Unpacking race,party and class from below: Surveying citizenship in the Msunduzi municipality

On the basis of a 2008 survey conducted in the Msunduzi municipality in the KwaZulu-Natal province, the paper begins an exploration of the character of popular politics and citizenship in South Africa. Embracing a ‘citizen-centred’ methodology informed by participation literatures, and sensibilities to the ‘work in progress’ character of African cities from urban studies debates, the paper interrogates the mainstream liberal-participatory model of citizenship in South Africa, and the critiques of current South African politics informed by these notions, specifically the ‘racial census’ and ‘dominant party syndrome’ analyses. Taken together these views can be read as characterising South African politics as a game for individual citizens governed by liberal rules, but played by racial and/or partisan groups in exclusionary ways, thus distorting liberal democratic mechanisms of representation and accountability. The paper also examines evidence for an alternative class-based analysis of one aspect of citizenship, namely, protest against poor local governance.The paper looks to unpack this ‘liberal model versus racialised communitarian practice’ imaginary by, on the one hand, demonstrating the ways in which citizenship is not racialised, or is asymmetrically racialised. Indeed, other than party allegiances and trust in key offices, very little by way of what citizens do, believe or think of themselves follows discrete racial lines. Similar points hold for partisanship too. On the other hand, the paper does not redeem the liberal-democratic model as there is also evidence of trust in government when it is not deserved based on performance, but more importantly, evidence that citizens embrace ‘informal’ means to secure their rights. A good example of this is protestors who are also more likely to vote than non-protestors. Taken together, these findings affirm both the way in which the racial and partisan legacy of the past is being undone by new institutions and practices, and suggest the complex intersection of these with networks of personal relations which characterise the local politics of most African cities.     

Legitimization through patronage? Strategies for political control beyond ethno-regional claims in Darjeeling,India

This paper asks how contending political leaders legitimize their authority in a competitive authoritarian regime. It contends that ‘legitimization through patronage’ is an important means of convincing the public of the rightfulness of a leader’s authority when ‘ideology-based normative legitimacy’ is declining and the formal electoral route is not available. Drawing on an understanding of legitimacy that accounts for leaders’ strategies and public receptions, the paper seeks to explore the moral norms and values on the basis of which followers evaluate leaders’ performance. Drawing on anthropological studies of patronage in South Asia not only helps to transcend an exclusively instrumental understanding of patronage by stressing its moral dimension but also complements comparative politics’ focus on the national level by studying the everyday processes through which political leaders’ legitimacy is locally constructed and contested in patronage relations. Evidence from Darjeeling in northern West Bengal/India (where the State’s preferential treatment of a regional party claiming leadership of a movement for regional autonomy has contributed to the establishment of a dominant party regime) highlights patronage’s potential as a legitimating strategy – but it also reveals its practical limits. While the establishment of resource monopolies over developmental funding helped leaders of the ruling party to “feed” their support networks and foster reputations as selfless “social workers”, differing bases for the evaluation of leaders, the growing expectations of followers, and dependence on external patronage resources limited the long-term success of patronage as a legitimating strategy. This, in turn, enabled the State to curtail demands for autonomy by controlling regional elite construction.     

The ebb and flow of power: British flood risk management and the politics of scale

This paper examines the rescaling of flood risk management (FRM) in Britain over the past 70+ years. Drawing on recent research in geography and elsewhere – which has engaged the politics of scale literature with the rescaling of water and environmental governance – we seek to illustrate the mis-match between the rescaling of the geographical unit of management and the nexus of power and control of those engaged in FRM. For those seeking positive examples of multi-level decentralised governance in water resource management, where power is shared across the spatial scales, our historical analysis struggles to find evidence. Rather, despite attempts to ‘hollow-out’ the state through the scaling ‘out’ and ‘down’ of FRM responsibilities, our evidence suggests that the control over key decision-making tools, resources and other modalities of power remains in the hands of a few key national-level decision-makers; it is the responsibility that has been decentralised, not least to those at risk of flooding. The application of the politics of scale theorising in a FRM context is innovative and, importantly, our case study demonstrates that such politics does not have to involve open conflict but is much more subtle in its deployment of power.     

Addressing issues of spatial spillover effects and non-stationarity in analysis of residential burglary crime

The aim of this paper is to address two critical but largely neglected issues in the spatial analysis of urban crime which are spatial spillover effects of crime penetrating neighborhood boundaries and non-stationarity regarding the relationships between contextual factors and neighborhood crime. We use a GIS-based spatial approach to normalize the estimate of burglary crime at block group level and use the geographically weighted regression (GWR) to investigate the correlates of neighborhood crime. Results suggest that the use of normalized measure of neighborhood crime helps better reveal the spatial patterns of burglary crime and the use of GWR accounts for the spatial variations of relationships between contextual factors and crime. In particular, the normalized measure of crime has implications for improving the measurement accuracy of the risk of crime across urban neighborhoods and can be applied to the spatial analysis of other socioeconomic issues such as housing foreclosures and environmental hazards which are also plagued by the spatial spillover issue when geographically contiguous data are analyzed.     

