Hybrid gentrification in South Africa: Theorising across southern and northern cities

Charlotte Lemanski, University College London

c.lemanski@ucl.ac.uk

 

The contemporary comparative ‘turn’ in urban studies, calling for urban theories to be open to the experiences of all cities, has come as no great shock to those undertaking research in cities outside the global north and in particular the Anglo-American sphere. However, the epistemological and methodological logistics of implementing such an egalitarian approach have hampered practical application. Based on research undertaken in South Africa, my recent paper in Urban Studies develops the concept and methodological approach of ‘hybrid gentrification’ (where‘gentrification’ could be replaced by any other urban theory historically entrenched in western experience) to demonstrate how non-northern urban experiences can and should create and refine urban theory.

 

To give some personal context: after a decade of research in urban South Africa, I was becoming increasingly frustrated with the utility of existing urban theories, many of which seemed only marginally relevant to my empirical work. Much of my research has focused on state-subsided housing projects, particularly addressing a specific settlement in Cape Town (Westlake village).Whilst not the primary focus of my original research, over time it became evident that a number of beneficiaries were selling their state-subsidised houses on the private (sometimes informal) market. In many senses, this was hardly surprising – eligibility for state-subsidised housing requires very low household income, and the provision of a house does not alleviate daily poverty, but merely creates ‘asset rich, cash poor’ households with an obvious mechanism to alleviate their cash poverty.Indeed, the re-sale of state-subsidised houses has been a national trend, but what has been significant in Westlake village is the high class/income profile of property purchasers, the majority of whom are local employers seeking accommodation for staff.At first glance, this appeared to resonate with theories of ‘downward raiding’, where the new indigenous middle-class, unable to afford property in the city, ‘raid’ low-income (often informal and/or state-subsidised) areas.However, in this South African example there was a clear income and class distinction between purchasers (commercial companies and elite households), occupiers(regularly employed un/semi-skilled workers), and vendors (mostly under- and un-employed) that did not match traditional urban theories of gentrification or downward raiding.Consequently, this unusual (according to traditional theories) process of class-based residential change has provided an empirical example and methodological approach from which to initiate theoretical analysis that is driven from the southern city.

In the paper, I argue that comparative urbanism’s call for a more egalitarian urban theory can be implemented by taking context-specific empirical trends and theoretical resources as an analytical starting point (rather than applying theories rooted in one context to another) from which to challenge existing, and create new, urban theories.In the specific case discussed here, the ways in which property sales in South Africa’s state-subsidised market provide distorted echoes, rather than identical duplications, of both gentrification and downward raiding, result in this paper coining the phrase ‘hybrid gentrification’.The hybrid gentrification concept and method serves as a model for expanding urban studies beyond its northern bias, as well as for theorising across northern and southern cities more broadly. By demonstrating the ways in which using diverse and unexpected empirical examples can develop and challenge theoretical labels and accompanying debates, hybrid gentrification provides a template for analysis that bridges the north/south theoretical divide, allowing ‘northern’ urban theories to be reshaped and refined by southern’ practices (and vice versa).

 

 

 

Cities, conflict, and state fragility: Reflections on a five-year research programme

Tom Goodfellow, Dennis Rodgers & Jo Beall [1]

For a fleeting moment during the final decade of the twentieth century, the general trajectory of conflict across the world seemed straightforward. With the Cold War over, the number of interstate wars was in free-fall and the dominant form of violence was internal, within fragmenting states no longer propped up by their superpower sponsors. The age of ‘total war’ between states had thus been largely superseded by a wave of civil conflicts, often characterised as ‘new wars’ and widely considered as limited in scope and scale.

Over a decade into the new millennium, however, the trajectory now looks far from obvious. Like international wars, civil wars too have been steadily declining in number. Yet from Colombia to Cairo, Brazil to Baghdad and Kenya to Kandahar, each month brings new manifestations of what Arjun Appadurai (in)famously termed the ‘implosion of global and national politics into the urban world’. Although riots, gang crime, and terrorist attacks have afflicted cities for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, the increasing ubiquity of such events – even if not ‘wars’ in any conventional sense - suggest that the hallmark of the contemporary period is one of rising ‘urban conflict’ rather than ‘peace’. 

