Department of Political Studies

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Browsing by Author "Bénit-Gbaffou, Claire"

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    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, London, 2014) Piper, Laurence; Bénit-Gbaffou, Claire
    The formal system of local governance in South Africa has the ‘ward’ as its lowest and smallest electoral level — a spatial unit consisting of between 5,000 and 15,000 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.
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    Party politics, the poor and the city: Reflections from the South African case
    (Elsevier, 2012) Piper, Laurence; Bénit-Gbaffou, Claire
    Local democracy and ‘spaces’ of citizenship and participation are at the core of much contemporary research focusing on cities (Barnett and Low, 2004). This is the case both for researchers interested in issues of urban governance and social and spatial justice, around for instance the notion of ‘right to the city’, and also for those focusing on urban social dynamics and local identities. This is because local citizenship can be an important dimension of such identities and group formation, and local identities can profoundly impact the lived experiences of citizenship. Local democracy indeed, while not necessarily equivalent to deeper democracy or greater justice at the more general level (Purcell, 2006), at least opens avenues for the engagement of urban residents in debates about their immediate environment, including on issues dealing with the distribution or design of urban goods (housing, services, access to space). Notably absent from the literature focusing on local democracies on cities, and maybe more especially in African contexts, is the importance of party politics in the construction of local debates and urban citizenship. This is the gap that this themed issue begins to address.