Torn wheels and rough pavements: an ethnography of navigation towards informal and indigenous urban futures amidst crisis in Warwick Junction, Durban

Robbins, Matthew

Torn wheels and rough pavements: an ethnography of navigation towards informal and indigenous urban futures amidst crisis in Warwick Junction, Durban

Thesis / Dissertation

2023

Abstract

This dissertation explores the context(s) in which ‘mobile informality' is practiced by traders and associated workers in Durban's Warwick Junction, theorising the conceptual affordances that arise from it. Using an ethnographic approach, the study explores the navigatory responses of barrow operators and recyclers to the ‘friction' and ‘roughness' which make up the fabric of life-making projects in a city in crisis, and investigates the State and Municipal logics of governing informality. I show that eThekwini Municipality's attempts to achieve a ‘caring and liveable City' in line with its Modernist ideals, through such approaches as the formalised, restrictive and aggressively policed permit system for informal workers, negatively impacts many informal workers. Additional ‘frictions' in the path of informal work – which emerge daily as issues of safety, of dignity, of rights, and of access to opportunities – are rooted in the Municipality's problematisation of informality as a survivalist response to moments of crisis, and thus as something counter to ‘a modern Durban', and therefore which ought to be discouraged. This account is challenged by informal workers and NGOs in Warwick, who understand informality as a set of indigenous urban forms and practices which are entirely appropriate to the time and place in which they exist, and which should be protected and accounted for in the policy and planning of a truly ‘caring and liveable' city. By pushing up against the Durban's ‘margins of refusal', these actors practice informality as a prefigurative politics of urban life, an approach which offers much to the theorisation of city futures.

Keywords

Anthropology

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