Land evictions and the real power of City rulers (original) (raw)
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Qualitative Sociology, 2021
While existing literature has amply demonstrated how states may "see" their populations, we know less about which residents are legible to the state as populations. Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted between 2011 and 2019 in Cape Town, South Africa, this paper compares the fate of two large land occupations, one of which was evicted, one of which was not. In doing so, this paper demonstrates how rather than taking "populations" as a given, this status should be understood as an outcome. It suggests that participants in each respective occupation began with different views of the state. In other words, the way residents saw the state impacted each respective organizational outcome, which in turn affected how they were seen by the state. In one occupation, participants saw the state as a partner in obtaining housing, and so they organized themselves as atomized recipients. In the other, they viewed the state as an obstacle, and so they organized themselves collectively. Only in the latter case were residents viewed as a population; in the former, they were all evicted. Ultimately, this paper argues that, by bringing tools from political sociology to bear upon urban ethnography, we can gain insight into a process otherwise overlooked in the literature, allowing us to make sense of a question that is central to understanding urban politics in the global South: how do municipal governments decide which occupations to evict and which to tolerate?
The legal-historical context of urban forced evictions in South Africa
The aim of this article is to place forced evictions in their legal-historical context by analysing the rural and urban land tenure measures used during apartheid to limit the nature and duration of black people’s tenure. The hypothesis of this article is that the homelessness and extensive housing crisis in present-day South Africa have their origins in the apartheid era, when government’s rural and urban land tenure measures, together with private owners’ common-law remedies, led to large-scale forced evictions. A renewed appreciation of the legal-historical context of forced evictions should enable the courts to understand the social and historical context of section 26 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 and the Prevention of Illegal Evictions from and Unlawful Occupation of Land Act 18 of 1998. This limited historical study places forced removals and the demolition of homes in the context of apartheid land law. The description and analysis of legislation a...
Social Forces, 2022
How do postcolonial states manage increasingly urbanized surplus populations, or those rendered superf luous to global capitalism? Zachary Levenson's Delivery as Dispossession tackles this question from the vantage point of land occupations in South Africa. This is an extreme case: unemployment is dramatically high, often hovering around 40 percent (including discouraged job-seekers). Under apartheid, policies of racial exclusion restricted urbanization, but with the lifting of inf lux control restrictions, the poor and jobless today concentrate in urban areas. In post-apartheid cities, a sizable housing backlog remains, informal settlements proliferate, and overcrowding defines low-income residential areas-all this, despite the fact that the democratic state has delivered approximately four million homes in less than three decades (Levenson 2022, p. xi). Levenson's account focuses on two land occupations in Cape Town: Kapteinsklip and Siqalo. Both represented attempts by residents to escape overcrowded conditions in nearby townships and informal settlements, and to build new communities where they could find some dignity and autonomy in their living situations. Yet, the two land occupations met with varied success: Kapteinsklip was evicted, Siqalo was not. The cases raise two important questions: first, why is the post-apartheid state, committed as it is to redressing the ills of apartheid and colonialism, evicting poor Black residents-including so-called "African" and so-called "Colored" residentsfrom vacant land; and second, why are some evicted but others not? The short answer: order. In contrast to the vast literature on evictions, which typically explains dispossession in terms of land grabs and profit, in post-apartheid South Africa the "logic of eviction" is primarily political rather than economic (Levenson 2022, p. xi). From the perspective of the state, land occupations appear to disrupt the orderliness and effectiveness of housing delivery. In turn, Levenson suggests, it is precisely those land occupations that appear the most disorderly that become most vulnerable to eviction. The first two chapters of Delivery as Dispossession lay out the overarching argument. They are impressively clear and compelling, and make for excellent course reading if one only has room for a couple chapters on their syllabus. Chapter 1 lays out the two cases, introduces the Gramscian theoretical framework, summarizes the arguments, and describes the methodology. Chapter 2 zooms outward, contrasting the dispossession/delivery relation in the apartheid and postapartheid periods. Under apartheid, Levenson argues, housing delivery enabled dispossession:
Housing and ESC Rights Law Quarterly, 2008
On 19 February 2008, a Constitutional Court victory was won for the desperately poor residents of two ‘bad buildings’ in the inner city of Johannesburg, who had been facing eviction. The Court ordered the City of Johannesburg to provide the occupiers with affordable alternative accommodation within the inner city. The judgment has significant implications for any future evictions undertaken against poor and vulnerable people in Johannesburg, with the Court stressing the need for prior ‘meaningful engagement’ to have taken place between local authorities and affected residents before an eviction order can be granted. This article briefly outlines the background to the case, provides an analysis of the Constitutional Court’s judgment and explains the situation at present with regard to the residents of the two buildings. More broadly, it considers the ongoing problem of inner city evictions in Johannesburg.
