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This paper develops infrastructural citizenship as an analytical framework that bridges geography's sub‐disciplinary silos. While urban geography promotes infrastructure as a core lens for understanding the city, recognising that political struggles are mediated through infrastructure, discourses of citizenship are rarely employed. Similarly, while political and development geography promote citizenship as vital in understanding socio‐political life, often framed by citizen‐led action to secure basic rights and services, critical debates on urban infrastructure are typically overlooked. Consequently, despite the growth in studies recognising the politicised nature of urban infrastructure and the centrality of citizenship to urban life, the multiple ways that citizenship and infrastructure relate in diverse urban settings has received limited critical attention. This paper demonstrates how urban dwellers' relationship to public infrastructure in the domestic spaces of the home and settlement, and the temporal scale of the everyday, offers a representation of broader political identities and perceptions, framed through the language of citizenship. In South Africa, despite 25 years of significant post‐apartheid public investment in housing and services, frustration at poor service delivery and beneficiary (mis)use of public infrastructure remains dominant. While citizens adapt and consume public infrastructure in ways deemed “illegal” and “uncivil” by the state, citizens view these actions as a legitimate form of “citizenship‐in‐action” in the context of rapid urbanisation and poverty, and are frustrated by perceptions of state neglect. Using the analytical framework of infrastructural citizenship, the paper reveals how this state–society disjuncture represents a citizenship mismatch that is embodied in infrastructure, rather than a material product of state disinterest or citizen destruction per se.

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This paper examines the fear of crime in post-apartheid South Africa and its impact on urban space and form, focusing in particular on Cape Town. South African statistics point to alarming increases in serious crime over recent years and, although such statistics are considered unreliable, reflecting to some extent increases in the rate of crime reporting, the public perception is nonetheless one of decreased security. Attempts to mitigate fear have resulted increasingly in the creation of fortified enclaves and a withdrawal from public space. Although the more extreme manifestations are restricted to affluent areas, levels of residential protection have increased among all groups. As in other parts of the world, this “architecture of fear” results in growing danger within the public domain and the increasing polarization of social groups. The paper argues that this trend in South Africa perpetuates the social divisions that were inherent in the apartheid state into the post-apartheid context, with the fear of crime being used as a justification for a predominantly racist fear of difference.

This paper considers the impact of urban South Africa's new spatial order on its already fragile social dynamics. Analysis considers the relationships between residents of a gated community and their neighbouring (non-gated) area, addressing both the attitudes and perceptions that exist amongst residents of each area towards the 'other' neighbourhood, as well as the nature of any direct contact between residents. The case study for this paper is located in a master plan private development, constructed in 1999 in the heart of Cape Town's wealthy (and predominantly White) 'southern suburbs'. The development hosts two vastly different residential areas that despite spatial proximity are socially and functionally isolated.

In the global South, policies providing property titles to low-income households are increasingly implemented as a solution to poverty. Integrating poor households into the capitalist economy using state-subsidized homeownership is intended to provide poor people with an asset that can be used in a productive manner. In this article the South African "housing subsidy system" is assessed using quantitative and qualitative data from in-depth research in a state-subsidized housing settlement in the city of Cape Town. The findings show that while state-subsidized property ownership provides long-term shelter and tenure security to low-income households, houses have mixed value as a financial asset. Although state-subsidized houses in South Africa are a financially tradable asset, transaction values are too low for low-income vendors to reach the next rung on the housing ladder, the township market. Furthermore, low-income homeowners are reticent to use their (typically primary) asset as collateral security for credit, and thus property ownership is not providing the financial returns that titling theories assume.

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This paper reveals how urban theories traditionally rooted in northern cities and academies are challenged and redeveloped by southern perspectives. Critiques of urban theory as narrowly northern (or Anglo-American) have recently emerged, spawning the comparative urbanism movement that calls for urban theories to be open to the experiences of all cities. Using the example of the sale of state-subsidised houses in South Africa, this research uses two parallel concepts, gentrification and downward raiding, to challenge the northern empirical focus of urban theory. Despite describing similar processes of urban class-based change, the concepts are rarely considered analogous, entrenched in divergent empirical contexts and academic literatures. While gentrification debates largely reference the northern central city, downward raiding is reserved for the southern 'slum'. In contrast, this research develops 'hybrid gentrification' as a concept and methodological approach that demonstrates how non-northern urban experiences can and should create and refine urban theory.