Occupations as reparative urban infrastructure: thinking with Cissie Gool House

Abstract

Understood as a direct claiming and remaking of vacant space by marginalized urban residents, occupations claim the right to housing and disrupt property relations, surfacing conflicting rationalities between different valorizations of land and infrastructure. We are interested in occupation as a reparative practice, intervening into the socio-material fabric of the city, with the potential to remake urban life-worlds. We draw inspiration from scholarship on infrastructural repair, conceived as the necessary labor of sustaining and filling in the gaps of fragile systems of provisioning that would otherwise be abandoned or left to decay. We situate our reflection in Cape Town, at the Cissie Gool House occupation, a former hospital that was vacant when it was occupied in 2017. In paying attention to the labors of endurance at CGH, this paper advances an expanded conceptual framework of repair, conceiving of occupations as a reparative urban infrastructure that includes material and affective practices. Our concern is with the enactment of more emancipatory forms of reparative practices that prefigure more hopeful futures. In thinking with CGH, we draw out a set of practices that can be read as central to sustaining, reclaiming, and future-making, naming these: infrastructural repair, prefiguration, defiant endurance, and refusal.