Place of life stories in labour geography: Why does it matter?

Labour geography foregrounds the role of workers in shaping geographies of work by paying attention to the larger actions of labour in response to the capital and state. It however pays less attention to the everyday geographies of labour and the complexities of the ‘social being’ in trying to understand workers motivations and responses. This review argues for labour geography to look beyond the factory gates to understand the nuanced politics of labour as relations get ‘reworked’ within a patriarchal-capitalist society. It argues for paying close attention to the life stories and experiences of workers, to create linkages between lives as waged workers in a formal workspace with the informal nature of work-life outside, without losing sight of the larger struggles of labour and global processes, to develop a more grounded understanding of worker’s agency and actions.     

New housing/new crime? Changes in safety,governance and everyday incivilities for residents relocated from informal to formal housing at Hammond’s Farm,eThekwini

New state-subsidised ‘RDP’ housing in South Africa aims to provide former informally-housed residents with a better quality of life, stronger community and decreased levels of crime. Despite the state’s ambitions, this process is highly contradictory, increases in safety occurring alongside rising incivilities and tensions. This paper contributes to an emerging set of debates on the socio-political outcomes of state-led housing interventions in the global South, through an illustration of the limitations of efforts to produce ‘safe neighbourhoods’ in contexts of high unemployment alongside high levels of violence. The conceptual framing of ‘Southern Criminology’ (Carrington et al., 2015), centres the significance of histories of colonial and post-colonial violence, inequality, hybrid governance and justice practices, as well as informal living, and is employed to analyse recently housed residents’ experiences of crime and safety in South Africa, in a north eThekwini settlement, Hammond’s Farm. Recognising these ‘Southern’ factors, the paper argues that movement into new formal housing, is typified by significant material changes at the home and neighbourhood scale which foster privacy and safety, formalised governance practices and (partial) improvements in policing services. These occur in conjunction with access to new leisure activities including alcohol consumption and ‘township life’ which alongside ongoing poverty foster urban incivilities. A ‘Southern Criminology’ perspective frames concluding questions about the nature of crime in contexts of urban change, which are persistently shaped by inequality and wider historical and structural factors, challenging the state’s aspirations to achieve crime reduction through housing.     

Security and party politics in Cape Town

Despite a long academic debate on the patrimonial dimension of the state in Africa and a more recent interest in African political parties, the effect of patronage and party politics on governability in Africa’s cities remains poorly addressed in the academic literature. This includes the case in South Africa when one looks at the security sector, which to a certain extent, looks like a depoliticised field of expertise. Popular claims for security seem to be a side issue in the literature on social movements, while vigilante specialists and policing experts do not place party politics at the core of security issue challenges, especially in poor townships. The provision of security in poor neighbourhoods is an important resource in the struggle for political support however. This is examined through two case studies in Cape Town Coloured townships, considering the role played by political leaders, NGO leaders and key officials in grassroots mobilisations for security. These mobilisations are not only about politicking however; ‘ordinary members’ of local security organisations also get involved for motivations, which have nothing to do with confrontational party politics. These different agendas between ordinary members and local leaders cannot be read as the manifestation of a fundamental opposition between the popular classes and a westernised elite as suggested by Charterjee. It reveals instead prevalent and ambivalent relationships between partisan politics and popular mobilisations for security in a context of high insecurity.     

Citizenship,abandonment and resistance in the India–Bangladesh borderland

Drawing on ethnography in the enclaves in India and Bangladesh, this paper explores a multifaceted yet enduring relationship between citizenship, abandonment and resistance. Following the partition in 1947, the enclave residents’ citizenry was enacted like other Indian or Bangladeshi citizens’ disregarding these enclaves’ trans-territorial reality. This paper will demonstrate that enclave dwellers did not live in the ‘citizenship gap’, the difference between rights and benefits of citizenship, rather they lived without any citizenship rights. Life in these enclaves was highly complex and experiences in the enclaves challenge the usefulness of citizenship as a universal framework of analysis for the people who are ranked as citizen but never have it. In this context, a combination of the reverse conceptualisation such as citizenship and Agamben’s conceptualisation of abandonment not only allows for these dimensions of lived experiences to be addressed and explored, it also focuses on the temporal aspect of citizenship implicated in politics. Finally, the paper calls for widening the consideration of the empirical study on everyday citizenship practices and experiences around the globe to extend and intensify the citizenship literatures.     