Displacement, Estrangement and Sovereignty: Reconfiguring State Power In Urban South Africa
Government and Opposition, 2008
Academic writing often portrays migrants as either passive victims of violence and aid recipients or as courageous heroes facing horrific indifference and hazards. This article recodes them and their activities as potent forces for reshaping practices of state power. In this depiction, displacement also becomes a lens for re-evaluating the nature of sovereignty in urban Africa. Through its focus on Johannesburg this article explores how migrant communities intentionally and inadvertently evade, erode and exploit state policies, practices and shortcomings. Rather than being bound by their ambiguous status, they exploit their exclusion to exercise forms of autonomy and freedom in their engagement with the state and its street-level manifestations. Through these interactions, displacement and the continued mobility of urban residents is generating new forms of non-state-centric urban sovereignties and new patterns of transnational governance shaped, but not controlled, by state institutions. To recognize these evolving configurations we must look beyond Manichaean perspectives to see the full nature and degree of territorial control.
Contexts, 2021
In Cape Town, South Africa, some residents risk eviction and even arrest by participating in land occupations. But where else are they to go as they wait decades for state-provisioned housing? This article explores the tensions between South Africa's technocratic model of housing delivery and residents' own demands for inclusion, proposing a synthetic approach that urges municipalities to stop criminalizing squatters.
Evictions in South Africa during 2014 - an analytical narrative : feature
2015
The South Africa Constitution and pertinent legislative frameworks recognise the right of access to housing. This right extends to people who live in informal settlements, where they erect shacks and other structures. These people also include persons that take occupation of places/settlements 'illegally', although they are not expected to resort to illegal means in exercising their right. Due to a lack of access to housing people often erect shacks or other structures on land for which they do not have legal occupation. Such persons occupy lands belonging to private persons or entities, government and local municipalities. As a result, South Africa continues to witness cases and incidents of forced evictions whereby persons who are in illegal occupation of land are forcefully removed from it. In addition, people are evicted for reasons to do with urban development and planning.
Waiting for the state: a politics of housing in South Africa
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2015
Although specified in the South African Bill of Rights, for the majority of South African citizens the right to access housing translates in practice to the experience of waiting. In this paper we reflect on the micropolitics of waiting, practices of quiet encroachment, exploring how and where citizens wait and make do, and their encounters with the state in these processes. We argue that waiting for homes shapes a politics of finding shelter in the meanwhile partially visible yet precarious, the grey spaces of informality and illegality that constitute South African cities. At the same time, waiting generates a politics of encounter between citizen and state, practices immersed in shifting policy approaches and techniques, the contingent and often-opaque practices of governance. In sum, the politics of waiting for housing in South Africa proves paradoxical: citizens are marked as legitimate wards of the state. Yet, to live in the meanwhile and in the long term requires subversion, ...
Sanhati, 2008
The industrial and mining towns on the Eastern outskirts of Johannesburg are unlovely places. They're set on flat windswept plains amidst the dumps of sterile sand left over from old mines. In winter the wind bites, the sky is a very pale blue and it seems to be all coal braziers, starved dogs, faded strip malls, gun shops and rusting factories and mine headgear. All that seems new are the police cars and, round the corner from the Harry Gwala shack settlement, a double story facebrick strip club. But even here the battle for land continues. The poor are loosing their grip on the scattered bits of land which they took in defiance of apartheid more than twenty years ago. The state is, again, sending in bulldozers and men with guns to move the poor from central shack settlements to peripheral townships. In every relocation many are simply left homeless. It is very difficult to resist the armed force of the state but people do what they can. Officials are often stoned. In principle the courts should provide relief from evictions that are not just illegal but are in fact criminal acts under South African law. There have been notable successes but it is often difficult to get pro bono legal support, legal processes are slow and the evictions continue. In the Harry Gwala settlement the poorest women are on their hands and knees searching for bits of coal to bake into lumps of clay to keep the braziers burning. S'bu Zikode from Abahlali baseMjondolo in Durban and Ashraf Cassiem from the Anti-Eviction Campaign in Cape Town are here to meet with the Harry Gwala branch of the Landless People's Movement. These are all poor people's movements that have been criminalised and violently attacked by the state. The meeting is to discuss strategies for holding onto the urban land that keeps people close to work, schools, libraries and all the other benefits of city life. This is what it has come down to. Militancy is about holding onto what was taken from apartheid.