Gendered il/legalities of housing formalisation in India and South Africa

Abstract

Urban interventions, such as state-led housing provision in India and South Africa, establish new legal landscapes for urban residents (formerly slum/informal dwellers), who become home owners, legal occupiers of spaces, ratespayers and visible citizens although not in ways that are necessarily contingent. These material-legal processes are also acutely gendered underscoring wider calls for a feminist approach to legal geographies. Informed by a comparative empirically driven study, this paper explores how in both contexts, urban interventions work to enhance gender equality through improving women's material shelter in the city, and introduce tenure security, often prioritising very poor women. Yet, their implementation is riddled with slippages as well as operating within a broader poverty-patriarchy nexus. This means that these legally framed benefits have occurred alongside complex and perverse outcomes including unemployment, gendered tensions and acute loss of privacy for some. Housing interventions produce uneven legal geographies, with persisting gendered inequalities and poverty distorting residents' abilities to benefit from material-legal interventions aimed at improving their lives.

Feminist legal geographies

“…Here, and in agreement with the conclusions that Meth et al (2019) arrive at in relation to land rights in South Africa, and Gillespie and Perry (2019) on protected wetlands, legal pluralism is shown to be essential to understanding women's lived experiences and is essential to any critical analysis of legal norms and processes. Therefore, several papers in the theme issue explicitly discuss pluri-legality, the multiplicity of legal orders that co-exist from the local to the global, and from more 'familiar bodies of law' to those which are 'customary law, indigenous law, religious law, or law connected to distinct ethnic or cultural groups within a society' (Tamanaha, 2008: 375).…”

“…Unpacking how law reproduces inequitable power dynamics by utilizing an intersectional analytic is also visible in Meth et al's (2019) exploration of state-led housing interventions in India and South Africa as the authors employ a multi-method qualitative and comparative study to examine the experiences of (in)security of differently socio-legally positioned home 'owners' across gender, class, caste, and religion. Through this intersectional analysis, the authors illustrate the paradoxical effects of programs that seek to mitigate gender inequality and security through the provision of housing upgrades and relocation as experiences of insecurity, particularly domestic violence, emerge in response.…”

“…The authors note that spatiality and the issue of distance became a defining feature of the Supreme Court's ruling, which overturned the TRAP laws, as the legal arguments presented in court centered on how distance created an undue burden for women seeking to exercise their legal right to an abortion. Meth et al (2019) also focus on gaps within the law as they illustrate how housing interventions meant to improve the lives of urban residents in Kulamnagar, India, and Hammond's Farm, South Africa produce uneven legal geographies resulting in disproportionate impacts for poor women of color. By centering their analysis on the patriarchypoverty nexus and its role in shaping experiences of privacy and (in)security -specifically in relation to domestic violence -the authors detail how the formalization and extension of housing rights fall short in achieving 'intersectional gains' for recipients when gender, poverty, caste, and religion are considered concurrently.…”

“…In this introduction to our theme issue on feminist legal geographies, we provide a short entre´e to the papers by exploring the 'doing' of feminist legal geographic work through, first, a methodology-focused section. In the second section we turn to some of the key messages that the authors illustrate by way of research in Cambodia, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and the US in respect to the hopes and failures of law to exercise and claim various rights: to asylum (Gorman, 2019), housing (Meth et al, 2019), protective areas (Gillespie and Perry, 2019), reproductive choice (Statz and Pruitt, 2019), and legal rights and capabilities within marriage (Schenk, 2019), and in cyberspace (Farries and Sturm, 2019). Together, they speak the vibrancy of emerging feminist legal geographic literature and echo work in feminist legal studies, which is characterized by the breadth of subjects it engages with (Davies and Munro, 2016).…”

Gendered dispossession and women’s changing poverty by slum/squatter redevelopment projects: A case study from Turkey

“…The transfer of the right to housing from informal settlements into formal housing areas is also gendered as it is compounded by the complex entanglements between patriarchy, capital, land, and poverty. Even in slum redevelopment projects with gender-sensitive schemes, women's right to land and housing can be undermined by local and cultural interpretations and implementations that skew the design of laws and regulations (Meth et al, 2019). The urban development projects implemented in squatter settlements in Turkey, like the KUTP, do not have a specific gender agenda and remain limited to the negotiation over the compensation amount and possible housing(s) that would be allocated as a result of the demolition of squatter buildings.…”