Browsing by Author "de Swardt, Cobus"

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    Cape Town's African poor
    (Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2004) de Swardt, Cobus
    The typical ‘face of poverty’ in South Africa is no longer that of a rural woman engaged in subsistence agricultural production. Poverty today also refers to the large number of unemployed men who wait daily in vain on street corners for a casual job, women suffering from among the highest rates of HIV/Aids infection in the world, large numbers of children living in areas with among the highest crime and murder rates in the world, and poor black communities which continue to be excluded from the economic riches of our country. We can no longer ignore the problem of urban poverty. A large part of Cape Town’s less affluent population live on the Cape Flats, which was relatively unpopulated until the 1960s. Since then, two waves of settlement took place: the period after the 1960s saw the forceful resettlement of so-called ‘Coloured’ people through apartheid socio-spatial engineering, and in the 1980s a then illegal process of large-scale African migration from the impoverished areas of the Eastern Cape began (see Hindson 1987; Tomlinson & Addleson 1987). Numerous studies (see Swilling et al. 1991, for example) demonstrate how the combined effects of social engineering, spatial planning and rural-urban migration have contributed to urban sprawl, the expansion of racialised economic geographies, and the creation of an apartheid city.
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    Urban poverty in Cape Town
    (Sage Publications, 2005) de Swardt, Cobus; Puoane, Thandi; Chopra, Mickey; du Toit, Andries
    This paper describes key findings of a household livelihood survey conducted in impoverished African settlements in Cape Town, one of Africa’s wealthiest cities. Poverty in these areas is strongly shaped by the history of the Eastern Cape’s adverse spatial incorporation into the South African economy. Migrants from the rural areas are highly dependent on and integrated into the increasingly monetized economy – but are simultaneously marginalized and adversely incorporated within it. Survey findings show the costs and implications of this failure of the formal economy to provide adequate livelihoods. While many eke out a living in a vital yet marginal informal economy, these strategies are thoroughly linked to and dependent on the income that can be secured through participation in the formal job market. Those who are unable to find a foothold in the urban economy are highly vulnerable and are at risk of being confined to long-term poverty traps.