Popular Politics in SA Cities

Unpacking Community Participation Community meetings seldom lead to significant change in urban policies and have been accused of being sterile, sedative, or manipulative. This book starts with a simple question: why do people then continue to participate in these meetings, sometimes massively and regularly? Authors from various disciplines explore the multiple roles of these invited spaces of participation. From the consolidation of individual social status and networks to the construction and framing of the local community, the display of political or group loyalties and maintenance of clientelist exchange, access to information, rumours or gossip but also forms of education on who and what is the state, invited spaces of participation are also, crucially, places of the emergence of collective awareness, through shared expressions of frustration, that can lead to political mobilisation and other, less institutionalised forms of participation. This book, unpacking community politics and rethinking the complex articulations between invited and invented spaces of participation, is relevant for international and national audiences interested in urban governance and local democracy.

Figures and tables

Introduction Politicising and politicking community participation in urban governance 1
Claire B�nit-Gbaffou

Part 1 Politicising spaces of participation

Chapter 1 From party-state to party-society in South Africa: SANCO and the informal politics of community representation in Imizamo Yethu, Cape Town

Laurence Piper

Chapter 2 Against ourselves � local activists and the management of contradictory political loyalties: The case of Phiri, Johannesburg

Boitumelo Matlala and Claire B�nit-Gbaffou

Chapter 3 Social movements, mobilisation and political parties: A case study of the Landless People’s Movement, South Africa

Luke Sinwell

Chapter 4 Ritualistic spaces? Re-examining invited spaces of participation

Obvious Katsaura

Chapter 5 Constructing communities in public meetings: Local leaders and the management of xenophobic discourses in Yeoville

Claire B�nit-Gbaffou and Eulenda Mkwanazi

Part 2 Beyond invented/invited spaces of participation

Chapter 6 Uncooperative masses as a problem for substantive and participatory theories of democracy: The cases of
‘people’s power’(1984�6)and the ‘xenophobia’ (2008) in South Africa

Daryl Glaser

Chapter 7 Participation, neoliberal control and the voice of street traders in Cape Town:

A Foucauldian perspective on ‘invited spaces’

Marianne Morange

Chapter 8 Meetings in Vosloorus (Ekurhuleni): Democratic public spaces or spaces for grievances?

Philippe Gervais-Lambony

Chapter 9 ‘Bringing government closer to the people’? The daily experience of subcouncils in Cape Town

Chlo� Buire

Chapter 10 Contesting the participatory sphere: Encountering the state in Johannesburg and Cape Town

Alex Wafer and Sophie Oldfield

Chapter 11 Beyond invented and invited spaces of participation: The Phiri and Olivia Road court cases and their outcome

La�la Smith and Margot Rubin

Postscript Viewing South Africa’s urban governance from an ‘Indian’ perspective

Glyn Williams

Contributors

Index