Why is urban local government failing in many South African secondary cities? Through the example of a major instance of governance collapse in the Emfuleni local municipality, this article discusses the fault lines in the legal and structural architecture underlying governance of South African cities and towns. It argues that, while human failings explain some of the municipality's failings, there are also deeper problems around municipal demarcation, intergovernmental relations, urban autonomy, and local government financing.

This article considers anew the utility of rights-discourse in alleviating social hardship. It revisits the Critical Legal Studies-inspired debates on the topic, but in the context of justiciable socioeconomic rights, such as those found in the South African Constitution. The article explains the "emptiness" of the socioeconomic rights jurisprudence of the South African Constitutional Court by comparing the South African socioeconomic rights narrative to Peter Gabel's account of the manner in which rights discourse enables the status quo to assimilate and defeat social movements. By doing this, the article shows that socioeconomic rights are accomplices to, rather than victims of, the sidelining of the needs they represent, despite their transformative potential. However, since rights remain one of the only viable political tools through which denial of socioeconomic needs may effectively be confronted, we should not abandon rights-discourse but should instead attempt to translate abstract socioeconomic guarantees into concrete legal entitlements. [End Page 796]

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This article questions the usefulness of the notion of an ‘urban periphery’ for efforts to capture and ameliorate urban marginalisation and exclusion through human rights-based litigation. Focusing on South Africa’s Gauteng City Region, the article argues that the notion of an urban periphery fails to capture the nuances of marginal urban life and the interests of poor, marginalised urban residents in accessing the city. In the specific context of the right of access to housing, the article then grapples with South African judicial engagements with the spatial dimensions of urban marginalisation. It finds that, despite the fixation of human rights litigators, activists and commentators on housing location and the ‘urban periphery’, courts are adopting a more nuanced and balanced approach to urban marginality. It accordingly identifies interests that should be accommodated by such an approach and points to legal concepts which may more constructively respond to these.