African Centre for Cities

Starting from the puzzle posed by the ultimate aim of modern governmental rationality to nurture the population and its tendencies to exclude large parts of the same population from the spectrum of its care, this article argues that abandonment is always already inscribed into this rationality. In contradiction to Agamben, abandonment here is not attributed to the sovereign exception but is traced back to modern processes transforming the political—as problematised by Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. Complementing their observations with the empirical and the anti-political implications of “the count” based on Ian Hacking's and Jacques Rancire's thought, first a conceptual framework for understanding biopolitical abandonment is outlined, then the materialisation of abandonment is assessed. Arriving finally at the possibility of thinking resistance to the power that disallows life through conceiving of politics as disruption, the final section discusses the South African shack-dwellers' struggle that, on occasions, is able to disturb the dynamics of abandonment and so potentially furthers the conceptualisation of resistance to biopolitics.

While deeply sympathetic to David Harvey’s commitment to a politics that can move to a new and more just order this paper, based on the experience of a period of immersion in the shack dweller’s movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, asks if Harvey’s commitment to scaling up the level of political action, alongside a project of political education, risks removing politics from the grasp of the people who are currently struggling, with a considerable degree of success, to restore their right to political speech and imagination.

Taking its cue from the worldwide proliferation of struggles for access to the city, this paper aims to assess the impact of globalized neoliberalism on the juridico-legal techniques of contemporary urban governmentalities and to inquire into the ways in which such techniques can be resisted. It suggests that at least in urban contexts, the police order that, according to Foucault, was largely superseded by the modern liberal technologies of governing through freedom, today seems to be rather active. Arguably, global cities' competition for capital promoted by the globalized neoliberal economic order and its imperative to actively intervene in producing the market, pairs up conveniently with the detailed methods of regulating the early modern West. On the other hand, the self-limitation of governmental reason originating in the political economic criticism of the police state equips governance with the means of voluntary impotence and, placing the management of the economy at the centre of governmental activity, it increasingly adapts law to social and economic processes. While, according to Rancière, these tendencies lead to the effacement of the gaps between legal inscriptions and social realities, and thus tend to impede the occurrence of the political, in interpreting the struggles of South African shack dwellers, the paper aims to illustrate how inscriptions of equality may nevertheless trigger the political disruption of urban biopolitics.

Using as its point of departure the claim that today the urban is the main site for the abandonment of superfluous people, this article explores the emancipatory politics of the South African shack-dwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo. Based on a notion of political subjectivization as the appropriation of excess freedom, I argue that Abahlali disrupt the order of the ‘world-class city’ when they expose the contradiction between the democratic inscriptions of equality and the lethal segmentation of the urban order. In articulating their living conditions as the unjustified breach of the promise of ‘a better life’, the shack-dwellers prove their equality and thus emerge as political subjects. As the article argues, at the centre of this process is a political practice of speaking and listening that is driven by the imperative to reverse the distancing and delaying practices of an order that abandons them by remaining physically, experientially and cognitively proximate to the experiences of life in the shantytown.

Working with a conception of intellectual inequality as always fabricated and contingent in nature, this article elaborates the deployment and disruption of political illiteracy by focusing on the politics of South African shack-dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo. The discussion moves through the dis/placement of the legal charge of public violence, the state violence of illegal evictions, the discourse of service delivery, and the educative trusteeship of abandonment. The article concludes with some concerns that emerge through the movement’s practice and the very attempt to research political illiteracy.

Motivated by the litigious politics of the South African shack-dwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, this paper enquires into the knowl- edge dynamics implied by the governmentality literature’s take on the (neo)liberal deployment of (human) rights. It suggests that by implic- itly constructing the freedom of codified rights as illusionary and opposed to the reality of neoliberal rationalities of government, this scholarship posits a cognitive hierarchy between agents of government and the governed, and thus reproduces the power dynamics that it seeks to criticise. Interweaving a presentation of Abahlali’s self- articulation as knowledgeable and rightful subjects with Jacques Rancière’s notion of ‘literariness’, the paper accounts for codified rights’ potential to enable the disruption of such dynamics, and traces the governmentality literature’s suspicion towards this potential back to its textual methodology.

Intrigued by the so-called “rebellion of the poor,” this paper traces back the current South African concern with popular protest to its reconfiguration during the last years of the apartheid order. Focusing on the discourse around grassroots resistance in the mid- to late-1980s, I begin by showing how, in juxtaposition to an ideal notion of civil society, popular mobilization had been largely delegitimized and the emancipatory politics of ungovernability recast as antidemocratic by the first few years of the post-apartheid regime. In deploying particular notions of violence and culture, this discursive shift, I suggest, fed into reconstructing the ungovernable subject as the racial other of the new South Africa’s citizenry. The second part of the paper mobilizes Foucault’s genealogy of liberalism to draw parallels between this process and the liberal effort to resolve the potentially conflicting principles of governing the economic subject and the subject of rights within the realm of civil society. Finally, via the postcolonial critique of liberal notions of civility and their rootedness in racial thinking, I suggest that civil society secures the governability of the population through rendering the potentially disruptive freedom of the people as the excess freedom of the racialized other.

