Doing Boundary Work: Suburban Residents’ Associations in Johannesburg

Rubin, Margot

doi:10.1177/0021909620970567

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…The analysis uses interview quotes to validate residents' "deep local knowledge" (Streule et al, 2020) about the production of their homes, neighborhoods, and livelihoods. Residents' repertoire of action (Rubin, 2021) simultaneously draws from and reinforces incrementality and affordability, contributing to feelings of appropriation and emplacement, as Streule et al (2020) and Caldeira (2017) have also observed.…”

Section: Residents' and Builders' Experience With Self-buildingmentioning

confidence: 82%

“…The association between homeownership aspirations, displacement, and "tensions brought about by powerful actors whose interests are poorly mediated through contemporary governance" (Huchzermeyer, 2021, p. 193) is not uncommon in analyses of self-built housing, particularly in the African context. As a response to the disjuncture (Croese et al, 2016) represented by profitseeking actions of powerful state and private actors on the one hand, and the needs, demands, and repertoires (Rubin, 2021) of local communities, on the other hand, critical housing studies have focused on home building and dwelling as lived experience. While the notion of home in these analyses is "complex and multi-scaled, directly tied to human well-being" (Huchzermeyer, 2021, p. 193), a crucial concern is with the loss of home for a variety of factors that can ultimately lead to conditions of "un-homing.''…”

Section: Meanings Of Home and Homeownershipmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Meanings of Self-Building: Incrementality, Emplacement, and Erasure in Dar es Salaam’s Traditional Swahili Neighborhoods

Izar

2022

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Self-building is the prevalent mode of urban production in rapidly urbanizing African cities. National and international policy frameworks, as well as popular discourse, still portray self-building as an informal and temporary fix for insufficient state investment—as the exception, rather than the rule. Meanwhile, emerging literature about the Global South draws from an analysis of processes, practices, spatialities, and lived experiences of urbanization and dwelling. This literature seeks to unveil how ordinary processes such as self-building unfold in different localities and realities, challenging the reluctance of government and private actors in recognizing self-building as a long-term mode of urban production. This article contributes to this literature through an ethnographic analysis of the oldest and most common modality of self-built houses in Tanzania—the Swahili house—and its unfolding in two traditional, centrally-located neighborhoods of Dar es Salaam. It emphasizes the home and dwelling aspirations, practices, and trajectories of a predominantly low-income population settling in the city. Based on the analysis, this article proposes that the self-building of Swahili houses and neighborhoods in Dar es Salaam represents a form of popular urbanization, characterized by long temporalities that simultaneously facilitate and are facilitated by affordable and incremental forms and processes of home building through residents’ appropriation of their own territories. However, in the city’s increasingly contested inner-city territories, top-down policy responses and large-scale, infrastructure-led urban development generate tensions and make such a popular form of self-building vulnerable to erasure and un-homing.

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Section: Residents' and Builders' Experience With Self-buildingmentioning

confidence: 82%

Section: Meanings Of Home and Homeownershipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Meanings of Self-Building: Incrementality, Emplacement, and Erasure in Dar es Salaam’s Traditional Swahili Neighborhoods

Izar

2022

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“…In Kenya, most grassroots organisations in informal settlements take the form of community-based organisations and self-help groups, increasingly organised under the umbrella of resident associations (RAs). Since colonial times, RAs have been the associative form representing residents’ views in middle-class neighbourhoods, responding to government ineptitude in meeting the infrastructural needs of residents (Rubin, 2021). More recently, RAs have increasingly extended to both high- and low-income settlements in Kenya (Echessa, 2010) and other African cities.…”

Section: Organisational and Urban Incompletenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Organising grassroots infrastructure: The (in)visible work of organisational (in)completeness

et al. 2022

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In this article we build on the concept of incompleteness, as recently developed in both organisational and urban studies, to improve our understanding of the collective actions of grassroots organisations in creating and governing critical infrastructures in the changing and resource-scarce contexts of urban informal settlements. Empirically, the article is informed by the case of resident associations providing critical services and infrastructure in informal settlements in Kisumu, Kenya. Findings suggest three organisational processes that grassroots organisations develop for the production and governance of incomplete grassroots infrastructures: shaping a partial organisation but creating the illusion of a formal and complete organisation; crafting critical (and often hidden) material and organisational infrastructures for the subsistence of dormant (but still visible) structures; and moulding nested infrastructure that shelters layers of floating and autonomous groups embedded in communities. In a resource-poor environment, the strategy is to create incompleteness, less organisation and to keep it partial and limited to a minimum of elements. The article also explores the political implications of organisational and infrastructural incompleteness by examining how it leads to efforts to craft loose and ambiguous governmental arrangements, connecting them materially and politically to formal infrastructure systems. These governmental arrangements are shifting and in the making, and therefore also incomplete. The article reveals how grassroots organisations mobilise a wide range of (in)visibility approaches. It concludes by exposing the hidden power of ‘incompleteness’ and the potential in hiding certain elements of incompleteness from outsiders, while rendering other elements visible when perceived as useful.

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Broadening the landscape of post-network cities: a call to research the off-grid infrastructure transitions of the non-poor

Lemanski

2021

Landscape Research

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Doing Boundary Work: Suburban Residents’ Associations in Johannesburg

Cited by 5 publications

References 29 publications

Meanings of Self-Building: Incrementality, Emplacement, and Erasure in Dar es Salaam’s Traditional Swahili Neighborhoods

Meanings of Self-Building: Incrementality, Emplacement, and Erasure in Dar es Salaam’s Traditional Swahili Neighborhoods

Organising grassroots infrastructure: The (in)visible work of organisational (in)completeness

Broadening the landscape of post-network cities: a call to research the off-grid infrastructure transitions of the non-poor

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