OpenUCT :: Browsing by Author "Selmeczi, Anna"

Browsing by Author "Selmeczi, Anna"

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Open Access
Accessing land in the city s peri-urban areas: The case of Lilongwe, Malawi
(2024) Galimoto, McDonald; Selmeczi, Anna; Ngwenya Nobukhosi
Land access is arguably key to the attainment of sustainable urbanisation and development. Studies show that high urbanisation rates have resulted in a high demand for serviced land and housing in the face of a slow rates of formal provision of the same. This is particularly true in Lilongwe's peri-urban areas where, despite presenting itself as an opportunity to facilitate a parallel system of accessing land for the majority of residents, the unrelinquished customary land tenure system in the urban and periurban areas is continuously in conflict with the failing statutory land tenure. Therefore, the study asks: How do Lilongwe's residents access land in the city's peri-urban areas? This qualitative case study research sourced primary data through semi-structured individual interviews with residents in Areas 26, 44, 54 and 55 and non-participant observations as well as secondary data sourced through desktop investigation. The findings show that, despite being the preferred mechanism, the formal land access system is marred with numerous challenges emanating from the historicised internal and external inefficiencies which culminate in the government's delayed creation of plots. The challenges include limited human, technical and financial capacity and inconsistent application of the law. These inefficiencies and challenges are rooted in Malawi's historical land dispensation that favours clientelist modes of political legitimation that manifest in poorly coordinated land expropriation programmes and l'aissez faire implementation of planning law. These inefficiencies have led to the proliferation of the uncharted (read informal) mechanisms of land access. The findings also indicate that land access remains gendered, by the prevailing inheritance rules in each area, which is observed to be changing due to intermarriages, modernisation and legal reforms. By declaring customary land as planning areas without instituting legal procedures to formally extinguish the existing customary land tenure rights, the state and non-state actors disregard international human rights principles, protocals, treaties and conventions. These findings echo scholarship that finds land tenure systems in the global South cities to be precarious. Despite strong commitments, in recent times, to implement urbanisation-focussed SDG 11 “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”, the empirical evidence and the historicised trends observed in Lilongwe entails 2030 may come too quickly for Malawi to comprehensively achieve the goal. Based on these findings, the research recommends avenues for future research that will inform the government's land access and tenure formalisation programmes in the peri-urban areas.
Open Access
Buffalo city metro - is bigger better? The hierarchy of urban labels and why they matter
(2022) Nakkungu, Mildred; Selmeczi, Anna
The post-apartheid era in South Africa demonstrated a grand shift in the country's legislation. Local government legislation was particularly affected, as it was at the municipal level that the policies of apartheid were visible. Part of addressing the legacy of spatial segregation included a suite of legislation aimed at addressing the legacy of apartheid and the deep socio-economic inequality present by ensuring that local government had high levels of autonomy. By forging the concept of “developmental local government”, the legislation cemented local government as an active branch of state, able to address the post-apartheid goal of redistribution. My research focuses on one aspect of this legislation, the categorizing of municipalities. South African local government legislation is outlined in a way that provides greater autonomy to municipalities that are deemed “metros” whilst simultaneously describing the model of “cooperative governance” which describes all levels of government as being equally crucial and able to perform governance. The case of Buffalo City Municipality (BCM) forms the focus of my case study because it is an example of a small city that was promoted to ‘metro status'. My research teases out the political and technical hopes, dreams and realities of ‘metro status'. It relies on a narrative qualitative inquiry based on the input from 19 interviewees (including academics, national government ministers and municipal employees) and an analysis of the governmental, legislative and media archives focussed on the local government transformation in the country. Being prompted by the work of Jennifer Robinson, who asks scholars to consider the trajectory of urban labels and the theories they are grounded in, I do not take for granted the jurisdictional/legislative label of “metro” and I seek to answer the question: Is bigger better? Further, the growing questions on the absence of scholarly research on smaller cities gives this research room to ask questions regarding a city caught between larger and smaller cities. BCM demonstrates a municipality whose hopes to be a big city may have been rooted more in appearances rather than in fact. Whilst the term metro speaks to a set of technical assumptions of the characteristics of a city, BCM demonstrates an example of how politics plays a large part in how local government policy is enacted. Where ‘metro status' can be perceived simply as a change in jurisdictional status, BCM demonstrates that even for a small city the prestige of ‘metro status' brings a slew of political and governmental infighting at local, regional and even national level.
