House as a claim to citizenship in post-apartheid Alexandra

Abstract

Questions of housing in post-apartheid South Africa were concerned initially with numbers (i.e. with building a million houses between 1994 and 2000), with the aim of overcoming the apartheid-inherited housing inequalities. More recently, since the Breaking New Ground housing Programme, which was inaugurated in 2004, the shift has been towards sustainable communities and the gradual eradication of informal settlements. However, questions of housing have seldom engaged with the question of citizenship, or with the question of how the ‘right’ to housing relates to perceptions of state legitimacy. This is despite the fact that the social contract of post-apartheid South Africa is premise on not only the legal and constitutional rights of citizens, but on the capacity of the state to connect its citizens into the infrastructural networks of a modern society, among which is housing. One place where the issue of housing is most contentious is the former black group area, Alexandra, one of the few areas where black South Africans were able to own land before apartheid. Alexandra became an over-populated and under-serviced island of black urbanization in the middle of the wealthiest neighborhoods of Johannesburg and residents of ‘Alex’ as it is colloquially called, were forced to endure a whole range of formally-imposed and informally-evolved forms of home-making: range from gendered hostels, to sharing houses and even rooms between families, to informal shacks in back-yards and later on vacant municipal land. Resolving the housing crisis in Alexandra has been seen as a political and civil priority, but despite the building of thousands of houses, the neighborhood remains characterized by over-crowing, informality, and social disaffection. By investigating the experiences of Alexandra residents with accessing housing in post-apartheid South Africa, I aim in this dissertation to explore the empirical and theoretical linkages between the material object of the house (whether as informal shack, formal RDP house or something otherwise) and expectations of state legitimacy and civic participation among residents: proxies for conceptualizations of citizenship. I develop a typology of different housing to demonstrate how official conceptions of housing do not always coincide with lived experiences of housing needs. Ultimately, I show how this incommensurability causes tension between the state and the urban poor, who express feelings of abandonment by the state - and those whose commitment to the post-apartheid social project is severely tested.