New struggle is for ownership of the city

Marie Huchzermeyer, Mail & Guardian

The imprint of apartheid is still evident in South African cities. As acknowledged widely by planning academics and recognised in the National Development Plan and draft Integrated Urban Development Framework, urban expansion has engendered new forms of segregation and exclusion.

Apartheid-divided suburbs have their equivalent today in fortified estates catering to an exclusive moneyed minority – a mere 3% of South Africa’s households. More densely packed, walled townhouse complexes cater to the aspiring middle class, which makes up barely 10% of South African households.

WISER: Public Positions: The Right to the City

WISER

Marie Huchzermeyer

New national spatial planning legislation in 2013 highlights the need to spatialize justice. However, the new spatial planning framework does not ensure local autonomy. In the new legislation, spatial justice remains poorly defined and is in conflict with hierarchical imperatives of ‘national [political-economic] interest’. This is at a time when South Africa is witnessing a growing national distrust in the local, as the political landscape diversifies and opposition party support increases in urbanised areas. Aspects of spatial justice can emerge in the absence of planning and property rights – much is to be learned from informality; spatializing justice is a complex but necessary endeavor, it can build a just and reliable economy, but it needs a strong political bearer that trusts the local and is willing to tamper with property rights.  The multiple dimensions found in a progressive reading of the right to the city help inform this political project.

Humanism, creativity and rights: invoking Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city in the tension presented by informal settlements in South Africa today

Humanism, creativity and rights: invoking Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city in the tension presented by informal settlements in South Africa today by TigersEye99

Unfriendly Bodies, Hostile Cities: Reflections on Loitering and Gendered Public Space

Unfriendly Bodies, Hostile Cities: Reflections on Loitering and Gendered Public Space by TigersEye99

A Place in the City

More than a decade after apartheid ended millions of South Africans still live in basic home-made shacks. We hear from the inhabitants as they eloquently argue their case for real citizenship rights.

David Harvey & David Graeber Discuss the Right to the City

The Right to the City

by David Harvey, New Left Review, 2008

We live in an era when ideals of human rights have moved centre stage both politically and ethically. A great deal of energy is expended in promoting their significance for the construction of a better world. But for the most part the concepts circulating do not fundamentally challenge hegemonic liberal and neoliberal market logics, or the dominant modes of legality and state action. We live, after all, in a world in which the rights of private property and the profit rate trump all other notions of rights. I here want to explore another type of human right, that of the right to the city.