Karly Kiefer Final SRP

Partnership in Tension:
Negotiating Citizen-State Engagement in Cape Town’s Slum Upgrading
By Karly Kiefer
M.A. Candidate, Global Environmental Policy
School of International Service
American University
December 14, 2015
Substantial Research Paper
SRP Advisor: Malini Ranganathan

Table
of
Contents

Chapter
1:
Introduction
.....................................................................................................................
1

Chapter
2:
Citizen-‐State
Engagement:
Top-‐down
and
bottom-‐up
strategies
...................
3

The
mutual
realm
...........................................................................................................................................
3

Participatory
development:
You
are
cordially
invited
to
participate
..........................................
4

Radical
democracy:
fostering
change
from
below
..............................................................................
6

Cultivating
Transformational
Change
.....................................................................................................
8

Characteristics
of
government
..................................................................................................................................
9

Characteristics
of
citizens
............................................................................................................................................
9

Overarching
environment
and
the
meaning
of
citizenship
.......................................................................
10

Chapter
3:
The
SA
SDI
Alliance
and
its
engagements
with
the
state
.................................
12

History
of
the
SA
SDI
Alliance
...................................................................................................................
12

People’s
Housing
Process:
fitting
a
people’s
process
into
a
market-‐driven
paradigm
.........
13

Switching
Gears:
From
a
pre-‐defined
housing
paradigm
to
area-‐based
planning
.................
16

Re-‐blocking:
Synthesizing
a
community-‐driven
process
and
a
city
strategy
...........................
17

Partnership
in
Practice:
How
Re-‐blocking
Works
.............................................................................
19

Chapter
4:
The
dialectical
tension
of
opposites
.......................................................................
21

Two
opposites
coming
together
..............................................................................................................
21

Collaborations
that
allow
for
productive
tension
.............................................................................
23

Outcomes
for
both
sides
.............................................................................................................................
25

Conclusion:
An
incremental
right
to
the
city
............................................................................
28

Works
Cited
..........................................................................................................................................
31

Appendix
A:
Pictures
.........................................................................................................................
35

1
Chapter
1:
Introduction

In a modern era marked both by a nation-state system that depends upon the
interdependence and mutual trust between citizens and states, and by a de-nationalizing
globalization that creates space for the emergence of non-state collectivities in arenas such as the
global city, increasing efforts are being made to understand the relationship between citizens and
the state and how exactly citizens and the state are to engage with each other to effect change.
The relationship and interactions between citizens and the state and how they can effect
economic, political, social and structural change in society are studied through a variety of
critical lenses, some of which come from a top-down perspective, asking questions of how to
enable and encourage citizen participation in governance structures and development processes;
others which view change as coming from the bottom-up, asking questions of how community
actors can effectively pressure the state and transform societal processes. Although citizen-state
engagement by definition involves both top-down and bottom-up actors, these altering
perspectives are rarely studied together.
This paper straddles the line between these two viewpoints by looking at a grassroots-
driven slum upgrading process that has recently been institutionalized within a city development
strategy. Through the re-blocking pilot project in Cape Town, the Informal Settlement Network
(ISN), made up of informal settlement residents and leaders across the city, and their allied NGO
the Community Organization Resource Center (CORC), have partnered with the city government
to incrementally improve the structure and service provision in overcrowded informal
settlements by reorganizing shacks according to an organized spatial layout. Settlement
communities envision and design the layout of their settlement and begin savings schemes to
contribute to their new shacks financially, CORC and ISN help facilitate the technical process,
and the city provides water and sanitation connections to the new re-blocked settlements. The
push-and-pull between the varying perspectives and processes of each actor encompasses
discourses of both participatory development and radical democracy/social mobilization.
Through enabling a dialectic between bottom-up and top-down actors in which each actor is able
to maintain its distinct identity, re-blocking allows for sources of productive tension and for the
re-imagining of new forms of citizenship in “radically incremental” ways.
Throughout the paper, I utilize the term “citizen-state engagement” to refer to the sphere
where citizens and the state operate together. This sphere has been characterized in other
literature as the “participatory sphere”, however, as the word “participation” is often tied up with
specific participatory-development approaches, I have chosen to use the term citizen-state
engagement to encompass all types of planned interactions, collaborations, and contestations,
that occur between citizens and the state with the goal of effecting some sort of societal change.
While citizen-state engagement can involve a spectrum of citizen’s groups and happen at any
level of government, the primary focus of this paper is on a grassroots community organization’s
interactions with a municipal government.
Chapter 2 reviews critical scholarship on citizen-state engagement, exploring both top-
down and bottom-up approaches and criticisms often rallied against them. It then investigates
ideas about what factors contribute to the transformational potential of citizen-state engagement
efforts—by transformational potential, I mean the ability of a specific citizen-state engagement

2
effort to have an impact that extends beyond the bounds of the project itself to affect economic,
political, social, or structural dynamics of society.
Chapter 3 looks at a particular instance of citizen-state engagement, the re-blocking
partnership in Cape Town, in depth. First, however, it outlines the history of the South African
Shack Dweller’s International Alliance (which is the network that contains the bottom-up
organizational partners of the re-blocking policy), and examines one of its previous efforts to
engage the state on housing policy which resulted in a ‘People’s Housing Process’. It discusses
how South Africa’s market-driven housing subsidy policy emerged under the government’s
neoliberal Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR) program, and examines the efforts
of the SA SDI Alliance to engage with the national government to produce a more community-
driven housing process within the housing subsidy policy. After examining the recent shift in
both the national government and the SA SDI Alliance from focusing on individual housing
delivery to advocating for more holistic settlement upgrading, this chapter goes on to explore
how re-blocking emerged as a community-driven process, and how the partnership between the
City of Cape Town and the SA SDI Alliance developed.
Chapter 4 analyzes the re-blocking partnership as a dialectical process where top-down
and bottom-up rituals exist in tension with each other. It examines how each actor has
maintained its distinct identity, instead of morphing or collapsing into the other, and how this has
allowed for a productive tension to form that is capable of producing both physical and non-
tangible outcomes that are beneficial to both sides. It contrasts this with the People’s Housing
Process, which was created to fit within the nationally defined housing policy, and thus did not
allow top-down and bottom-up processes to exist in tension with each other.
The concluding chapter explores how the productive tension that emerges through the re-
blocking process has the potential to usher in new notions of citizenship beyond the liberal-
democratic conception of citizenship employed by modern states. Combining Henri Lefebvre’s
notion of the right of city dwellers to appropriate and participate in the creation of urban space
with Edgar Pieterse’s conception of radical incrementalism, I conceive of an “incremental right
to the city” that emerges not through radical societal restructuring, but through strategic
engagements and negotiations between citizens and the state. Through the back and forth process
of negotiating and working through tensions that arise from its dialectical process, I argue, re-
blocking has the potential to incrementally empower city inhabitants in influencing the processes
and imaginaries that produce urban space.

3
Chapter
2:
Citizen-‐State
Engagement:
Top-‐down
and
bottom-‐up

strategies

This chapter describes various approaches to and motivations for citizen-state
engagement. It will first distinguish between top-down and bottom-up approaches, before
delving into the characteristics that emerge across literatures of political and social sciences and
critical development studies as being indicative of transformative citizen-state engagement, and
concluding with a discussion of how citizen-state engagement relates to new notions about
citizenship.
In this paper, top-down approaches to citizen-state engagement refer to state-led
strategies for engaging citizens, often through the framework of participatory governance and
development, while bottom-up approaches refer to grassroots or community-driven efforts to
mobilize and engage the state, whether through collaboration or conflict. In reality, any effort at
citizen-state engagement involves both citizens and the state, and thus the categorization of
efforts as either top-down or bottom-up is simplistic, and the two should not be thought of as
mutually exclusive. While acknowledging the problems with using simplistic terms such as these,
I nevertheless find them useful as a starting point for broadly distinguishing between various
approaches. Utilizing these terms will be helpful later on in understanding some of the tensions
and conflicts that emerge from the re-blocking process, which is both community-driven and
state-supported.
The
mutual
realm

Any attempt to study the interactions of citizens and governments must first look at what
is assumed about each party and their roles and responsibilities to each other. Through a classical
economic lens, government and citizens were understood to operate in separate realms—the
government operating in the public realm and responsible for producing non-excludable and non-
rival goods such as security, and citizens operating in the market and producing private goods.
Any interactions between the public and private realms only occurred as the two realms
supported each other—a term labeled by Peter Evans as “complementarity.” Evans gives the
example of the state providing a rule-governed environment, which supports the production
efficiency of private actors (Evans, 1996).
However, more modern understandings of state and society have challenged the notion
that the two exist in entirely separate realms. V. and E. Ostrom’s work studying metropolitan
governance in California in the 1960s showed that governance can be polycentric—with citizens
and government working together in the production of public goods, and led to notion that there
are more types of goods than just purely public or purely private goods (Ostrom, 2010). Evans
has theorized that synergy between government and citizens occurs not only through
complementarity, where the two separate realms support each other, but also through
embeddedness, whereby citizens and public officials connect across the public/private divide. He
fleshes out the concept of embeddedness by looking at cases in Taiwan where farmers and public
officials have worked together to operate irrigation systems, and in Northeast Brazil, where the
ties between public health officials and individuals have ensured communities’ commitment to
health (Evans, 1996).
Many different fields have studied the political, social, and economic implications of the
concept that government and citizens do not operate in entirely separate realms. Beginning with

