Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the technology of mobility for people with physical disabilities living in a South African urban setting. It describes specific opportunities for people using a wheelchair to design their city and its transports by opposing or co-operating with local authorities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the technology of mobility for people with physical disabilities living in a South African poor urban setting. This paper moves away from a perspective that exposes only limitations in order to underline specific opportunities for people using wheelchairs to (re) design the city individually and collectively, in formal and informal ways.

In the township of Mitchell's Plain well known for its daily violence, defining when and where using the chair involves a negotiation of moral and medical norms with a pursuit of security. In this process, the wheelchair must be analysed as one element of a broader continuum of mobility, where public and private systems are used as complement or replacement for the chairs. The availability of these complements enhances already present inequalities among people with disabilities as well as gender norms around the occupation of space.

Two systems of public transport, namely Dialaride (specialised transport) and MyCity bus (mainstream service), will be further discussed. Initiatives of the City of Cape Town, they are the origins of discussion and complaint from people with disabilities. I will show how, through co-operation with or opposition to the local government, associations of people with disabilities participate actively in their recognition by the authorities and in their inclusion in the post-apartheid city. My conclusions draw upon sixteen months of participant observation call up the theoretical framework of the anthropology of material things and the sociology of space.