Open Access
Conflicting rationalities and the governance of homelessness in Ward 64, Cape Town
(2022) Cousins, Danica; Selmeczi, Anna; Smit, Warren
In South Africa there is no national mandate or coherent policy framework around the issue of homelessness. Therefore no budget, laws or policies can be used to mobilize and unify the actors involved in the governance of homelessness. This, accompanied by an out of date City of Cape Town Street People Policy, has left the question of "who is responsible for service provision to street-based people'' ambiguous and politically inflammatory. This study explores the value of understanding the problem of homelessness and the way it is governed at a local level. Therefore, it examines how the multiple and varied understandings of street-based people affect governance of the issue of homelessness in Ward 64, Cape Town. To do so, an ethnographic case study approach was combined with Watson's theory of Conflicting Rationalities and used to examine the sociological experiences of street-based people. What resulted was a framework which allowed the “logics and imperatives” of homelessness to be understood through a rationality of survival. Approaching an investigation of homelessness through this rationality validates and reasons with the experiences and survivalist activities of street-based people. To investigate the governance of homelessness in the Ward, data from multiple in-depth interviews and fieldwork observations was analysed through a nodal governance framework. The results indicate that nodes whose engagement with street-based people is motivated by the complaints of, and their responsibility to City and Ward residents, deploy reactive technologies. Alternatively, nodes whose primary responsibility is to street-based people employ a variety of developmental responses. The success of a developmental response is largely reliant on effective partnerships. However, organisational pride and competition for funding present significant challenges to these partnerships and, therefore to the effective governance of homelessness. The case study presented in this thesis highlights the value of Ward level research and interventions into homelessness. Accepting that street-based people are not a homogenous group leads to an understanding that homelessness will not present the same in different areas. Therefore, the facilitation of realistic and meaningful strategies to govern homelessness requires a local understanding of the interaction between the multiple rationalities of both street-based people and governance stakeholders.
Open Access
Connections Matter: Implicit infrastructures and Electricity Access in Witsand, Cape Town
(2022) Dipura, Romeo; Oldfield, Sophie; Selmeczi, Anna
For most residents living in Wits and, on Cape Town's north-western urban periphery, electricity access involves piecing together electricity wires and connecting them to Eskom transmission lines or tampering with Eskom prepaid meters and recharging with cheaper black market electricity vouchers. These practices require residents to circumvent Eskom's vouchers and prepaid meters in order to adapt Eskom electricity to their lived realities. In a context where Eskom electricity provision is sometimes absent, often unreliable, and largely unaffordable, residents engage diverse strategies to take charge of their own electricity inclusion. This research draws on over twenty months of fine-grained ethnographic work in Wits and, where I reside, which included journaling, transect walks, to map typologies of connections, participant observations, and semi structured interviews. Building on Storeys' (2021) notion of ‘implicit' infrastructures, in this thesis I substantiate how resident-made electricity connections prove a critical, although implicit, part of the wider electricity infrastructure system. While these connections are essential for residents' access, they are also dangerous and unsanctioned by Eskom. Resident-made electricity connections involve enduring bodily, material, legal and relational risks. These risks range from resident electrocutions and house-fires to Eskom penalties and disconnections. Drawing on a sociotechnical approach to infrastructure, I use the notion of ‘precarious power' to explore the mix of agency and precariousness that are entangled in the everyday practices of ordinary people making electricity connections. I argue that in improvising electricity access, residents in Wits and exercised their agency to circumvent, adapt and appropriate Eskom electricity. Yet in doing this they simultaneously endured the precariousness of the daily labors, bodily risks and contestations associated with their practices. In making this argument, I contribute to an understanding of urban residents' everyday infrastructural experiences through an analytical frame that is neither dismissive of their agency nor celebratory of their struggles.
