Abahlali baseMjondolo and struggle for the city in Durban, South Africa
- Authors: Pithouse, Richard, 1970-
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6208 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1008578
- Description: 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.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Pithouse, Richard, 1970-
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6208 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1008578
- Description: 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.
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Elections: a dangerous time for poor people's movements in South Africa
- Authors: Pithouse, Richard, 1970-
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6203 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1008572
- Description: [From introduction]: History groans with the suffering caused by authoritarian individuals and regimes that were elected to power. For this reason the only useful measure of the commitment of any political project to democracy is to see how it responds to challenges to its own position and ideas.
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- Authors: Pithouse, Richard, 1970-
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6203 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1008572
- Description: [From introduction]: History groans with the suffering caused by authoritarian individuals and regimes that were elected to power. For this reason the only useful measure of the commitment of any political project to democracy is to see how it responds to challenges to its own position and ideas.
- Full Text:
Hard choices ahead
- Authors: Pithouse, Richard, 1970-
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:6204 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1008573 , http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/334.1
- Description: preprint , From Introduction: In recent weeks people have been willing to risk arrest, violence and in some cases death at the hands of our habitually brutal police force to assert a whole range of demands. These demands have included an insistence on the right to the cities, the right to an income, the right to a decent education and the right to a living wage.
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- Authors: Pithouse, Richard, 1970-
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:6204 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1008573 , http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/334.1
- Description: preprint , From Introduction: In recent weeks people have been willing to risk arrest, violence and in some cases death at the hands of our habitually brutal police force to assert a whole range of demands. These demands have included an insistence on the right to the cities, the right to an income, the right to a decent education and the right to a living wage.
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Hold the prawns
- Authors: Pithouse, Richard, 1970-
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6206 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1008576
- Description: [From introduction]: In the cities of the global South elites are often desperate to repress the reality of the shack settlement. Maps are printed in which shack settlements appear as blank spaces, laws are passed that assume that everyone can afford to live formally and, in the name of order and development, the poor are beaten out of the cities. The great elite fantasy is the creation of 'world class cities' – shiny, securitised nowherevilles in which the poor understand that their place is to live in some peripheral ghetto and only come into the city as menial workers. But from City of God to Slum Dog Millionaire and now District 9 cinema has put the shack settlement in the mall and at the heart of how Rio, Bombay and Johannesburg feature in the global imagination.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Pithouse, Richard, 1970-
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6206 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1008576
- Description: [From introduction]: In the cities of the global South elites are often desperate to repress the reality of the shack settlement. Maps are printed in which shack settlements appear as blank spaces, laws are passed that assume that everyone can afford to live formally and, in the name of order and development, the poor are beaten out of the cities. The great elite fantasy is the creation of 'world class cities' – shiny, securitised nowherevilles in which the poor understand that their place is to live in some peripheral ghetto and only come into the city as menial workers. But from City of God to Slum Dog Millionaire and now District 9 cinema has put the shack settlement in the mall and at the heart of how Rio, Bombay and Johannesburg feature in the global imagination.
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Land occupation and the limits of party politics
- Authors: Pithouse, Richard, 1970-
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6200 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1008565
- Description: In the recent election the DA, together with COPE, made much of their intention to defend the rule of the law. But while the dust thrown up in that election is still settling, the City of Cape Town is already engaged in violent and unlawful behaviour towards its most vulnerable citizens.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Pithouse, Richard, 1970-
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6200 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1008565
- Description: In the recent election the DA, together with COPE, made much of their intention to defend the rule of the law. But while the dust thrown up in that election is still settling, the City of Cape Town is already engaged in violent and unlawful behaviour towards its most vulnerable citizens.
- Full Text:
The KwaZulu-Natal Slums Act: bloody legislation against the expropriated
- Authors: Pithouse, Richard, 1970-
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6201 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1008568
- Description: [From introduction]: On 14 May 2009 the Constitutional Court will hear the attempt by the shack dweller’s movement Abahlali baseMjondolo to have the KwaZulu-Natal Slums Act declared unlawful. Other provinces have been mandated to develop similar legislation and the decision of the court may have a significant impact on the future of our cities.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Pithouse, Richard, 1970-
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6201 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1008568
- Description: [From introduction]: On 14 May 2009 the Constitutional Court will hear the attempt by the shack dweller’s movement Abahlali baseMjondolo to have the KwaZulu-Natal Slums Act declared unlawful. Other provinces have been mandated to develop similar legislation and the decision of the court may have a significant impact on the future of our cities.
- Full Text:
We are all the public
- Authors: Pithouse, Richard, 1970-
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6198 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1008562
- Description: [from introduction]: Across the country the most vulnerable people in our society are being subject to brazenly unlawful and often violent action at the hands of the state. Homeless people, refugees, sex workers, street traders and shack dwellers are all being taught, in the most literal sense of the term, to know their place. But state illegality is not only aimed at the segregation of physical space. It is also about ensuring that the people on the margins of society know their political place.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Pithouse, Richard, 1970-
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6198 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1008562
- Description: [from introduction]: Across the country the most vulnerable people in our society are being subject to brazenly unlawful and often violent action at the hands of the state. Homeless people, refugees, sex workers, street traders and shack dwellers are all being taught, in the most literal sense of the term, to know their place. But state illegality is not only aimed at the segregation of physical space. It is also about ensuring that the people on the margins of society know their political place.
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We need a conversation about development
- Authors: Pithouse, Richard, 1970-
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6199 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1008563
- Description: [From the introduction] From the Communist Party across to the corporate spin-doctors and down to the Development Committees in the shack settlements, more or less everybody in South Africa speaks the language of development. In some ways this is a good thing. It indicates a hard won agreement that the realities of inequality in our society are so cruel and perverse that any social project can only be credible if it will ameliorate these divisions and the suffering they cause.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Pithouse, Richard, 1970-
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6199 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1008563
- Description: [From the introduction] From the Communist Party across to the corporate spin-doctors and down to the Development Committees in the shack settlements, more or less everybody in South Africa speaks the language of development. In some ways this is a good thing. It indicates a hard won agreement that the realities of inequality in our society are so cruel and perverse that any social project can only be credible if it will ameliorate these divisions and the suffering they cause.
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