4
this idea, this chapter will now explore ways that citizens and the state engage with each other
and operate together.
Participatory
development:
You
are
cordially
invited
to
participate

A top-down framework for understanding how citizens and the state should work
together that has emerged in the past 30 years is the idea of participatory development.
Participatory development emerged in an international context that encouraged state
decentralization and other free-market principles outlined in the Washington Consensus such as
privatization of public entities and deregulation. Shifting power from central to local
governments was thought not only to increase the efficiency of service delivery, but also to
encourage the growth of democracy by bringing the state closer to the people. It was believed
that strong local governments would help the Global South better manage large service deficits
and increase democratic reform through government accountability and citizen participation.
However, it was soon realized that purely technocratic approaches to decentralization would not
in and of themselves lead to greater realized democracy.
In response to this realization, development institutions began advocating a “participatory
development” agenda that recognized that development is a social process affected by culture
and local realities. Development institutions began encouraging beneficiary involvement in
development projects, with a goal of local empowerment. Many development efforts began
utilizing tools such as the Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), a qualitative research approach
developed by Robert Chambers that uses mapping techniques in order to learn from locals and
incorporate local knowledge into development programs. Through participatory development
and participatory governance, the focus is on encouraging communities to be involved in
development projects and governance processes that affect them (Mohan & Stokke, 2000).
Mohan and Stokke describe participatory development as a new form of neoliberalism—
“revisionist neoliberalism”—that considers that increasing civic participation in government
arenas must go hand in hand with decentralization in order for democratization to develop and
marginalized groups to be empowered.
The participatory development approach has received much criticism for employing a
mechanical approach to local empowerment. Instead of seeing the bigger picture of societal
inequality and marginalization, participatory development, much like the Washington Consensus
itself, has been implemented in a technocratic and project-driven way. Mohan and Stokke note
that revisionist neoliberal strategies for participation assert a “harmony model of power,” which
assumes that power comes from within and thus that “empowerment” is something that can be
unleashed as communities work together (Mohan & Stokke, 2000). This view ignores the
economic and political structural changes that are truly necessary for marginalized actors to have
a voice and allows development interventions to hyper-focus on the “local” as a means to
achieve empowerment (Hickey & Mohan, Relocating Participation within a Radical Politics of
Development, 2005).
Paul Heller notes that the assumption that decentralization would automatically enhance
democracy and citizen engagement in developing countries was ill informed; indeed, many of the
colonial regimes of the global South operated as decentralized authorities. Indirect rule emerged
as a way to give traditional ‘native’ rulers more involvement in colonial governments, but in
reality authoritarianism was still pursued, with village chiefs merely acting as “local despots” to
the colonial authorities’ ultimate power, a phenomenon Mamdani hailed as “decentralized
despotism” (Mamdani, 1999). Modern decentralization strategies have also similarly ignored

5
power dynamics, and the type of citizen-state engagement that emerges through participatory
development has been criticized for the same ‘patron-client’ sentimentality where citizens have
been “invited” to participate in a pre-ordained structural order and process.
The financial pressure that local governments face also plays an enormous role in
determining how participatory processes play out. Because political decentralization has often
occurred without fiscal decentralization, local governments must often rely on outside sources of
funding for service provision. Thus, in tripartite partnerships between governments, private
actors, and citizens that emerge to enhance service delivery, those with the financial power take
on a superior role. Miraftab explains how this has occurred in South Africa’s housing subsidy
scheme, which was a partnership between low-income households, private housing developers,
and local governments to deliver 1 million houses to low-income households within five years.
This policy, which will be discussed more in depth in Chapter 3, dictated that housing
construction was to be a partnership where all actors had an equal say. However, the government
allowed the private housing developers to control the process, as they held the fiscal power
(Miraftab, 2004c). Attuyer’s recent study of a collaborative urban regeneration project in Dublin
founds similar results, as private real estate actors ended up controlling the project. As she says,
“Market pressures were given priority over community needs, contradicting local and central-
state rhetorical emphasis on community engagement” (Attuyer, 2015, p. 16).
Kothari and Cooke note that in development and governance, participatory rhetoric has
been given an almost “religious authority” and can do no wrong (Kothari & Cooke, 2001).
Miraftab explains how participatory rhetoric uses a particular brand of “government-friendly”
participation to mask exclusion elsewhere. As she notes, decentralization and participatory
development have allowed some disadvantaged people to be brought into the participatory
sphere. She labels this as the “invited” space of citizenship, made up primarily of grassroots
organizations and community groups that seek out coping mechanisms for hardship without
directly challenging the power structure of society. Those types of collective action that directly
confront authorities and challenge the status quo are still excluded from participation, and
operate only in an “invented” space of citizenship (Miraftab, 2004a). In this sense, participation
is put forth as something that is defined and “granted” by the state, which only further ingrains
the power disparity between states and disadvantaged actors.
Participatory development rhetoric can also allow governments to justify exclusive
policies as being a product of public “choice.” Miraftab (2012) relates the neoliberal urban
development strategies of Cape Town to the city’s own urban exclusionary policies during the
colonial era. While in the colonial city, segregation and the creation of forced residence locations
for blacks was rationalized through a “sanitation discourse” in the name of promoting public
health, today, Cape Town’s creation of City Improvement Districts (CIDs) creates “privileged
locations” for the elite and justifies them through the discourse of “crime reduction.” Miraftab
notes that placing the CID policy within a framework of participatory and inclusive governance
allows the city to institutionalize urban exclusion by claiming that citizens within these
improvement districts have been involved in their creation.
Another common criticism of top-down approaches to citizen-state engagement is that
they have a tendency to treat citizens as homogenous and ignore power and politics at play
within civil society and community groups. As Eversole notes, “Grassroots groups work in
contexts which are no less political for being grassroots” (Eversole, 2003, p. 791). Failing to
understand the complexities within communities can lead to elite capture of the process, and

6
simply creating spaces for participation does not mean that all groups have the same ability or
disposition to participate (Cornwall & Coelho, 2007).
Some critics have argued that the participatory development framework as it exists
cannot be redeemed; Cooke and Kothari (2001) have put forth the position that participatory
development is an unjust exercise of power and have gone so far as to label it tyrannical. In their
view, by ignoring existing power dynamics at play in society, participatory development has
served only to reinforce those power dynamics. However, for all of the criticisms it has received,
the discourse of “participation in governance and development” still prevails among most
government and development actors, and its study and implementation are given a high priority.
Radical
democracy:
fostering
change
from
below

In contrast to the participatory development approach to citizen-state engagement put
forth by state and development institutions, grassroots groups are often motivated to engage with
governments through a desire to create their own path to economic development and take charge
of their own destinies. Mohan and Stokke describe “participation from below” as a post-Marxist
form of radical democracy, where citizens are motivated by a desire to mobilize against the state
and develop their own political agency through social movements (Mohan & Stokke, 2000). This
approach views power not as something that can be fostered from within, but instead sees
empowerment as requiring structural political and economic transformation.
While the goal of most grassroots groups in their interactions with the state is to pressure
governments to change the status quo, there are a variety of ideas about how best for grassroots
groups to engage with governments in order to effect transformation--some techniques are more
conflictual in nature, others are more collaborative. It is difficult to place techniques definitively
in a category of being “conflictual” or “collaborative”—in reality all grassroots approaches to
interacting with government fit more on a spectrum than they do in one category or the other.
However, this section will broadly generalize techniques that are seen as more conflictual verses
those that are seen as more collaborative.
Grassroots conflictual techniques advocate that citizens assert their rights through direct
opposition with the government. Within the sphere of grassroots organizing in informal
settlements, which is most relevant for this paper, this can be through mobilizing citizens to
engage in activities such as street protests or land invasions, or through judicial means like suing
government agencies for illegal evictions. In Cape Town, the Western Cape Anti-Eviction
Campaign (AEC) demonstrates a grassroots organization that engages in direct opposition with
the government. Made up of members who have been threatened by eviction, it seeks to demand
the full spectrum of citizenship rights for the poor through defying state-sanctioned evictions. Its
members engage in protests and sit-ins and defiant actions such as reconnecting illegal water
connections or breaking new locks in order to reoccupy homes. State response to and media
portrayal of conflictual types of engagement by grassroots organizations is often negative and at
times violent; in the case of AEC, the state has opposed mass protests with tear gas and by
detaining or imprisoning activists (Miraftab & Wills, 2005).
In contrast, grassroots collaborative techniques often focus on negotiating and partnering
with governments to bring about change. The type of collaborative grassroots organizing most
relevant to this paper has its roots in the Indian Alliance, formed in 1987 when three Indian
organizations entered into a partnership. The organizations consisted of the National Slum
Dwellers Federation—a community based organization made up of slum dwellers founded by
Jockin Arputham, Mahila Milan—an organization of poor women who engage in savings

