Post-apartheid City Research Articles

Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Post-Apartheid City

Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Post-Apartheid City

:Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City

:<i>Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City</i>

Urban agglomeration, glocalisation, and the governance of scalar transformation in the global south: a case study from Cape Town, South Africa

AbstractIn theorising the rapid expansion of urban agglomeration across the world, a significant body of work has examined the transformation of scale from the perspective of geographical size and the regulatory facets of devolved power. A further literature has examined what are seen as the relational dimensions in the transformation and constitution of space and the extent to which these are socially constructed. In this conceptualisation, scale is constituted and reconstituted by capitalist relations of production, social production, and consumption. The influence of capitalist relations on scale has most explicitly been illustrated by the impact of globalisation and the way it has served to weaken the regulatory powers of nation states and is simultaneously reordering the hierarchy of government power within them. Metropolitan governments have been exposed to global markets and to the influence of transnational corporations and, in a process of glocalisation, increasingly endeavour to create an entrepreneurial environment conducive to attract and retain foreign investment. Hitherto the interpenetration of the global and local has largely been studied in the context of urban agglomeration and scalar transformation in the global North. In an attempt to address this lacuna this article examines the manifestation of the process of glocalisation in metropolitan Cape Town in South Africa in the global South. It posits that the municipal government’s ambition to transform the city into a modern digitally based economy linked to global markets manifests many of the characteristics of glocalisation. Furthermore, it argues, far from promoting greater social inclusion in a highly unequal post-apartheid city, the economic model which has been adopted is exacerbating social inequality and poverty.

Book Review: Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City. Zachary Levenson, 2022.

Drawing on fieldwork over the course of a decade in two encampments in Cape Town, South Africa, Matthew Levenson’s book uses a Gramscian framework to analyze the dynamics between the state and the organizational formations of encampments. His relational perspective on eviction considers the main factors influencing the likelihood of state-enforced evictions and underlines the effect of different organizing tactics, constructing land occupations as alternative housing versus social movements. In challenging and expanding our understandings of the politics of eviction, the book provides insights for housing movements globally.

Queer Belonging in Durban, South Africa: Thoughts from the Zanele Muholi Homecoming Exhibition

In this article, I seek to queer belonging in a post-apartheid city space. I will do this by taking a queer orientation towards a particular public space—the Durban/eThekwini City Hall in South Africa, and a particular set of experiences I had there during the Zanele Muholi Homecoming exhibition in 2017–18. I will also seek to use these to unsettle the concept of belonging. This queering happens at two levels. First, how the relatively mainstream or institutional space of City Hall space was queered through the exhibition of a black queer artist at the Durban Art Gallery. Given that the City Hall was built to symbolise Britishness in the colonies, this occurrence, although momentary, is illuminating. Second, during my experiences at the exhibition there were several moments which stuck with me. I take one of these which took place with my mother and reflect on it to complicate our understandings of belonging. Ultimately, belonging operates in complex ways within post-apartheid cities demonstrated by one particular place and experience in Durban. For LGBTIQ+ people, belonging is many things. In this article, I demonstrate the possibilities of public art to claim belonging in a city not designed for queer black life, and some of the slippages and productivity of “not belonging” using the notion of reciprocity.

The good, the bad and the tenant: Rental platforms renewing racial capitalism in the post-apartheid housing market

This article examines how racial capitalism intersects with platform capitalism through the rise of rental platforms and corporate landlords in the post-apartheid housing market. Combining 18 months of fieldwork in Cape Town with the spatial analysis of sales and longitudinal census data, I demonstrate how rental platforms enabled the consolidation of the private rental sector and the emergence of corporate landlords through the classification of tenants centered upon credit scoring. To automate tenant screening solutions, rental platforms leveraged and extended the information dragnet knitted by credit bureaus. This dragnet of unprecedented depth and volume is built upon the infrastructures and devices that enabled the for-profit, racial classification of people, housing and neighborhoods during colonialism and apartheid, notably ID numbers. In the context of racialized indebtedness and housing inequalities engineered by racial property regimes, the use of platforms to sort the “good” from the “bad” tenant and manage rental portfolios shifts mechanisms of segregation and reproduces racialized patterns of capital accumulation across the post-apartheid city. The article argues that rental platforms extend the extractive logic of racial capitalism through two joint rentier mechanisms: the transformation of rental housing into a new asset class; the extraction and assetization of rental data.

