

The contributors take the classic accounts of metropolitan modernity and test them against what urban life after apartheid is actually like, the experience the volume calls city-ness. What surfaces is a city with many centers and an international reach, carrying a hybrid history that keeps working its way into the present.

Planning built on rigid rationalities and racial separation has been left behind. In its place the essays find intermingling and improvisation, and a distinctly local variety of cosmopolitan culture taking shape.