Making Experience Legible: Spaces of Participation and the Construction of Knowledge in Khayelitsha

Abstract

This paper examines how knowledge and accountability are framed and challenged within participatory spaces. I focus on an April 2013 case study from Khayelitsha, a township at the margins of the City of Cape Town. Over the course of one week, local members of a non-governmental organisation undertook a ‘social audit’, an attempt to dissect one of the city's many service provision contracts and to investigate local delivery of these services within several informal settlements. This paper argues that the audit inverts the city's existing spaces of governance by highlighting everyday forms of knowledge as paramount, creating legibility for non-expert forms of knowledge, and positioning government and private contractors as those who should be accountable to the community. Understanding the dynamics within community-led spaces of citizen participation can thus serve to identify and critique normative practices within neoliberal governance that further marginalise residents living within the urban periphery.