Feminist Praxis, Citizenship and Informal Politics

by Faranak Miraftab, 2006

This article focuses on the Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC) in Cape Town, South Africa, which is part of the larger anti-privatization movement, mobilized by disadvantaged township residents to assert their constitutional rights and resist evictions and service disconnections. It introduces the mutually constituted concepts of invited and invented spaces of citizenship and stresses the range of grassroots actions spanning those. The article also sheds light on the gender dynamics of the Campaign and how its patriarchal order is being destabilized. The AEC case study engages the pioneering feminist scholarship on citizenship that has embraced both formal and informal arenas of politics. The study points out the risk in constructing yet another binary relation between grassroots coping strategies (in invited spaces) and resistance strategies (in invented spaces). The article calls for a refinement of feminists’ extended notion of politics, recognizing the oppositional practices of the poor in order to construct an inclusive citizenship. It argues that doing so better reflects the practices of the grassroots and furthers a progressive feminist praxis.

Insurgency and Spaces of Active Citizenship: The Story of Western Cape Anti-eviction Campaign in South Africa

by Faranak Miraftab & Shana Wills, 2005

This article concerns the struggle waged by the poor in Cape Town, South Africa, to assert their constitutional rights to shelter and basic services and protect their life spaces against neoliberal policies. Using insurgent urbanism and active citizenship as its conceptual guide, this article attempts to enhance understanding of grassroots spaces for practicing inclusive citizenship, stretching beyond a limited interpretation of formal citizen participation. Through the example of the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign in South Africa, the article aims to contribute to a recent opening in the planning inquiry by overcoming the selective definition of what constitutes civil society and public participation and underlining the significance of invited and invented spaces of citizen participation in the formation of inclusive citizenship and just cities.

When the Mountain meets its Shadow

Cape Town, South Africa

In hardly any other city of the world can poverty and wealth be found as close together.  When The Mountain Meets Its Shadow tells the stories of Ashraf, Mne, Zoliswa and Arnold, who, each in their own way, fight for survival in the informal settlements around Cape Town. While Ashraf and his friend Mne from the Anti Eviction Campaign fight against evictions and water cut-offs in the townships, Zoliswa, a single mother, is looking for a new position as a cleaner and Arnold trains as an armed guard to work in the booming security industry. When the city council wants to clear an entire informal settlement, Ashraf and his friend Mne are confronted with their own, undigested experiences from the apartheid years ...

Housing battles in post-Apartheid South Africa: The Case of Mandela Park, Khayelitsha

by Martin Legassick, Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, 2003

Mandela Park is situated in Khayelitsha, Cape Town’s largest township, some 26 kms from the city center. It was established by the Botha government from 1983 with the initial intention of housing all Africans in the area. This of course proved impossible: Crossroads, KTC etc as well as the established townships of Gugulethu, Nyanga, Langa remained. Instead the repeal of the pass laws in 1986 resulted in the mushrooming of Khayelitsha, partly from other parts of Cape Town, but mainly from new immigrants from the Eastern Cape. The township grew to perhaps 300,000 by 1990 and to 500,000 and more during the 1990s – and is possibly the second (after Soweto) or third (after Mdantsane) largest in the country. Mandela Park was established within Khayelitsha in the late 1980s, by the banks, who bought the land and started building housing on it in 1986 – one of the few areas in the country where Africans bought housing through bank bonds.

Building unity in diversity: Social movement activism in the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign

by Sophie Oldfield & Kristian Stokke, 2004

The Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign is a movement of community organisations from poor, marginalised areas of Cape Town that formed in February 2001 to fight against evictions and water cut-offs.  A diversity of issues lies behind the emergence of the Campaign, although the initial impetus was Cape Town City Council-led evictions of families from two areas of state-owned flats in former coloured group areas. Across the Campaign, activists and organisations share threats and experiences of water cut-offs and evictions, collective discontent with postapartheid polices of cost-recovery on basic services, and dissatisfaction with local political representation (Leitch 2003). Through involvement in the Campaign, tactics
and strategies have been shared and activists have been empowered in their everyday community-based activism. An important oppositional voice in local politics in Cape Town, they have joined together to intervene, and often disrupt, citywide policy and public discourse on equity and socio-economic rights. The Campaign has given force as well as shape to a discourse on justice and the imperative to challenge postapartheid service delivery and cost-recovery policies.