Paper short abstract:

The paper explores changes made to public housing (i.e. alterations, repairs, neglect) in a 20yr state-subsidised settlement in Cape Town. While citizens extend their houses as a symbol of citizenship identity, the state's punitive response challenges this political, financial and physical security.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reveals that urban dwellers' everyday experiences of state housing offers a representation of broader political identities and perceptions, framed through the language of citizenship. Using a case study that explores the changes made to public housing (i.e. alterations, repairs, neglect) over the twenty years of occupancy in a state-subsidised housing settlement in Cape Town, South Africa, the paper makes two core arguments. Firstly, that citizenship functions through infrastructure - i.e. urban dwellers 'see' the state in their everyday lives through their access to public housing and associated services, while the state conceptualises low-income urban dwellers primarily in infrastructural terms - as consumers, complainers and demanders. In this context, absent or decaying infrastructure can represent a decay of citizenship in terms of citizens' perceptions of the state's failure to provide basic services (often in relation to perceptions of how other citizens receive services). At the same time, while the state may view infrastructure alterations made by citizens (sometimes in response to decay, other times viewed as the cause of decay) as a violation of citizens' responsibilities as welfare beneficiaries; for citizens, making changes to their house represents the active demonstration of their identity and rights as a permanent urban citizen. This tension highlights the second core argument, that the alleged financial, political and physical 'security' offered by state housing are challenged and diluted by the state's narrow normalisation of the ways in which citizens are expected to function as new homeowners.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the encounters of urban dwellers with the state in state-led housing projects in Cape Town and Lagos. Based on the everyday lived experiences of residents the paper argues that for many African urbanites increased formality is often characterised by housing insecurity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the experiences of urban dwellers in state housing projects in African cities and their encounters with the state in the pursuit of decent and dignified homeownership in Cape Town and Lagos. Using a non-comparative case study approach the paper draws on extensive research in both cities to explore the everyday experiences of state housing bureaucracy and management by residents of Ruo Emoh, Cape Town and Ilasan Jakande Estate, Lagos. Based on a longitudinal methodology, a timeline of the contingent, material, bureaucratic and political practices that define state-led housing projects as well as the encounters between urban dwellers and the state in the process of infrastructure (housing and related services) access and provision is also traced to provide an in-depth insight into everyday lived experiences. Interest in infrastructure has grown rapidly through research exploring how urban residents experience infrastructure in their everyday life, however careful consideration of how everyday practices could potentially inform conceptions of infrastructure and their role in urban production, negotiation and contestation is limited. Access to infrastructure reveals the hidden materialities of cities and reflects and reproduces urban inequality and coping strategies mediated by socio-economic status which could manifest in various ways and outcomes. These varying processes are evident in Ruo Emoh and Ilasan Jakande where after years of struggle, housing security and insecurity are the respective current realities. Based on two African cities the paper argues that despite considerable contextual differences, for many African urbanites increased formality is often characterised by housing insecurity.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the ways in which state power is folded into the intimate and mundane day-to-day experiences of home-making, the materiality of the house and bureaucratic artefacts in the house, and the ways in which residents manage the uncertainty that is so often produced in these encounters.

Paper long abstract:

Eastridge is a low-cost housing development in Cape Town constructed and managed by the Cape Town Community Housing Company, a state-owned but privately managed company. The residents of Eastridge, most of whom have been living in their houses for 17 years, were recently declared 'unlawful occupants' in houses they expected to be the legal owners of years ago.

Through their protracted struggle to receive permanent legal title to their homes, the residents encounter the state in ways that are destabilising, shocking and even violent at the same time as being intimate and mundane. Using ethnographic and oral history data gathered from three households in Eastridge in 2018 I explore the ways in which families encounter and navigate the complex network of institutions, sites, agents and artefacts that make up the imaginary of the 'state' (Wafer and Oldfield, 2015). I also explore the ways they cope with the uncertainties, disruptions and constraints introduced through these encounters in their every-day home-making practices. By paying close attention to the material form of the house and the way the residents alter it, decorate it and maintain it over time as well as the piles of receipts, bills, letters of demand and contracts that the residents accumulate and carefully store, we can gain an insight into the lived experience of the state. An insight that allows us to see the state and state power as a contingent, dynamic and incomplete process that emerges out of specific encounters with its 'citizens'.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the ways in which housing bureaucracy, and its legal and policy processes, have incrementally rendered residents of Eastridge, Cape Town as illegal occupants of their homes of over two decades.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we explore the ways in which residents of Eastridge, a neighbourhood in Mitchells Plain, Cape Town, have been termed as 'unlawful' occupants of their homes of over two decades, through complex and shifting operations of the housing bureaucracy. Drawing on a research project completed in collaboration with the Eastridge Housing Committee and the Western-Cape Anti Eviction Campaign, we trace the small and large, the banal and obscure, the political and intimate, policy and legal processes which intertwine to dispossess residents of their right to live in these homes and place them in a situation of prolonged precarity. Through archival work and interviews with residents and housing agents, we examine this encounter with housing policy, its lived realities, and the emotions that these residents navigate: from hope to despair, from confusion to a determined anger to retain their homes. The paper reflects on both the structural violence of bureaucracy and its relationship to the right to housing, as well as the administrative and political constraints to housing agencies' actions, thus complicating a more conventional understanding of citizen-state encounters.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explore how multiple divides within a marginal space in Cape Town, South Africa shape urban citizenship. These divides are constituted and (re)produced through a complex field of housing policies and interventions, where rights are differentiated and temporariness and permanence co-exist.

