Marianne Millstein

uTshani BuyaKhuluma––The Grass Speaks: the political space and capacity of the South African Homeless People’s Federation

The point of departure for this article is the contemporary tendency towards localisation of politics in the context of neo-liberal globalisation. Mediated through institutional reforms, political discourses and localised struggles, this localisation of politics produce new and transformed local political spaces. The purpose of the article is to examine the capacity of popular movements to use and transform such political spaces within the South African housing sector. This analysis is done through a combination of conceptual examination of political space and actor capacity and a concrete case study of the political strategies and capacities of The South African Homeless Peoples Federation. The article argues that the Federation has utilised political relations at different scales to mobilise resources such as land and subsidies for housing for its members. It has also influenced the formulation of housing policies through its discourses and practical experiences with people-driven housing processes. In consequence the Federations ability to function as a civil/political movement has granted them a certain capacity to participate in the complicated process of turning de jure rights to adequate shelter into de facto rights for the urban poor as citizens of a democratic South Africa. 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Making Communities Work? Casual Labour Practices and Local Civil Society Dynamics in Delft, Cape Town

Casual labour practices are one of the defining characteristics of developing urban labour markets. Whenever non-governmental organisations (NGOs), businesses or the state apparatus institutionalise the use of casual labour, politics are involved. Based on a case study from Cape Town, South Africa, this article explores this politics of labour at the community level. A main focus is on the implications of casual labour practices for local civil society politics and forms of representation, by examining how different actors engage politically in the labour practices of municipal services and a large-scale housing project. Our analysis reveals how formal requirements for using local labour are interpreted in community terms as territorialised notions of entitlements and rights, leading to a simultaneous shift towards fragmentation and territorialisation of interests where local community groups facilitate employment casualisation ‘from below’. These processes also create new insider–outsider dynamics which threaten to fragment historical forms of class-based solidarity as community actors compete over access to limited resources; they also challenge broader aims of integration in an urban landscape deeply divided by class and race.

Urban governance transformations and the first two years of the N2 Gateway project in Cape Town

South African cities regularly experience service delivery protests, which often target local governments who are blamed for non-delivery and non-participation. The legitimacy crisis of local democracy can be understood in the context of broader urban governance transformations since 1994, with implications for city governments’ ability to deliver services and realise participatory governance. This paper explores the initial phase of the N2 Gateway project from 2004 to 2006 as a case study of the politics of urban governance in Cape Town As a centralised and politically driven project, the experiences from the first phase of N2 Gateway shows how local actors were sidelined and how narrow participatory mechanisms failed to engage local government actors and community interests, contributing to a local politicisation of exclusion and allocation.

Rights, identities and belonging: Reflections on the everyday politics of urban citizenship in Delft, Cape Town

ABSTRACT The purpose of the article is to explore the complex and contested politics of urban citizenship in relation to everyday spaces in Delft, a poor township in Cape Town South Africa. The arguments build upon a decade of ethnographic research on community politics and organizing relating to housing in Delft, Cape Town. Through illustrative examples, the author shows how housing rights and policies have been mediated through and imbricated with racial identities, residential status and notions of belonging in the community. She finds that these subjectivities are not inherent in conflict but often overlap and work simultaneously in community organizing and practice. These findings inform a critical engagement with current rethinking of urban citizenship in the Global South. The author argues that attention to the ordinary and everyday practices of citizenship may lead to a better understanding of how political subjectivities and agency are produced and practised. She concludes by proposing three dimensions that could guide a research agenda on everyday politics of urban citizenship: reconstructions of political subjectivities through state–society encounters, implications of differentiated subjectivities for how urban citizenship is perceived and claimed, and what practices of citizenship are seen as expressions of political agency.

Rethinking Civil Society in Development: Scales and Situated Hegemonies

The new development agenda formulated through the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is rich with issues such as women empowerment, inclusive society, environment and decent work that have been high on the agenda of civil society actors. However, civil society itself gets only a scant attention among other implementing bodies. We argue for nuanced investigation of civil society in the context of SDGs, and its rethinking in the arena of development research, and propose an approach that pays attention to situated hegemonies at different scales, and engages with empirical complexities in a non-normative tone. We illustrate the proposed agenda by reviewing literature on local organizing, established organizations, and networks and alliances especially in the contexts of South Africa and Tanzania. In conclusion, we suggest that paying attention to situated hegemonies at different scales provides a fruitful framework for discussing civil society in both development research and practice in the threshold of new global development era.

The State of Urban Agendas in Norwegian Development Research and Policy

The article explores the geographies of knowledge production about urban Africa in the Norwegian context. Norwegian development debates have responded slowly and reluctantly to urban transformations in Africa. However, there seems to be an emerging focus on African cities both in research and in policy circles. This agenda has much to gain from a growing international literature that challenges existing approaches to African cities. These scholars argue that research and development policy debate continues to represent African cities as dysfunctional exceptionalisms from Western urban experiences or as places where complex urban dynamics of inclusion and exclusion can be solved by policy interventions. Thus, the urban agenda must move beyond what has been labelled the ‘shackles of developmentalism’. The article identifies similar divides in knowledge production in the Norwegian context and critically assesses the state of urban agendas in Norwegian development policies. I argue that policies and debates tend to reproduce similar representations about urbanism, or the lack thereof, to the ones identified in the critical international literature on urban development issues. These representations must be challenged and reworked in order for us to grasp the complexities of African cities and to start developing appropriate political responses.