7
schemes, and the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC)—an NGO made
up of social work professionals. The Indian Alliance has focused on using the technical capacity
and political engagement skills of SPARC and the activism and local knowledge of the urban
poor through NSDF and Mahila Milan to foster negotiations and long-term collaborations with
government to improve the lives of the urban poor. Some of their key tactics include developing
the financial power of the poor through savings groups and developing the negotiating power of
the poor through conducting enumerations--a process where community members collect data on
their settlements and their residents, essentially a “community-driven census.”
Sassen (2000) notes that globalization has opened up a transnational sphere, what she
calls the “geography of centrality”—places linked not by their physical proximity but by their
situational proximity. This allows for, as she says, a “new politics by traditionally disadvantaged
actors operating in this new transnational economic geography” (p. 49). This can be seen in the
way that the Indian Alliance’s methodology has spread among the urban poor throughout the
world. The Indian Alliance is now one member in a global network of organizations of the urban
poor in 33 countries called Slum Dwellers International (SDI). Through this network, the urban
poor in various countries learn from each other through horizontal learning exchanges and
documenting and publicizing successes. Appadurai (2001) claims that the mobilization of the
urban poor through the Indian Alliance and subsequent members of the SDI network is a new
form of deep democracy that represents efforts to reconstitute citizenship through “governance
from below”.
Bottom-up approaches to citizen-state engagement are not without criticisms of their own,
however. For those that operate under the assumption that radical democracy and bottom-up
approaches are the remedy to the failures of state-driven participatory approaches, Mohan and
Stokke remind that resistance is not always progressive and social movements are not always
about enhancing rights; local politics should not be viewed as simple or idealized (Mohan &
Stokke, 2000). Heller notes that efforts to build up capacity and empowerment through social
movements are often hindered by the lack of a centralized process and the difficulty of sustaining
social movements over time. Further, proponents of radical democracy can suffer from the same
assumptions of local homogeneity as proponents of participatory democracy; it cannot be
assumed all citizens come from the same place or have the same perspective, and in reality it is
rare for an entire community to come together under one specific cause (Heller, 2001).
Approaches that are more collaborative, such as SDI’s methodology, have been criticized
for allowing grassroots movements to be co-opted by the top-down participatory approaches of
government. Contrary to Appadurai, Roy (2009) claims that the collaborative approaches of the
Indian Alliance cannot be categorized solely as “governance from below”; rather, these
techniques both resist and comply with top-down structures—the urban poor are both
empowered and self-disciplined. For instance, the Indian Alliance’s enumeration data was
utilized in the World Bank-funded “Mumbai Urban Transport Project”, and the Alliance played a
role in the project’s resettlement of 20,000 families. This project has received criticism for
relocating families in far-off locations without regard for their distance from their work sites.
Roy questions whether the collaborative approach can survive the “violence” of urban renewal,
noting that in the wake of the controversial McKinsey & Company “Vision Mumbai” report
which called for a slum-free city, and the subsequent rise in violent slum demolitions in Mumbai,
the Indian Alliance was criticized by rights-based approach movements for not taking more
direct action against the state.
On the other hand, the Indian Alliance claimed that the communities of their federation

8
did not want to engage in direct defiant action against the state, for fear of retribution. As a
leader from the Indian Alliance posted on the SDI website during this time:
Communities of the poor, especially women, are clear that spurts of defiance in which
their youth and men participate with support from middle class activists look good on TV
and in the local newspaper, but they produce angst and fear for the women and children
themselves. (Sheela Patel, 2005, as quoted in Roy, 2009, p. 175).
Just as participatory development faces criticism for not seeing the bigger picture and for merely
providing coping mechanisms for the marginalized, so grassroots approaches can face an equal
amount of scrutiny for focusing too much on the big picture; if mobilizing against the state in
order to transform power structures of society leaves the urban poor more vulnerable, it cannot
be assumed that that is necessarily the preferred or morally-demanded action. Thus, on the one
hand, taking a collaborative grassroots approach runs the risk of being co-opted by the top-down
participatory development paradigms; on the other, taking a rights-based, confrontational
approach risks leaving the vulnerable in society less secure and more vulnerable to reprisal.
Cultivating
Transformational
Change

The fundamental difficulties of citizen-state engagement lie in the discrepancy in
motivations and goals of the different actors. Top-down participatory development approaches
seek to affect tangible outcomes such as service delivery and poverty reduction. Bottom-up
approaches seek to change power structures of society and help marginalized actors realize
citizenship. Some would argue that this fundamental difference in the underlying goal negates
the possibility for successful collaboration between the state and grassroots actors.
As was mentioned at the outset, segmenting processes of citizen-state engagement as
either top-down or bottom-up can be problematic because dualism tends to promote moralistic
thinking--the idea that one way is right and the other is wrong. Pieterse (2008) describes the
problems that can result from promoting one particular approach as ideal:
The problem is that progressives tend to fall into one of two kinds of traps: either they
assign everything to the realm of dominating power, manifested in tendencies by
governments and development agencies to use progressive-sounding discourses to simply
camouflage new forms of rule and oppression; or they uncritically buy into the familiarity
of left-sounding discourses and assume that a neat consensus-driven politics will bring
redistributive politics and outcomes into the world. (p. 172)
Ranganathan explores the relationship between institutionalized citizen participation and
grassroots organizing around water access in Bangalore, and argues for a view that does not see
the two as operating entirely separately, but explores the “dialectics of participation” that
emerges from the relationship between the two. While the government utilizes the financial
contributions of peripheralized residents to improve their water service delivery targets,
peripheralized residents utilize their institutionalized financial participation to make claims on
their right to place; thus, financialized and insurgent strategies co-constitute each other.
(Ranganathan, 2013).
In the chapters that follow, I will show how the re-blocking partnership in Cape Town
exemplifies the idea that the relationship between state-driven development and grassroots
organizing techniques produces a tension of opposites that has the potential to be fruitful and
create change. First, however, I will briefly explore theories for what makes certain cases of
engagement between citizens and the state successful and others unsuccessful. There is no metric
for determining this, and in fact many of the criticisms of participatory development mentioned

9
earlier are related to it tendency to view participation as a formula that can be implemented to
empower citizens. Defining success depends upon the goals and motivations of the actors
involved, and there can be a multitude of perspectives on that even within one particular project.
However, exploring the literature on the factors that influence the outcomes of interactions
between state actors and citizens will be helpful in assessing what has shaped the outcomes of
the re-blocking process. This section will first look at characteristics of the two actors--the
government entity and citizens—that can affect outcomes, and then will move beyond this to
look at how the broader characteristics of politics and society and new notions of citizenship can
influence outcomes.
Characteristics
of
government

Most literature agrees that a necessary pre-condition for citizen-state engagement to
thrive is that it be supported by a committed political agent (Heller, 2001; Cornwall & Coelho,
2007; Hickey & Mohan, 2005). While this may seem entirely obvious, those that operate from
the standpoint of bottom-up/radical democracy approaches may overlook the necessity of state
support to effect change. Mohan and Stokke note that social movements must “realize the power
of the state and not demean it” (Mohan & Stokke, 2000, p. 260). In Mahmud’s study of health
system improvements in Bangladesh, he found that “the exclusion of officials from the invited
space creates hostility and conflict and undermines the credibility of people’s participation
efforts” (Mahmud, 2007, p. 73).
Other scholars have also noted that citizen-state engagement is enabled by competitive
political environments. Evans notes that the degree of shared interest between government and
civil society is largely determined by the level of political competition that a government faces
(Evans, 1996). Heller looked at three cases of decentralization in South Africa, Porto Alegre, and
Kerala, and found that decentralization helped promote participation in both Kerala and Porto
Alegre because each case had political parties that operated in a competitive environment. In
South Africa, the African National Congress became all-powerful after the end of apartheid and
faced no political competition; thus, its decentralization reforms were less successful at engaging
civil society (Heller, 2001).
Finally, citizen-state engagement needs to be supported by a government with adequate
administrative structures and a grounding legal framework (Evans, 1996; Cornwall & Coelho,
2007). Hickey and Mohan also found that successful cases of participatory governance in Kerala
and West Bengal were located within a broader program of state reform (Mohan & Stokke,
2000).
Characteristics
of
citizens

On the other side are the characteristics that have been present in citizen groups when
citizen-state engagement has been successful. Civil society must not only be organized and have
capacity for collective action, it must also have the skill of engaging with government (Heller,
2001; Cornwall & Coelho, 2007). Heller claims that young democracies often struggle from a
lack of political competency. He claims this is partially why South Africa’s decentralization
policies failed: “Because the vast majority of South Africans have until recently never enjoyed
the fruits of representative democracy, most citizens have yet to develop the basic competencies,
especially those of interfacing with representatives and state bureaucracies, that allow for
effective participation” (Heller, 2001, p. 148). Coelho and Cornwall claim that in order for

