Strengthening community-based adaptation for urban transformation: managing flood risk in informal settlements in Cape Town

ABSTRACT

Urban citizens increasingly need to adapt to climate risk. This is especially the case in informal settlements that have limited state engagement and are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Community-based adaptation (CBA) in the informal settlement has the potential to support the transformation that re-shapes power relations as well as reducing climate risk. This paper explores how multiscalar governance in Cape Town can either empower or undermine CBA to flooding in informal settlements. Drawing on urban political ecology, the analysis reveals significant tension around differing ideas of the temporality of informal settlements, as well as token community inclusivity in participatory planning processes. While everyday governance practices have been used by the City of Cape Town at the local scale, a local community-based organisation has used insurgent planning to envision and enact a more just city. A community designed and spear-headed reblocking process (rearranging shacks in a settlement to allow for flood drainage and service delivery) is a powerful example of CBA and represents the potential of community-based organisations to take steps towards transformative action. In order to enable more widespread urban transformative CBA, it is important to address the drivers of vulnerabilities and underlying power dynamics of political decision-making to destabilise the status quo and move towards real adaptation.

KEYWORDS:

• Community-based adaptation
• transformation
• flood risk
• informal settlements
• urban adaptation
• urban political ecology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Approval for this research was granted by the University of Cape Town Faculty of Science Research Ethics Committee under ethics approval code FSREC 84–2017. Interviewees signed consent forms to agree to participation in this research study.

2 Also known as “Bantusans” the homelands were created based on ethnic background, and required black South Africans to be citizens of these “homelands” rather than South Africa (The Homelands 2011).

3 Depressions in the land used to capture stormwater to minimise flooding.