While recent efforts to analyse resistance to post-conflict interventions have led to important insights into the nature of contemporary peacebuilding efforts, their failure to adequately problematize the concept of resistance itself and to adapt it to the specific realities of post-conflict neoliberalism has proven to be problematic. This article explores the internal tensions and inconsistencies that define the concept of resistance in post-conflict environments, focusing specifically on five topics: the interaction of structure and agency; the presence of intent; the role of power; the nature of markets; and the possibility of emancipation. Key problems are highlighted, and, where possible, potential solutions are proposed. The issues raised by this article demand immediate attention if the conceptual viability and analytical value of resistance are to be maintained in post-conflict contexts.

This article explores common approaches to informal economic activities in post-conflict South Sudan. Placing these within the context of broader peacebuilding and development initiatives that are based on core neoliberal economic principles, it argues that neoliberalism simultaneously incorporates and disavows informality, viewing it as a manifestation of natural local market activity while treating its imperfections as solvable through further economic liberalization. In doing so, neoliberalism ignores its own role in producing and sustaining informality while informing theoretical and practical approaches to it that are conceptually problematic and contextually inappropriate. An analysis of the nature of informality in South Sudan not only reveals these flaws, but also points to how the very nature of informality itself undermines some of the central tenets of neoliberal economic orthodoxy.

The political evolution of Kampala under the National Resistance Movement (NRM) has profoundly affected the fortunes of the city's street vendors. This article examines the effects of institutional changes brought about by the NRM's efforts to monopolize power in the city, arguing that the twin forces of democratization and decentralization allowed street vending to flourish while the reversal of these processes precipitated its dramatic decline. Democratization and decentralization initiated a period of intense political competition in which vendors could trade political support for protection from politicians who were more interested in political survival than the implementation of policy. This ability was lost when the central government introduced a new city government that shifted the balance of power from elected politicians to appointed technocrats. The new city government has since sought legitimacy through development and urban management initiatives that aim to transform Kampala into a supposedly modern, well-organized city. In doing so, it has sought to eradicate street vending, a practice it sees as the antithesis of and an obstacle to its ambitions. Lacking the channels for political influence that they previously enjoyed, street vendors have been forced to face the full brunt of government repression.

For a large segment of the urban poor in Kampala, Uganda, street vending has long served as a key livelihood strategy in the absence of formal employment opportunities and a public social safety net. This article explores the effects of de-democratisation on the rights of street vendors in Kampala, describing how changes to local government institutions and processes have forced vendors to adopt new strategies to assert their rights in an environment of closed political space. It argues that for street vendors in the city, economic and social rights are fundamentally rooted in political rights. As de-democratisation has robbed them of their political rights, it has also robbed them of their ability to assert their right to engage in their economic activities, leaving them increasingly vulnerable and marginalised. Barring a fundamental change in the city's political landscape, the hardships that vendors face appear to have no end in sight.

This article explores the reasons behind Canada’s declining participation in United Nations peacekeeping operations. It proposes a decision-making model that explains how politicians assess opportunities to commit personnel to peacekeeping missions by balancing their policy objectives with the pressures of electoral politics. Emphasizing the importance of voters in political decision-making processes, it argues that participation in peacekeeping is dependent on three key factors: a belief in the value of peacekeeping in principle; a belief in the value of a given peacekeeping operation; and risk aversion in response to the potential costs of peacekeeping. Tracing Canada’s declining participation in peacekeeping operations since the 1990s, it particularly focuses on how this calculus has, in different ways, limited Canada’s involvement in peacekeeping under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government and Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, arguing that the former undervalued peacekeeping as a means of obtaining its foreign policy objectives and as a feature of national identity, minimizing the perceived benefits of participation, while the latter has focused on the inherent risks of peacekeeping despite a professed commitment to peacekeeping in principle, maximizing the perceived costs of further personnel commitments. The decisions of successive Canadian governments have led to a free-rider problem in which Canada is willing to enjoy the benefits of peacekeeping but unwilling to bear the costs.