The Cities and Fragile States project of the Crisis States Research Centre, a research programme funded by the Department for International Development, recently finalised five years of research that aimed to explore the link between the urbanisation of violence and debates concerning a category of countries often described as ‘fragile’, ‘failed’ or ‘failing’ states. What, if anything, is the link between weaknesses at the level of the state in particular parts of the developing world, and changes in the spaces in which violence plays out? What, moreover, can be said about why some cities in troubled regions remain remarkably peaceful and resilient, seemingly against the odds?

These are some of the questions we address in a new Special Issue of Urban Studies on ‘Cities, Conflict and State Fragility in the Developing World’. In our analysis we turn to history, reflecting on the central role that cities played in building states in early modern Europe, as discussed extensively in the work of Charles Tilly. Too often today it seems that cities are where state-building projects in the developing world unravel rather than consolidate, and our research explores why this is in a diverse range of cases. Through comparative analysis, moreover, we find that in fact cities can be (and sometimes are) still central to processes of state-building – messy and protracted though these may be – when the conditions are right.

To understand contemporary forms of violence in many parts of the world we deploy a concept of ‘civic conflict’, which is both distinct from civil war and eschews the simplistic tendency to think of forms of urban violence as being either ‘social’, ‘political’, or ‘economic’ in nature. The word ‘civic’ is suggestive of cities on the one hand, and of citizenship (and by extension, the state) on the other. From sectarian riots to gang violence, terrorism, and ‘turf wars’ between urban landlords, these forms of conflict are all linked both to the city as a distinct space and to contestation over citizenship and entitlements, often reflecting a sense of neglect by the state. 

These forms of conflict are quite different from ‘conventional’ civil war, which generally involves an effort by a rebel organisation to fully take control of the state. Civic conflicts instead represent expressions of discontent, demands for attention, claims of entitlement to the resources of the city, and sometimes the establishment of parallel structures of control that take the place of (or fill the gaps in) state institutions.

In many parts of the developing world, both of these forms of conflict exist simultaneously. In others, however, civil wars have largely ceded to civic conflicts, which may be equally or more devastating but which do not require formal peace settlements so much as new political settlements in cities - and between urban and rural communities. As the world becomes more urban, our understanding of violent conflict and routes to its resolution must keep pace.

Some of the countries discussed in our Special Issue are still mired in rural-based civil conflicts, where cities and towns have for long periods remained relative havens of peace. Even in such cases, however, there is reason to doubt that these cities will remain peaceful when civil wars draw to a close. All too often, urban havens can become flashpoints of violence later on, precisely because they attract people in droves but their governments neglect to ‘think urban’ in post-war reconstruction efforts, usually perceiving urban growth as temporary.

Our research explores how struggles over urban citizens’ needs are managed by political elites, and how this has crucial impacts on both the incidence of violent conflict and prospects for long-term development. It examines cases in Colombia and South Africa where elites have risen to this challenge with relatively impressive results, as well as examples from Pakistan, Nicaragua, and East Timor where urban violence was precipitated or exacerbated by elite strategies. In other cases we discuss, including Mozambique and Rwanda, we see the possibility that latent urban conflicts are simply being ‘deferred’ to a later date.

Through these and a range of other cases including Afghanistan, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Special Issue explores how civil conflicts become civic ones, and assesses different government strategies for managing civic conflict in states that simply cannot begin to fulfil all their citizens’ demands.

Critically important, we argue, is the evolution of systems of institutionalised bargaining between urban groups that cohere around socioeconomic identifiers that go beyond ethnic, religious or racial ones. Making demands on the state is vital for state-building itself; yet when demands are based on fixed exclusionary categories and individual patrons, a likely outcome is either violence or the kind of unproductive rent-sharing that does little to bring development.

Actively increasing urban citizens’ capacity to make collective demands in ways that are non-violent – rather than denying them political agency by hoping either that they will return to the countryside or that economics will somehow save the day – is now in order.  This means a reinvigoration of urban political contestation in fragile states: something that has largely been ignored in the policy debates on fragility over the past decade.