Book Review: Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City

Book Review: Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City

Tactile technologies of the self: connection, hapticscape and self-development narratives in Cape Town’s Afro-Latin dance scene

Drawing on ethnographic research within the salsa, bachata and kizomba (SBK) scene of Cape Town, this article examines the values and narratives of personal development that Cape Town’s adepts of Afro-Latin dance elaborate around the emic notion of “connection.” I describe how this multisensory experience is informed by an ethic of personal development and self-transformation, which at the same time reflects the influence of global neoliberal entrepreneurial paradigms — together with the hopes, values and hampered dreams of Cape Town’s post-apartheid middle classes. Narratives and descriptions of the hapticscape and multisensory knowledge built through the search for connection highlight how these encounters give shape to intimate spaces where salsa amateurs can imagine, materialise and embody the multiple injunctions they navigate and can reconfigure the boundaries of intimacy, identity and otherness in the post-apartheid city.

An Assessment of Cultural Places of Interest in Tshwane to Inform a Tourism Shift From Colonial to Indigenous Towards Decolonisation

This paper continues from the premise that the built form of the South African post-apartheid city continues to perpetuate the paradigm that only the colonial culture is available for tourist consumption. South Africa is a culturally diverse country that provides tourism to an international tourist market that seeks diverse cultural experiences. However, with most African cultural artefacts found encased in colonial architecture museums, questions arise regarding the authenticity of the cultural experience and the appropriate cultural representation in built form. This paper provides recommendations towards the transformation of the post-apartheid city following an assessment of the current tourist attractions that host cultural artefacts and serve as tourist attractions. Most of this data exists, and this paper investigates, collates and assesses the data based on these criteria: colonial and indigenous, restricted, and accessible, and static or transformative. The collated data is presented in urban mapping and architectural illustrations. The study is focused on the City of Tshwane in South Africa. Selected case studies are presented. The findings indicate a substantial under-representation in the City of Tshwane of what this paper argues to be culturally appropriate tourist attractions. This paper argues that there is a market for the consumption of culture as an experience away from colonial towards indigenous.

‘This country beyond the township’: Race, class and higher education mobilities in the post-apartheid city

This paper examines the impact of educational mobilities on the lives of university students from an urban working-class township in South Africa. In highly unequal urban contexts, these mobilities provide access to valuable material resources and engender subjective transformations that facilitate access to higher education spaces. Based on fieldwork with students from Khayelitsha, a black urban township in Cape Town, it argues that these mobilities are shaped histories of racial segregation, demands of globalizing labour markets, and students’ personal readings of changing urban environments. Drawing on the concept of mobility capital, the paper suggests that even as these movements enable access to educational opportunities, they do not automatically generate the forms of capital required for social mobility. While students used mobilities to access higher education, they struggled to develop the social networks, embodied dispositions, language skills and cultural competencies that would provide social advantage. Rather, their experiences on campus reveal how mobility capital is structured by material and symbolic inequalities, which are frequently alienating and exclusionary. Finally, the paper emphasizes the importance of everyday movements and attachments between home and university spaces to the formation of student identities.

Review of “Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Post-Apartheid City”

How do postcolonial states manage increasingly urbanized surplus populations, or those rendered superfluous to global capitalism? Zachary Levenson’s Delivery as Dispossession tackles this question from the vantage point of land occupations in South Africa. This is an extreme case: unemployment is dramatically high, often hovering around 40 percent (including discouraged job-seekers). Under apartheid, policies of racial exclusion restricted urbanization, but with the lifting of influx control restrictions, the poor and jobless today concentrate in urban areas. In post-apartheid cities, a sizable housing backlog remains, informal settlements proliferate, and overcrowding defines low-income residential areas—all this, despite the fact that the democratic state has delivered approximately four million homes in less than three decades (Levenson 2022, p. xi). Levenson’s account focuses on two land occupations in Cape Town: Kapteinsklip and Siqalo. Both represented attempts by residents to escape overcrowded conditions in nearby townships and informal settlements, and to build new communities where they could find some dignity and autonomy in their living situations. Yet, the two land occupations met with varied success: Kapteinsklip was evicted, Siqalo was not. The cases raise two important questions: first, why is the post-apartheid state, committed as it is to redressing the ills of apartheid and colonialism, evicting poor Black residents—including so-called “African” and so-called “Colored” residents—from vacant land; and second, why are some evicted but others not?