Since the beginning of the new millennium, a plethora of works has been published on the making of the ‘creative city’ and the urban impact of the creative economy. So far, however, limited recognition has been given to how the development of cultural industries and the creative economy as a whole influences urban transformation in the rapidly urbanising Global South, especially in Africa. In Cape Town, a steadily growing number of creative industries and ‘culturepreneurs’ (Lange 2005) are carving out new spaces from the city’s highly contested urban setting. Over the past five years, the mixed-use, inner-city fringe area of Woodstock has seen the incessant arrival of creatives from various sectors. Travelling alongside is a property sector geared towards catering specifically for the creative industries’ spatial demands by turning old industrial structures – the remains of Woodstock’s former capacity as national hub for clothing, food processing and other light manufacturing – into creative centres hosting international film studios, leading galleries and designer ‘theatre retail spaces’. After setting the stage through a comprehensive introduction to the rise of the creative economy in South Africa and Cape Town, this article tunes into the current local development of Woodstock, based on extensive field research in the area. It traces ways and forms of conflict but also new social interfaces between the new creative tenants and the old established community, on the one hand pointing to problematic issues like lingering gentrification, sociospatial polarisation and lopsided cultural representation while also trying to flesh out some of the opportunities for finding the right frequency of engagement between creative industries and spaces of vernacular creativity within Cape Town’s post-apartheid urban realm.

‘Live Design. Transform Life’ – the four short words at the heart of Cape Town’s slogan for its appointment as World Design Capital (WDC) 2014 may sound simple, yet they stand for an ambitious and challenging endeavour. In terms of the three official themes of ‘rebuilding’, ‘reconnecting’ and ‘repositioning’ Cape Town, the city government intends to use this international accolade as a tool for mastering the ‘high wire act’ (Pieterse 2012) of finding new ways to redress some of the most severe post-apartheid urban development challenges – by design. At the same time, it seeks to augment its economically competitive edge, boosting international recognition and foreign direct investment. A rather recent initiative, the WDC programme was devised in 2008 by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (Icsid) ‘with the ambitious, yet imperative goal to impress upon cities, the importance and recognition of design as a leading development tool’ (Icsid 2012) and launched in Torino, Italy, as its pilot city. [...]
After a brief look at the frequent traveller logbook of the creative city paradigm (Landry 2000; Florida 2002) and the role international cultural accolades play in its
worldwide dissemination and translation, the chapter will explore how the WDC idea came to be ‘grounded’ (Cochrane & Ward 2012) in Cape Town. Reconstructing its travel patterns through the evidence collected from qualitative interviews, media coverage analysis and participant observation helps to uncover the entangled pathdependencies, knowledge channels and personal networks, as well as the diverse array of interests and political rationales involved. Moreover, it reveals the ways in which the global WDC brand has been locally appropriated as a new legitimising label for large-scale government actions that include, but also go beyond, re-enacting a creative city script. The rather erratic and unfi nished nature of this process to date also leads me to question the popular neoliberal notion of ‘fast policy formation’ as ‘the importation of off-the-shelf program techniques from other locations’ (Peck 2002, p. 344). In a rather patronising manner, this implies a more linear modus operandi of prefabricated policy – ‘download, plug and play’ – than the fumbling ‘mix and match’ I encountered while following Cape Town’s route towards its appointment as WDC. My observations support Clarke’s (2012, p. 34) suggestion that much ‘more could be made of the local politics of fast policies’. Furthermore, they resonate with the growing body of academic work that seeks to look beyond neoliberalism as the prime theoretical vantage point, as it often tends to obstruct a broader epistemological engagement with the diverse urban dynamics of post-apartheid South Africa (Parnell & Pieterse 2010; Morange 2011; Parnell & Robinson 2011).

Continue reading in Haferburg, C. & Huchzermeyer, M. (Hrsg.) (2014): Urban Governance in Postapartheid Cities. Stuttgart:Schweizerbart; Durban: UKZN Press, S. 251-270

Though urban culture, creativity, and innovation strategies have attained frequent traveler
status in global urban policy circuits, the intricate ways in which they are translated and reassembled
in the global South, namely in Southern African cities, have not yet been sufficiently
scrutinized.
In order to grasp the experimental formations and erratic flows of governmental technologies
supporting the creative city narrative and the consequences of its sweeping “aesthetisation of
the social” (RECKWITZ 2012), the paper closely attends to the emerging political practices
deriving from Cape Town’s recent designation as World Design Capital 2014.
In October 2012, it was awarded this prestigious accolade after an extensive international bidding
process. Ever since, ‘design’ has become the buzzword with local politicians, planning
elites and creative economists, as the mayoral office has pushed the objective of fostering
‘good governance’ by ‘good design’ to the top of its urban development agenda1. Drawing on
results from long-term empirical fieldwork2, I’d like to offer a two-pronged analysis: Firstly, I
will consider how, by and for whom the global “creative policy fix” (PECK 2011) is adapted
and retrofitted through the use of ‘design//er//ed’ as a floating signifier for several institutional,
spatial and social development projects in Cape Town. These detailed findings will then
serve as basis for a broader theoretical argument around the relational notion of “variegated
neoliberalization” (BRENNER et al. 2010) in the contemporary post-apartheid city and how it
can be studied by enriching policy mobility research with recent epistemological perspectives
on Southern Urbanism.