Browsing by Author "Scheba, Suraya"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Cape Town crisis: An analysis on drought response measures, the motives behind them, and their implications for equitable water access
    (2021) Koehler, Lara-Marie; Scheba, Suraya
    Cape Town has recently undergone major policy and regulatory changes within its water management strategy in response to a three-year drought (2015-2018). Due to the vulnerability of humanity to climate change, its uncertainty, and the risks that it poses for securing a reliable source of water, it is important to fully understand the implications of Cape Town's responding water management changes, in understanding that similar events could occur again in the future. Situated within the field of political ecology, this research aims to determine how the evolution of water management in Cape Town in response to the drought will most likely impact the ideal of equitable water service provision throughout the city's post-crisis context. By utilizing a series of personally conducted semi-structured interviews and secondary official city documents, this research focuses on the tourism industry and the African Water Commons Collective (AWCC) as a lens to understand what motivated the CoCT's water-policy decision-making processes, how the economy and low-income communities were considered and treated in response to these decisions, how these have gone on to impact their respective experiences with water accessibility, and what this implies regarding their accessibility for the near future. The results reveal that a significant number of policy decisions were based on the emergence of a duality of crisis: (1) a drought that mandated reducing demand and augmenting supply and (2) a financial model in need of stabilizing in order for the department to be able to do so. The tourism industry and low-income communities indeed experienced the City's governance responses differently; their experiences each implying very different outlooks for their accessibility in the future. The tourism industry's position within the economy and local government has proven to make it better able to adapt and be resilient in the face of water shortages, painting a pretty picture for its future survival in the face of climate change. The strained relationship between low-income communities and local government, on the other hand, has proven to complicate the City's attempts to improve water and sanitation services in those areas. Without this communication, the City cannot expect to fully understand how the impacts of their decisions are influenced by the spatial and infrastructural contexts of low-income communities. For this reason, improvements in living conditions for those areas cannot be expected. Rather, it is important that the City recognizes the impacts its decisions have on accessibility for the poor, and why. Recognizing that similar events are increasingly likely in the future, at a global scale and with greater frequency, the ability of the Water and Sanitation Department (W&SD) to recognize, reflect and react to these conflicting objectives is crucial if equal water accessibility between citizen groupings is ever going to be met.
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    Food, love and resistance: lessons on reimagining social reproduction from East Bay housing cooperatives
    (2023) Guner, Sibel; Scheba, Suraya; Battersby Jane
    Western cities are painfully lonely. Their residents are working more, eating worse, and missing community. An ideology that values capital production over human wellbeing has resulted in extensive systems governing the production of economic goods while restorative social practices are squeezed to the margins. In urban housing, this manifests as atomized nuclear households that maximize private resources and a focus on waged work, often sustained invisibly by the labour of feminized bodies. Yet across the San Francisco Bay Area, informal housing cooperatives challenge this trend by building detailed systems of care that reframe residents' relationship with the realm of social reproduction by collectivizing domestic labour. Among the social reproduction practices being organized, the food system stands out for its embodied nature and ability to serve as at once social, cultural, and political – it is the heartbeat of these homes. Using the communal food system as an entrypoint for analysis allows us to interrogate how such housing projects address the challenges of urban capitalism while complicating assumptions across the field of urban studies that such spaces inherently improve the state of urban crisis today. This research explores the question: How do food systems in East Bay housing cooperatives model ways to build non-extractive systems of care in the context of contemporary urban crisis? This investigation is approached with embedded research in two Bay Area housing cooperatives to examine the motivations, counter-politics, and impacts of these spaces on their members. Findings reveal that many residents see the practise of collectivising their home as part of a greater vision for political change, at the same time that unconscious bias limits the accessibility of these homes and can risk reproducing gendered labour struggles. The systems in housing cooperatives are thus not an end goal but an ongoing negotiation that can lead to improved conditions only with attention, care, and critical awareness of the need for social and labour justice to extend into the domestic sphere.
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    From drought to desalination: The case of Cape Town
    (2021) Beerthuis, Sharda; Scheba, Suraya
    The recent Cape Town drought and fear of a severe water crisis between 2015- 2018 was followed by a fast-tracked crisis management response. In line with a wider global trend, the City of Cape Town adopted a technology called ‘reverse osmosis desalination' into the water supply mix. This ‘water production' technology is alluring as it promises to be ‘drought- proof', preserving a constant flow of water in times of increased climatic uncertainty. Yet, the implementation of water technologies in Cape Town continues to be a highly debated topic. Cape Town suffers from a longstanding legacy of uneven racialized infrastructure development practices, resulting in unequal water access and consumption. In this context of unequal water security across social groups and increased climatic vulnerability, it is important to carefully consider the implications of new water technologies if the desired outcome is a more sustainable and equitable water future. Drawing on urban political ecology, this dissertation explores the process in which the instalment of three temporary desalination plants and planning for permanent desalination in Cape Town emerged. This, in order to carefully consider its consequences for equitable water security. By utilizing secondary official city documents, reports and news articles from several credible news platforms, supported by a number of personally conducted semistructured interviews and secondary sourced interviews with City employees, this thesis aims to understand how desalination is constituted as a crisis response. This exploration is organized around analyzing the relationships and dynamics between various actors, the events that signified the processual nature of the adoption and the emergent effects for water access across the City. The findings reveal that the promise that desalination holds as a technical solution to climatic uncertainty undermines the / contradictions that evolve alongside the instalments. While desalination was pushed by the municipality as a drought relief technology for all citizens, the results show that the emergence of this technology came with frictions, as it was contested, ecologically disturbed and critically questioned by multiple actors. As my findings demonstrate, desalination triggers the emergence of exclusive decision-making processes and financial constraints, especially for vulnerable citizens. This thesis thus argues that desalination implies to only secure water for some, while intensifying water insecurity for the already vulnerable. While the City strives towards a “shared water future”, the high focus on extending its water supply to meet growing demands lacks consideration of meeting existing demands, excluding the socio- political processes within current water decision making. This rather reinforces racialized- spatial and distributional inequities across a diverse range of social groups within the City.
