The road to TRAs is paved with good intentions: Dispossession through delivery in post-apartheid Cape Town

Levenson, Zachary

doi:10.1177/0042098017735244

Cited by 17 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…Blikkiesdorp, an area developed to house evictees under the Emergency Housing Programme, is made up of metal structures designed and delivered by the state as 'temporary housing'. It is infamous for its violence and dislocation, and is the subject of scholarly, artistic and activist critique (Amin and Cirolia, 2018;Levenson, 2017). In Delft, the socio-economic conditions mirror the national challenges of South Africa.…”

Section: Delft In Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a multi-scalar reading of informality in Delft, South Africa: Weaving the ‘everyday’ with wider structural tracings

Cirolia

Scheba

2018

Urban Studies

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Informality is a critical theme in urban studies. In recent years, ‘the everyday’ has become a focus of studies on informality in African cities. These studies focus on particularity and place. They offer a useful corrective to top-down and universalising readings which exclude the daily experiences and practices of people from analysis. As we show in this article, everyday studies surface valuable insights, highlighting the agency and precarity which operates at the street level. However, a fuller understanding of informality’s (re)production requires drawing together particularist accounts with wider and more structural tracings. These tracings offer insights into the ways in which state and financial processes influence and interface with the everyday. In this article, we use the case of housing in Delft, a township in Cape Town, to demonstrate this approach and argue for a multi-scalar and relational reading of the production of informality.

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Section: Delft In Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a multi-scalar reading of informality in Delft, South Africa: Weaving the ‘everyday’ with wider structural tracings

Cirolia

Scheba

2018

Urban Studies

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“…For the emergency housing programme, qualification is less an issue. However, the temporary relocation areas people are sent to are often far from transport, incredibly dangerous, and poorly serviced (Cirolia, 2014;Levenson, 2018). The result is that families choose and in some cases are compelled by circumstances to fend for themselves, rather than make use of this programme.…”

Section: Next Generation Planningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Retrofitting, repurposing and re-placing

Cirolia

Ngwenya

Christianson³

et al. 2021

plaNext

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The vast majority of city planning literature on informal occupations has focused on how residents occupy vacant and peripheral land, developing informal structures to address their basic needs. A smaller body of work, but one with much purchase in South Africa, explores the informal occupation of existing formal structures and how residents infuse these emergent places with social and political meaning. Across this work, occupations represent a dominant mode of city-building in the Global South. Contributing to this debate on city-making and occupations, this paper departs from an unusual case of South African occupation. We explore how displaced people have occupied a multi-storey vacant hospital building situated close to Cape Town’s city centre. Using documentary photography and interviews with residents, we argue that this occupation reflects a logic of ‘retrofit city-making’. We show that, through processes of repairing, repurposing, and renovating, dwellers have retrofit an institutional building, previously designed by the state for a very different use, to meet their needs and desires. As cities become more densely built and vacant land more peripheral or scarce, the retrofit of underutilised buildings, particularly through bottom-up actions such as occupation, will become an increasingly important mode of urban development. Not only are the practices of material transformation useful to understand, so too are the ways in which occupations reflect significantly more than simply survivalist strategies, but also care and meaning-making.

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“…While the provincial government is responsible for managing the database of applicants for housing subsidies, the City of Cape Town has a housing database of residents in need of housing. The City's database-referred to as the waiting list-plays a key role both as a governmental technology of control as well as an object of critique and contestation (CLC and SERI 2013;Levenson 2017Levenson , 2018. The City insists that its allocation of housing opportunities follows the waiting list and that anyone who believes they have a right to housing assistance must register.…”

Section: Housing and Urban Citizenship In Delftmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some of the grievances have been the slow pace of delivery, limited participation in delivery processes as well as challenges with elite capture and patronage in participatory processes, lack of low-cost housing in inner-city areas, the poor quality of housing materials, the quality and affordability of public services, allocation of housing and associated demands for spatial justice, and the use, quality and peripheral location of temporary relocation housing that often turns permanent for those relocated. As I elaborate below, urban citizenship is thus differentiated and partial for those whose house-and other constitutional rights-is yet to materialize (Dugard et al 2016;Levenson 2017Levenson , 2018Lemanski 2019b;Wafer 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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‘If I Had My House, I’d Feel Free’: Housing and the (Re)Productions of Citizenship in Cape Town, South Africa

Millstein¹

2020

Urban Forum

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While urban divisions are commonly emphasized in urban studies, there has been less emphasis on reproductions and contestations of divides within marginal urban spaces. This paper explores the dynamics of juxtaposed differences related to housing and urban citizenship in Delft, Cape Town. Delft is a microcosm of thirty years of official housing interventions in post-apartheid South Africa. It is also a space in which differences of urban formality and informality and of permanence and temporariness co-exist, and where housing is at the centre of community politics. This is driven by residents’ perceptions, interpretations and negotiations of differentiated housing rights and opportunities, residential categories and identities and notions of belonging. A particular manifestation of juxtaposed material and temporal differences in housing infrastructure is the construction of temporary relocation areas (TRAs). The multifaceted challenges with the TRAs in Delft illustrate the political nature of housing infrastructure as reported by (Lemanski 2019a, b) and how citizen-making is shaped in and through articulations of formality and informality, and of permanence and temporariness. This informs a politics of citizenship where the precariousness of permanent temporariness as reported by (Yiftachel 2009) for those living in the TRAs is set against those whose right to secure housing is realized, giving them recognition and permanence as ‘proper’ citizens. These dynamics may simultaneously inform rights-based claims to citizenship through collective struggles and individual actions, and localized forms of exclusion from the project of citizenship.

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The road to TRAs is paved with good intentions: Dispossession through delivery in post-apartheid Cape Town

Cited by 17 publications

References 48 publications

Towards a multi-scalar reading of informality in Delft, South Africa: Weaving the ‘everyday’ with wider structural tracings

Towards a multi-scalar reading of informality in Delft, South Africa: Weaving the ‘everyday’ with wider structural tracings

Retrofitting, repurposing and re-placing

‘If I Had My House, I’d Feel Free’: Housing and the (Re)Productions of Citizenship in Cape Town, South Africa

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