Order and security in the city: producing race and policing neoliberal spaces in South Africa

Abstract

This paper examines the reproduction of racialized urban spaces in post-apartheid South Africa through a case study of the Central City Improvement District in Cape Town. Urban neoliberalism provides mechanisms of governance that reproduce spaces generated by apartheid under conditions of democracy. My focus is on private policing and the regulation of the central city through the socio-spatial ordering of downtown in ways that secure the interests of property owners and more affluent consumers. Private policing in this context produces a form of social ordering based on emerging conceptions of racialized citizenship linked to market access. It works to exclude or tightly regulate the black urban poor, who are unable to participate freely in this quasi-public neoliberal space, and to remove these ‘undesirable’ elements back into the townships. In doing so, it contributes to reproducing the spatial segregation and the racial identities of the apartheid period.