Infrastructural citizenship: conceiving, producing and disciplining people and place via public housing, from Cape Town to Stoke-on-Trent

Abstract

This paper examines public housing as an art of government to conceive, produce and discipline a normative ideal of ‘good’ citizenship through people and place. Using the framework of infrastructural citizenship, case studies from state-subsidised homeownership programmes in Cape Town (South Africa) and Stoke-on-Trent (UK) demonstrate how public housing provides a physical mediator for the politicisation of citizenship. Infrastructural citizenship is explored through both state expectations (of housing, of citizens) and citizens’ everyday practices, revealing state-society contestation and conformity in how ‘order’ and ‘decency’ materialise. In bridging the global south/north the paper not only generates new knowledge from two rarely contrasted contexts, but also illuminates and challenges the dominance of global north examples in public housing debates. By juxtaposing contemporary case studies where neither is the dominant lens for analysis, the paper argues that difference is particularly illuminating for knowledge production, and that housing theory and policy need to embrace postcolonial perspectives to ensure global relevance and legitimacy.