Open Access
Cosmo City Greens: contested aspirations of ecologically sustainable lifestyles in mixed-income housing
(2023) Funde, Sinazo; Selmeczi, Anna
This thesis is concerned with the relationship between the residents of Cosmo City, a mixedincome housing development in Gauteng, and green spaces in the development. It argues that the legacy of apartheid spatial planning has led to the unequal distribution of green infrastructure across the development, and this has disenfranchised the low-income residents. Segregation was the core of maintaining the apartheid regime. South Africans were not only divided according to race, culture and economically, but they were also divided spatially and so was the provision, proximity, and distribution of services. This segregation primarily affected the Black population negatively, as they were the ones moved to the outskirts of urban centres with little to no access to tenure or basic services. Access to green spaces was also limited as the history of South Africa was immersed in the displacement of the indigenous people out of their homes that honed their relationships between culture and nature. High economic status and access to green spaces have a positive relationship especially in the housing space. But what happens in the case of mixed-income developments? Since the change from apartheid to democracy, South Africa has implemented many housing plans and policies to undo fragmentation caused by apartheid spatial planning. Many of these plans failed over the course of implementation but their revision continues. Mixed-income housing policies have gained momentum in urban planning, especially in southern cities. These policies potentially not only bridge racial and economic disparities but they also confront issues of fragmented environmentalism through housing developments. South Africa's first mixed-income housing development, Cosmo City in Johannesburg has been the blueprint for many other mixed-income developments in the country. Cosmo City was successful in fulfilling its objectives of bringing people from the different socioeconomic backgrounds into the same neighbourhood. However, its objectives of promoting environmental sustainability across the development have not been realized. This research uses the stories of a group and middle- and low-income residents of Cosmo City as a case study to investigate the potential of mixed-income housing in South Africa to address the legacies of green apartheid through the equitable distribution of green infrastructure in mixed-income housing spaces. By investigating residents' greening aspirations, this research explores the ways in which the equitable distribution of green infrastructure in such developments can contribute to more egalitarian approaches to sustainability and facilitate social inclusion and cohesion among the residents. Qualitative research methods and desktop research were used to achieve the objectives of the study. A case study was conducted, which included regular visits to Cosmo City and open-ended interviews conducted with residents and an environmental officer from the developing company. The findings show that inequalities in the distribution and quality of green infrastructure in Cosmo City have led to reinforcing negative stereotypes and supress the livelihoods of low-income residents. In response, some residents have adopted diverse ways of breaking with the past through self-taught greening practices, even in complex situations that have already been pre-established for them. The recommendation which is made by this thesis in order promote a more holistic idea of environmental sustainability in mixed-income housing, is that stakeholders must understand the socioenvironmental dynamics of low-income residents in their respective urban spaces to accommodate their ecological needs.
Open Access
Electricity Supply in Khartoum: the planned, the delivered, the experienced
(2021) Hassan, Basheir Hassan Razaz; Selmeczi, Anna
As the first step in rethinking infrastructure configurations and their alternatives, this thesis aims at looking into the existing policy framework that governs electricity supply in Khartoum, its implementation and how it's experienced by Khartoum's residents. By zooming into one locality in Khartoum, the “Eastern Nile Locality”, the research has attempted to analyse the ways with which the limited electricity infrastructure is planned and allocated through its translation into policy frameworks in neighbouring areas falling under different zoning classification that correspond to their residents' income brackets. Review of the policy framework was conducted firstly, using a mix of desktop research and interviews with officials from the relevant institutions, investigating the key guidelines that govern electricity distribution across the various residential zones in terms of no/access to the grid, tariff regimes, contractual arrangements, alternative configurations and so on. The second part of the research was using ethnographic research methodologies to examine users' experience of electricity supply in its material and non-material dimensions. The studied cases revealed three main user categories; firstly, those grid-connected via the standard producers set by the Electricity Distribution Company. The second are those gridconnected via emerging models that could be classified as micro-financed co-production gridconnection. The third are those who remain off-grid and follow alternative routes. These varying regimes of service delivery are experienced by Khartoum residents on multiple levels, the most significant of which are firstly linked to users' experience of electricity as an unrivalled energy form that could be converted into a multiplicity of other forms, or its functional dimension as a modern technology that dis/enables greater space-time manipulation. Secondly, its more symbolic or representational aspects and their translation into social codes that define modern citizens and modernized states. Lastly, users' experience has pointed to the close link that the users make between electricity and the different relations that they form in their endeavors to access power services as in the different set of financial, legal, institutional and social relations and their implications in shaping subjectivities and articulating political positions.
