City Improvement District Research Articles

Privatization of Public Spaces and Its Impact on the Socio-Political and Spatial Landscapes of the Cape Town Central City Improvement District (CCCID)

Globalization and its antecedent neoliberalism have brought untold competition amongst global cities. As cities strive to bid for the highest order in terms of maintaining and attracting both local and foreign investments as well as tourists, it is imperative to build socially cohesive, environmentally friendly and economically competitive cities as these attributes have become key essential. However, not every city has the financial means to undertake such obligations so they often resort to the formation of public-private partnerships, a phenomenon often termed as Business Improvement Districts, for the attainment of such goals. More often than not the concept of Business Improvement Districts has been criticized for weakening the publicness of public spaces as they restrict social interaction, constrain individual liberties and exclude undesirable populations through the use of spatially controlled measures such as surveillance policing, law techniques and design measures that 'code' spaces as private. On the contrary, the concept has been commended for regenerating or rejuvenating public spaces, which have mostly fallen victim to crime and grime, hence improving the publicness of contemporary public spaces. Using a qualitative research methodology, the study empirically sought to identify the factors which contribute to a privatization of public spaces. Moreover, the objective of the study was to identify the characteristics of privatized public spaces and their implications on socio-political and spatial landscapes. To accomplish the stated objectives, the study examined 11 public spaces within the City of Cape Town’s City Improvement Districts, through observation methods that were guided by Nemeth’s index scoring sheet, and an interview schedule to solicit information. Also, relevant pieces of literature were reviewed on the topic to accomplish the stated objectives. Findings were that the Cape Town City Improvement District is a public-private partnership which often employs measures such as laws, rules, surveillance, policing, accessibility, territoriality, design and image to encourage or discourage freedom of usage. Recommendations were presented to urban planners, architects, policymakers, and other stakeholders who are interested in management and provision of public spaces.

Queering Hip-Hop, Queering the City: Dope Saint Jude’s Transformative Politics

Queering Hip-Hop, Queering the City: Dope Saint Jude’s Transformative Politics

Mobility and the City Improvement District: Frictions in the Human-capital Mobile Assemblage

In this paper, we interrogate the role of the city improvement district (CID) in the intervention and management of mobility within the context of the South African city and the case study of the Groote Schuur Community Improvement District (GSCID), a public–private urban governance scheme situated in Cape Town’s middle income southern suburbs. Using the theoretical lens of bodily-scale mobility, we investigate the CID’s activation and management. This is useful, as we will demonstrate, because it is through the mobility and immobility at the scale of the body, where the CID’s mandate is operationalised and it is through the control of mobility that the CID’s mission, discourses and activities are linked. This work demonstrates that CIDs, as elite-driven urban renewal initiatives closely aligned with capital interests, employ exclusionary spatial practices that have the potential to shape the twenty-first century urban experience in significant ways. We conclude by theorising the co-constitutive nature of human mobilities and capital as the ‘human-capital mobile assemblage’ and by arguing that the CID occupies an ambivalent place in the contemporary city.

Informal settlements and urban heritage landscapes in South Africa

Informal urban settlements and trade zones represent an increasingly pressing issue for urban heritage developers. In light of the recent revisitation of the UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape, this article explores the current challenges faced at the intersection of heritage practice, urban planning, and informal communities. Heritage recommendations operate within the domain of soft law and their implementation relies on the voluntarism of public parties and the private sector. Such heritage recommendations are thus rarely taken up outside of city improvement districts with recognizable property-owning stakeholders, commercial infrastructures for security, maintenance, and investor marketing. In South Africa, the particular circumstances of the post-apartheid landscape render urban planning frameworks prone to reinforcing the marginalization of informal stakeholder engagement, ultimately perpetuating a socio-spatial inequality such programs set out to mitigate. The civic practices of new social movements and historical knowledge that emerges from the context of informal and neglected urban environments illustrate emergent answers to the exclusionary dynamics of urban heritage planning.

The international circulation and social constructions of a policy model: City Improvement Districts and urban service management in Johannesburg

Resume La circulation internationale de « modeles » et leur transfert d’un contexte geographique a l’autre font l’objet de nombreux debats theoriques et methodologiques. S’appuyant sur l’exemple du modele nord-americain des business improvement districts et sur l’etude de cas de Johannesburg, cet article mobilise la litterature francaise et anglophone pour analyser la construction sociale de ce modele, apprehendee a travers les modalites de constitution et de circulation des savoirs. Le recours a des approches discursives permet d’eclairer les reinterpretations locales de ce modele, en mettant en lumiere les processus de decontextualisation et recontextualisation a l’œuvre dans les strategies entrepreneuriales a l’echelle micro-locale.

Rescaling White Space in Post‐apartheid Johannesburg

AbstractThis paper traces three political mobilizations in the wealthy suburbs of Johannesburg: a boycott of redistributive tax policies, the creation of gated communities and residents’ associations, and the demand for residential city improvement districts (CIDs). I argue that state rescaling and networked governance are constituted through struggles over governmental power. I also argue for more attention to race in the political economy of scale. Struggles over the scalar, networked, and territorial dimensions of governance are constitutive moments in the shifting articulation of race, class, and space. An analysis of articulation highlights the role of territory, identity and imagination in the production of space, demonstrates that neoliberal forms of networked governance are products of struggle, and reiterates the feminist argument that governmental interventions are about more than just capital accumulation.

