In situ solutions, participatory practices and the inclusion of community knowledge have become key ingredients in urban upgrading policies across the world. Knowledge, however, is not neutral, but value-laden, representing different and conflicting interests. Including community-based knowledge, therefore, is far from straightforward. To understand the politics of urban development interventions, a deeper conceptualisation of the relationship between knowledge and power is required. This article tries to contribute to this conceptualisation through an empirical analysis of political mobilisation and knowledge in slum upgrading. Specifically, it problematises the role of community knowledge in urban development through a study of two informal settlement upgrading projects in Cape Town. Findings from this qualitative research contradict the notion of a unified community whose 'community knowledge' can be engaged with. In both settlements, knowledge politics have resulted in tensions within the settlement, creating new interests groups and knowledge alliances, showing the complex interconnectedness of knowledge, power and mobilisation. As knowledge has been built, used, exchanged and contested to upgrade livelihoods, this knowledge has been standing in a mutually constitutive relationship with collective action. Although this analysis supports, rather than contradicts, the assumption that including different types of knowledge enhances rather than weakens urban governance, its final argument is that this can only be achieved through substantive democratic and participatory processes.
The BRICS partnership has been portrayed in mainstream social media as an inter-state initiative that could challenge the geo-political hegemony of the Western bloc. Thus, far relatively little has been said about the prospect of extending the partnership to the level of ordinary citizens and how this might be achieved. A declared goal of BRICS, articulated in 2016, is that of ''building responsive, inclusive collective solutions to core themes with a particular focus on institution-building, implementing past commitments and exploring innovative solutions to common issues''. This paper provides a preliminary assessment of the idea of ''BRICS from below'' might entail in policy terms by looking at how BRICS pronouncements have led to collective solutions, especially to economic development as it affects the local level, using South Africa as the case study site. The paper concludes that it appears the realities of the forms of engagement still resonate with more traditional forms of state led alliance building that are aimed less at transformation than at coordinating 'national self-interest'.
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AbstractThe effective and equitable delivery of public services remains a challenge for all countries but it is especially problematic in newly democratised states with highly diverse and unequal populations. Influencing the design of more inclusive administrative systems is the notion of a universal citizenship which applies the concept of the equality of individuals to the needs, identities and sense of agency of citizens both between and within states. Reinforced and intertwined with the notion of the universal, citizen, is the uncritically constructed notion of community. The construction of a single identity citizen living in communities imbued with homogenous characteristics is carried forward into the policy construction of participatory governance, which has become part of the orthodoxy of administrative thinking in many states in the global south. This paper examines the how the notion of community forms part of service delivery, and particularly the delivery of public housing to poor areas of Cape Town, South Africa, through participatory processes. It argues that official understandings of homogenous communities which infuse development and service delivery policies not only undermine the stated objectives of participation but they also ultimately impede effective service delivery.
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