IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/urbstu/v56y2019i3p594-611.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Towards a multi-scalar reading of informality in Delft, South Africa: Weaving the ‘everyday’ with wider structural tracings

Author

Listed:
  • Liza Rose Cirolia

    (Africa Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, South Africa)

  • Suraya Scheba

    (University of Cape Town, South Africa)

Abstract

Informality is a critical theme in urban studies. In recent years, ‘the everyday’ has become a focus of studies on informality in African cities. These studies focus on particularity and place. They offer a useful corrective to top-down and universalising readings which exclude the daily experiences and practices of people from analysis. As we show in this article, everyday studies surface valuable insights, highlighting the agency and precarity which operates at the street level. However, a fuller understanding of informality’s (re)production requires drawing together particularist accounts with wider and more structural tracings. These tracings offer insights into the ways in which state and financial processes influence and interface with the everyday. In this article, we use the case of housing in Delft, a township in Cape Town, to demonstrate this approach and argue for a multi-scalar and relational reading of the production of informality.

Suggested Citation

  • Liza Rose Cirolia & Suraya Scheba, 2019. "Towards a multi-scalar reading of informality in Delft, South Africa: Weaving the ‘everyday’ with wider structural tracings," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 56(3), pages 594-611, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:56:y:2019:i:3:p:594-611
    DOI: 10.1177/0042098017753326
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0042098017753326
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/0042098017753326?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ananya Roy, 2009. "The 21st-Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory," Regional Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 43(6), pages 819-830.
    2. Eric Trovalla & Ulrika Trovalla, 2015. "Infrastructure as a divination tool: Whispers from the grids in a Nigerian city," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 19(2-3), pages 332-343, June.
    3. Colin McFarlane & Renu Desai & Steve Graham, 2014. "Informal Urban Sanitation: Everyday Life, Poverty, and Comparison," Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 104(5), pages 989-1011, September.
    4. AbdouMaliq Simone, 2011. "The surfacing of urban life," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 15(3-4), pages 355-364, August.
    5. Solomon Benjamin, 2008. "Occupancy Urbanism: Radicalizing Politics and Economy beyond Policy and Programs," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 32(3), pages 719-729, September.
    6. Colin McFarlane, 2012. "Rethinking Informality: Politics, Crisis, and the City," Planning Theory & Practice, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 13(1), pages 89-108.
    7. Jamie Peck, 2020. "Cities beyond Compare?," Regional Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 49(1), pages 160-182, July.
    8. Charlotte Lemanski, 2011. "Moving up the Ladder or Stuck on the Bottom Rung? Homeownership as a Solution to Poverty in Urban South Africa," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(1), pages 57-77, January.
    9. Yosef Jabareen, 2014. ""Do it yourself" as an informal mode of space production: conceptualizing informality," Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 7(4), pages 414-428, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Tara van Dijk & Amita Bhide & Vinay Shivtare, 2016. "When a participatory slum sanitation project encounters urban informality: The case of the Greater Mumbai Metropolitan Region," International Area Studies Review, Center for International Area Studies, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, vol. 19(1), pages 45-59, March.
    2. Fulong Wu, 2020. "Scripting Indian and Chinese urban spatial transformation: Adding new narratives to gentrification and suburbanisation research," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 38(6), pages 980-997, September.
    3. Christian Schmid & Ozan Karaman & Naomi C Hanakata & Pascal Kallenberger & Anne Kockelkorn & Lindsay Sawyer & Monika Streule & Kit Ping Wong, 2018. "Towards a new vocabulary of urbanisation processes: A comparative approach," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 55(1), pages 19-52, January.
    4. Jennifer Robinson, 2022. "Introduction: Generating concepts of ‘the urban’ through comparative practice," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 59(8), pages 1521-1535, June.
    5. Shin, HaeRan & Chae, Sangwon, 2018. "Urbanisation and land use transition in a second-tier city: The emergence of small factories in Gimpo, South Korea," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 77(C), pages 534-541.
    6. Fran Tonkiss, 2015. "Afterword: Economies of infrastructure," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 19(2-3), pages 384-391, June.
    7. Kevin Ward & Timothy Bunnell, 2021. "Reflections on five years of the Summer Institute in Urban Studies," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 58(4), pages 863-878, March.
    8. Tom Gillespie, 2020. "The Real Estate Frontier," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 44(4), pages 599-616, July.
    9. Christine Hentschel, 2015. "Postcolonializing Berlin and The Fabrication of The Urban," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 39(1), pages 79-91, January.
    10. Zachary Levenson, 2018. "The road to TRAs is paved with good intentions: Dispossession through delivery in post-apartheid Cape Town," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 55(14), pages 3218-3233, November.
    11. Dekel, Tomer & Meir, Avinoam & Alfasi, Nurit, 2019. "Formalizing infrastructures, civic networks and production of space: Bedouin informal settlements in Be'er-Sheva metropolis," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 81(C), pages 91-99.
    12. Seth Schindler, 2014. "Producing and contesting the formal/informal divide: Regulating street hawking in Delhi, India," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 51(12), pages 2596-2612, September.
    13. Idt, Joel & Pellegrino, Margot, 2021. "From the ostensible objectives of public policies to the reality of changes: Local orders of densification in the urban regions of Paris and Rome," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 107(C).
    14. Christof Parnreiter, 2022. "The Janus-faced genius of cities," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 59(7), pages 1315-1333, May.
    15. Jennifer Robinson, 2016. "Comparative Urbanism: New Geographies and Cultures of Theorizing the Urban," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 40(1), pages 187-199, January.
    16. Idalina Baptista, 2019. "Electricity services always in the making: Informality and the work of infrastructure maintenance and repair in an African city," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 56(3), pages 510-525, February.
    17. Allen J. Scott, 2019. "City-regions reconsidered," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 51(3), pages 554-580, May.
    18. Carolyn Cartier, 2017. "Contextual Urban Theory and the ‘Appeal’ of Gentrification: Lost in Transposition?," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 41(3), pages 466-477, May.
    19. Tauri Tuvikene, 2016. "Strategies for Comparative Urbanism: Post-socialism as a De-territorialized Concept," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 40(1), pages 132-146, January.
    20. Michael Storper & Allen J Scott, 2016. "Current debates in urban theory: A critical assessment," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 53(6), pages 1114-1136, May.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:56:y:2019:i:3:p:594-611. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/urbanstudiesjournal .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.