 [1] Respectively Lecturer in Urban Studies and International Development, University of Sheffield; Professor of Urban Social and Political Research, University of Glasgow; and Director, Education and Society, British Council.

Cities Policy in the UK: the Role of the Centre for Cities and the Cities Outlook

David Waite, University of St Andrews

Cities policy in the UK has seen a strong revival of interest since the late 1990s. Though urban and regional policy took many prior forms (from spatial-Keynesianism to Thatcher’s overhaul and turn to enterprise zone initiatives, for example), the “State of the English Cities”, the “Review of Sub-national Economic Development” and the “Barker Review of Housing” can be seen, among other interventions, to reflect crucial moments in the production of policy capability on English cities.

The rise of public policy think tanks devoted to assessing city economic development has accompanied this refocus. Here workstreams led by the “Work Foundation” and “Institute for Public Policy Research” (IPPR) are prominent examples. Spinning out of the latter by 2007, the “Centre for Cities”, core funded by the Gatsby Foundation, has sought to position itself at the vanguard of urban policy innovations.

A set of policy positions and outputs mark the role played by the Centre for Cities. In terms of the former, the devolution of powers and revenue-raising tools to regional levels has been a long-standing recommendation. Citing the UK’s centralised governance structure vis à vis other OECD economies, the argument is mounted that local representatives need the powers to support their city economies in a way that reflects unique city conditions and trajectories. Rather than central government dictating blunt one-size-fits-all policy, addressing diverse local needs, it is argued, requires tool kits tailored to and accessible at local levels.

Across the centre’s work more generally, a non-partisan stance appears closely guarded. Links with London-based academics and advisors may signal a key epistemic community and a core channel of affiliation, however, numerous local authority, third and private sector relationships have also been forged.

In terms of outputs, the annual “Cities Outlook” is positioned as the authoritative guide (or, to some, the “bible”) on UK city economies. Six versions of the Outlook, going back to 2008, have now been released. The Outlook usefully calls on a set of metrics by which a broad understanding of the UK’s largest 64 urban economies can be attained. Building on ONS and NOMIS data principally, city-region measures, hinging on “primary urban area” definitions, are deployed to bring functioning metropolitan systems into view. Preceding the annual health check, depth analyses of recessionary recovery, unemployment challenges and housing market dynamics have provided thematic introductions in recent years. Alongside the Outlook each year, specific city viewpoints as well as commentaries on funding tools and governance approaches set out to bolster the evidence base.

The influence think tanks have on policy agendas and decision makers is a critical, if not driving, measure of efficacy. In terms of the centre’s role – witnessing, among other things, the appointment of a Minister for Cities; a programme of devolution around “city deals”; and the establishment of LEPs in the wake of RDAs being disbanded – one can point to a clear alignment between the broad overtures made by the Centre for Cities and the cities policy emerging under the coalition government.

Cities policy is a deeply complex area. However, while certain policy positions may be contested for relying on patchy empirical foundations (for instance, evidence on the devolution and growth link) and while recent growth agendas strain, like many others, to strike a balance between the “realistic” and aspirational, the Centre for Cities appears successful in capturing the attention of policymakers and steering a legitimating narrative for policy development. Looking forward, it will be interesting to track the evolution of the centre’s work as the localism and deals programmes progress and to monitor engagement with wider, resurgent debates around industrial policy.

Social Centres and the Struggle for Glasgow’s Commons

Inversely, there is also no doubt that the knowledge of urban reality can relate to the possible (or possibilities) and not only to what is finished or from the past (Lefebvre 2008: 94 [1974]).

I have spent the last four years immersed in the world of social centre activism both in Nijmegen (Netherlands) and Glasgow (Scotland). This is an untidy world of once bounded political subjectivities smashed by emotions that actively struggle against the fragmentation of politics, life and the city; emotions that reveal there potential in the presence of others. The result can be a profound collective experience that, as one participant puts it, places “discourse over dogma” (Sarah 2012). This is a world of plurality, complexity and emergence, where the shattered pieces of those once pure ideas are mixed-up-added-to-and-put-back-together-again with no more than a cautionary glance back at technocrats and market worshipers alike; a world where singular and plural are not mutually exclusive categories; a world that grounds the possible in the here-and-now.