Alcohol-related crime and disorder across urban space and time: evidence from a British city

Using a Police recording system containing new forms of information on the role of alcohol consumption, this paper focuses on the space and time dimensions of alcohol-related crime and disorder, and situates the patterns in the context of the functions of different urban spaces. Data for Worcester in 1999 show that alcohol is noted as a contributory factor in 8% of recorded crime, but that the recorded role of alcohol is far higher for certain crime types: 48% of all harassment crimes; 36% of violent crime and 16% of criminal damage (other). Most recorded alcohol-related crimes occur in the city centre and at night, while at a more detailed level the main urban spaces are the city centre night-time leisure zones, and the spaces which act as routeways for the night-time revellers. The combined crime and disorder data sets, supported by interview evidence, indicate subsidiary alcohol-related daytime clusters in the shopping area and associated with specific city centre functions. By exploring the patterns, important clues to the immediate contributory factors emerge, but a more comprehensive explanation requires further research. Places, particularly in the night-time leisure zone, where alcohol-related crime is less pronounced, are as important to our understanding as those where crime/disorder is clustered. A detailed knowledge of the variety of spaces and times of alcohol-related crime and disorder is key to the development of appropriate urban design, planning and licensing policies, and can be used to inform a more closely targeted policing strategy.     

Health and safety in garment workers’ lives: Setting a new research agenda

Amidst new global initiatives to promote garment workers’ health and safety following a spate of deadly factory disasters across the Global South, this critical review calls for an expanded research agenda that looks beyond the workplace to examine the complex politics, spatialities, and temporalities of garment workers’ health and wellbeing. Drawing on ethnographic research on garment workers across South Asia, we argue against a narrow, technocratic, and depoliticised emphasis on physical infrastructures and building safety, and advocate instead a more holistic and politically-engaged research approach to the everyday health and wellbeing of workers. A conceptual focus on health and wellbeing offers a window onto workers’ employment experiences and reveals how routine work pressures, exhaustion and ill health are shaped by the dynamics of global supply chains, even well after workers have disengaged from these global circuits. Understanding how garment work affects workers’ wellbeing and their prospects for a fulfilling life requires research that moves beyond the workplace and covers the entire life course.     

Trans-scalar embeddedness and governance deficits in global production networks: Crisis in South African fruit

The governance of labour in global production networks (GPNs) has become a critical area of concern amongst academics and policymakers alike. To date, GPN research has focused on the role of private company codes and multi-stakeholder ethical initiatives primarily driven by lead-firms. Other GPN studies highlight the critical role of civil society organisations (CSOs) in challenging lead-firm purchasing practices and shaping regulatory outcomes at local production sites. However, GPN research has not sufficiently incorporated the role of nation states in regulating work through legislative frameworks and enforcement regimes, often referred to in the literature as ‘state’ or ‘public’ governance. This is despite a ‘regulatory renaissance’ taking place across certain developing countries, seeking to strengthen their national regulatory labour institutions (Piore and Schrank, 2008:1).The GPN framework provides an analytical lens through which to conceptualise cross-cutting strands of trans-scalar governance regimes, involving complex networks of state, private and civil society actors operating at multiple scales. Notions of territorial and societal embeddedness are used to elucidate how global ethical standards derived from particular country contexts become enmeshed in national regulatory frameworks and local societal relations, shaping governance outcomes for precarious workers incorporated into GPNs. The paper draws attention to the ‘trans-scalar embeddedness’ of labour governance regimes which interact across geographical scales and, in the case of South African fruit, reflect a ‘trans-scalar governance deficit’ for precarious workers. It is argued that the influence of national regulatory regimes should be more fully incorporated into analytical frameworks for understanding governance outcomes in GPNs.     

(Re-)negotiating access: The politics of researching skills and knowledge for ‘sustainable communities’

The last decade has witnessed a surge of interest in ‘sustainable communities’ within the UK. This has stimulated a plethora of research aimed at acquiring a better understanding of what ‘sustainable communities’ might look like and how they can be achieved. However, this has not been accompanied by a reflection and interrogation of the actual processes, challenges and politics of doing ‘sustainable communities’ research. This paper addresses this gap by highlighting the importance of paying attention to the on-going process of negotiating access when carrying out sustainability research at the community level. We draw on a recent study of skills and knowledge for ‘sustainable communities’ in Stroud Gloucestershire, UK, to illustrate the importance of sensitivity to social relationships throughout and beyond the research trajectory within sustainability research. Our experience raises important questions about the politics of research practices when doing sustainability research ‘with’ communities and the challenges associated with participatory approaches as a means to demonstrate research impact. We argue that in developing a fuller understanding of why and how different types of community level initiatives can contribute to the ‘sustainable communities’ agenda, greater consideration needs to be given to how these community practices can be better supported through the process of doing academic research.     

