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

Urban Studies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 594-611 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liza Rose Cirolia ◽  
Suraya Scheba
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Urban Studies ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Top Down ◽  
African Cities ◽  
Street Level ◽  
Daily Experiences ◽  
The Everyday

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.

scholarly journals In bodies and homes: Gendering citizenship in Southern African cities

Urbani izziv ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol Supplement (30) ◽  
pp. 37-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie Oldfield ◽  
Netsai Sarah Mathsaka ◽  
Elaine Salo ◽  
Ann Schlyter
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Body Politics ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
African Cities ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Urban Contexts ◽  
The City

How do the everyday contexts in which ordinary women struggle to access and maintain a place on the peripheries of the city shape experiences of citizenship? This paper explores this question in George, a periurban Lusaka neighbourhood in Zambia and through experiences of Zimbabwean migrant women’s negotiation of a place on the peri-urban edges of Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa. In the logics of citizen-subjects, the experiences of these groups of women should be poles apart, the first with rights imbued in citizenship, the second migrants without. Here instead, we demonstrate the ways in which gendered political subjectivities embed in the hard, lived realities of home. In placing gender and everyday body politics at the forefront of our analysis, the paper makes visible the micro-realities of making home. We demonstrate that an assumed recursive relationship between citizenship and home, as a physical and social place in the city, is problematic. Building on debates on citizenship and its gendering in post-colonial African urban contexts, we demonstrate instead that citizenship and its gendered contestations and emergent forms in Southern African are crafted in quotidian activities in homes and everyday city contexts.

“It’s natural to look for a source”: A qualitative examination of alternative beliefs about HIV and AIDS in Cape Town, South Africa

2015 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clara Rubincam
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Hiv Prevention ◽  
Focus Group ◽  
Scientific Evidence ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Hiv And Aids ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Street Level ◽  
Outright Rejection ◽  
Past Experiences

This article highlights how African men and women in South Africa account for the plausibility of alternative beliefs about the origins of HIV and the existence of a cure. This study draws on the notion of a “street-level epistemology of trust”—knowledge generated by individuals through their everyday observations and experiences—to account for individuals’ trust or mistrust of official claims versus alternative explanations about HIV and AIDS. Focus group respondents describe how past experiences, combined with observations about the power of scientific developments and perceptions of disjunctures in information, fuel their uncertainty and skepticism about official claims. HIV prevention campaigns may be strengthened by drawing on experiential aspects of HIV and AIDS to lend credibility to scientific claims, while recognizing that some doubts about the trustworthiness of scientific evidence are a form of skeptical engagement rather than of outright rejection.

scholarly journals Negotiating polyvocal strategies: Re-reading de Certeau through the lens of urban planning in South Africa

Urban Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (12) ◽  
pp. 2440-2455 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Andres ◽  
Phil Jones ◽  
Stuart Paul Denoon-Stevens ◽  
Melgaço Lorena
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Urban Studies ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
University Of California ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Practitioner Attitudes ◽  
Planning Profession ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Canonical Text

The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau M (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press) has become a canonical text in urban studies, with de Certeau’s idea of tactics having been widely deployed to understand and theorise the everyday. Tactics of resistance were contrasted with the strategies of the powerful, but the ways in which these strategies are operationalised were left ambiguous by de Certeau and have remained undertheorised since. We address this lacuna through an examination of the planning profession in South Africa as a lieu propre– a strategic territory with considerable power to shape urban environments. Based on a large interview data set examining practitioner attitudes toward the state of the profession in South Africa, this paper argues that the strategies of the powerful are themselves subject to negotiation. We trace connections with de Certeau’s earlier work to critique the idea that strategies are univocal. We do this by examining how the interests of different powerful actors can come into conflict, using the planning profession as an exemplar of how opposing strategies must be mediated in order to secure changes in society.

