Paper short abstract:

I unpack the consultation process linked to the displacement of street traders from a public square in central Cape Town in the name of urban regeneration. Drawing from Foucault’s work, I unravel the “technologies of control” that undermine the traders’ capacity to resist this entrepreneurial turn.

Paper long abstract:

In post-apartheid Cape Town, in the early 2000s, an ambitious urban regeneration project based on an entrepreneurial agenda was launched by a coalition of public and private actors in the city centre. It has led to the eviction of the poor from the streets of the CBD and to the containment of street trade to restricted spaces. Despite the South African tradition of political struggle, continued against the neoliberalisation of urban policies, and despite the democratisation and enhancement of participation processes, this trend is not encountering much resistance on the ground. I argue that this lack of resistance is partly linked to the capacity of the Capetonian growth coalition to shape, delimitate and control the space of the traders' political mobilisation through the strategic steering of an ad hoc consultation process. Drawing from a Foucauldian perspective on neoliberalism and power as a relational exercise, I investigate this hypothesis by unpacking the consultation process that surrounded the revamping of a major Capetonian public square in 2009, the Green Market Square, and the concurrent displacement of street traders that took place in preparation of a major international sport event (the FIFA World Cup). I use this case study (and a qualitative survey based on interviews with key actors of this process) to unpack the capacity of the growth coalition to craft innovative "technologies of control" in order to foster the sense of territorial competition among street traders and to frame their relationship to the local state in terms of entrepreneurial citizenship.