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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how diverse state, customary, and grassroots actors negotiate peri-urban land transformation in Bushbuckridge, South Africa, showing how informal practices and contested authority drive changes on South Africa’s urban frontiers.

Paper long abstract

Debates on peri-urban land in Africa often depict customary tenure systems as being ‘overrun’ by urbanisation, market expansion, and state formalisation. This paper challenges such linear accounts through an analysis of Bushbuckridge, a rapidly urbanising region in South Africa where informality functions not as a residual condition but as a dynamic space in which authority, access, and land values are negotiated. Drawing on four arenas of interaction, namely state-led land regularisation, commercial investment, a booming informal house-building economy, and NGO advocacy, this paper traces how land commodification and formalisation unfold through the intersecting actions of state agencies, traditional authorities, residents, and intermediaries. These processes do not follow a single trajectory. They produce new uncertainties and conflicts while also generating opportunities for residents and customary authorities to assert claims, protect interests, or advance particular development visions. Taken together, the arenas reveal a shifting and sometimes contradictory landscape in which no actor fully controls land transformation. Instead, peri-urban change in Bushbuckridge emerges from ongoing negotiations that recalibrate authority and reshape the meaning and value of land. The paper argues that these dynamics constitute a complex, contingent form of land governance that cannot be captured by narratives of either erosion or persistence of customary systems.