How I Walk through the Gang Streets in Manenberg, South Africa

Politeia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Denver Davids
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Drug Abuse ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Youth Violence ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Street Gangs ◽  
Gang Violence ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Many

Gang violence is pervasive in the everyday life of residents of Manenberg, Cape Town, South Africa. Historical social displacement and socio-economic circumstances have led to an increase in street gangs among the youth and in youth violence. This article analyses the many ways in which the youth navigate their community to avoid or deal with this violence as well as the ways in which they manage to endure the effects of poverty, drug abuse and domestic difficulties. It looks at how young men spend their time on the streets, where they are vulnerable to the actions of local street gangs that operate in Manenberg. Despite facing the pervasive challenges of membership uptake in gangs and of related crime and violence, some youths find ways to safely make a life and survive in Manenberg. This article ethnographically explores the experiences and stories of these youths. Further, it explores factors that are determinants in building and maintaining resilience to violence, which assists young men not to become members of gangs.

Planning ‘Suburban Bliss’ in Joe Slovo Park, Cape Town

Africa ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 511-548 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Robins
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Housing Development ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
The Everyday

AbstractJoe Slovo Park, a housing development in a white middle-class suburb of Cape Town, was designed to replace the shack settlement of Marconi Beam with an orderly working-class suburb. This article focuses on the vicissitudes of post-apartheid housing development schemes, and raises troubling questions about the failure of planners, policy makers and developers to take into account the complexities of the everyday lives they sought to transform. Had they done so they might have anticipated the ‘re-informalisation’ of the newly formalised suburb. The article explores the disjunctures between the planners' model of ‘suburban bliss’ and the reality. The messy, improvised character of low-income housing development in South Africa is contrasted with their Utopian and technocratic vision. This is not to deny that dreams embodied in blueprints may often be shared by the intended ‘beneficiaries’, only that for a variety of social, economic and cultural reasons poor communities are generally unable to realise such ideal visions of modern urban living.

scholarly journals Dis-locating public space: Occupy Rondebosch Common, Cape Town

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 555-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch ◽  
Emma Thébault
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Empirical Analysis ◽  
Urban Studies ◽  
Partial Dislocation ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Space Research ◽  
Vacant Land ◽  
Context Specific

We argue here that public space research might benefit theoretically from the Southern Turn in urban studies. Our first objective is theoretical and methodological: unpack the idea of public space to make it suitable beyond its original location. Détienne’s work on Comparing the Incomparable, combined with Staeheli and Mitchell’s notion of “regimes of publicity” offer the theoretical tools for such a displacement. We end up thinking about public space as various, context-specific configurations of loosely structured, juridical, political, and social elements that take on new shapes and are prone to partial dislocation when dis-located. We test this model by displacing it to a piece of vacant land—Rondebosch Common in Cape Town. In so doing, we deal with our second objective: offering a detailed empirical analysis of the Occupy Rondebosch Common 2012 events, which relates to broader public space debates in contemporary, liminal, South Africa.

Slang registers, code-switching and restructured urban varieties in South Africa

2013 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rajend Mesthrie ◽  
Ellen Hurst
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Code Switching ◽  
African Cities ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
South African Cities

This paper examines the status of an informal urban variety in Cape Town known as Tsotsitaal. Similar varieties, going by a plethora of names (Flaaitaal, Iscamtho, Ringas) have been described in other South African cities, especially Johannesburg, Pretoria and Durban (see also Sheng in Kenyan cities). This paper seeks to describe the essential characteristics of Cape Town Tsotsitaal, which is based on Xhosa, and to argue for its continuity with similar varieties in other South African cities. However, this continuity eventually calls into question many of the previous assumptions in the literature about Tsotsitaal and its analogues: e.g. the thesis that these varieties necessarily involve code-switching, or that they are pidgins, even ones that are creolising in some areas. More generally, this paper serves several purposes: (a) to comment on and elucidate why there is a proliferation of often contradictory names, (b) to examine the degree and types of switching in the different varieties, and (c) to clarify the relationship between what are essentially tsotsitaal registers and the urban languages they are part of.

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