Levenson, Zachary. Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City

Levenson, Zachary. Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City

Containment and conversion: Urban livelihoods and the circulation of value amid South Africa's avian influenza outbreak.

In South Africa the racialized contours of economic life powerfully shape the distribution of who owns poultry enterprises, who is employed to labor in them, who consumes poultry products, and in which way. When, in late 2017, an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N8) decimated the South African poultry sector, it revealed the ontological transformations of industrial egg-laying poultry into "cull birds" and then into imileqwa, the quintessential rural chicken. It thus showed how distinct regimes of value "articulate," blurring infectious and noninfectious concerns as new chains of conversion were inaugurated across domestic and global economies. Thanks to the mediations performed by the network of egg-laying chickens, (White) farmers, (Black African) consumers, and state veterinarians, translations of value take place in which industrialized egg-layer chickens turn into socially enlivened beings. Such beings sustain and nurture social reproduction in South Africa's postapartheid cities and beyond. [zoonosis, value, human-animal relations, global health, one health, race, urbanism, South Africa].

Culture Consumption Shift to Mitigate the Climate Emergency

The built form of the South African post-apartheid city continues to perpetuate the paradigm that only one culture is available for consumption. Culture is consumed by South Africans who form part of a nation diverse in culture, and by an international tourist market, seeking the provision of diverse cultural experiences. Yet, most African cultural artifacts are found encased in colonial architecture museums, where the narrative is restricted to the observed, and where the cultures are entombed and thereby unable to reach out and affect the city around it. This places these cultures as either historical records and artifacts, or something foreign to the city, belonging to the fringes of the post-apartheid city, and not as an existing way of living that is held by city dwellers that lacks places that allow them to bear fruit and serve. In this paper, the authors argue that there is an opportunity to provide built form interventions that will accommodate the many cultures alive and active within South Africa. These cultures may be represented in built form, as a facilitator for first-hand experience, and may then further establish a market for cultural consumption and contemporary tourism that is more authentic. To do so, secondary data is presented on the current social and economic melee of how culture is consumed as a value-add good product in the post-apartheid city. Furthermore, two cultural architectural interventions are presented as case studies. A conceptual framework is constructed, showcasing the lessons learned, as well as expanding the conversation around culture, consumption, and climate – as well as how responsible tourism may support positive responses to each. By introducing the climate emergency, architecture’s complicity in driving consumption is further exposed. An argument is presented whereby existing architectural interventions in the post-apartheid city are shown to fall short in their attempts to transform the city away from the colonial capitalist linear economy consumption practices that degrade the environment. The paper concludes with a vision for future architectural interventions that better succeed in providing space and place for diverse cultural inclusion, thoughtful consumption patterns and climate change mitigation. There is a market for the consumption of culture as an experience. An indigenous circular economy of locally produced, and locally consumed culture is an alternative to current human consumption patterns that damage the environment.

Womxn as agents of change to transform the post-apartheid city

The built form of South Africa’s post-apartheid city perpetuates the perception that a heteronormative, protestant, white, masculine, binary norm is the societally preferred perspective. This perpetuation means that queerness, spirituality, womxnness – and all those included within this community, are pushed down by this perceived preferred type of person. This paper presents secondary data on the current social and cultural milieu that restricts womxn from being agents of change in transforming the post-apartheid city. Architecture is complicit in what drives the masculinity that manifests itself in built form. Consequently, existing and future architectural interventions within the post-apartheid city fall short in their attempts to transform the city. Anecdotally, this failure is due to the reluctance to include womxn in the architectural programme of these interventions. This lack of transformation results in the phenomenon that the subdued group at the bottom of the social hierarchy remains silent, as they are left without adequate room to act, be seen, or establish their voice. This paper theorises how this zeitgeist[1] perpetuates post-colonial capitalist industrial linear economy thinking or the masculine approach. The approach vested in profiteering from natural resources and an oppressed labour force. As a result, there may be a connection between the successful implementation of this masculine thinking approach and the global ecological breakdown, proven to be due to the human-caused climate emergency. Finally, this paper argues for a newly established agenda that will inform architectural interventions for programmes that encourage a balanced (feminine and masculine) approach as a contributing solution.&#x0D; &#x0D; [1] Zeitgeist, or spirit of the time; the spirit characteristic of an age or generation.