10
citizen-state engagement to impact society, people must recognize their rights as citizens instead
of viewing themselves as clients or beneficiaries (Cornwall & Coelho, 2007).
Formal or informal groups that emerge to represent communities must both have
legitimacy in the community and must accurately reflect all of the various groups and sectors
within a community (Eversole, 2003; Cornwall & Coelho, 2007). Heller also notes that social
movements must remain autonomous from the state, claiming that part of what hindered South
Africa’s attempts at democratic decentralization was the fact that after apartheid ended, social
movements that used to represent disadvantaged groups got absorbed into the new government
(Heller, 2001; Pieterse, 2008).
Overarching
environment
and
the
meaning
of
citizenship

Increasingly, literature on the interactions between citizens and the state has looked
beyond what characteristics are necessary for government actors or grassroots actors in order to
make engagement meaningful, to looking at the implications that social, economic, and political
environments have on citizen-state engagement and how approaches to citizen-state engagement
can engage with those environments to transform power dynamics and allow for the emergence
of new conceptions of citizenship rights.
Some scholars have noted that transformational citizen-state engagement must grapple
with issues of institutional change (Gaveta, 2004). This involves having an immanent
understanding of development as an underlying process tied into the broader political
environment, rather than an imminent understanding of development as a series of technical
interventions (Hickey & Mohan, 2004). Others have found that citizen-state engagement is most
fruitful when it begins “on the ground” with interactions between communities and street-level
bureaucrats, as this allows actors to build trust (Evans, 1996; Tendler & Freedheim, 1994).
Giddens has noted that the modern institution of the state requires individuals to put their trust in
an abstract system, as opposed to traditional, pre-modern sources of trust such as kinship systems.
He notes that “facework commitments”, or points of connection between individuals and
representatives of an abstract system, are places where trust can either be built or broken down
(Giddens, 1990). Thus, on the ground interactions between communities and street-level
bureaucrats can help generate the trust that is necessary for citizen-state engagement to be
productive.
Citizen-state engagement that takes the form of partnership projects between
communities and that state must have an inclusive institutional design from the beginning, and
the community should have a strong role in the project initiation and design (Cornwall & Coelho,
2007; Miraftab, 2004c). It is not enough to involve citizens in collaborative approaches; they
must be co-founders and co-designers of the project. As will be explored more later, the South
African housing subsidy program was conceived of without input from low-income communities
and their grassroots organizations; the government failed to realize and take advantage of
communities’ own capacities in funding, designing, and building their own homes, and project
implementation suffered because of it (Miraftab, 2004c).
Any effort at citizen-state engagement is inevitably tied to what citizenship actually
means, and many scholars have begun exploring new notions of citizenship that go beyond the
modern ‘liberal-democratic’ conception of citizenship as a set of obligations and entitlements
granted and legitimized solely by the state. The alternate ways of conceiving of citizenship rights
are many—from Appadurai’s ‘governance from below’, to Holston’s conception of ‘insurgent
citizenship, to Hickey and Mohan’s framing of ‘civic-republican citizenship’, to citizenship

11
ideas arising from Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ notion (Hickey & Mohan, 2004; Appadurai,
2001; Holston, 1998). What these ideas have in common is that they grapple with notions of
citizenship that involve actors other than the state defining and claiming an array of political,
social, and spatial rights that are excluded from the state’s formal conception of citizenship. The
concluding section of this paper will explore some of these new conceptions of citizenship in
more detail, but suffice it to say here that for citizen-state engagement to have transformative
power, it must be open to grappling with new notions of citizenship outside of the legal
definition of formal citizenship.
This chapter has given a brief description of various approaches to citizen-state
engagement—namely, state-implemented participatory development, and community-driven
grassroots organizing—and has explored their origins and their critiques. It has argued that the
relationship between top-down and bottom-up approaches is worth exploring, and has discussed
some of the factors that affect the outcomes of citizen-state engagement efforts. The next section
will look at a particular citizen-state engagement project that has arisen between grassroots
actors and the City of Cape Town.

12
Chapter
3:
The
SA
SDI
Alliance
and
its
engagements
with
the
state

On February 10, 2015, representatives from the Cape Town city government and from
the South African Shack Dwellers International Alliance gathered with community members
from the informal settlement of Flamingo Crescent in Lansdowne Civic Center to celebrate the
official re-blocking of Flamingo Crescent. Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille gave an address
commending the collaboration of the city and the community, and presented community
members with certificates of tenure, along with official street names and addresses. Re-blocking
is defined as “the reconfiguration and repositioning of shacks in very dense informal settlements
according to a community-drafted spatial framework” (“CORC Annual Report”, SA SDI
Alliance, 2014, p. 33). In 2013, the City of Cape Town adopted re-blocking as an official slum
upgrading strategy and partnered with South Africa’s Shack Dwellers International Alliance
(hereafter referred to as “SA SDI Alliance” or “the Alliance”) on three pilot projects to redesign
the layout of informal settlements to allow for better use of space, better service provision, and a
safer environment. This section will give an overview of the SA SDI Alliance and its history of
collaborating with the state before delving into the specifics of the re-blocking partnership in
Cape Town. After looking at the origins of the SA SDI Alliance, it will first explore the
organization’s attempts to engage the national government in institutionalizing a people’s
housing process within South Africa’s housing subsidy scheme, then discuss how this experience
influenced their later efforts to collaborate with the city of Cape Town on re-blocking, and
finally take an in-depth look at the process of re-blocking.
History
of
the
SA
SDI
Alliance

The SA SDI Alliance currently consists of five organizations, whose roles can be read
about in Table 1. The organizations making up the Alliance have gone through many changes,
but they spur initially from the South African Homeless Peoples’ Federation (SAHPF), a
network of people from informal settlements who began savings schemes across the country in
the 1990s. The Federation was formalized in 1994, after learning exchanges in 1991 and 1992
connected leaders with the work of the National Slum Dwellers Federation and the Indian
Alliance in India (“History”, SA SDI Alliance Website). The SAHPF was initially supported by
an NGO called the People’s Dialogue on Land and Shelter. The SA SDI Alliance was one of the
founding members of the broader Slum/Shack Dwellers International network and remains one
of the most active members today. From the beginning, the SAHPF grew out of the Indian
Alliance’s methodology of “self-help economics” and was rooted in the idea that the poor can
better their own circumstances through organizing and savings. The SA SDI Alliance developed
during a time when global political forces emphasized the development of “efficient states” that
were financially stable and self-sufficient. The fact that the Alliance was founded upon the idea
of self-sufficiency allowed it to fit within a global context that valued economic competence, and
may have helped it gain traction with the state from early on.

13
Error! Not a valid bookmark self-reference.Table 1: South African SDI Alliance Partners1
Alliance Member Description
Informal Settlement
Network (ISN)
Agglomeration of settlement-level organizations of the poor at the city-wide
scale in Cape Town, eThekwini, Johannesburg, and other cities
Federation of the
Urban Poor (FEDUP)
Nationwide federation of slum dwellers who aim to build organized
communities to create sustainable/self reliant communities. Core activities
are women-led daily savings, enumeration, pragmatic partnerships w/state,
incremental informal settlement upgrading
Community
Organization
Resource Center
(CORC)
NGO that supports the social processes of community-based organizations
by facilitating engagements with formal actors like the state. Supports the
development of savings, enumeration, and community-led development
strategies
uTshani Fund Formal bridging finance institution that provides loans for community-led
house construction and incremental informal settlement upgrading.
Community Upgrading Financing Facility (CUFF) is administered by
uTshani and funds small-scale incremental upgrading projects of ISN
iKhayalami Research, design, and manufacture affordable shelter solutions that are easy
to transport and quick to erect. Contributed expertise and products to
organized communities undergoing spatial reorganizing.
In 2002 the Community Organization Resource Centre (CORC) was founded, and shortly
thereafter replaced the People’s Dialogue as the primary supporting NGO for the Federation. In
2004, a segment of the SAHPF was renamed the Federation of the Urban and Rural Poor
(FEDUP), which became the primary federation of urban poor connected to the SA SDI Alliance.
Since 1992, FEDUP has mobilized nearly 25,000 savers across the country (“Savings,” SA SDI
Alliance Website). Following the SDI methodology, the SA SDI Alliance seeks to create
inclusive and pro-poor cities using the techniques of community mobilizing, savings, settlement
profiling and enumerations, negotiating with local authorities, and promoting learning exchanges
through the SDI network.
People’s
Housing
Process:
fitting
a
people’s
process
into
a
market-‐driven
paradigm

The SA SDI Alliance organizations have a long history of seeking to engage with the
South African government, particularly around housing for the poor. South Africa itself has a
deep and complex relationship with housing. This section will look at the attempts by the SA
SDI Alliance to collaborate with the South African government on inclusive housing delivery
through the creation of the People’s Housing Process. As this section will discuss, the SA SDI
Alliance attempted to create a people-driven housing process that would fit within the
government’s pre-defined market-driven housing paradigm.
The exclusion of non-white South Africans from housing and basic services was a key
way that apartheid was enforced, and the Group Areas Act of 1950 mandated urban segregation
that pushed many black South Africans out of their homes in the city and into poorly serviced
townships. Thus, at the dawn of the democracy in 1994, “ housing for all” was one of the key
themes pushed by the new government. The South African constitution in 1996 proclaimed
1
Source: http://sasdialliance.org.za/about-us/alliance-organogram/)

