Studentification in South Africa: Possible Redirections and Political Implications for Local Government

Abstract

This article challenges existing approaches to local government within the discipline of public administration through a case study of off-campus student communities in post-apartheid South Africa. These communities have become contemporary political spaces through the daily activism of students who occupy urban space both as off-campus students and as ‘new’ members of the community with a politicised outlook on their daily lives. The heightened political consciousness that derives from a long history of South African student activism brings different kinds of community engagement for local government to contend with, which are not easily captured by the spatially bounded understanding of local government that is assumed both by the law and by existing theory. Although early literature on studentification emphasised the agency of residents resisting the disruptive impact of students on community life, I argue that the South African case requires a view of students as political agents who demand basic services and improved livelihoods in the city on their own behalf both as students and as city residents. This intersectional pattern of citizenship that students bring to the South African university city gives them a substantial foothold to influence productively and direct the governance patterns of both local government and higher education. The article calls for the beginning of critical local government studies in two ways: a centring of students’ political agency in the theorisation of studentification and a contextual positioning of studentification in the literature of local government studies. This, I argue, could generate transdisciplinary possibilities for the revitalisation of the public administration discipline.