Reading political contestation in Pakistan’s Swat valley – From deliberation to ‘the political’ and beyond

In recent years, the Swat valley in North-West Pakistan has witnessed various waves of ‘politics’. Different groups have attempted to change socio-economic conditions, each according to their clear visions of a better future. After a period of top-down attempts at modernisation by the state, development projects inspired by deliberative democracy have attempted to increase political space for ‘local people’, but failed. Swat has also witnessed agonistic politics, with the emergence of a fundamentalist social movement that constructed a radical discourse of otherisation, entering into an antagonism with the state that created war and havoc. Thus, Swat offers a challenging learning ground to reflect on practices for producing change, as well as on theoretical currents in academia. I argue that deliberative and radical theorising provide insights into the political life of Swat, but fall short analytically (missing social complexities), procedurally (favouring specific techniques of social negotiation), and normatively (due to preconceived understandings of a ‘better future’). I substantiate my argument by showing that both positions take euro-centric conceptualisation of ‘citizens’, a (modern) ‘state’, and ‘citizen/state relations’ as universals – basic conditions that are not met in the post-colonial setting of Swat. I therefore argue that our curiosity should be redirected from ontologised explanation to an analysis of actual practices of societal negotiation and the norms within which these are embedded. Such insights will make it possible for us to appreciate the enormous challenges people in Swat face in their struggle to negotiate aspirations among disparate voices and to imagine some common understanding of a ‘better future’ – challenges that go beyond what deliberative or agonistic theorising can offer.     

When green is White: The cultural politics of race,nature and social exclusion in a Los Angeles urban national park

Scholars have attributed park (non)use, especially ethno-racially differentiated (non)use, to various factors, including socio-cultural (e.g. poverty, cultural preferences, etc.) and socio-spatial determinants (e.g. travel distance, park features, etc.). But new geographic research is proposing alternative explanations for park (non)use, employing a ‘cultural politics’ theoretical lens. The cultural politics frame offers fresh insights into how practices of socio-ecological exclusion and attachment in parks may be undergirded by political struggles over the making and ordering of racialized identities. Challenging partial and essentialist explanations from leisure research, some cultural politics scholars have recently argued that ethno-racial formations, cultural histories of park-making (e.g. segregated park systems), and land-use systems (e.g. zoning and property taxes) can operate to circumscribe park access and use for some people of color. Using the cultural politics frame, this paper documents the ethno-racial and nativist barriers Latino focus group participants faced in accessing and using some Los Angeles parks. Participants reported feeling ‘out of place’, ‘unwelcome’ or excluded from these parks. They identified the predominantly White clientele of parks; the ethno-racial profile of park-adjacent neighborhoods; a lack of Spanish-language signs; fears of persecution; and direct experiences of discrimination as exclusionary factors. These findings have implications for future research and for park planning and management.     

Spatialities of data: mapping social media ‘beyond the geotag’

As emerging sources of so-called ‘big data’ are increasingly utilized in order to understand social and spatial processes, so too have these new data sources become the subject of harsh criticism from more critically-oriented geographers and social scientists. This paper argues that one of the major issues preventing a more productive dialogue between critical human geographers and those already engaging in the mapping and analysis of these new data sources is around the ways that space and spatiality are conceptualized in social media mapping. As such, this paper draws on and extends earlier critiques of the ‘spatial ontology of the geotag’, in which the geographic analysis of geotagged social media data over-privileges the single latitude/longitude coordinate pair attached to each individual data point, often leading to the kind of simplistic mappings and interpretations prevalent today. The goals of this paper are two-fold: first, to demonstrate how the spatial ontology of the geotag is implicitly operationalized within mainstream social media mapping exercises, and how this understanding of space remains incongruent with existing conceptions of space drawn from human geography. Second, using the example of tweeting in the wake of the August 2014 killing of an unarmed African–American teenager by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, this paper demonstrates how a more geographically-situated analysis of this kind of data, inspired by relational or multidimensional conceptualizations of space, can yield alternative understandings of the social processes embedded in such data.     