14
housing as a fundamental right for all, and the right to housing is seen in the country as one of
the central symbols of democracy. From 1992-1994, the National Housing Forum, made up of
members of government, development organizations, community representatives, and the private
housing sector, deliberated on how best to implement a redistributive housing policy to address
the housing injustices of the apartheid government (Newton, 2013). What emerged from the
process was the 1994 Housing White Paper, which introduced the Housing Subsidy Scheme
(HSS). The basic premise of the HSS is that eligible households under a certain income threshold
can apply to receive a one-time housing subsidy from the government of an amount linked to
their income level (Bradlow, 2013). Although theoretically households can use the subsidy
amount individually, towards the purchase or building of their own home, in reality, the subsidy
amount is not high enough for poor households to buy a home of their own, and the subsidies are
most often utilized at the project-level, whereby the subsidy amount of a group of approved
individuals will go to a private housing developer to buy and service tracts of land for that group.
Once housing developers have paid their own salaries out of the small subsidy amount, the
remaining amount is spent on providing serviced land, and usually recipients must pay for their
own housing construction (Miraftab, 2004c).
The government faced an enormous challenge in developing its housing policy, as the
urban housing backlog in 1994 was estimated to be over 1.2 million (Republic of South Africa,
2014). The housing backlog has grown significantly as the number of informal settlements has
grown. Although the government achieved provision of 3 million houses in May 2013, the
housing backlog remained at 2.1 million households in 2012 (“Housing,” The South African
Government Wepage; “Strategic Plan 2014-2019,” Department of Human Settlements).
Throughout the program’s history, delivery has been hampered by bureaucratic hurdles as
responsibilities have been divided among different tiers of government. Housing subsidies are
administered through the provincial government, while municipal governments remains
responsible for service provision (Bradlow, 2013). In addition, the housing projects carried out
under the subsidy scheme often end up moving poor families to land on the periphery of cities
that is far from their places of employment, a sardonic echo of both the colonial housing
provision and the apartheid-era housing provision that relegated non-whites to locations outside
the cities (Miraftab, 2003).
It is not the goal of this paper to go into an in depth analysis of the failures of the Housing
Subsidy Scheme, however, a few critiques are worth noting to understand how and why the SA
SDI Alliance began its interactions with the government around the housing subsidy program.
Bradlow notes that the Housing Subsidy Scheme was initially crafted under the auspices of the
Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP), a framework pursued by the national
government that focused on the redistribution of resources and inclusive citizenship. However,
the national government took a massive turn in approach when it implemented the highly
neoliberal Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR) policy in 2006, making its key
values efficiency and growth instead of justice and redistribution. What was initially crafted as a
policy to redistribute welfare after the racially biased housing policies of the apartheid
government was carried out under an overarching framework that prioritized efficiency and cost-
effectiveness.
Miraftab (2003) notes that the premise of the housing subsidy scheme was based on two
ill-informed assumptions. First, the government assumed that by mandating that housing
developers and beneficiaries sign a “social compact” agreeing to the terms of a project before a
project was implemented, it could guarantee that communities would be equal partners with

15
private developers. This substantiates some of the criticisms of participatory development
approaches outlined in chapter 2—namely, that participatory development mandates
“participation” in a technocratic way that neglects power disparities in society. In this case, the
government neglected to consider how the financial and power disparities between the two
groups would impact project design and implementation. A second ill-informed assumption by
the government was that once poor households had utilized their subsidy amounts, they would be
able to access additional credit through banks for further house improvements. The government
attempted to incentivize banks to grant loans to poor households through a variety of tools meant
to reduce risk, but this was to little effect, and poor households remained unable to access
additional credit once their subsidy amount was spent.
In the context of the massive backlog of housing and of growing frustration with the
housing subsidy process among the urban poor, SA SDI Alliance members began
communications with the government early on in order to develop a process that would work for
the poor. In 1994, representatives from the Homeless People’s Federation and the NGO People’s
Dialogue met with the National Housing Minister Joe Slovo to discuss finance mechanisms for
housing the poor (Bradlow, 2013). The Minister committed to providing R10 million towards the
establishment of a finance mechanism managed by the poor themselves in order to speed housing
delivery along as the poor waited to receive their subsidies. The idea was that this mechanism
would act as a revolving fund, where capital would be lent to the poor to construct their own
housing, and once they had received their government subsidies, they could repay the money
back into the fund to go towards other projects. The uTshani Fund was established in 1995 with
funds from international donors, and the R10 million from the Housing Ministry came through in
1996 (“uTshani Fund,” SA SDI Alliance Website). The development of the uTshani Fund was
one of the key influences and drivers of the Peoples Housing Process (PHP), a formal program
launched by the Ministry of Housing in 1998 to encourage a more people-centered housing
process which allowed for subsidies to be funneled directly to community-based organizations of
the urban poor. In addition, the PHP set up a Social Housing Fund to give technical support for
housing to NGOs (Miraftab, 2003). The PHP allows for the development of housing partnerships
and projects between the government, CBOs, and NGOs without the involvement of the private
sector. To date, the uTshani Fund has been the primary facilitator of housing delivered through
the PHP and had constructed over 15,000 houses by 2008 (“uTshani Fund,” SA SDI Alliance
Website; Bradlow, 2013).
Despite the fact that homes constructed through the PHP have been shown to be of better
quality and lower cost than homes constructed through private-developer projects, the PHP has
remained very underutilized and a majority of houses constructed through the HSS remain in the
hands of private developers (Miraftab, 2003). In 2002, in order to dissuade the elite capture that
often occurred as housing beneficiaries resold their subsidized homes, an amendment was added
to the HSS that required beneficiaries to contribute a small amount of their own funds in order to
receive the housing subsidy. For houses produced through the PHP, however, beneficiaries could
make their contribution through labor instead of financially. This caused private firms to take an
interest in the PHP, realizing that they could exploit the labor of beneficiaries to their advantage
(Newton, 2013). The government has made efforts to refocus the initial PHP principles through
an “Enhanced” People’s Housing Process (ePHP). While the ePHP remains an active part of
South Africa’s housing law, it has not “taken off” to the extent it seems that such an inclusive
process should. Bradlow (2013) theorizes the PHP has been difficult to mainstream because “the
long-standing enthusiasm for private contractor focused models of housing construction has

16
persisted in light of the legacy of GEAR” (p. 56). Furthermore, the PHP remains rooted in a
process focused on individual housing subsidies, rather than holistic neighborhood planning. The
decision for who is eligible to utilize subsidies for a specific project is still individualized, and
individual subsidy applications will be approved at different times, leading to a case where rather
than having a neighborhood that has been formalized as a whole, a neighborhood will have
houses and shacks side by side (S. Mxobo, personal interview, November 25, 2015).
In conclusion, the SA SDI Alliance’s efforts to collaborate with the national government
on a more inclusive housing strategy resulted in the institutionalization of the People’s Housing
Process, where housing subsidies for the poor could be funneled through community-based
organizations such as the uTshani Fund, rather than through private housing developers. While
the People’s Housing Process has had success in delivering homes to the urban poor, the fact that
it is rooted within the top-down, individual-housing-delivery process has imposed limitations on
its effectiveness and transformative potential. The following section will discuss how the SA SDI
Alliance shifted its focus from trying to fit itself into a state-defined housing process that was
created under the GEAR framework, to creating its own process for incremental settlement
upgrading and inviting the city to take part in the process.
Switching
Gears:
From
a
pre-‐defined
housing
paradigm
to
area-‐based
planning

In 2008, the SA SDI Alliance began to work to form a more broad-based network of the
urban poor called the Informal Settlement Network (ISN) that could come together at the city-
level. While the Homeless People’s Federation (by this time subsumed under the name FEDUP)
was comprised of membership-based savings groups and primarily made up of women, the
Informal Settlement Network allowed for a looser membership base and sought to incorporate
existing settlement leaders and other community-based organizations (such as the Coalition of
the Urban Poor and the Alliance of Rural Communities) into its structure (“ISN”, SA SDI
Alliance Website; Bradlow, 2013; Beck & Purcell, 2013). After a series of dialogues carried out
by community leaders of informal settlements in five cities, ISN formed with the goal of creating
a national urban network with capacity to lobby at both the city and national level for more
inclusive and community-driven planning (“ISN”, SA SDI Alliance Website). While FEDUP’s
primary role remained mobilizing women’s-led saving schemes and working with the
government and poor families on subsidy allocation, ISN would focus more on growing the
network, knowledge production and generation through settlement enumerations and exchanges,
and influencing city-wide upgrading agendas (“More about the FEDUP and ISN…”, SA SDI
Alliance, 2014).
As opposed to the Federation’s previous efforts to engage the government in the context
of its top-down, private housing delivery framework, the Alliance, with ISN in tow, now focused
on area-based planning in the form of community-driven, incremental, in-situ settlement
upgrading. The Alliance’s new engagement approach was strategic--the national government had
released its slum upgrading policy a few years prior, in a document that was surprisingly
progressive in its approach. The Breaking New Ground Policy, released in 2004, recognized that
the government’s prior efforts to accommodate informal settlement residents by relocating
residents to new houses through the housing subsidy program was insufficient. As the policy
proclaims:
There is however a need to acknowledge the existence of informal settlements and
recognize that the existing housing programme will not secure the upgrading of informal
settlements. There is also a need to shift the official policy response to informal