Gender, evictions, and relocations during COVID-19 in South Africa: Lessons for programming and practice

abstract Through secondary data analysis, review of reports of evictions during COVID-19 and policy analysis, this article examines women’s experience of evictions and relocations during the COVID-19 lockdown in cities across South Africa. Declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in South Africa at the end of March 2020 was accompanied by regulations which were designed to limit interactions in public spaces. However, these did not take into account that in informal settlements, where evictions are common, demarcation between public and private spaces is indistinct and remains contested. Moreover, there was little consideration of the fact that women and their children, who comprise most inhabitants in informal settlements, bear the brunt of evictions. The demographic composition of informal dwellers is often an indicator of the profile of the victims of evictions and possibly relocations. The experience of eviction among women is shaped by their multiple identities as informal dwellers, workers, mothers, and partners. Initial results suggest that evictions affected mostly women. The outcome was loss of their homes, possessions, and livelihoods in informal settlements at a time when their inadequate living conditions made them vulnerable. Evictions – particularly during the coldest months of 2020 – exacerbated their situation. While the findings address evictions as a challenge affecting women living in places and spaces where they are considered not to belong, they also speak to women’s vulnerability and their right of place in post-apartheid cities. This article contributes to the theoretical understanding of women’s experiences of evictions and relocations and how these intersected with COVID-19 to amplify the general vulnerability of women.

South African Community Activism and the Urban Poor in the Post-Apartheid City: Towards Sustainable Sanitation in Cape Town's Ghetto Settlements

South African Community Activism and the Urban Poor in the Post-Apartheid City: Towards Sustainable Sanitation in Cape Town's Ghetto Settlements

The violence of space and spaces of violence: Peace as violence in unequal and divided spaces

Peace is a spatio-social and temporal experience, dependent on a number of variables that are influenced by positionality and privilege. Often “peaceful” spaces are inherently violent due to racism, sexism, classism, ableism, transphobia, homophobia, and agism among other forms of oppression. This article presents the conceptualisation of the violence of space, as a means by which inequalities are maintained spatially and socially, and demonstrates how in Cape Town, South Africa this exacerbates displacement and reinforces the persistence of violence in townships and informal settlements or temporal and physical spaces of violence. Empirically, through thematic analysis I evidence the conceptualisation of peace without justice as a form of violence through participant narratives of movement and use of space in the post-apartheid city. Using a spatial lens, I demonstrate how these inequalities perpetuate violence and observe the work still to be done in addressing maintained transgenerational inequalities. I utilise interviews with a range of actors working across different city spaces to demonstrate the violence of maintained divides with a specific focus on materialisations of violence, both structural and direct violence, in the areas of housing and transport. In this paper I also highlight organisation and resistance to inequalities, while overall, arguing that the product of the violence of space and spaces of violence is a violent peace whereby engineered poverty and systemic inequalities are maintained.

Lessons Learned from Applying an Integrated Land Use Transport Planning Model to Address Issues of Social and Economic Exclusion of Marginalised Groups: The Case of Cape Town, South Africa

The Group Areas Act of 1950 has resulted in post-apartheid South African cities being characterised by spatial patterns with limited access to social and economic opportunities for the black and coloured population. Typically, high-density low-income housing is located peripherally, while low density high-income housing is located in accessible central areas. With increased rural-to-urban migration, the demand for formal housing has historically surpassed supply, which has increased the growth of informal settlements. Current discourse within South African land use policy suggests that in-situ upgrading of informal housing is a viable response to integrate informal settlements into the formal city. In parallel, it is proposed that new low-income residential areas and employment-generating land uses should be located along transport corridors to improve access to transport, its infrastructure and the opportunities it provides for previously marginalised groups. This study uses Cape Town as a case city to explore two land-use driven development strategies directed at informal settlements and low-income housing. A dynamic land use transport model based on a cellular automata land use model and a four-stage transport model was used to simulate land use and transport changes. Specifically, in-situ upgrading of informal settlements and strategically locating new low-income residential and employment generating land uses along transport corridors were considered. The results from the analysis suggest that in-situ upgrading is a viable option only if new informal settlements are in areas with easy access to economic centres. With regards to low-income housing, targeted interventions aimed at ‘unlocking’ low-income housing activities along transport corridors were found to be useful. However, it was also observed that middle-income residential development and employment generating activities were also attracted to the same corridors, thus, resulting in mixed land uses, which is beneficial but can potentially result in rental bids between low and middle-income earners thus displacing low-income earners away from these areas.

Black Power, Inc.: Global American Business and the Post-Apartheid City

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