The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism

‘Smart cities’ is a term that has gained traction in academia, business and government to describe cities that, on the one hand, are increasingly composed of and monitored by pervasive and ubiquitous computing and, on the other, whose economy and governance is being driven by innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship, enacted by smart people. This paper focuses on the former and, drawing on a number of examples, details how cities are being instrumented with digital devices and infrastructure that produce ‘big data’. Such data, smart city advocates argue enables real-time analysis of city life, new modes of urban governance, and provides the raw material for envisioning and enacting more efficient, sustainable, competitive, productive, open and transparent cities. The final section of the paper provides a critical reflection on the implications of big data and smart urbanism, examining five emerging concerns: the politics of big urban data, technocratic governance and city development, corporatisation of city governance and technological lock-ins, buggy, brittle and hackable cities, and the panoptic city.     

Undoing environmental justice: Re-imagining equality in the Rosia Montana anti-mining movement

In this paper we outline the limitations of Environmental Justice theory when it comes to explaining and theorising the politics of contemporary environmental movements. Justice, we argue, needs to be understood not as a formalised and preconceived ‘thing’ to be delivered or applied but as an open egalitarian ideal that movements across the world continuously redefine in embodied and performed ways which are historically and geographically distinct. Drawing upon the fifteen year long anti-mining struggles of Rosia Montana, Romania, we explore the tension between seeking ‘traditional’ forms of justice (i.e. dialogic consensual politics) and putting forward more radical demands for socio-ecological change, in which representation and recognition are seen as insufficient practices for distributing justice. Visibility (rather than recognition) and egalitarian politics (rather than distribution) become the quilting points of struggles of many contemporary environmental movements, equality can only be enacted (or staged) through praxis that disrupts the distribution of the sensible experience and exposes the arbitrariness and incompleteness of power. We argue that in order to analyse and theorise the praxis of contemporary environmental movements, it is imperative for geographical literature to engage with post-foundational theory, and ‘un-do’ pre-conceived ideas and theorisations of (environmental) justice.     

Messing with gender in feminist political ecology

Feminist political ecology (fpe) is at a crossroads. Over the last 2 years, feminist political ecologists have begun to reflect on and debate the strengths of this subfield. In this article, we contribute by pointing to the limited theorization of race in this body of work. We argue that fpe must theorize a more complex and messier, notion of ‘gender’, one that accounts for race, racialization and racism more explicitly. Building on the work of feminist geography and critical race scholarship, we argue for a postcolonial intersectional analysis in fpe – putting this theory to work in an analysis of race, gender and whiteness in Honduras. With this intervention we demonstrate how theorizing race and gender as mutually constituted richly complicates our understanding of the politics of natural resource access and control in the Global South.     

Empowering the empowered? Slum tourism and the depoliticization of poverty

Mumbai’s Dharavi slum occupies a plot half the size of Central Park. It is home to one million people, with almost half of residents living in spaces under 10 m², making it over six times as dense as daytime Manhattan. Using ethnographic fieldwork and online analysis, this article examines slum tourism and the perceptions and experiences of western visitors. Local tour operators emphasize the productivity of the slum, with its annual turnover of $665 million generated from its hutment industries. Its poor sanitation, lack of clean water, squalid conditions and overcrowding are ignored and replaced by a vision of resourcefulness, hard work and diligence. This presentation of the slum as a hive of industry is so successful that visitors overlook, or even deny, its obvious poverty. Dharavi is instead perceived as a manufacturing hub and retail experience; and in some cases even romanticized as a model of contentment and neighbourliness, with western visitors transformed by ‘life-changing’, ‘eye-opening’ and ‘mind-blowing’ experiences. This article concludes that the potential of slum tours as a form of international development is limited, as they enable wealthy middle-class westerners to feel ‘inspired’, ‘uplifted’ and ‘enriched’, but with little understanding of the need for change.     

The differential impact of physical disorder and collective efficacy: a geographically weighted regression on violent crime

While much of the research on neighborhood crime considers the neighborhood as a whole, this study utilizes spatial analysis techniques to examine how the presence of disorder and collective efficacy create unique pockets of opportunities for criminal behavior within neighborhoods. This spatial perspective reveals how the effect of disorder and efficacy upon crime patterns itself varies across a neighborhood. Physical disorder is measured through systematic social observations and the level of collective efficacy is evaluated through survey responses of neighborhood residents. The indices of disorder and efficacy are compared to crime data from police call logs using geographically weighted regression. Our findings demonstrate a complex spatial relationship between disorder and efficacy. The effects of disorder and efficacy are not consistent across an entire neighborhood, but rather display local variations in small geographical areas within neighborhoods, including some pockets of the neighborhood where the relationships between disorder, efficacy, and crime were contrary to the expected relationships. Based upon these findings, we conclude opportunity is central to understanding crime, and emphasize the role of informal social control in neighborhoods.