The social centre experience is also one of struggle, disappointment and at best partial success. We inhabit a city of sanitized real spaces and headspaces where movement patterns are all too often predictable, obedient, appropriated (Allen 2006). A city where embryonic tastes are always already there, framed within a plan that limits idiosyncratic engagement. In today’s city, just like yesterday’s city, the knowledges of people on-the-ground are debased or contained or co-opted into a system of ‘pre-determined finalities’ (Lefebvre 1996 [1974]). Lefebvre understands this as part of a strategy. “Finality” he writes “is an object of decision. It is a strategy, more or less justified by an ideology” (ibid: 82). He asks, “Where does this finality come from? Who formulates and stipulates it?” (ibid). Lefebvre is clear in his answer. It is capitalism that produces these finalities, as it must to survive, “by occupying space, by producing space” (Lefebvre 1979). But social centre activists and anarchists before them understand that capitalism cannot act alone. It lacks the authority it requires to impose its extractions upon us. Only the state can provide such an authority. We refer to this dual order as neoliberalism and its processes have become prosaic in our cities so as to appear unexceptional, so as to disappear from our view.

I see social centres as places that unsettle that authority’s “system of sensible evidences” (Ranciere 2000:13) that names, categorizes, assigns a value to all things and distributes roles accordingly. In unsettling the partition and distribution of the sensible we are challenging its order and in doing so we are asserting a position of equality: we are saying we are capable; we are well placed to challenge the consensus that the current order of things is reasonable. “Equality” then “is a tactic” (Social Centre Activist 2012). The tactic is to recognize our privileges and share what they afford us with others. The tactic is to recognize that no one struggle should exceed any other. The tactic is to practice politics is to practice democracy is to be seen and heard in the city. This is the raison en d’être of the social centre experience. For social centre participants only through equality can we save, better manage and protect what we have in common.


Johnnie Crossan
PhD Candidate
School of Geography and Earth Science
University of Glasgow

 

On the urban-climate interface

There was a recent magazine advert that was developed by the energy company Total that I found strangely compelling. Under the banner headline ‘Common Interests’ (the Co was in a different colour font), was the image of an imposing iceberg floating serenely on the ocean. What was arresting about the advert was what lay beneath the ice. Where there should have been the ice there was instead an inverted city, replete with brightly lit skyscrapers and sprawling suburbs. In many ways this image serves as an appropriate visual metaphor for our special issue on Urbanization and Climate Change. Just as this image makes a clever connection between the changing climate and what is going on in our increasingly urbanized planet, this special issue brings critical perspective to the complex relations between urbanization and climate change.

It addition to its overall visual impact, what I found most intriguing about this image was the area of interfaced connection that it constructed between the city and the ice. In many urban contexts, the climatic impacts of cities are felt in places that are distant from the metropolises themselves. But this image brought the environmentally distant into the immediate proximity of the city, and it made me think deeply about the varied connections that exist between urbanization and the changing climate. At one level, these connections are fairly obvious: urban areas are, after all, responsible for two thirds of all of the greenhouse gas emission that enter the atmosphere every year. In addition to being the villains of the climate change process, however, many cities are also the victims of the effects of a changing climate. Flooding, extreme weather, tidal inundation, and water shortages are now threats that face many cities around the world. In this context, cities are now key contexts within which climate change adaptation practises are being developed and implemented. Cities also have their own particular climatic challenges. The urban heat island effect, makes cities much more vulnerable to the impacts of increasing temperature than other geographical locations. At the other end of the spectrum, the palls of aerosol pollution that surround many cities appear to insulating urban centres from the full heat of the increasing in global average temperatures we are witnessing.       

This special issue explores all of these themes in a range of different geographical contexts. In exploring these themes, the papers in this special issue develop a critical account of the urban climate agenda. This critical perspective seeks to better understand the political and economic nature of the urbanization process, and the ways in which this process conditions urban climate change impacts and policies. This critical perspective is also about utilizing the urban as a context within which to understand the uneven spatial develop and distribution of climate change policies and regimes of responsibility throughout the world.  