Open Access
Sites of migrant landing: (un)braiding topographies of relations across hair salons in Mowbray
(2024) Mosienyane, Keamogetse; Selmeczi, Anna; Kimari Wangui
This dissertation explores hair salons in Mowbray as a node for landing amongst African migrant women who have settled in Cape Town, are arriving or in transition. To land is to set foot and to find grounding, and it is also to contend with borders. Therefore, to conceptualise the hair salon as a landing space is a deliberate geographical choice that situates landing in the central city. The significance of this is to emphasise that migrants do not land only once at national borders such as airports, shores, land ports, etc., that landing is not a singular event, and continues as African migrants try to find grounding in their new urban contexts. The dissertation's centring of the hair salon is a Black reading of space that facilitates porous mobilities through social relations and networks informed and maintained by African migrant women. Going beyond characterisations as informal trading spaces, a porous infrastructural analysis can be deployed to engage with the African hair salon as a spatial node that forefronts African women's place making in the city. The methodology for this research includes ethnographic semi-structured interviews, some of which were held during hair appointments with hairstylists, observations, archival material of Mowbray and other periodical texts. Additionally as part of the methodology, an experimentation with braiding as a cartography in Black feminist geographies provides a map of mobility in the urban space, that is routed and rooted in African women's beauty practices. Two distinct relations to the hair salon have emerged in the findings. One that emphasised place making through social relations, and the other that showed the different ways that displacement and anti-migration attitudes and policies affect the survival and maintenance of hair salons. For the former, hairstylists shared that the way they entered the hair salon market was through family and friends or a friend of a friend recommendations; the salon provides various mobility for workers who after saving up can also begin their own practices; through braiding, practices of beauty are embraced with themselves and their customers. For the latter, urban development projects such as the demolition of a long-standing shopping centre; rental increase; high inflation and unchanging prices; lack of immigration documentation were discussed in length. The hair salon stands at the intersection of community and resource building for demographics that face displacement and structural marginalisation in the city. Keywords: Black hair salon, landing, urban migration, mobility, African migrant women, arrival infrastructure, people as infrastructure, braiding as cartography, urban displacement
Open Access
Understanding the Contemporary Character of Braamfontein Johannesburg: Towards a renewed understanding of urban renewal in cities in the South
(2019) Katz, Ivanna; Selmeczi, Anna
Work on urban renewal internationally focuses on a vast range of topics, including gentrification, increased criminalization of poverty, rent-seeking behaviour, and neoliberal urbanism. These arguments tend to centre the interests and actions of certain actors, prioritize certain forces (such as economic ones), and thus tend to predict a particular set of outcomes. In adopting a southern urbanist epistemology, and Jennifer Robinson’s reimagined comparativism through a reconceptualized 'case’, this research shows how predominant assumptions regarding the drivers and outcomes (both social and physical) of urban renewal do not necessarily apply in the case of Braamfontein, an instance of urban renewal in Johannesburg, a post-apartheid city in the south. The findings examined here include policy narratives and empirical referents to culture-led strategies of urban renewal and ways in which they speak less to market-orientated objectives, and more to socio-political ones; how the findings in Braamfontein speak to literature on gentrification, studentification, and youthification, showing that urban renewal and gentrification are not the same processes, and that studentification does not necessarily lead to youthification or gentrification; how attempts to suppress informal trade have led to the proliferation of iterant strategies on the part of hawkers, and have in turn led to enhanced relationships between informal traders and the formal economy; and, finally, how the presence of communities self-identifying as foreign or gay are shown to be driven by forces other than those that the literature typically predicts.
Open Access
Working for Small Change: Investigating the Livelihoods of Ride-hailing Drivers in Cape Town, South Africa
(2021) Stein, Malte; Selmeczi, Anna
Since its introduction in 2009, ride-hailing has been at the centre of many critical discussions concerning the disruption of the (public) transportation sector, labour issues and tax matters. Missing voices in this discourse have notably been the employees of ride-hailing companies, specifically in the Global South. Setting out to inquire about the living and working conditions of ride-hailing drivers, this study employed a qualitative research framework and ethnographic methods in a case study of Uber drivers in Cape Town, South Africa. Semi-structured and in depth interviews were used as leading method to find out more about the drivers' hopes, troubles, aspirations and coping mechanisms. Particularly in the Global South, the growing informalisation and commodification of labour pose a threat to workers. Drivers in need of income are subject to unstable short-term employment that is low pay, does not offer social security, exhibits highly uneven employment relationships, includes large financial risks and predominantly serves customer and corporate interests. Yet, countering fatalistic narratives that frame drivers as helpless and exposed, this thesis offers accounts of creative rule-bending, mitigation strategies and community organisation used to mitigate precarity. I argue that ride hailing work is located at least partially in a grey zone as the everyday struggle for opportunity forces workers to search for alternative spaces on the fringes between the formal and informal and the legal and illegal. In a comparable manner, ride-hailing companies use legal grey zones and loopholes to advance their business and become the benefactors of the precarious hustle of thousands of mostly migrant drivers in South Africa. This study adds in-depth and original ethnographic research and critical theorisation to the literature on ride-hailing and the living and working conditions of marginalised workers. It illustrates the urgent need to further inquire about the proliferating commodification and informalisation that ride-hailing and the gig economy entails in the Global South.

Browsing by Author "Selmeczi, Anna"

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