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    The Labour of Home
    (2023) Byrnes, Kathryn; Scheba, Suraya
    The city of Cape Town's history of designed inequality has continued to maintain and extend barriers to accessing affordable housing for poor and working-class families. This work explores the emergence of occupation as a working-class housing and survival strategy that innovatively addresses these barriers to accommodation. Through intimate one on one conversations and shared experiences, this research unpacks the home-making journeys of a small group of residents at Cissie Gool House in Woodstock, investigating their grapplings with citizenship, past pursuits of home, and the rebuilding and reimagining of space undertaken as they continue to transform a hospital into a home. This thesis has found that occupied spaces such as Cissie Gool House have empowered residents to create fulfilling, central, home spaces for themselves that innovatively address the shortcomings of state housing schemes, while additionally developing social networks and programs that uplift, educate and support residents.
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    Occupations as housing models: The everyday and political role of collective labour in sustaining an occupation over time
    (2024) Fortuin, Kezia; Scheba, Suraya
    In line with calls to decolonise planning, and planning imaginaries, this dissertation takes seriously one of the most pervasive models of securing housing and connecting to basic services across the global south: the occupation of land and buildings. Emerging literature has established the everyday labour of survival in occupations as equally a political labour, disrupting earlier understandings of occupations as either survival strategy or political statement. Enquiring into occupations as existing models of housing provisioning, this dissertation uses the notion of ‘labour' to understand how occupations are sustained over time at their everyday and political scales. The research is informed by two years of ad-hoc engagements with, and five months of focused ethnographic fieldwork at, the Cissie Gool House building occupation in Cape Town. Limiting the study to four of the occupation's spaces of collective labour – the kitchen, the garden, the maintenance team and the security and safety team – the research finds an established system of resident-led management guided by mature strategies to respond to crisis, keep the community safe, counter criminalisation and meet community needs. Moreover, in the context of state dis-engagement and the threat of eviction, their model of resident-led management has become crucial evidence of their capacity to be engaged. This evidence is mobilised in the effort to ‘reach for the state' in the carving out of the future of the site as affordable housing. ‘Labour,' although understudied in the infrastructural turn, is useful empirically, in providing an attentive, intimate and embodied reading of southern urban planning and repair practices; conceptually, in tying together disparate bodies of literature on southern urbanism, infrastructures, repair and affect; and methodologically, in insisting on the use of the body to generate data. As such, I advocate for an embodied turn in the study of southern urban planning and repair practices.
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    The political ecology of community-based adaptation to flood risk in informal settlements: the case of a local community organisation
    (2018) Fox, Ashley; Ziervogel, Gina; Scheba, Suraya
    As urbanisation rates increase in parallel with growing climate change concerns, African cities are increasingly required to explore and support adaptation planning that reduces climate risks for the most vulnerable. Informal settlements are particularly vulnerable to climate change due to their high density, limited service provision, and a lack of economic and political opportunities for residents. In Cape Town, informal settlements face disastrous floods every year in the rainy season due to their location on degraded, low-lying lands as a result of Apartheid spatial planning. This thesis explores how multi-scalar governance in Cape Town can either empower or undermine efforts at community-based adaptation (CBA) to flooding in informal settlements. Drawing on urban political ecology, this thesis assesses the potential for CBA to lead to wider transformation. Using a case study approach, it focuses on the informal settlement network (ISN), a community-based organisation of the urban poor. ISN members and other actors involved in flood management in Cape Town were interviewed to understand the flood management landscape and the relationships and dynamics that exist between the various actors. The analysis showed that the CoCT’s efforts at participatory planning reinforce the hegemonic power dynamics between government and communities, but that everyday governance practices can be used at a smaller-scale to enforce positive change. In reaction to top-down governmental processes, ISN uses insurgent planning to envision a more just city. They navigate sanctioned and un-sanctioned spaces of citizenship to drive development from the bottom-up. The community designed and spearheaded reblocking process (rearranging shacks in a settlement to allow for flood drainage and service delivery) is a powerful example of CBA and represents the potential of communitybased organisations to take steps towards transformation. In order to enable true transformative CBA, both the CoCT and ISN need to adjust the epistemological framing of their planning processes in order to address the drivers of vulnerabilities, rather than just the vulnerabilities themselves.