Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on political agency and urban politics beyond a polemic of resistance or participation, drawing on a multi-layered ethnography of neighbourhood ‘activism and its politics in an impoverished and historically segregated Cape Town periphery.

Paper long abstract:

Political mobilisation has been a central element of post-apartheid urban politics, a set of practices through which the urban poor have built varied forms of political agency to secure resources and claim democratic rights. Polemical analyses of such acts and the urban politics generated, however, build overly stylized conceptualizations of state-society interactions, bound up either in notions of resistance or participation. This paper reflects on political agency and urban politics beyond this polemic through a multi-layered ethnography of neighbourhood 'civic', community-based activism and its politics in an impoverished and historically segregated Cape Town peripheral neighbourhood. Initiated thirty years ago, the Civic's genesis lies in the social trauma of forced removals and resistance to apartheid-era evictions, and in the period after apartheid, its occupation of land, and contestation of the city's razing of its shack settlement in Court. Yet, despite successfully winning this fight, the civic and its residents feel a stigma, as leaders and residents in a 'dysfunctional township', an impoverished, violent, gangster-ridden neighbourhood. Through a collaborative eight-year research partnership with the Civic and its activists, I analyze the ways in which activism and work for justice and transformation disrupts this view, drawing on political and symbolic mobilization and agency to build and perform 'community' locally and across the city.