2. Academic Wits University Research Outputs (All submissions)
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Browsing 2. Academic Wits University Research Outputs (All submissions) by Type "Book chapter"
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Item Are Johannesburg peri-central neighbourhoods irremediably ‘fluid’? The local governance of diversity, mobility and competition in Yeoville & Bertrams(Wits University Press, 2014) Benit-Gbaffou, ClaireJohannesburg’s inner city, often emblematized by the infamously known Hillbrow, has often constituted the point of departure for depicting urban chaos, unpredictability, endless mobility, fluidity and undecipherable change – be it in novels and movies (see 2002 Welcome to our Hillbrow, 2010 Zoo City, 2008 Jerusalema), or in academic literature (Morris 1999, Simone 2006). Inner city neighbourhoods, in the CBD but also at its immediate fringe (‘peri-central’ areas) are currently functioning as ports of entry into South African economic capital, for both national and international migrants. They are characterized by a degree of urban decay that have earned these neighborhoods the label of ‘slums’, ‘sinkholes’, in need of ‘urban management’ and re-affirmation of ‘law and order’. Some have also attracted specific attempts at urban regeneration led mostly by the municipality, followed or not by private investment. They are all marked by a level of informality (in housing and in economic activities) which is often a condition for low-income migrants to enter the urban labour and housing markets.Item A capsular model for developing student teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge for nature of science(Infonomics Society, 2016) Vhurumuku, ElaosiItem City Planners(HSRC Press, 2009) Todes, AlisonCity planning is a small profession, with only 3 790 graduates by 2004. Data sources on the profession are limited, and there are only a few, mainly qualitative studies. 'Planning' as it is described in the Planning Professions Act (No.36 of 2002), was designated as a 'scarce skill' in the context of the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (Asgisa) and the Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition (Jipsa) (Berrisford 2006; Dol 2006b) Lack of Planning capacity was seen as constraining development in two main ways: through slow processing of land development applications, which was seen as holding up development; and through the lack of transformation of South African cities, perpetuating conditions such as long and costly travel to work, with impacts on labour costs. Further, the focus on infrastructure-led development would also require increased planning capacity.Item CLAIMING ‘RIGHTS’ IN THE AFRICAN CITY: POPULAR MOBILISATION AND THE POLITICS OF INFORMALITY IN NAIROBI, RABAT, JOHANNESBURG AND CAPE TOWN.(Oxon & New York. Routledge, 2014) Benit-Gbaffou, Claire; Oldfield, SophieIn this chapter however, we do not directly use the term ‘right to the city’, as we follow Mayer (2009) in her call against the ‘proliferation of this rights [to the city] discourse’ that runs the risk of weakening its political power (see also Purcell 2002)....Our aim, in articulating urban mobilisation to the notion of ‘rights’ (in the plural) in this chapter, is to understand more narrowly, more practically, and perhaps then theoretically, to what extent these ‘rights’ to the city are (or not) a strategic tool for collective mobilisation in cities of the South to access urban goods, spaces, resources. In this respect, we are more interested in literature that takes the notion of ‘rights’ seriously, in line with Fernandez in Brazil (2007) or Bhan in India (2009) for instance: examining the legal dimension of ‘rights’ and its impacts in securing different forms of access to urban spaces and urban goods. But this approach needs to explicitly take into account how the formality of this definition unfolds in urban politics and collective mobilisation marked by high levels of informality.Item Cultural diversity, 'Living Law' and Women's Rights in South Africa(Cambridge University Press, 2013) Albertyn, CatherineThis chapter considers the constitutional recognition of cultural diversity, especially as it is manifest through the recognition of customary law, and its relationship to the constitutional guarantee of gender equality. As the supreme law, the South African Constitution subjects all law (customary, common, and statutory) to the rights and values of the Constitution, including the primary democratic values of dignity, equality, and freedom. This chapter rejects the idea that the Constitution provides a “liberal democratic” framework that constitutes the basis for a “top-down” universalism that tests culture and custom against irretrievably external, liberal standards. Although the Constitution is capable of this, among other, interpretations, the chapter argues that the best – and most transformative – interpretation of the constitutional text is one that enables a deep respect for cultural identity and diversity and consequent recognition of positive