The Adaptative Nature of Neoliberalism at the Local Scale: Fifteen Years of City Improvement Districts in Cape Town and Johannesburg

By unravelling the adoption and adaptation of the North American Business Improvement District model in South African cities, this paper considers the way neoliberal principles are making their way in the post-apartheid context. Drawing on a comparative approach of BIDs in Johannesburg and Cape Town, we analyze the tensions and conflicts surrounding their implementation and unpack the resilience of this model. As unexpected as this resilience might be in such a context, i.e. far away from the heartland of neoliberalism, we argue that this resilience is linked to the permeability of the local contexts and to the plasticity of the model itself at the city and neighbourhood levels, reflecting a capacity to adapt to inherited regulatory frameworks, patterns of territorial development and embedded socio-political alliances of the local terrains, as well as an ability to accommodate post-apartheid issues through the crafting of what we refer to as local Third Ways .

The Spreading of the City Improvement District Model in Johannesburg and Cape Town: Urban Regeneration and the Neoliberal Agenda in South Africa

AbstractThe spreading of city improvement districts (CIDs) and connected forms of public–private partnership as an international model of urban renewal has been linked to the rise of ‘urban entrepreneurialism’ and the neoliberalization of policies and practices, at a time when competition between cities in the global economy has never been greater. The aim of this article is to explore the transfer and adaptation of the CID model in two cities of the South, Johannesburg and Cape Town. Arguing that CIDs are an example of the local embeddedness of neoliberalism, we highlight the role of the private sector in importing and adapting CIDs in South Africa, and point out the rise of techno‐politicians in CID management. Paying particular attention to discourses, we analyse the way images of decaying urban centres were used to legitimate the adoption of such schemes. The subsequent transformation of the model also enables us to explore the specificity of the adoption of this international best practice model in South Africa and its further circulation at the Southern African level. We conclude that while CIDs in South Africa raise familiar North American issues regarding the private management of public spaces, they also question the very nature of the African city model proposed and envisioned locally.RésuméLa diffusion du modèle du CID et du principe du partenariat public–privéà l'échelle internationale pour servir des stratégies de renouvellement urbain a été lue comme conséquence de la montée en puissance de l'urbanisme entrepreneurial et comme l'avènement de pratiques et politiques néolibérales, ceci alors que la compétition économique mondiale entre les villes est plus vive que jamais. Les auteures s'attachent dans cet article à décrypter le processus de transfert et d'adaptation du modèle du CID dans deux villes du Sud, Johannesbourg et le Cap. L'argument central est que les CIDs offrent un cas d'école de l'ancrage local du néoliberalisme. Le rôle du secteur privé dans l'importation et la promotion du modèle en Afrique du Sud est souligné, et illustre la montée en puissance des techno‐politiciens dans les affaires urbaines. Faisant une place particulière aux discours, les auteures analysent la façon dont les images du déclin des centres ont légitimé l'adoption du modèle. La transformation ultérieure du modèle permet par ailleurs de réfléchir aux spécificités de l'ancrage de ce modèle de «best practice» en Afrique du Sud et sa circulation à l'échelle de l'Afrique australe: alors que les CIDs nous renvoient à des questions relatives à la gestion privée des espaces publics déjà traitées dans les contextes du Nord, ils permettent également de réfléchir à la nature même du modèle de ville africaine proposé ici.

Housing Cape Town’s Forgotten Dead: Conflict in the Post-apartheid Public Sphere<sup>1</sup>

On 28 May 2008, the Cape Town Partnership Company Executive Officers’s newsletter reported on an ‘Interfaith ceremony at Prestwich Place [sic]’ to ‘consecrate’ a new ossuary building recently completed in Cape Town’s central business district. The announcement placed the Ossuary alongside other Partnership initiates and events such as the Harvest Festival, the Creative Cape Town initiative, and the upgrading of the Cape Town Station and the Grand Parade managed through the Partnership and the City Improvement District. The building of the Ossuary is intended to memorialise and bring closure to the contestations over the re-emergence of burial spaces in the city that have taken place in Cape Town since 2004. Presented as a successful ‘partnership’ between the Prestwich Place Project Committee, the City of Cape Town, the South African Heritage Resources Agency, the District Six Museum and Heritage Western Cape, this symbolic act of closure has been hailed a breakthrough in terms of heritage practice by practitioners and city officials alike. In this paper we visit the space of the Ossuary and its associated exhibition in the city, and reflect on the relationship between life space and burial space in Cape Town. Following the official path of the exhibition we pause to attach our own notes – a series of fragmentary interventions which trouble the smooth surface of containment. We use the experience of walking to reflect on the architecture of closure.

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

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.

Governing Post Apartheid Spatiality: Implementing City Improvement Districts in Cape Town

Abstract: To achieve a world‐class city capable of attracting business in a competitive global market, the municipal government of Cape Town, South Africa, like many cities of the global North, has adopted a model of urban revitalization popularized by New York City: business or city improvement districts (BIDs or CIDs). By examining CIDs in city center Cape Town, the paper casts light on the socio‐spatial relationship facilitating the neoliberal post‐apartheid regime and its governance. Analyzing discursive and spatial practices of Cape Town Partnership, the managing body of downtown CIDs, from 2000 to 2006, the paper reveals its difficulties in stabilizing the socio‐spatial relations of a transnationalizing urban revitalization strategy and rejects the view of CIDS as simply a global roll‐out of neoliberal urban policies. It highlights how CIDs are challenged from both within and outside of their managing structures by contentious local issues, and in particular by vast social inequalities and citizens' historical struggle for inclusive citizenship and the right to the city. Whether and how CIDs' inherent limitations can be overcome to address socio‐spatial inequalities is an open question.

Private policing in South Africa: The Cape Town city improvement district — pluralisation in practice

Changes related to postmodern trends outline, briefly, the way policing is being re-considered in South Africa. Testimony to this is the Cape Town City Improvement District Initiative which is represented as a case study of the nature of pluralised policing in contemporary South African communities. The types and amount of policing being undertaken and the relations between various policing entities is discussed as well as the implications of these types of networks in terms of various ideological and practical issues.