Abstract
This chapter examines the work of infrastructure in Cape Town’s informal settlements, exploring everyday entanglements with the material landscape as emergent spaces forged within layers of urban exclusions. For residents of informal sites in the Khayelitsha area, maintaining daily access to water, electricity, and sanitation requires frequent labor: extending illegal electricity lines, building self-made flush toilets, and pouring concrete foundations for shacks. This mundane work crafts emergent spaces—assemblages that simultaneously mark structural exclusions and the defiance of these exclusions. This chapter examines the work of self-made infrastructures within informal settlements, asking how the creation of small, concrete sites reveals the socio-political complexity of claiming space and making-do at the city’s edge. I ground this discussion within the origin stories of small site (Zukin 2010), examining how residents mediate spatio-temporal vagaries (Yifchatel 2009) through the symbolic impact of this material reworking.
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Notes
- 1.
Of other racial groups counted in this survey conducted by Statistics South Africa, 90% of Cape Town households headed by a Colored individual (a multiracial descendant group) and 98% of Asian-headed households lived in formal dwellings (City of Cape Town 2017, 25-26). In terms of numbers of households in informality: a total of only 189 households headed by a white individual were found to live in informal dwellings, while 204,803 households headed by a Black individual lived in informal dwellings; of the latter group, 66,492 households lived in informal dwellings in the backyards of other dwellings, and 138,311 households were in informal dwellings not in backyards (ibid.).
- 2.
All names used for individuals that participated in this research and for specific informal settlements are pseudonyms. However, the names of sites and individuals reported in national news or formal reports are retained.
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Storey, A.D. (2021). “If He Has a Shack Like That …”: Infrastructural Labor and Possibility in Cape Town’s Informal Settlements. In: Kup**er, P. (eds) Emergent Spaces. Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84379-3_13
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