If it wasn’t for the fact that the advert I was so drawn to was created by Total, I might suggest that it was an icon for this special issue. Having said that, it is clear that the advertising of big oil companies has become a lot more sensitive to climate change in recent years. Against the backdrop of a imposing glacier, one Humble advertisement once proudly boasted that each day it “supplied enough energy to melt 7 tons of glacier!”

Mark Whitehead, University of Aberystwyth

Credit and the Financialization of the Voluntary Sector

Moody’s, one of the three principle credit rating agencies, rated Aurora Health Care, Inc. A3 on January 13, 2010 (Moody 2010). This A3 rating placed Aurora in the ‘high upper medium’ credit grade and ensured bonds issued on behalf of Aurora would still be attractive to institutional investors. Aurora is the largest non-profit health care system in the state of Wisconsin and has locations throughout state. However, their facilities are concentrated in Milwaukee, its largest city. This rating was likely a relief to Aurora, given that Moody’s observed "high downgrade activity" in the US non-profit health care sector throughout 2009 (Masterson 2010). The downward trajectory of the credit risk of non-profit hospitals was related to two interrelated events. First, the financial crisis had a devastating effect on the overall US economy. Consequently, hospitals faced rising demand for charity care and a surge in bad debt, as unemployment increased and people were no longer able to pay hospital bills. Second, their own fiscal health was linked to the financial markets in numerous other ways. Aurora, in 2008, lost $73 million worth of investment assets and another $56 million due to ending up on the wrong side of variable interests rate bets. Furthermore, their defined benefit pension scheme also experienced substantial losses in the late 2000s. Aurora, by the end of 2008, had $347.8 million in unfunded pension obligations. Given these significant challenges to Aurora’s financial health, it is fair to ask how the company was able to receive such an optimistic credit rating?

Aurora’s financial ‘success’ was largely based on their spatial extension and reorganization. Beginning in 2004, Aurora enjoyed four straight years in which their operating cash flow increased. This increase, according to Moody’s (2010: 4), was the result of:

outpatient volume growth (surgical and non-surgical procedures); generally increasing observation stay volumes...; price increases; improved efficiencies; and supply cost savings. Aurora's favorable payer mix also contributes to its ability to grow revenues (just 50% of revenues are derived from Medicare and Medicaid combined).

This financial language renders the extensive reorganization of Aurora’s health care system understandable to investment managers. The actual practices that made this financial ‘success’ possible were Aurora’s expansion into the higher income suburbs of Milwaukee, its purchase of lucrative private physician practices, and the decrease of its spatial footprint in the economically depressed urban neighbourhoods of the city (see Hossler 2012; forthcoming).

Aurora’s financial ‘health’ reveals uncomfortable tensions that underlie the increasing use of the voluntary sector for the delivery of essential social services. In the absence of adequate state funding for social reproduction, voluntary sector organizations are increasingly turning to the private sector for access to financial resources – capital. In Aurora’s case, this means the bond market to fund its expansion into the suburbs and the investment markets to support its employee’s pensions. In the boom years of the capitalist economic cycle this strategy allowed voluntary sector institutions, such as Aurora, to meet their social mission – to serve the community – as well as it their financial requirements. However, during the lean years of the capitalist crisis, these objectives become increasingly incompatible. This suggests that the financial relations that underpin the voluntary sector require more analysis if they are truly to offer a ‘third way’.

Peter Hossler

References Cited

Hossler, Peter. “Free Health Clinics, Resistance and the Entanglement of Christianity and Commodified Health Care Delivery.” Antipode 44, no. 1 (2012): 98–121.

Hossler, P. “The Privatization of the Milwaukee Clinical Campus: A Case (study) for Geographic Approaches to Medical Services.” Geoforum (forthcoming).

Masterson, L. “Moody’s: Nonprofit Healtcare Downgrades Continue to Outpace Upgrades.” Health Leaders Media, February 17, 2010.

Wexler, BI, and SA Vennekotter. Moody’s Assigns A3 Rating to Aurora Health Care’s $226.2 Million of Series 2010A Bonds; Outlook Is Stable. Credit Rating Press Release. January 13, 2010. Moody’s. Accessed October 20, 2012. www.bondsonline.com/print/Todays_Market/Credit_Rating_News_.php?DA=view&RID=8759.