17
settlements from one of conflict or neglect, to one of integration and co-operation,
leading to the stabilization and integration of these areas into the broader urban fabric.
(Breaking New Ground, Section 4.1)
The approach that the Breaking New Ground policy proclaimed was formalized with the creation
of the Upgrading of Informal Settlements Program (UISP), laid out in Part 3 of South Africa’s
National Housing Code (2009). Through UISP, municipalities can apply for funding from the
national government for settlement upgrading programs. UISP advocates in-situ upgrading,
while recognizing that in some cases relocation may be necessary. It also encourages community
participation in the process (Department of Human Settlements, Republic of South Africa, 2009).
However, the actualization of the UISP has not lived up to its ideal of in-situ upgrading.
As Bradlow notes, set within the broader national top-down approach to housing, this policy has
had little political backing, and has been hindered by the fact that municipal projects require
provincial budget approval (Bradlow, 2013). Fieuw writes that because UISP did not lay out a
clear definition of what “slum upgrading” actually means, many UISP projects are in reality
conventional top-down housing projects under a different name (Fieuw, 2015).
With a broad understanding of the SA SDI Alliance’s previous efforts to engage the
national government on housing issues, and the new broader focus of both the Alliance and the
national government on slum upgrading instead of individual housing delivery, we now shift to
look at how the re-blocking partnership emerged in Cape Town between the city and the
Informal Settlement Network.
Re-‐blocking:
Synthesizing
a
community-‐driven
process
and
a
city
strategy

In March of 2009, a fire broke out in the informal settlement of Joe Slovo in Cape Town
that destroyed 512 shacks and left 1,500 people homeless (“Sheffield Road,” SA SDI Alliance,
2012). While fires breaking out in informal settlements are a common occurrence, this fire was
given special media attention—the Joe Slovo informal settlement is located along the N2
highway and was part of a contested national housing project that was in the midst of being
challenged in court. The N2 Gateway Project involved relocating the residents of Joe Slovo—a
settlement distinctly visible to tourists making their way from the Cape Town airport into the
city—to a new settlement 20 kilometers away (Beck & Purcell, 2013). Ironically, this project
was approved in 2004, the same year the national government released its “progressive”
Breaking New Ground policy calling for integrating informal settlements into the broader urban
fabric, exemplifying just how little the policy did to change action. The fire gave the SA SDI
Alliance a unique opportunity to work with the community to strategically rebuild shacks. The
SA SDI Alliance organization iKhayalami worked with community members in Joe Slovo to
reconfigure and reposition the shacks in the settlement in a more structured, organized layout
that better utilized space and made room for better service provision. This process has hence
come to be known as “re-blocking.”
The heightened media attention that the Joe Slovo settlement received allowed the SA
SDI Alliance to broadcast its work to the city, and the fact that the Joe Slovo re-blocking had
been completed at only 10 percent of the cost of more formal housing developments spurred the
interest of the city in the project. This led to the first meeting between the city’s Informal
Settlement Unit (ISU) and the Alliance in April 2009 (Bolnick, 2011). The Alliance and the ISU
discussed the possibility of working together on joint pilot projects at this and subsequent
meetings. However, the initial engagement process showed just how sharply the goals and
methods of each group varied. The Alliance wanted to take a holistic approach that focused on

18
reconfiguring the layout of settlements; the city only wanted to focus on service provision. The
Alliance wanted to focus work on settlements that faced the most risk—those lying in flood-
prone areas or areas at risk of natural disasters; the city wanted precisely the opposite. Despite
the difference in priorities, however, the parties agreed to continue moving the partnership
forward.
In October of 2009, ISN and CORC began working with Sheffield Road, a settlement of
167 households located on a road reserve near the N2 freeway, on the process of re-blocking.
Community members nominated a Project Committee of 13 people, and over the next year, the
community worked to begin savings schemes and conduct an enumeration of the settlement.
Implementing a community-driven and planned project was no easy feat—the planning process
saw residents argue over the size of the new shacks, the necessity of savings, and the layout of
the new settlement. Nonetheless, the community was able to work through its challenges
throughout the process, and by the end of 2011, the settlement was fully re-blocked and the city
had provided 19 toilets and taps to the settlement (“Sheffield Road,” SA SDI Alliance, 2012).
While the city and the Alliance continued to inch forward in their efforts to work together,
an increased focus on slum upgrading at the national level provided additional financial support
for the forthcoming collaboration. After a World Bank and Cities Alliance assessment of the
national slum upgrading program (UISP) concluded that more support and capacity was needed
for city governments to implement upgrading projects, the Department of Human Settlements
developed the National Upgrading Support Program (NUSP), which announced additional
funding mechanisms meant to supplement UISP funding (City of Cape Town, 2012). One of the
issues with UISP funding is that projects must follow a very strict order, and service provision
cannot be funded before security tenure is granted (Fieuw, 2015). The new Urban Settlements
Development Grant (USDG) would support city efforts focused on improving performance of
the built environment, and need not be used only for approved UISP projects. Thus, cities could
use grant funding to improve services in settlements that are not undertaking formal, nationally
approved upgrading projects.
The arrival of a more flexible funding mechanism happened at an opportune time for the
efforts of the city of Cape Town and the Alliance. Up until this point, discussions and
collaborations had occurred between the Alliance and the Informal Settlements Unit of the city,
without the official stamp of approval from the wider city government. In August of 2011, the
Alliance and the ISU presented their work in Sheffield Road to the recently elected Mayor of
Cape Town, Patricia de Lille, and the Mayor made an in-principal commitment to advancing the
partnership (“City of Cape Town adopts..”, SA SDI Alliance, 2013). This commitment was
documented in writing in April of 2012, when the City of Cape Town, CORC, and ISN signed a
Memorandum of Understanding agreeing to work together on projects to incrementally improve
informal settlements.
In July of 2013 the city moved to institutionalize re-blocking as an official strategy by
putting out a “Draft Policy to Inform the Proactive Re-blocking of Settlements” for public
comment (“City of Cape Town adopts..”, SA SDI Alliance, 2013). The policy was adopted on
November 5, 2013, and re-blocking has now been integrated into the City’s Five Year Integrated
Development Plan and the Cape Town Human Settlements Directorate’s Five Year Strategic
Plan. Re-blocking is framed by this city as a preparatory phase towards formal in situ upgrading
projects, with service provision for re-blocking efforts financed by Urban Settlement
Development Grants. Its grounding in community-led processes is clearly stated in city
documents. As is written in the city’s Integrated Development Plan 2013/2014 review:

19
The prioritisation of the re-blocking initiative forms part of a partnership cooperation
agreement with the Office of the Mayor, the Informal Settlements Network and the
Community Organisation Resource Centre. The focus of the re-blocking initiatives is to
reconfigure the location and positioning of informal structures into a more rationalised
layout, fostering a safer environment, creating far better living conditions, and enabling
easier access for the provision of basic services and emergency vehicles. This is an
initiative in which the local community takes ownership of the process, contributing to
more cohesive neighbourhoods. It also provides a platform for incremental upgrades to
formal tenure and ownership rights of these settlements. (City of Cape Town, 2014,
Strategic Focus Area 3, Program 3.4b)
The official Re-blocking Policy lays out how re-blocking fits into the broader city and national
development goals and assigns specific roles to all stakeholders including each project’s Steering
Committee, various city departments such as the Human Settlements Directorate and Utility
Services Directorate, and community organizations including NGOs and CBOs. The policy
makes sure to note that re-blocking is “not the commencement of the formal in situ upgrading of
the settlement by either the City or by the local community through the Upgrading of Informal
Settlements Programme or any other national housing programme,” but is rather a process that
puts settlements in a better position to undertake the execution of UISP projects (City of Cape
Town, 2013, p. 4). As one CORC employee described it, re-blocking functions as “more
organized temporary housing;” an interim step that lays the foundation for a final housing
solution (S. Mxobo, personal interview, November 25, 2015). The first three official pilot
projects took place in the settlements of Mtshini Wam, Kuku Town, and Flamingo Crescent from
2013-2014. The next section will give a closer look at how re-blocking works on a practical level
by describing the re-blocking process in the third pilot project, Flamingo Crescent.
Partnership
in
Practice:
How
Re-‐blocking
Works

Re-blocking involves a variety of stakeholders working together to incrementally
improve settlements. In each project, a steering committee is elected from within the settlement
that is responsible for project planning and design and for collecting and documenting savings
from community members. At the beginning of the project, the community agrees on the amount
that they will be responsible for contributing to the project through their savings—usually
between 10 and 20 percent of the total cost. In most cases, SA SDI Alliance NGOs have
provided the rest of the funding that goes towards top-structure construction, while the city funds
service installation through USDG grants. Collaborations have also emerged with student groups
from universities, as well as with other non-profit organizations, which have allowed for the
sharing of technical expertise, additional funding, and innovative developments such as vertical
vegetable gardens (“Mtshini Wam”, SA SDI Alliance, 2012). Frequent learning exchanges have
allowed community groups from other South African cities such as Durban to learn about the re-
blocking process, and federations of the urban poor from other countries such as Uganda,
Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Ghana have been brought to Cape Town to see the re-blocking projects
firsthand (MacPherson, 2013). Each pilot project has provided learning opportunities for all
involved and has ensured that the next project utilizes the learning from prior projects to its
advantage. What follows is a brief description of the re-blocking process in the third pilot project,
Flamingo Crescent. While each project plays out a little differently, this description will allow
for a general understanding of how re-blocking unfolds in a particular community.

