Making Experience Legible: Spaces of Participation and the Construction of Knowledge in Khayelitsha

Abstract

This paper examines how knowledge and accountability are framed and challenged within participatory spaces. I focus on an April 2013 case study from Khayelitsha, a township at the margins of the City of Cape Town. Over the course of one week, local members of a non-governmental organisation undertook a ‘social audit’, an attempt to dissect one of the city's many service provision contracts and to investigate local delivery of these services within several informal settlements. This paper argues that the audit inverts the city's existing spaces of governance by highlighting everyday forms of knowledge as paramount, creating legibility for non-expert forms of knowledge, and positioning government and private contractors as those who should be accountable to the community. Understanding the dynamics within community-led spaces of citizen participation can thus serve to identify and critique normative practices within neoliberal governance that further marginalise residents living within the urban periphery.

Acknowledgements

The research for this article was conducted with the generous support of a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation [Grant number 8612], and with additional support from the School of Anthropology, the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology, and the Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute at the University of Arizona. This research took place while the author was a visiting scholar associated with both the University of Cape Town and the University of the Western Cape. An early version of this paper was presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association and benefitted from the thoughtful feedback of the panel members and discussant. The author is grateful for the insightful comments and suggestions made on the article by Thomas Park, Lisa Thompson, Megan Sheehan, and Kimberly Kelly, as well as by the two anonymous reviewers. Any errors or omissions remain the responsibility of the author.

Notes

1. Contention over PFTs erupted in May 2013 into the ‘poo wars,’ in which activists linked to the ruling national party, the African National Congress, dumped containers of human waste on the steps of the Provincial offices and in other public areas to protest the use of portable toilet systems for informal settlements (City of Cape Town 2013b; Gontsana 2013).

2. Quotes from social audit events are taken from the author's ethnographic fieldnotes made at the time and represent as close to direct quotes as possible. Attribution to specific individuals is not made to protect their privacy under the ethical clearance for this research project.

3. Although research included conversations with individual City of Cape Town staff about sanitation provisioning and community engagement, this article draws only from statements of City staff made at public meetings or via press releases. This is done to ensure that only official and public statements about the City's position on the audit are represented, as the perspectives of individual staff may vary.