This article demonstrates how popular struggles over housing distribution lead to the transformation of the welfare state. In post-apartheid South Africa, municipal governments distribute free, formal housing to recipients registered on waiting lists. But as formally rational distribution fails to keep pace with growing demand, residents begin to organize mass land occupations. Municipalities respond to these land struggles by either organizing repression, making clientelistic exceptions, or providing transitional housing in temporary relocation areas (TRAs). The growth of TRAs – a direct response to land occupations – signals the institution of a new form of housing distribution alongside the old: substantively rational delivery. This argument engages recent work on the rise of new welfare states in the global South, demonstrating the limits of viewing social expenditure in narrowly quantitative terms. Instead, drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Cape Town, it interrogates the emergence of qualitatively novel logics of distribution.

Political sociologists have typically studied the state as a self-enclosed institution hovering above civil society. In this formulation, the state is rendered as omniscient, gazing out over a passive civil society as if it were a naturalized landscape. But in this special issue, we think about how states "see" in relation to whom and what is seen, and how these subjects and collective actors become visible in the first place. We advocate a relational political ethnography that views the state and civil society as inextricably intertwined and mutually co-constitutive. People's experiences with the state shape their visions of that state, which in turn inform their strategic decisions and everyday engagements. And these decisions and engagements affect how the state views them. To put it differently, in this special issue, we explore the dialectical relationship between how the state "sees" and how it is "seen." They are inseparable processes. As we argue here, the very unity and coherence of the state apparatus turns not just upon its self-representation but equally upon how people make sense of these representations. How people understand this apparent state in the context of their everyday lives is a crucial source of its power and authority; it explains the reproduction of the state as a social institution. We conclude by introducing the seven empirical contributions to this issue, all of which practice relational political ethnography.

South Africa’s post-apartheid government tried to use urban policy to reverse racial segregation. But as shack settlements proliferated on urban peripheries, squatters came to be viewed as a threat to the state rather than its beneficiaries. In Cape Town, urban policy has entrenched, rather than reversed, racially segregated settlement patterns.

Dispossession need not be the product of malicious intentions or a deliberate programme of accumulation. As I argue in this article, it may paradoxically be the consequence of social spending, or what I call dispossession through delivery. Using as a case study the proliferation of temporary relocation areas (TRAs) in post-apartheid Cape Town, I show how what appears as adequate housing from the municipal government’s perspective exacerbates social isolation, perpetuates squatting and aggravates unemployment, transport costs and interpersonal violence. I draw on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork in TRAs and land occupations, NGO reports and interviews with housing officials to understand dispossession through delivery in these relocation sites. While TRAs began as emergency housing in cases of environmental catastrophes, they have become regularised as a form of state-provisioned housing even in non-emergency situations and, above all, in cases of land occupations. They are but one of a range of technologies of delivery that facilitate dispossession, and I conclude this article with a discussion of how formal housing distribution and informal settlement upgrading have similar effects. When these various technologies of delivery are understood as bound together in a single articulation, ‘dispossession through delivery’ challenges the standard opposition between neoliberalism and social spending that characterises much of the literature and begins to map novel socio-spatial effects of one trajectory of urbanisation in a Southern city.

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