Paper long abstract:

While much has been written about inequalities in South African cities, less emphasis has been placed on the (re)construction of multiple divides - social, spatial, material, symbolic - within marginal urban spaces. In Delft, a poor township in Cape Town, such divides manifest in the juxtaposition of informal, temporary housing and formal, permanent housing opportunities. This article explores how material and socio-spatial divides are (re)produced through housing interventions in which multiple authorities play overlapping as well as contradictory roles, and how residents' access to different forms of housing produce very different experiences of citizenship. A particular spatial manifestation of the material divides in housing provision is the construction of temporary relocation areas (TRAs) by the South African government. These TRAs resemble 'grey spaces' (Yiftachel 2009) in which housing may be both formal and legal yet perceived and experienced as informal and sometimes illegal; where spaces which are governed and ordered may also be chaotic and violent; where temporariness and permanence co-exist. This shapes a particular politics of citizenship, where the persistent temporariness of everyday life for some in the TRAs is set against those whose right to housing is realized, giving them recognition and permanence as 'proper' citizens.

Paper short abstract:

The South African state has constructed myriad uncertainties concerning tenure and alienation of state-provided housing.However there is a thriving market in these units. Using data from over 200 online sales and key interviews we investigate how state-housing beneficiaries transact in this context.

Paper long abstract:

The South African housing programme has produced over 3 million housing opportunities, with many hundreds of thousands of households now having access to state provided 'RDP' units. Although the vast majority are structured as beneficiary-owned properties with freehold tenure almost half of the housing beneficiaries currently live in units without title deeds having been issued, confusing the nature and type of "ownership". Uncertainty is also constructed and produced through the "restrictive clause" in the title deed, which legislates that beneficiaries cannot sell their units within 8 years of receipt. However, sanction of sale and enforcement of the rules also remain unclear. There is further opacity, uncertainty and lack of clarity concerning the construction, and renting of backyard units, since state legislation and policy on these has gone through multiple incarnations and differs between and within municipalities. The paradox is that despite these uncertainties, there is a thriving property market in RDP units, and backyard rental. A review of on-line data between October 2018 and February 2019, has looked at the various modes of sale, the prices, terms and dynamics of over 200 state-subsidised units in 8 settlements across Gauteng. Complemented by qualitative interviews with property-owners, estate-agents, and buyers, the paper considers the myriad ways in which this market operates within a situation of state constructed uncertainty.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the third party associate system in Moroccan shantytown resettlement programmes and discloses the pervasive effects of unregulated, small-scale capitalism for resettled dwellers. I argue that housing affordability is not ensured through financial policy tools only.

Paper long abstract:

While in recent years, large-scale housing and resettlement programmes have experienced a renaissance in many developing countries, authors and policymakers have emphasised affordability as a key factor for success of these programmes (Buckley et al. 2016; Bredenoord et al. 2014). Subsidies, housing microcredit, and an increasing financialisation of housing have been common public responses to reduce the so-called affordability gap between housing demand and supply.

Morocco's Villes Sans Bidonvilles (VSB) programme, which aims at eradicating all bidonvilles (shantytowns) in Morocco, addressed affordability through the implementation of the tiers associé (third party associate) system. Two households from the bidonville receive together one plot in the new town. Then, they ask a tiers associé - individual small-scale investors that seek to invest in real estate property - to build a four-storey house on their plot. In return, the tiers associé receives the two lower floors, while the two resettled households move respectively into one of the upper flats. This has allowed even poor residents to become homeowners of a new flat.

However, the system shows severe deficiencies. A plot lottery, rumours, shrinking profit margins, unreliable tiers associés, and excessive requests by bidonville dwellers have produced numerous conflicts between the two actor groups. Numerous unfinished constructions, people forced to occupy building shells, and house collapses are its physical expressions. This paper explores the tiers associé system by drawing on the results of a household survey among resettled dwellers (n=361), interviews with third party associates, and in-situ observations during four months of field research.

Paper short abstract:

Urban peripheries contain spatially standardised areas of state led housing, yet residents' accounts of living in these spaces are often differentiated. What accounts for these differences? The urban peripheries of Ethiopia & South Africa are examined to understand the comparative lived experiences.

Paper long abstract:

Urban peripheries are heterogeneous spaces despite containing areas which are often, but not always, spatially standardised as a result of state led housing policies and property developer investments. Housing projects sometimes incorporate interventions in the public realm and wider infrastructure changes, yet residents' accounts of living in state led housing projects, their economic viability, their access to services, to employment opportunities and to the state are markedly differentiated, even at times, rather contradictory. What accounts for these differences and why are particular individuals, households, and neighbourhoods peripheralised within state led housing projects on the urban peripheries? This paper examines data from case studies from the urban peripheries of Addis, Gauteng and eThekwini (Ethiopia and South Africa) to understand how the new housing projects within the peripheries are experienced differently in order to address key research questions around the 'comparative lived experiences' of the urban periphery, and then how this diversity of experience relates to urban poverty and exclusion, despite being tied to often progressive state housing policies.