Informal settlement upgrading in Cape Town's Hangberg : local government, urban governance and the 'Right to the City'

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Integrating the poor into the fibre of the city is an important theme in housing and urban policies in post-apartheid South Africa. In other words, the need for making place for the 'black' majority in urban spaces previously reserved for 'whites' is premised on notions of equity and social change in a democratic political dispensation. However, these potentially transformative thrusts have been eclipsed by more conservative, neoliberal developmental trajectories. Failure to transform apartheid spatialities has worsened income distribution, intensified suburban sprawl, and increased the daily livelihood costs of the poor. After a decade of unintended consequences, new policy directives on informal settlements were initiated through Breaking New Ground (DoH 2004b). Local governments have nevertheless been slow to implement this new instrument despite more participatory, flexible, integrated and situational responsive policies contained therein. The City of Cape Town was one of the first applicants for Upgrading of Informal Settlements Programme (DoH 2004a, DHS 2009) funding in upgrading Hangberg's informal settlement after effective lobbying by local civic Hout Bay Civic Association (HBCA) assisted by the Cape Town-based NGO, Development Action Group (DAG). However, in September 2010 the upgrading project came to a standstill when Metropolitan Police clashed violently with community members who allegedly broke a key agreement when building informal structures on the Sentinel Mountain firebreak. Using the case study research methodology, the study seeks to unravel the governance complexities elicited by this potentially progressive planning intervention. Four theoretical prisms are used to probe and investigate the primary case study (Hangberg) due to the different ways of 'seeing and grappling' and 'narrating' a complex tale. This is characterised by the dialectics of power and powerlessness; regime stabilisation and destabilisation; formalisation and informalisation; continuity and discontinuity. These prisms are: urban informality, urban governance, deepening democracy, and socio-spatial justice. By utilising these four theoretical prisms, the study found the Hangberg case to be atypical of development trajectories, on the one hand, and conforming to the enduring neoliberal governance logics, on the other. In the concluding chapter, the study critically engages prospects of realising post-apartheid spatialities by considering recent policy shifts and programmes with the potential of realising the poor's 'right to the city'.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University