cultural norms and practices, while also addressing cross-cutting, intragroup inequalities, such as gender. This interpretation recognizes that transformation under the South African Constitution requires courts to address multiple and intersecting inequalities, and that culture and custom – long ossified in official law – face particular challenges in adapting to contemporary political, economic, and social conditions. Although democratic and cultural values might be rooted in different contexts, South Africa’s history of colonialism, apartheid, and political struggles, as well as its socioeconomic development, mean that there is considerable common ground within and across communities for harmonizing customary law and the Constitution.Item Data to action: An overview of crime, violence and injury in South Africa(Medical Research Council, 2008) Suffla, Shahnaaz; Van Niekerk, Ashley; Bowman, Brett; Matzopoulos, RichardItem Extreme-Case Formulations(Wiley, 2015) Whitehead, Kevin AExtreme case formulations (ECFs) are semantically extreme formulations that invoke the maximal or minimal properties of events or objects, such as “everyone,” “nobody,” “always,” “never,” “completely,” “nothing,” and so on. This entry reviews seminal work on ECFs, identifying their key features and interactional uses. These include their uses in defending against or countering challenges to the legitimacy of complaints, accusations, justifications and defenses; in proposing the objective (rather than circumstantial) nature of a phenomenon; in proposing that some behavior is right or wrong by virtue of being widespread; and in producing designedly non-literal (and thus not accountably accurate) descriptions that display various kinds of investment on the part of speaker, and can also be used in actions such as joking, teasing and irony. In addition, the entry describes some of the applied interactional research in which ECFs have been shown to be an important resource for participants, and thus for analysts.Item An Interpretation of Sustainable Development and Urban Sustainability in Low-Cost Housing and Settlements in South Africa(University of Cape Town Press, 2003) Irurah, Daniel K; Boshoff, BrianThe sustainable development paradigm can be viewed as a convergence of two paradigms that initially evolved in an antagonistic manner, possibly as far back as the industrial revolution. The first one is the growth and development paradigm, which was strongly rooted in economic growth based on the economic output of an economy as measured by GDP (gross domestic product). Until the late 1900s, governments and communities had committed themselves to a vision of improved standards of living through increasing the GDP of their respective economies, while paying minimal attention to environmental and resource impacts. Then in the 1950s to 1970s the environmental movement coalesced after almost a century of isolated pronouncements on resource and environmental degradation arising from exponential population growth as well as increasing levels of production and consumption. The movement argued that unless humanity voluntarily controlled population and economic growth, environmental and resource degradation would put a limit on human survival. The strongest substantiation of the argument was presented in the Club of Rome Report, Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972).Item Judicial diversity(Juta and Co, 2014) Albertyn, CatherineA judiciary controlled entirely by whites and enforcing laws enacted by a white parliament in which Africans have no representation—laws which in most cases are passed in the face of unanimous opposition from Africans— . . . cannot be regarded as an impartial tribunal in a political trial where an African stands as an accused.Item Local democracy in Indian and South African cities: A comparative literature review(Wits University Press, Johannesburg, 2011) Benit Gbaffou, ClaireThe local level has become since the 1990s an important arena of development of democracy in most countries of the world – in a move sometimes described as part of “the third wave of democratization” (Huntington 1992), encouraged both by progressive movements seeking a form of grassroots democracy, and by the World Bank as a new form of governance. India and South Africa are no exception, and both countries have implemented reforms of local government in the mid 1990s, with the objective of broadening and deepening democracy. This chapter aims at comparing the political and academic debates that took place in South Africa and India concerning decentralization, and more broadly local democracy, in an urban context1. We believe, with Hantrais, that “the definition and understanding of concepts and the relationship between concepts and contexts are of critical concern in comparative research that crosses national, societal, cultural and linguistic boundaries” (Hantrais 2009: 72). Through a literature review and a contextualization of local democracy’s history, institutions, and practices, this joint chapter aims at identifying the commonalities