Local Officials and the Struggle to Transform Cities
A View from Post-Apartheid South Africa
Distributed for UCL Press
Local Officials and the Struggle to Transform Cities
A View from Post-Apartheid South Africa
Why are even progressive local authorities with the will to improve seldom able to change cities? Why does it seem almost impossible to redress spatial inequalities, deliver and maintain basic services, elevate impoverished areas, and protect marginalized communities? Why do municipalities in the Global South refuse to work with prevailing social informalities, and resort instead to interventions that are known to displace and aggravate the very issues they aim to address?
Local Officials and the Struggle to Transform Cities analyzes these challenges in South African cities, where the brief post-apartheid moment opened a window for progressive city government and made research into state practices both possible and necessary. The book interrogates city officials’ practices through a comparative gaze into other ‘progressive moments’ in large cities in Brazil, the United States, and India. It considers the instruments that these officials invent to implement urban policies, the agency these officials develop, and the constraints they navigate in governing unequal cities. Claire Bénit-Gbaffou captures in this book actual officials’ practices through first-hand experience, state ethnographies, and engaged research. This reveals day-to-day practices that question generalized explanations of state failure in complex urban societies as essential malevolence, contextual weakness, corruption, and inefficiency.
This book opens the black box of the workings of the state, with the hope of opening paths for the construction of progressive policies in contemporary cities.
Table of Contents
List of figures
List of tables
List of contributors
List of abbreviations
1 Introduction: seeing like a City
Claire Bénit-Gbaffou
Part I: Seeing the local state through City officials’ practices
2 ‘Welcome to Alcatraz’: a reflection on three years in a City bureaucracy
Phil Harrison
3 Activists in the State: City officials working behind the scenes for change in post-apartheid Johannesburg
Claire Bénit-Gbaffou
4 Bureaucratic activism for inclusionary development in the City of Johannesburg
Margot Rubin
5 Entering the state as a community activist: the Operation Khanyisa Movement in Johannesburg City Council
Nicolette Pingo and Claire Bénit-Gbaffou
Part II: Seeing the local state from its margins
6 Acting like the state? Leaders’ participation in street trade management in Gauteng municipalities
Mamokete Modiba
7 Crafting a xenophobic bureaucratic order after May 2008 pogroms in Cape Town Rodolphe Demeestère
8 The politics of formulating policy on housing evictions in post-apartheid Johannesburg
Neil Klug
Part III: Seeing the local state through its policy instruments
9 Identifying learners in Johannesburg schools: how state rationalities converge to construct institutional xenophobia Jeanne Bouyat
10 Seeing and unseeing: housing, poverty and privilege on Johannesburg’s Corridors of Freedom
Sarah Charlton
11 Deceptive lenses: officials’ and activists’ visions of water issues in eThekwini
Mary Galvin
12 Lost in translation: The elusive equity objective in Johannesburg water policy
Darlington Mushongera
13 ‘Doing things right’ or ‘doing the right thing’? Limits to evaluative thinking in Johannesburg
Laila Smith
Part IV: International perspectives on the art of progressive city government
14 Is there a ’left art’ of City government? A view from post-apartheid South Africa)
Claire Bénit-Gbaffou
15 Preserving the progressive City: a North American perspective
Pierre Clavel
16 Porous bureaucracies, land and urban inclusion: a perspective from Indian Cities Varun Patil and Solomon Benjamin
17 Blurred boundaries and institutional activism: reflections from Brazil
Rebecca Naera Abers
Index