Although specified in the South African Bill of Rights, for the majority of South African citizens the right to access housing translates in practice to the experience of waiting. In this paper we reflect on the micropolitics of waiting, practices of quiet encroachment, exploring how and where citizens wait and make do, and their encounters with the state in these processes. We argue that waiting for homes shapes a politics of finding shelter in the meanwhile partially visible yet precarious, the grey spaces of informality and illegality that constitute South African cities. At the same time, waiting generates a politics of encounter between citizen and state, practices immersed in shifting policy approaches and techniques, the contingent and often-opaque practices of governance. In sum, the politics of waiting for housing in South Africa proves paradoxical: citizens are marked as legitimate wards of the state. Yet, to live in the meanwhile and in the long term requires subversion, an agency that is sometimes visible in mobilisation and protest, and at other times out of sight, simultaneously contentious and legitimate.
The success of the Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG 11) depends on the availability and accessibility of robust data, as well as the reconfiguration of governance systems that can catalyse urban transformation. Given the uneven success of the Millennium Development Goals, and the unprecedented inclusion of the urban in the SDG process, the feasibility of SDG 11 was assessed in advance of its ratification through a series of urban experiments. This paper focusses on Cape Town’s participation in piloting SDG 11, in order to explore the role of urban experimentation in highlighting the partnership arrangements necessary to allow cities to meet the data and governance challenges presented by the SDG 11. Specifically, we focus on the relationship between data and governance that lie at the heart of the SDG 11. The urban experiment demonstrates the highly complex and multi-level governance dynamics that shape the way urban experiments are initiated, executed and concluded. The implications of these dependencies illustrate that more attention needs to be paid at the global level to what data are important and how and where the data are generated if SDG 11 is to be met. Overall, this paper makes the case that the success of SDG 11 rests on effecting local level change and enabling real opportunities in cities.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11625-017-0500-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
South African cities have focused on sustainability as a policy and strategic objective. Nonetheless, realising the transformative potential of fostering sustainable transition pathways is challenging. Our entry point for understanding this impasse is that the ability of cities to transform lies in the opaque spaces between policy rhetoric and implementation. We unpack these policy disjunctures in two ways. Firstly, we posit that the potential of the City to ensure that policy based on progressive and transformative principles is implemented in ways that foster the intended action is tied up with its ability to perform as a learning institution. The transformative role of learning is in turn dependent on accessing the situated tacit knowledge that informs decision-making and action. Secondly, we propose that researching the capacity of the City to learn requires alternative spaces for research and deliberation. To illustrate these arguments, we draw on a knowledge co-production urban experiment in Cape Town to improve the efficacy and analysis of both policy development and implementation. Tacit knowledge surfaced practices that are found to hamper learning within the City. Engaging with identified barriers to learning and change provides alternate entry points for identifying feasible points of leverage to address sustainability disjunctures.
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