Redlining or renewal? The space-based construction of decay and its contestation through local agency in Brixton, Johannesburg

Haferburg, Christoph; Huchzermeyer, Marie

doi:10.4324/9781315597607-5

Cited by 12 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…State intervention in the housing market (i.e., subsidized houses in peripheral areas) and the scarcity of formal rental accommodation have resulted in a concentration of informal rentals (in backyards of formal townships and informal areas alike, as well as in inner-city apartment shares), where hidden types of inequality persist. In addition, areas characterized by full ownership by means of bank loans are located in better-off and mostly white areas, demonstrating where banking institutions are willing to invest and place risk, and thus underscoring where poorer people are less able to gain access to formal loans (Haferburg & Huchzermeyer, 2017).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reframing the Urban Challenge in Africa

Marrengane¹,

Croese²

2020

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This book explores the changing dynamics and challenges behind the rapid expanse of Africa's urban population.Africa's urban age is underway. With the world's fastest growing urban population, the continent is rapidly transforming from one that is largely rural, to one that is largely urban. Often facing limited budgets, those tasked with managing African cities require empirical evidence on the nature of demands for infrastructure, escalating environmental hazards, and ever-expanding informal settlements. Drawing on the work of the African Urban Research Initiative, this book brings together contributions from local researchers investigating key themes and challenges within their own contexts. An important example of urban knowledge co-production, the book demonstrates the regional diversity that can be seen as the main feature of African urbanism, with even well-accepted concepts such as informality manifesting in markedly different ways from place to place.Providing an important nuanced perspective on the heterogeneity of African cities and the challenges they face, this book will be an important resource for researchers across development studies, African studies, and urban studies.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reframing the Urban Challenge in Africa

Marrengane¹,

Croese²

2020

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“…Christopher (1994) shows that in the 1950s, 33 000 people were relocated to Soweto from Sophiatown and 13 000 from the Western Native Township. Brixton, and the new white areas that now surrounded it, were immediately north of the mining belt dividing the white northern suburbs from Soweto (see Figure 6.2) (Haferburg and Huchzermeyer, 2017).…”

Section: Imaginary 1: Brixton As a White Suburbmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: The urbanisation of imagination in South Africa

Ballard¹,

Mapukata²

2022

South African Urban Imaginaries: Cases From Johannesburg

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Richard completed an honours degree in Geography at the University of Natal (1994) and a PhD at the University of Wales-Swansea (2012). He worked as a researcher at the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal on contract from 2000 to 2006. From 2006 to 2014, he held an academic position in the School of Development Studies, initially on Senior Lecturer level and then at Associate Professor level. He joined the Gauteng City-Region Observatory in 2015 as a Principal Researcher. He has published on the dynamics of race and urban desegregation, gated communities, social movements, participatory processes, local democracy, cross-border migrants, urban developers, megaprojects in the human settlement sector, the middle class and development, cash transfers, governance and development, and industrial restructuring.

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“…Increasing state recognition of these grievances saw mixed attempts at housing support for the 'missing middle'. 7 A battery of financial inclusion legislation in the early 2000s sought to legislate investment in historically excluded places and populations, but was fiercely resisted by the financial sector (Haferburg and Huchzermeyer, 2017). Their lobbying in addition to a more private-sector-friendly Minister of Housing saw a shift towards risksharing and public-private partnerships rather than forced community reinvestment (Tomlinson, 2005: 36).…”

Section: Market Communities' Investments and Contestationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Under the FSC's memorandum of understanding with the state to invest R42 billion in affordable housing finance, these subdivisions became responsible for that. By 2009, 82% of that had been allocated as mortgages, pension fund loans and microloans (Marais and Cloete, 2015: 264), but with no area-based commitments -only income-based (Haferburg and Huchzermeyer, 2017).…”

Section: Market Communities' Investments and Contestationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Creating a gap that can be filled: Constructing and territorializing the affordable housing submarket in Gauteng, South Africa

Butcher

2020

Environ Plan A

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As the housing bubble burst in overheated property markets around the world, South Africa’s so-called ‘affordable housing market’ appeared to be bucking the trend. From 2010, affordable housing prices were rising and selling quickly, especially in Gauteng, Johannesburg’s city-region, chronically short of actually affordable housing and with a growing black middle class. Touted as ‘SA’s best-kept investment secret’, the affordable housing market offered a lifeline to the property industry and the potential to democratize segregated property markets. Yet, in practice, the tapping of South Africa’s lower-income housing market by capital has been a limited one, narrowly catering to particular subjects and spaces. Drawing on heterodox approaches to ‘actually existing markets’ and qualitative fieldwork conducted in Johannesburg between 2012 and 2013, this paper traces how the boundaries of the affordable housing and mortgage submarket are produced and shift through the investments of multiple communities with their own theories of housing markets and different interests in ‘making the market work’. Despite these investments and contestations, the submarket is narrowly territorialized within developer-driven housing largely in Gauteng for public-sector workers, to optimize the market within mortgage capital’s frameworks of risk, return, race and space. The South African mortgaged affordable housing submarket is not so much in need of market information or constitutive of a new frontier of global finance, as a territorial fix for domestic capital vis-à-vis development imperatives. To investigate struggles over this submarket, I draw together socio-institutional approaches to markets with critical political economy of housing markets and put them into conversation with critical development studies scholarship on markets. This combination allows us to make space for multiple projects of ‘improvement’ and profit in our analyses of market-making, as well as how these are shaped by, and shape, space and conjuncture. I seek to contribute to a growing literature on the geographies of markets from a Global South context where housing is framed as both a market good and constitutional right by examining a case of apparent ‘market failure’.

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Redlining or renewal? The space-based construction of decay and its contestation through local agency in Brixton, Johannesburg

Cited by 12 publications

References 1 publication

Reframing the Urban Challenge in Africa

Reframing the Urban Challenge in Africa

Introduction: The urbanisation of imagination in South Africa

Creating a gap that can be filled: Constructing and territorializing the affordable housing submarket in Gauteng, South Africa

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