Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: The racialised regulation of space under apartheid was increasingly undone by insurgent popular action from the late 1970s. After apartheid a technocratic agenda that reduced the urban crisis to a housing crisis successfully depoliticised the urban question. At the same time the state made often violent attempts to reinscribe certain aspects of apartheid spatial logic by forcibly removing shack dwellers living in well located suburbs to tiny houses, and then later ‘transit camps’, in peripheral ghettoes. However from 2004 there was a remarkable sequence of popular protest against local governments across the country. An autonomous shack dweller’s movement, Abahlali basemjondolo, emerged from this grassroots ferment and has since issued a compelling demand for organisational autonomy, grassroots urban planning and the right to the city.
Source: Revista Cidades
Author: Richard Pithouse
Institution: Rhodes University
Language: English
Subfield: Urban Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W1485037747