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.