Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism

Social Justice and the City

Introduction - body and city: the passive body the plan of the book a personal note. Part 1 Powers of the voice and eye: nakedness - the citizen's body in Perikles' Athens the cloak of darkness - the protections of ritual in Athens the obsessive image - place and time in Hadrian's Rome time in the body - early Christians in Rome. Part 2 Movements of the heart: comunity - the Paris of Jehan de Chelles \"each man is a devil to himself\" - the paris of Humbert de Romans fear of touching - the Jewish ghetto in Renaissance Venice. Part 3 Arteries and veins: moving bodies - Harvey's revolution the body set free - Boullee's Paris urban individualism - E.M. Forster's London. Conclusion: civic bodies - multi-cultural New York.

Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization.

Over the past decade, a large number of developing countries have made the transition from authoritarian rule to democracy. The rebirth of civil societies, the achievement of new freedoms and liberties have all been celebrated with due enthusiasm. But now that the euphoria of these transitions has passed, we are beginning to pose the sobering question of what difference democracy makes to development, or to be more precise, whether democracy can help redress the severe social and economic inequalities that characterize developing countries. Two separate problems are involved here. The first parallels the western European literature on the rise of the welfare state and is centrally concerned with patterns of interest aggregation, and specifically the dynamics and effects of lower class formation. This literature has convincingly argued that political rights can be translated into social rights, and procedural democracy becomes substantive democracy, only to the extent that lower class demands are organized and find effective representation in the state. In the developing world however, uneven capitalist development, resilient social cleavages and various forms of bureaucratic authoritarianism have blunted lower class collective action. The three cases examined here, however, break with this pattern. In South Africa, Brazil, and the Indian state of Kerala, working-class

http://www.patrickheller.com/uploads/1/5/3/7/15377686/moving_the_state.pdf

Moving the State: The Politics of Democratic Decentralization in Kerala, South Africa, and Porto Alegre

/pdf/writing-the-world-from-an-african-metropolis-2ek4s1q0h0.pdf

Writing the World from an African Metropolis

During each period of extreme stress and turmoil in South Africa’s past century the idea of reconstruction has loomed large. A primary tool for reconstructing society has been presumed equally, by many parties, to lie in urban planning. As less turbulent times return, governments have attempted to reshape the society and, more particularly, the cities by developing new institutions, laws, visions, systems, personnel and plans. In each major case until the present, however, the programmes of progenitors of such ideas have been overtaken by the accession to power of new regimes, at government or merely planning system level, which have co-opted the new institutions, etc., to their own programmes; or such programmes have, less spectacularly, faded away as the complexities of government overwhelm initially exciting but idealistic visions. The paper describes aspects of the emergence and reformulation of planning at several of these stages: after the South African War, beginning in 1901; after the First World ...

Reconstructing South Africa’s cities? The making of urban planning 1900–2000

Our reflection on past treatment of urban segregation begins with the assertion that the implicit acceptance of ‘race’ as a legitimate and primary category of inquiry has impoverished the understanding of residential segregation in the South African city. The first section of the paper illustrates the prevalence of racially defined empirical urban studies and tries to explain why this categorisation remains unchallenged. In the second section of the paper we demonstrate that where efforts are made to explain the emergence of a racialised urban structure, inappropriate or inadequate points of reference are involved. Particular attention is given to the use of the race/class debate, feminist perspectives on urban policy, the literature on white supremacy and the city, and in the work on ‘race’. The final section of the paper suggests an alternative approach to exploring urban segregation. Specifically, we pose the questions: what were urban administrators in the early part of the twentieth century to do and...

Rethinking urban South Africa

In the early months of 1990, as the excitement of F.W. de Klerk's change of direction captured international attention, government television in South Africa offered its white viewers a new serial which revealed that those previously 'disqualified' people, showing an increasing tendency to move in next door, might even be 'People Like Us'.' This crude, if entertaining, ideological manipulation provided an extraordinary antithesis to earlier National Party contortions. Exactly forty years before, when Dr T.E. Donges introduced the Group Areas Bill in the House of Assembly, his staff had to cast around for evidence of the popularity of generalised, compulsory urban racial segregation. In doing so they found many examples of demands for, moves towards and attempts at enforced separation of 'race groups' in urban areas. Some of these Donges cited during the lengthy parliamentary debates on the Group Areas Bill. But what were the forces pushing for comprehensive segregation? Who contributed to the framing of the Bill? Was there a preconceived scheme to impose a master plan for internal urban apartheid? Our inability to answer these questions stems from the fact that the creation of 'group areas', usually considered to lie at the very core of urban apartheid, has not yet been studied by scholars. The origins of the Group Areas Act have been the subject of some speculations but no serious research; the same applies to examination of the specific nature of the changes which it introduced, and to the

Comprehensive Segregation: The Origins of the Group Areas Act and Its Planning Apparatuses

A significant proportion of the black urban population in South Africa rent accommodation. Surveys conducted in two low-income settlements in Cape Town and Johannesburg show that the rental housing...

https://eau.sagepub.com/content/9/1/133.full.pdf

Alan Mabin

Papers

Reconstructing South Africa’s cities? The making of urban planning 1900–2000

Rethinking urban South Africa

Comprehensive Segregation: The Origins of the Group Areas Act and Its Planning Apparatuses

Low-income rental housing: are South African cities different?:

Labour, capital, class struggle and the origins of residential segregation in Kimberley, 1880–1920