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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:The contested politics of housing allocation in Ikapa, Cape Town, 1981-1994
Authors:Oldfield, SophieISNI
Zweig, PatriciaISNI
Year:2010
Periodical:Journal of Southern African Studies (ISSN 1465-3893)
Volume:36
Issue:1
Pages:133-150
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:housing policy
urban housing
townships
1980-1989
1990-1999
External link:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03057071003607378
Abstract:This article investigates housing allocation politics in the Ikapa townships of Cape Town - in particular, New Crossroads - from 1981 to 1994. It focuses on the ways in which officials and community actors struggled for agency in housing allocation through differently constructed assertions of legitimacy and legality. Complex and contested politicized identities both divided and interlinked 'community' and 'State', enmeshed in dichotomous categories such as: 'borners' (people holding limited residential rights because they were born in the city) and 'amagoduka' (people born in rural areas with no rights to urban residence), politicized residents and nonpoliticized residents, and local officials ambiguously positioned both as agents of the State and as township residents themselves. Through this analysis, the article demonstrates the complex ways in which community-driven and State-determined processes shaped housing allocation practices, and the contested politics they produced in New Crossroads specifically and in the Ikapa area more broadly. The competing discourses that developed around the right to allocate houses in New Crossroads illustrate how formal and informal allocation systems were established and transformed over time, their interrelationships and disjuncture, and the processes and politics they consequently produced. Although the article's analysis is historical, the housing conflicts and politics investigated resonate with the politics of housing access in South African cities in the contemporary period. Notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]
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