20
Flamingo Crescent, a settlement of 450 residents and 104 shacks, first began engaging
with the Informal Settlement Network in 2012. When the community decided they wanted to
pursue re-blocking, they appointed a steering committee of nine members. While initially the
community was reluctant about contributing money to savings, community exchanges to
Sheffield Road and Mtshini Wam allowed them to see the impact of re-blocking and the
necessity of savings, and the community agreed to contribute 20 percent of the cost of re-
blocking through savings. With technical support from ISN and CORC, community members
conducted an enumeration in April 2012, which created a detailed geospatial and socioeconomic
profile of the settlement (Hendler, 2014). The settlement profile showed that the community
shared 14 chemical toilets and two water taps, and a lack of electricity caused the frequent
outbreak of fires from cooking. In 2013, CORC helped to facilitate collaboration between the
community and students from the Cape Town University of Technology, and the student group
assisted the community in developing the re-blocked layout. The community also partnered with
students from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the US, who helped to develop plans for a
community crèche that was to be funded by the Centre for Early Childhood Development.
From early on in their dialogue with the city, the community advocated for one-to-one
water and sewer connections and official street names and addresses for their homes
(Community Organization Resource Center, 2015). The re-blocking of shacks began in May
2014 and was done cluster by cluster; this allowed community members to stay with neighbors
while their cluster was being reconstructed instead of requiring the whole community to be
temporarily relocated (“Flamingo Crescent”, SA SDI Alliance, 2015). SA SDI Alliance NGO
iKhayalami helped train community members in construction skills, and the city’s Expanded
Public Works Program allowed 20 community members to be hired as construction workers
during the re-blocking process. Habitat for Humanity South Africa provided roof sheets and
windows for the structures, and CORC funded the structure costs remaining after the
community’s 20 percent contribution. Structure construction was finished in December of 2014,
at which time the city supplied individual household service connections, electricity boxes, and
paved access roads (“Flamingo Crescent”, SA SDI Alliance, 2015). On February 10, 2015, Cape
Town Mayor Patricia de Lille spoke at an official community launch celebration and provided
each community member with certificates of tenure (Community Organization Resource Center,
2015). The city and the Post Office gave the community official street names and addresses, and
the community crèche, Little Paradise, was officially opened (See Figures 1-3 in Appendix A).

21
Chapter
4:
The
dialectical
tension
of
opposites

Re-blocking cannot be labeled as simply a bottom-up or a top-down process. On the one
hand, it is driven by a grassroots movement of the urban poor, and the planning and
implementation of each particular project is driven by community members. On the other hand, it
is supported by the city and has now been incorporated into the city’s formal settlement-
upgrading plans. In this section, I argue that the re-blocking project is an example of the dialectic
between top-down and bottom-up processes. Viewed within the framework of Marx’s dialectic
materialism, re-blocking can be seen as a place where two opposing forces come together to
create a whole. Within the dialectic each group remains distinct and is not absorbed into the
other; instead, the dialectic allows for a productive tension to form between the two approaches.
This section will explore how this dialectic works—first focusing on the coming together of the
two opposites, then looking at how this allows productive tension to form, and finally looking at
the outcomes of this dialectical process of negotiation.
Two
opposites
coming
together

Miraftab (2013) notes that both a push from below and a pull from above are needed to
sustain a meaningful citizen-state engagement. While grassroots actors must be a driving force in
conceiving the process of collaboration, the government must also be willing to accommodate
community participation in the process. The re-blocking project in Cape Town has emerged as
both a community driven and government-supported process. The Informal Settlement Network
and the individual communities undergoing re-blocking have been the project initiators and
drivers. Rather than the community being brought into a process defined by the government, the
city has been brought into a process initiated and designed at the grassroots level.
The SA SDI Alliance has always sought to initiate grassroots-driven processes towards
development. As is stated on their website, “We learnt that what this country needed was not
participation by the people in a government process, but government’s participation in a people’s
process” (“History,” SA SDI Alliance Website). Part of the reason the SA SDI Alliance has been
able to collaborate with the city of Cape Town on a community-driven process is because it has
been able to learn from its past experiences. The re-blocking approach emerged in light of the
challenges the homeless people’s federation had in engaging with the government on the
Housing Subsidy Scheme. The Alliance attempted to create a participatory sphere for the poor
within the government’s existing market-driven, individual-housing paradigm through the
creation of the uTshani revolving fund and the People’s Housing Process. While the People’s
Housing Process has had success in delivering over 15,000 homes, and this paper by no means
seeks to minimize its value, the Homeless Peoples Federation’s attempts at creating a place for
the urban poor within the Housing Subsidy Scheme clearly took place within the government’s
market-driven housing process. As Bradlow (2013) contends, “Although FEDUP was able to
achieve policy innovation with respect to the institution of PHP, it was also forced to contend
with a bureaucratic structure that was fundamentally opposed to incrementalism” (p. 72). The
People’s Housing Process exemplifies a conception of citizen-state engagement as a convergence
between top-down and bottom-up processes—an effort to “meet in the middle” or create a “third
way” that has aspects of both top-down and bottom-up approaches. In contrast, re-blocking is a
case where top-down and bottom-up processes are both present, but they exist in tension with
each other and the lines between the two remain distinct.

22
As was seen in chapter two, one factor that is necessary to enable a “push from below” is
that the groups that represent communities are perceived with legitimacy by those communities
(Eversole, 2003; Cornwall & Coelho, 2007). Pieterse criticizes FEDUP’s traditional savings-
based mobilization strategy, noting that at times its reification of savings can impose a “moral
regime” on participants that can verge on authoritarian. “As a result,” he writes, “the highly
disciplined and ritualistic methodology of these organizations does draw strong lines of inclusion
and exclusion inside the communities where they operate, even though they supposedly operate
on non-sectarian principles” (Pieterse, 2008, p. 56). The creation of the Informal Settlement
Network shows an awareness on the part of the SA SDI Alliance that the rigidity of a
mobilization effort based solely on savings strategies can be limiting. The creation of ISN was an
effort by the SA SDI Alliance to tap into the power of existing settlement leadership in many
settlements in order to institute a broader-based movement that, by encompassing a wide range
of groups, would be perceived with legitimacy by a broad range of people.
This focus on a “broader-based movement” is not without its own criticism. The
historical homeless people’s federation represented through FEDUP was made up of over 85
percent women, and it is not without merit to question whether the creation of ISN was caused in
part by an unwillingness of existing settlement leadership structures (often male-dominated) to
align themselves to a women’s-led movement (Beck & Purcell, 2013). Nevertheless, the
Informal Settlement Network has allowed for a broader membership base and has had much
success in Cape Town in helping many informal settlement communities to organize for the first
time. ISN and FEDUP remain closely linked through the SA SDI Alliance, and in November
2013 at the SA SDI Alliance National Forum, the two groups signed a joint charter agreeing to
utilize their skills together whenever possible (“More about the FEDUP and ISN…”, SA SDI
Alliance, 2014).
Equally important to the re-blocking partnership is the “pull from above”—the fact that
the city has supported the process institutionally and financially. Working to collaborate at the
local level, instead of the earlier efforts to collaborate with the national government over the HSS,
has had an impact in how the partnership has played out. Beginning engagement with a small
department, the Informal Settlements Unit within the Human Settlements Directorate in Cape
Town, allowed the Alliance some flexibility and leniency it may not have had had engagements
begun with the broader city government. Two of the conditions the ISU set forth in its initial
meetings with the Alliance were that settlements agreed upon for pilot projects not be located in
road reserves nor in flood prone areas. The first settlement that the two groups collaborated on
for re-blocking, Sheffield Road, was located in a flood-prone road reserve. As Bradlow (2013)
quotes from his personal communications with an ISU employee, “The Sheffield Road re-
blocking wasn’t sanctioned by the city. The city found out much later that we were involved in
the re-blocking of Sheffield Road. Had we been known before, we would have been stopped. I
know that for a fact” (p. 94). Because collaboration started at a lower level, however, street-level
bureaucracy allowed for some “wiggle-room.”
This relates to Evans’ assertion that face-to-face interactions can help build mutual trust
and enhance the commitment state-agents feel towards communities. As Evans has written,
“Social capital is formed by making some who are part of the state apparatus more thoroughly
part of the communities in which they work. The networks of trust and collaboration that are
created span the public/private boundary and bind state and civil society together” (Evans, 1996,
p. 1122). Misunderstanding and mistrust between the community groups and the city officials
has been one of the greatest challenges within the re-blocking pilot projects (S. Mxobo, personal

