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.