Sophie Oldfield

The Centrality of Community Capacity in State Low-income Housing Provision in Cape Town, South Africa

The development of low-income housing continues to be a political imperative and an urban reconstruction priority for the post-apartheid South African state. But, even though policies for housing construction and delivery by the state are in place, in practice many homeless families initiate, direct and drive the process through which they secure state-provided housing. I analyse in this study two such cases where homeless residents in peripherally located, poor areas of the Cape Metropolitan Area successfully accessed state-provided housing. In both instances, homeless families organized around the different sets of capacities that structured the nature of the linkages that each forged to resources outside of their respective areas, and thus the ways in which they pursued their need for housing. I argue in this study that uneven and place-specific, community-based capacity often directs the manner in which communities interpret, interface with and access state-run urban reconstruction projects such as housing provision. An analysis of community-based capacity thus proves useful to investigate the potential and the problems that underlie state initiatives for development and the manner in which communities participate and engage with urban reconstruction and development. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000.

Who's Serving Whom? Partners, Process, and Products in Service-Learning Projects in South African Urban Geography

The literature on service learning in geography courses has established and substantiated the importance and usefulness of such projects for student learning. In this paper the assumption is questioned that similar sets of benefits accrue to ‘community’ participants, those involved who are located outside the university context. The research undertaken demonstrates that projects, and the research or ‘service’ that they produce, are embedded in more complicated sociopolitical terrain that reflects not only the relationship between university and community, but also the complex ways in which organizations link to ‘communities’ and residents with complex local identities and interests. Analysis of this topography demonstrates the context-specific structuring of partnerships, research processes and the consequent diverse ‘after-lives’ of any research products that are produced.

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.

Accessing the State: Everyday Practices and Politics in Cities of the South

This special issue explores everyday practices and politics of accessing the state and state resources from a southern, urban perspective. The collection of papers documents, urban low-income residents’ everyday relationships with the state, through the study of actual practices of interaction with a range of state representatives at the local level (councilors and officials, at various levels of local government). Formal and informal, legal and illegal, confrontational and cooperative, we analyze the multiple tactics of engagement with the state by low-income residents to understand the extent to which they allow access to state resources and to degrees of state recognition, even in contexts of mass poverty, informality and scarce public resources. The modes of interaction with the state also embody and frame low-income residents’ representations of the state, of their expectations, and of their own citizenship. This special issue critically draws together a wide-ranging and important debate on governance, and the relationships it constructs between state and civil society. The main question we raise is how the dynamics of governance reform, with attempted development or deepening of both decentralization and participation, affect everyday practices to access the state and the resulting politics that shape state–society relations in southern contexts? Collectively, the papers in the special issue reflect on the ways in which low-income citizens’ access to the state challenges existing theories of the state and democracy. Stemming from a research programme entitled ‘The Voices of the Poor in Urban Governance: Participation, Mobilization and Politics in South African Cities’,1 this special issue focuses on South African cities primarily but not exclusively. Although the contexts examined have their own specificities, we argue that they provide an interesting and critical context in which to work through the debate from a Southern perspective. South African societies are specific in the huge expectations residents have in the post-apartheid state, and in the ways that ideals continue to be framed in modernist terms, as emblematized by policies of mass public housing delivery and effort towards mass access to urban

Engagement and reconstruction in critical research: negotiating urban practice, policy and theory in South Africa

In this paper we examine critical engagement in research in order to rethink and reconfigure binaries such as theorizer and practitioner and theory and practice across South and North. We argue that while we welcome the ‘moral geographies’ literature (and its ideas about ‘caring at a distance’) as a catalyst for forging more beneficial connections between South and North, we suggest this is not enough. Drawing on South African experiences of critical academic engagement in issues of urban geography, we examine moments for innovative knowledge construction that bridge theory and practice. These experiences are used to substantiate a normative argument for ‘inclusive geographies’ through critical engagement in order to break down boundaries between, for instance, theorizers and practitioners, intellectuals and activists, and South and North.

