Demystifying the database: the state's crafting of Cape Town's housing allocation tool and its technologies

The City of Cape Town's integrated housing database is used to manage the allocation of state housing across the city. It is a technical intervention in a contested and politicised context. On the surface, it appears to be an effective state tool that determines eligibility for housing assistance, and subsequently, the implementation of fair housing allocation practices. This veneer of technicality, however, conceals the complex state work involved in the production, maintenance, and use of the database. In the context of South Africa's transition from apartheid to democratic modes of governance, this research examines the database to engage with the state's work in producing tools for legitimate decision-making. As a state tool, the database and its functioning has been largely rendered invisible, either dismissed because of the opacity of its functioning, or positioned as a political myth, a smokescreen that conceals the state's inability to deliver on its housing promises. However, a technopolitical lens challenges researchers to pay attention to the form, function and development of state tools; nuances that are too often overlooked. In this research I therefore examine the housing database as a legitimate state tool for fair housing allocations. Using archival material, I explore the making of the database. Based predominantly on interview material with key informants, I investigate the production of the data held within the database. I consider, through policy and document analysis, the use of the database and its data in the actual practice of housing allocation decision-making. In sum, the research tracks the ideological, political, bureaucratic, and technological shifts that have shaped the database over three decades of housing allocation reform. Through this analysis of the development, form, and function of the database, I substantiate the ways in which the database works as a mode of governance, crafted by the state, that builds and sustains housing allocation decision-making. Demystifying the database as a state tool highlights its gradations, textures and contradictions. Its analysis makes visible the state craft that is key to its development, form, and function – what shapes the state's housing allocation decision-making. This analysis opens up the South African housing crisis beyond the impasse where citizen need exceeds the state's capacity to supply houses, and shifts the narrative away from an ambivalent, unwilling or uncaring state, to one that makes visible and describes the state's craft on housing allocation decision-making

Between the (in)formal and the (il)legal : the 'permanent temporariness' of waiting for a house

Includes bibliographical references.In Cape Town, 400 000 households are waiting for housing from the state. This thesis explores the everyday lived realities that waiting for housing entails: what waiting means to housing applicants, what living in temporary accommodation solutions for the long-term entails, and how these effects of waiting shape citizens' perceptions and encounters with the state. This research, conducted through open-ended, qualitative interviews provides a detailed and in-depth understanding of not only the everyday material and social experiences of waiting for housing and life in temporary accommodation, but also the types of encounters that citizens have with the state in relation to housing given the circumstances in which they wait. These narratives of waiting provide a detailed and nuanced understanding of the 'permanent temporariness' (Yiftachel, 2009a; 2009b) that waiting entails given the often difficult circumstances in which people live while waiting for housing, in overcrowded council houses, backyard shacks and informal settlements. Situated in the 'gray spaces' (Yiftachel, 2009a; 2009b) that exist between legal and illegal and formal and informal, housing applicants live in a state of 'betweenness' (Perramond, 2001) materially, socially, emotionally and politically. This 'betweenness', the core of the relationship between citizens and the state, produces a particular encounter with the state in relation to housing. This 'gray' encounter encompasses the varied ways housing applicants choose to interact with, and against, the state to access housing

Local responses to global sustainability agendas: learning from experimenting with the urban sustainable development goal in Cape Town

The success of the Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG 11) depends on the availability and accessibility of robust data, as well as the reconfiguration of governance systems that can catalyse urban transformation. Given the uneven success of the Millennium Development Goals, and the unprecedented inclusion of the urban in the SDG process, the feasibility of SDG 11 was assessed in advance of its ratification through a series of urban experiments. This paper focusses on Cape Town’s participation in piloting SDG 11, in order to explore the role of urban experimentation in highlighting the partnership arrangements necessary to allow cities to meet the data and governance challenges presented by the SDG 11. Specifically, we focus on the relationship between data and governance that lie at the heart of the SDG 11. The urban experiment demonstrates the highly complex and multi-level governance dynamics that shape the way urban experiments are initiated, executed and concluded. The implications of these dependencies illustrate that more attention needs to be paid at the global level to what data are important and how and where the data are generated if SDG 11 is to be met. Overall, this paper makes the case that the success of SDG 11 rests on effecting local level change and enabling real opportunities in cities