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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how people rendered “out of place” in Cape Town’s world-class city project are governed through regimes of visibility, and how its unhoused population mobilises practices of “making the town dirty” to transform marginality into a political resource in staking claims to the city.

Paper long abstract

In its aspirations to a "world-class city" aesthetic, Cape Town’s growing unhoused population is rendered “out of place”, borrowing from the lexicon of Douglas (1966). Racialised and classed conditions are routinely framed in policy, discourse, and practice as obstacles to development, rather than as consequences of infrastructurally reinforced underdevelopment produced under Apartheid. Central Improvement Districts (CIDs), quality-of-life bylaws, digital incident-management platforms, and privatised security infrastructures operate as interlocking technologies of urban governance, managing urban order while containing the visibility of poverty at the city’s margins.

Drawing on ethnographic research with people on the streets and members of housing activist coalitions, this paper examines how historically structured conditions shaping Black lives are deliberately pushed into view through practices interlocutors describe as “making the town dirty.” I argue that being rendered “out of place” in an aspiring world-class city is strategically instrumentalised as both a critique of racialised spatial arrangements and unjust social orders, and as a site of political imagination.

Through occupations, encampments, slogans, and spatial transgressions, unhoused activists transform marginality into a material and rhetorical force that reconstitutes the street as a space of claim-making. The ethnography reveals the city as a field of relational tensions through which competing visions of order, care, and belonging are negotiated. By foregrounding a politics of visibility, the paper contributes to broader anthropological conversations on how polarised urban spaces are not only governed and divided, but actively reworked through everyday struggles over recognition, place, and the right to inhabit the city otherwise.