23
interview, November 25, 2015). However, through the projects, city officials have begun to
recognize the commitment communities have to incrementally improve their neighborhoods. As
one CORC staff member puts it “I think one of the things we have been able to see is the fact
that even the [city] officials do recognize the work that is done by communities and the fact that
if they engage better with people, there is the start of some kinds of results through the
involvement of the community. So they start seeing and speaking the language that we speak” (S.
Mxobo, personal interview, November 25, 2015). Bradlow (2013) also notes how certain
officials within the ISU have been key drivers in bringing re-blocking to the city level, and how
interacting with ISN made ISU officials willing to overlook some of the city-level biases with
regard to upgrading projects.
Another possible factor in the city’s willingness to engage in the re-blocking process is
the degree of political competitiveness in Cape Town. As was noted earlier, Heller (2001) found
that the lack of political competition the ANC government faced after the end of apartheid made
its decentralization reforms less successful at engaging civil society. The Western Cape is the
only one of South Africa’s nine provinces led by the ANC’s opposition party, the Democratic
Alliance (DA). The DA gained a majority of Parliamentary seats in the Western Cape for the
first time in 2009, and currently maintains 26 of the Province’s 42 Parliamentary seats (Electoral
Commission of South Africa, 2015). The first DA Mayor in the city of Cape Town was elected
in 2006, and Patricia de Lille, Cape Town’s current DA Mayor, was elected in 2011 with 62
percent of the vote (“Safe to assume De Lille…”, 2011). Clearly, the Western Cape has seen a
higher degree of political competition than other provinces that have remained ANC-majority
since 1994, and this could have an impact on fostering an environment within the province that is
more open to engagement with civil society.
In conclusion, re-blocking is an example of citizen-state engagement that involves both
grassroots actors working through bottom-up processes, and state actors working through top-
down processes. However, both parties have remained distinct, and neither process has absorbed
the other. The next session will discuss some of the tensions that this produces.
Collaborations
that
allow
for
productive
tension

Conflict arising from citizen-state engagements is not uncommon; indeed, as was
discussed in Chapter 2, many grassroots actors utilize conflictual strategies as a method of
engaging with the state and demanding their rights. While re-blocking is a collaborative strategy,
conflicts and tensions no doubt arise, as they do in any setting where multiple actors are working
together. What is unique about the conflicts and tensions that emerge throughout the re-blocking
partnership is that they are nested within a process that has space for both parties—a process that
is both community driven and government supported. Conflict that emerges is conflict rooted in
action, and parties are forced to learn how to negotiate and compromise in order to move forward.
Bradlow (2013) describes the type of conflict that has emerged from the re-blocking
partnerships as “quiet conflict.” He relates this to Asef Bayat’s discussion of the “quiet
encroachment of the ordinary”—the way in which the everyday action by the urban poor to
sustain their basic needs is in itself a form a quiet defiance against the system they have been
excluded from (Bayat, 2000). However, Bradlow’s notion of quiet conflict involves collective
action rather than individual action. As he writes:
In the cases of the partnerships [in Cape Town] the development of institutionalized
collaboration has provided space for conflict between grassroots actors and institutions of
the local state. But these are not conflicts that have led to destruction or overthrow.

24
Rather, these are conflicts that have forced each party to search for and articulate the
values that they bring to processes of physical “delivery” of services. (Bradlow, 2013, p.
128)
Re-blocking has produced both internal conflict within communities and conflict between
communities and the government actor. Both participatory development and grassroots
techniques have been criticized at times for assuming homogeneity among communities, and re-
blocking has shown that it cannot be assumed that all residents within a community will always
be in agreement. In Sheffield Road, the entire project was brought to a standstill when
community members could not agree on the size of reconstructed shacks. Families in smaller
shacks were fine with adopting a uniform shack size for all, while families in larger shacks
insisted that their re-blocked shacks be at least as big as they had been. When tensions
heightened, some families from larger shacks refused to take part in the re-blocking process and
the project was nearly abandoned. However, by taking a step back, CORC and ISN were able to
help negotiations ensue. Re-blocking the shacks of the willing households first helped reluctant
households to see the positive outcome and get on board (Bolnick, 2011).
Another common tension within communities has been over savings. Due to the strong
belief in South Africa that housing is a socio-economic right and the fact that many of the urban
poor are currently waiting for their government-promised housing subsidies, settlement
communities are often reluctant to invest their own money in housing projects. However,
learning exchanges have allowed communities contemplating re-blocking to see the results of
community savings firsthand and have increased incentive to save. It should be noted that
“productive conflict” does not mean that all problems are immediately or permanently resolved;
savings still proves to be an issue in re-blocking projects, and some of the communities have not
yet contributed their agreed upon amount. However, re-blocking is helping communities learn to
view themselves as citizens instead of clients or beneficiaries of government-implemented
processes, a distinction that Cornwall and Coehlo (2007) have put forth as necessary for
transformative citizen-state engagement to occur.
Conflict in the re-blocking projects has also arisen due to the vast difference in goals and
methods between grassroots organizing strategies and formal bureaucratic procedures. Chapter 3
discussed the initial difficulties in developing a partnership project when the city and the SA SDI
Alliance had such different criteria for the selection of pilot projects and different end goals. As
was noted above, reconciling these differences was helped in part by the fact that early
negotiations happened with a very small city department. Another source of conflict occurred
due to the slow bureaucracy involved in the processing of Expanded Public Works Program
contracts. In Mtshini Wam, the city had agreed to create 45 short-term jobs for community
members to be hired as construction workers during the re-blocking. However, the contracts
were slow in coming, and the community’s frustration mounted as re-blocking construction
began with no date for the procurement of the contracts in sight (“Mtshini Wam”, SA SDI
Alliance, 2012). Knowing the importance of keeping the community mobilized and engaged,
CORC ended up pre-financing construction jobs out of their budget while they waited for the
EPWP contracts to come through.
This conflict exemplifies the difficulties of applying bureaucratic procedures to community
driven processes, and also emphasizes the importance of CORC in its role as facilitator and
mediator in the collaborative efforts between top-down and bottom-up actors. CORC is in the
unique position of straddling between the two sides and understanding both processes. As a
CORC employee described it:

25
There is always tension. Always. If the community decides today they want to implement
tomorrow, they don’t want to wait long. But then for the city, you have to wait for three
months to process things, then wait another couple of months to put the project on tender.
So those conflicts are always there, and those challenges between the two. Managing
those conflicts just becomes a part of the work that we do. (S. Mxobo, personal interview,
November 25, 2015)
The difficulties of making such as collaboration work are not to be minimized. The fact that re-
blocking has been institutionalized within the city’s Integrated Development Plan shows that the
policy is supported high up within the city government, but it does not make the on-the-ground
challenges of synthesizing a community process and a state process any easier. Even the project
managers on the city side have felt frustration with the slow bureaucratic processes they must
follow. As a CORC employee describes of the city project manager for the Mtshini Wam re-
blocking, “He hated [the bureaucracy] very much. He hated that he has to wait a couple of
months just to get a couple of toilets” (S. Mxobo, personal interview, November 25, 2015).
However, in order for both parties in this collaboration to achieve their outcomes, which, as will
be described below, is key in making the project work, the city must ensure that all of its formal
procurement practices and policies are followed. As an SDI employee notes, “South Africa’s
standards when it comes to sanitation and infrastructure and all of that are very high. So that
obviously implies extra costs and often it is not as imaginative as the way the community might
have come up with, in terms of doing things” (N. Schermbrucker, personal interview, November
25, 2015). In order for the dialectic to be maintained, however, the city cannot abandon its
distinct identity as the top-down actor, just as the community cannot allow their role and their
goals to be co-opted by the government.
The SA SDI Alliance, informal settlement communities, and the city are actively learning
from the conflicts and tensions that arise in the partnership. As has been noted, learning to
engage with the government is a skill that civil society groups must develop in order for their
efforts to have transformative power (Cornwall & Coelho, 2007; Heller, 2001). Re-blocking is
allowing community groups to develop that skill through the murky and laborious process of
working through conflict. As will be discussed below, working through these conflicts has
allowed re-blocking to produce outcomes that are beneficial to both sides.
Outcomes
for
both
sides

For a partnership of any sort to be capable of achieving success, all parties in the
partnership must feel they have something to gain. As Miraftab (2004c) writes, “Philanthropy
from the private sector or government benevolence is not a reliable foundation for a
partnership…[all partners] are more likely to sustain the partnership when its benefits are equal”
(p. 93). If top-down participatory development is viewed as a means to an end goal of enhanced
efficiency and effectiveness, and grassroots driven engagement with government has the end
goal of empowering communities and helping the marginalized achieve their citizenship rights, a
successful collaboration must recognize and fulfill both of these purposes. The re-blocking
partnership is a case where both the physical and intangible goals have been brought to fruition.
Re-blocking is not an example of a grassroots initiative trying to fit itself within a
government defined process, as was the case with the Alliance’s efforts to create space for the
poor within the Housing Subsidy Scheme. Nevertheless, re-blocking still has been strategically
placed where there was an “institutional opening” for it as the precursor to formal upgrading
projects. While re-blocking remains a community-driven process, the fact that it could be

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