POST-APARTHEID SOCIAL POLARISATIONS: THE CREATION OF SUB-URBAN IDENTITIES IN CAPE TOWN

ABSTRACT The intersections between post-apartheid state policy and the expressed experiences of residents of an ex-coloured area (Retreat) and a predominantly African informal settlement (Imizamo Yethu) in Cape Town are presented. Three conclusions about post-apartheid Cape Town emerge. The impact of state policy is uneven, both between and within the individual communities. Although social divisions are created by past and present housing policies, the real threat to the urban populations of Imizamo Yethu and Retreat is economic. Finally, governments intentions of integrating racially divided South African cities seem likely to fail, at least in the less affluent quarters of Cape Town. Thus a racialised legacy, which post-apartheid state interventions barely ameliorate, underscores the significance of cultural networks as mediating mechanisms for survival among the urban disadvantaged. Post-apartheid polarizations are generating new sub-urban identities.

Waiting for the state: a politics of housing in South Africa

Abstract Although specified in the South African Bill of Rights, for the majority of South African citizens the right to access housing translates in practice to the experience of waiting. In this paper we reflect on the micropolitics of waiting, practices of quiet encroachment, exploring how and where citizens wait and make do, and their encounters with the state in these processes. We argue that waiting for homes shapes a politics of finding shelter in the meanwhile partially visible yet precarious, the grey spaces of informality and illegality that constitute South African cities. At the same time, waiting generates a politics of encounter between citizen and state, practices immersed in shifting policy approaches and techniques, the contingent and often-opaque practices of governance. In sum, the politics of waiting for housing in South Africa proves paradoxical: citizens are marked as legitimate wards of the state. Yet, to live in the meanwhile and in the long term requires subversion, an agency that is sometimes visible in mobilisation and protest, and at other times out of sight, simultaneously contentious and legitimate.

Social Movements, Socio-economic Rights and Substantial Democratisation in South Africa

In spite of the fact that leaders of the anti-apartheid social movements have entered into political power and defined the relations between state and civil society in collaborative terms, South Africa’s democratic transition has not put an end to adversarial popular struggles (Ballard et al. 2003). One decade into democratic rule, the South African state faces severe challenges in including and transforming a racially and socially fractured and polarised society. In fact, post-apartheid South Africa has been marked by an increase in social inequality, particularly in the context of neo-liberal macroeconomic policies (Daniel et al. 2003). Material deprivation, combined with increasing use of force against popular protests, have produced and radicalised a range of new social movements that politicise socio-economic rights and demand access to land, health care, housing and public services (Desai 2003). Contestation over the meaning of democratisation, and the relationship between economic liberalisation and the pursuit of social justice lie at the heart of these struggles.

A Politics of Land Occupation: State Practice and Everyday Mobilization in Zille Raine Heights, Cape Town:

In this paper we reflect on a contested land occupation in Cape Town, the informal settlement of Zille Raine Heights in the city’s southern suburbs, to explore the settlement’s struggle to gain a legal right to land and the state’s attempts to remove it. In occupying land and defending their right to a decent place in the city, Zille Raine Heights and other settlements like it challenge the state in precise ways. This paper explores the provisional and unstable ways in which land occupiers and the state access and defend resources such as land, and in the process, engage in a politics of occupation together.

The Contested Politics of Housing Allocation in Ikapa, Cape Town, 1981–1994

This article investigates housing allocation politics in the Ikapa townships of Cape Town from 1981 to 1994. It focuses on the ways in which officials and community actors struggled for agency in housing allocation through differently constructed assertions of legitimacy and legality. Complex and contested politicised identities both divided and interlinked ‘community’ and ‘state’, enmeshed in dichotomous categories such as: ‘borners’ (people holding limited residential rights because they were born in the city) and ‘amagoduka’ (people born in rural areas with no rights to urban residence), politicised residents and non-politicised residents, and local officials ambiguously positioned both as agents of the state and as township residents themselves. Through this analysis, we demonstrate the complex ways in which community-driven and state-determined processes shaped housing allocation practices, and the contested politics they produced in New Crossroads specifically and in the Ikapa area more broadly. The competing discourses that developed around the right to allocate houses in New Crossroads illustrate how formal and informal allocation systems were established and transformed over time, their inter-relationships and disjuncture, and the processes and politics they consequently produced. Although the articles analysis is historical, the housing conflicts and politics investigated resonate with the politics of housing access in South African cities in the contemporary period.