Working it out: Labour geographies of the poor in Soweto, South Africa

Abstract

Local economic development (LED) research and policy grapple with the informal economy and township transformation. While most current thinking centres on firms, this paper argues that non-firm worlds of work and their spatiality are not adequately understood. Representations of the places where poor people work remain abstract and incomplete. The paper reports on a survey of 320 low-income Sowetan residents and in-depth interviews with 20 workers about their work roles in the urban space economy. The findings, which show poor workers engaging with diverse sectors and locations in complex ways, challenge the dominant spatial narratives about isolated poor residential areas. Poor workers deliberately create their own social capital in work realms. This being the case, a more finely tuned conceptualisation of these workers and their roles in urban space is essential to sharpen LED discussions so that policies can be based more on real rather than imagined spatiality.

Keywords:

• informal settlements
• space economy
• social capital
• labour geographies

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by a US National Science Foundation grant (number 0721025).

Notes

¹In Gauteng, for example, the number of informal settlements increased steadily from 47 in 1990 to 200 in 2006 (Murray, 2008:94) to 500 in 2010.

²A system of dispositions, expressed in everyday living, seeing, acting and thinking, common to people who share similar positions in social space (Bourdieu, 1977).