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Evictions have been shown to be a mechanism of primitive accumulation in nature conservation. This paper adds an historical analysis to the discussion on primitive accumulation in conservation by exploring the seemingly innocuous mechanism of White belonging to land in South Africa's private nature reserves. Contemporary articulations of White belonging are replete with stories and images of White male "pioneers" from the colonial era who, upon arrival in "empty lands", were able to create economies out of nothing. Such representations of history on private nature reserve websites and other promotional material invisibilise Black belonging and legitimise private conservation. By illuminating the inconsistencies in the empty lands narrative and the legacies of three championed conservation pioneers from the 19th century, this paper argues that White belonging is a mechanism of primitive accumulation, while Black belonging continues to be expressed in various ways in contemporary South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue using smart technologies beyond the grid disrupts the access and use of existing energy sources, with profound impacts on everyday social life. We show how off‐grid smart energy solutions constitute their own politics when considering existing conceptualisations of urban infrastructures in geography and the social sciences. To expose its politics, or "micropolitics", we consider how tensions occur at the interface between infrastructures, where there are additions and modifications. We draw on an empirical example of Qandu‐Qandu, an informal settlement in South Africa, to highlight how the placement, technical capabilities, and flexible financing options associated with off‐grid solar energy create micropolitics with profound implications for everyday life. To conclude, we reflect on the value of using disruptions for understanding and enhancing equity in off‐grid settings, contributing to the broader sustainability transitions narrative, and its "liveliness". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1950 onwards, under the apartheid regime's Group Areas Act, hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes across South Africa's cities. While the removals from some areas, notably District Six in Cape Town, are well documented and memorialised, many others have largely been erased from public memory. In a context of burgeoning research into issues of spatial justice in Southern cities, this paper puts forward the argument that the concepts and practice of memory and memorialising in urban spaces deserve more attention. Specifically, we suggest that the relationships between space and memory, shaped by collective, public acts of remembering and forgetting, can expand our understanding of what constitutes spatial justice in our cities. Reflecting on a research project conducted in Lower Claremont, a racially mixed, middle‐class suburb in Cape Town that was declared White in 1969 and subsequently dubbed Harfield Village, we explore some of the ways in which remembering and forgetting take place on the urban scale, and their implications for imagining just cities. We ask, too, what possibilities exist for active remembering in this place and in similarly ordinary city spaces. Analysing oral histories from former residents and interviews with current occupants of the neighbourhood, we open up some of the complications in surfacing forgotten stories and creating landscapes of memory. In the final section of the paper we reflect on an art installation that formed part of the research project, and suggest some possibilities for active memory work in our urban spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa has a coal‐based energy system and extractive economy, largely responsible for its high emission levels relative to countries with similar GDP. This extractive, coal‐based economy began during British colonisation and today shows few signs of transitioning rapidly to limit climate change. This paper interrogates the role of coloniality in climate delay, given that colonisation is responsible for establishing fossil fuel dependence in South Africa. Combining theory on decolonisation, specifically colonial hierarchies of power, with a critical discourse analysis, this research uses interview and policy data to show how colonial power hierarchies can lead to climate delay in South Africa, through normalising emissions intensive development and silencing alternatives. In doing so, it highlights the need to recognise the colonial foundations of climate change and the potential for a coalition between decolonisation and climate action to motivate for radical change both in South Africa and at a global level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fairtrade operates its global system through a homogenising but marketable set of standards. Combined with issues around how to include producers in governance, this has led to feelings of disconnection and disenfranchisement for the latter, which are impacting on Fairtrade's effectiveness and legitimacy. Through a focus on the South African wine industry, this paper argues that the Fairtrade community needs to be reinvigorated through dialogical communication, impactful participation and cultural synthesis to better enact responsibility across its systemic geographical and cultural distances. "Being‐with" its multiple stakeholders makes space for a more responsive, contextual and connected system. Drawing on the ideas of Paulo Freire, the paper concludes that a Fairtrade built on solidarity through a participatory and decentralised system would allow for discussions of the ideals and practices that are essential to negotiating, and not swallowing up, the shifting "we" of Fairtrade and more effectively balancing its local and global responsibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper utilizes the introduction of bus rapid transit (BRT) in South Africa to unravel the role of South-South connections in local policymaking. While the South African systems are unmistakably modeled after Bogotá's Transmilenio, whose accomplishments have been touted as the low-cost, high-quality transport solution, the process through which other Southern cities influenced the circulation of BRT remains underexplored. In so doing, this paper asks how and why certain cities are brought into conversation with one another and what happens as a result? This analysis suggests that policy circulation is never a rational survey of best practices but a political process through which policymakers select their sites of learning in accordance with wider aspirations, ideologies and positioning. Illustrating the way in which policymakers deploy different meanings of the global South and their position within this construct to justify local policy decisions adds a critical dimension to understandings of policy mobilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There exists a growing literature on the geographical aspects of neoliberalism and neoliberalisation. In this paper I focus on how the neoliberalisation process is articulated at the scale of the local state in Durban, South Africa. I examine the neoliberalisation process through the lens of the water sector. This paper contributes to the body of literature showing how private sector governance techniques are being used in the public sector effecting its neoliberalisation. I show how pricing structures are neoliberal and in turn how they are deployed and contribute to the neoliberalisation of the local state in Durban. I show that accounting strategies, tariff structures, and cost recovery measures are central to the neoliberalisation process in Durban. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is part of an ongoing effort to make sense of the turbulent forces at play in South Africa in relation to other parts of the world. Engaging debates over neoliberalism from a South African vantage point, I show how currently influential theories cast in terms of class project, governmentality, and hegemony are at best partial. A more adequate understanding is not just a matter of combining these different dimensions into a more encompassing model of “neoliberalism in general”. The challenge, rather, is coming to grips with how identifiably neoliberal projects and practices operate on terrains that always exceed them. A crucially important dimension of what is going on in South Africa is that escalating struggles over the material conditions of life and livelihood are simultaneously struggles over the meaning of the nation and liberation, as well as expressions of profound betrayal. These processes underscore the analytical and political stakes in attending to interconnected historical geographies of specifically racialized forms of dispossession, and how they feature in the present. The paper concludes with a call for a properly post-colonial frame of understanding that builds on the synergies and complementarities between a Gramscian reading of Fanon and relational conceptions of the production of space set forth by Lefebvre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To achieve a world-class city capable of attracting business in a competitive global market, the municipal government of Cape Town, South Africa, like many cities of the global North, has adopted a model of urban revitalization popularized by New York City: business or city improvement districts (BIDs or CIDs). By examining CIDs in city center Cape Town, the paper casts light on the socio-spatial relationship facilitating the neoliberal post-apartheid regime and its governance. Analyzing discursive and spatial practices of Cape Town Partnership, the managing body of downtown CIDs, from 2000 to 2006, the paper reveals its difficulties in stabilizing the socio-spatial relations of a transnationalizing urban revitalization strategy and rejects the view of CIDS as simply a global roll-out of neoliberal urban policies. It highlights how CIDs are challenged from both within and outside of their managing structures by contentious local issues, and in particular by vast social inequalities and citizens' historical struggle for inclusive citizenship and the right to the city. Whether and how CIDs' inherent limitations can be overcome to address socio-spatial inequalities is an open question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces three political mobilizations in the wealthy suburbs of Johannesburg: a boycott of redistributive tax policies, the creation of gated communities and residents' associations, and the demand for residential city improvement districts (CIDs). I argue that state rescaling and networked governance are constituted through struggles over governmental power. I also argue for more attention to race in the political economy of scale. Struggles over the scalar, networked, and territorial dimensions of governance are constitutive moments in the shifting articulation of race, class, and space. An analysis of articulation highlights the role of territory, identity and imagination in the production of space, demonstrates that neoliberal forms of networked governance are products of struggle, and reiterates the feminist argument that governmental interventions are about more than just capital accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By unravelling the adoption and adaptation of the North American Business Improvement District (BID) model in South African cities, this paper considers the way neoliberal principles are making their way in the post-apartheid context. Drawing on a comparative approach of BIDs in Johannesburg and Cape Town, we analyse the tensions and conflicts surrounding their implementation and unpack the resilience of this model. As unexpected as this resilience might be in such a context, that is, far away from the heartland of neoliberalism, we argue that this resilience is linked to the permeability of the local contexts and to the plasticity of the model itself at the city and neighbourhood levels, reflecting a capacity to adapt to inherited regulatory frameworks, patterns of territorial development and embedded socio-political alliances of the local terrains, as well as an ability to accommodate post-apartheid issues through the crafting of what we refer to as 'local Third Ways'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews post-apartheid South Africa through Fanon's critical analysis of decolonization. Since, for Fanon, apartheid represented the purest form of the Manichean politics of space that characterizes colonialism, a Fanonian perspective on South Africa asks to what extent has the geographical layout of apartheid been remapped? Addressing this question necessitates shifting the 'geography of reason' from technical discourses of policy-makers to the lived reality of the 'damned of the earth'. From this perspective, Fanon's critique becomes relevant in two ways, first as a prism to understand the rise of xenophobic violence as a symptom of the degeneration of the idea of South Africa's 'promised land' and second as a way to listen to a new grassroots shack dweller movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, that is challenging both neoliberal and progressive assumptions by advocating a quite different geographic layout for a 'truly democratic' society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the core of colonial and apartheid social engineering was a spatial strategy based on institutions and infrastructure linking together rural homesteads and villages, and mining centers and towns. In the case of the mining industry, single-sex compounds were set up as the foundation of the infrastructure of control over black labor. In this paper we examine how various forms of control operated. We locate our contribution within the labor geography literature. We argue that it was not only state institutions and major corporations that shaped landscapes of control. In this regard we highlight the centrality of workers' agency, specifically the way in which the National Union of Mineworkers captured the compounds and subverted the logic of employer control. However, the union's successes as well as the advent of democracy have resulted in profound changes, thus presenting the union with new challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the increasingly important connections between the private sector and nature conservation agencies. It looks specifically at the connections between two important philanthropists, the late Anton Rupert, a South African business tycoon, and the late Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands. Both have been highly successful in raising funds for nature conservation, and marketing the idea of transfrontier conservation. This paper explores the networks they formed and were part of to try and explain how they were able to do so. It also attempts to analyse how their donations and fund raising have shaped thinking about nature conservation in (southern) Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I seek to gain an understanding of the power that water meters are able to acquire in regulating the daily rhythms of life in the South African city of Durban. In doing so, I put Georg Lukács's writings on reification to work. Lukács's theorisation of the phenomenon of reification captures the twin processes of encroaching formal rationalisation and commodity fetishism. Charting the history of the introduction of water meters and the rise in power of associated infrastructures, I seek to put a historical geographical materialist imagination to work. Thus, I develop a relational ontology of the urban waterscape before seeking to identify lines of struggle that might challenge the dictatorship of the water meter and move towards radically democratic technologies for a more equitable distribution of water. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]