and differences in the political and social stakes contained in the debates on “local democracy”.Item Mediation and the Contradictions of Representing the Urban Poor in South Africa: the case of SANCO leaders in Imizamo Yethu in Cape Town, South Africa(Palgrave MacMillan, 2014) Piper, Laurence; Benit-Gbaffou, ClaireThe formal system of local governance in South Africa has the ‘ward’ as its lowest and smallest electoral level – a spatial unit consisting of between 5000 and 15000 voters. The ward is equivalent to the ‘constituency’ in much of the rest of the world. Notably, the history of South Africa means that the vast majority of people live in ‘communities’ or neighbourhoods that are far smaller in scale than the ward, and most of these are the site of multiple claims of informal leadership by a variety of local organisations and their leaders. For example, the Cape Town ward, in which our case-study is located, includes at least five different communities, distinguished in racial and class terms. Existing ‘below’ and ‘within’ the formal area of the ward, popular practices of representation are manifested through a variety of community based organisations, more or less formalised, regulated and recognised. Some of these community based organisations are neighbourhood-specific, while some of them are federated into broader, national structures including the South African National Civic Organisation (SANCO).Item Race-Class Intersections as Interactional Resources in Post-Apartheid South Africa(Sage, 2013) Whitehead, Kevin AItem ‘Race’, social transformation and redress in the South African social and health sciences(Unisa Press, 2006) Bowman, BrettItem Redlining or renewal? the space-based construction of decay and its contestation through local agency in Brixton, Johannesburg(Taylor and Francis, 2017-04-21) Haferburg, Christoph; Huchzermeyer, MarieIn South Africa, space-based exclusion remains prevalent in many forms. In this paper, we focus on the "redlining" of selected neighbourhoods, a technique applied by banks to structure lending decisions in the property market. As a consequence of redlining, prospective home-owners may find it impossible to secure a bond in such an area. This rationale and its results have been described extensively in urban studies literature: zoning areas as "not credit-worthy" prevents investment and creates a self-fulfilling trajectory towards crime and grime. Residents in these neighbourhoods are subject to a practice of territorial stigmatization. This results in economic insecurity with various negative neighbourhood effects, e.g. individual disinvestment or slumlording. Redlining is currently not in the spotlight of media or research in South Africa. The structural effects of this practice, however, are significant. The translation of socio-spatial perceptions into financially excluding techniques is not prevented in South African legislation. The relevance of dissecting this conundrum is demonstrated in our case study of Brixton, one of Johannesburg’s socio-economically most diverse neighbourhoods. It is precisely in mixed areas such as Brixton on Johannesburg’s east-west axis where redlining is applied, effectively devaluing a process of unplanned socio-economic integration of over two decades. In our case study, however, we observe how some residents respond to this and successfully counter redlining by banks with a combination of individual and collective strategies. However, our case of local agency also demonstrates the huge effort that is needed to challenge the financial institutions’ spatial ideology.Item 'Slum' Upgrading and 'Slum' Eradication under MDG Seven Target Eleven(University of Rhodes. Sociology., 2008) Huchzermeyer, MarieThe modest MDG target on improving the lives of ‘slum’ dwellers occupies a complex and in some ways contradictory terrain. This chapter reviews the usage of the term ‘slum’ and its adoption into the Millennium Development Project. The slogan ‘Cities Without Slums’, which accompanies the target, has led to an initially unintended emphasis in official communication of the target. In order to explore the deviation between the norm that cities should not have ‘slums’ and the actual MDG target, the chapter reviews the role of norms and targets within the UN. Turning in more detail to MDG Seven Target Eleven, it compares the origin of Target Eleven with the trajectory that led to the adoption of the other MDG targets. Due to the World Bank’s role in the formulation of Target Eleven and its slogan, the chapter reviews World Bank urban policy at the time, as well as the World Bank’s subsequent shift to more directly embracing the urban poor and promoting informal settlement upgrading. The position of the urban economy and urban competitiveness within the World Bank’s policy of 2000 is relevant to understanding the coining of the slogan ‘Cities Without Slums’, as well as its utility to city beautification initiatives driven by the urban competitiveness agenda. The World Bank’s subsequent refinement in urban policy is not paralleled in high level