PREFIGURING PRAGMATICALLY? Prefigurative Politics and the Constellation of People Power Strategies for Winning Affordable Housing in Cape Town

Abstract

This article contributes to ongoing discussions about the practice of prefigurative politics by urban social movements, and the relationship between prefiguration and other political practices. We argue that urban social movements can deploy prefigurative power in combination with other political strategies with which it is often contrasted and opposed. To demonstrate, we explore Cape Town's Reclaim the City movement that occupied several inner‐city buildings to create affordable housing for low‐wage Black communities—prefiguring the kind of affordable housing that they were demanding. They developed this strategy iteratively after having tried to play by the rules through litigation and mobilize through protest. When those approaches failed to shift decision makers, they tried to prefigure their goal for housing through occupation. Prefiguration offered distinctive strategic advantages: it helped demonstrate that affordable housing was possible and provided direct relief for people facing housing stress. These advantages not only engaged new participants but contributed to new affordable housing commitments from the City of Cape Town and the courts. We show how movement participants understood their prefigurative occupation as part of a constellation of people power strategies and suggest that this points towards the potential for prefiguration to be deployed pragmatically as well as ideologically by urban social movements.