Rights, identities and belonging: Reflections on the everyday politics of urban citizenship in Delft, Cape Town

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the article is to explore the complex and contested politics of urban citizenship in relation to everyday spaces in Delft, a poor township in Cape Town South Africa. The arguments build upon a decade of ethnographic research on community politics and organizing relating to housing in Delft, Cape Town. Through illustrative examples, the author shows how housing rights and policies have been mediated through and imbricated with racial identities, residential status and notions of belonging in the community. She finds that these subjectivities are not inherent in conflict but often overlap and work simultaneously in community organizing and practice. These findings inform a critical engagement with current rethinking of urban citizenship in the Global South. The author argues that attention to the ordinary and everyday practices of citizenship may lead to a better understanding of how political subjectivities and agency are produced and practised. She concludes by proposing three dimensions that could guide a research agenda on everyday politics of urban citizenship: reconstructions of political subjectivities through state–society encounters, implications of differentiated subjectivities for how urban citizenship is perceived and claimed, and what practices of citizenship are seen as expressions of political agency.

KEYWORDS:

• housing
• political agency
• South Africa
• urban citizenship

Acknowledgements

I thank the residents and activists in Delft who have shared their experiences and knowledge with me for more than 10 years. I also thank Kristian Stokke for constructive input on an early draft of this manuscript and for preparation of Figs. 1 and 2. The three reviewers are thanked for their constructive comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article. Additionally, I acknowledge the support and funding received from the Nordic Africa Institute (NAI), where I was employed while working on the TRA project.

Notes

1 I inducted the research while I was based at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden, and was funded through the Institute’s core funding from Nordic governments.

2 Unpublished paper titled ‘The temporary citizen: Disjointed incrementalism in Cape Town’s urban policies’ by M. Millstein and D. Jordhus-Lier, presented at the Nordic Urban Development Conference in Helsinki, 13–15 November 2013.

3 Shortly after its construction, the TRA was named Blikkiesdorp (which means ‘Tin Can Town’) by the residents and the name has since been adopted by city officials.

4 Xhosa is the most common language spoken among the black South African in the province of Western Cape, and is used in official communications in Western Cape and the City of Cape Town, along with English and Afrikaans. Afrikaans is spoken by ‘coloured’ residents (see Note 5 below for an explanation of ‘coloured’).

5 Old apartheid terms such as ‘coloured’ are still used extensively. The category ‘coloured residents’ refers to those of mixed descent who were granted limited rights during apartheid.

6 While the City of Cape Town government used the term ‘housing database’ and dismissed the term ‘waiting list’, the latter term continued to be used by officials and residents (CLC & SERI 2013; Oldfield & Greyling 2015).