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This paper develops infrastructural citizenship as an analytical framework that bridges geography's sub‐disciplinary silos. While urban geography promotes infrastructure as a core lens for understanding the city, recognising that political struggles are mediated through infrastructure, discourses of citizenship are rarely employed. Similarly, while political and development geography promote citizenship as vital in understanding socio‐political life, often framed by citizen‐led action to secure basic rights and services, critical debates on urban infrastructure are typically overlooked. Consequently, despite the growth in studies recognising the politicised nature of urban infrastructure and the centrality of citizenship to urban life, the multiple ways that citizenship and infrastructure relate in diverse urban settings has received limited critical attention. This paper demonstrates how urban dwellers' relationship to public infrastructure in the domestic spaces of the home and settlement, and the temporal scale of the everyday, offers a representation of broader political identities and perceptions, framed through the language of citizenship. In South Africa, despite 25 years of significant post‐apartheid public investment in housing and services, frustration at poor service delivery and beneficiary (mis)use of public infrastructure remains dominant. While citizens adapt and consume public infrastructure in ways deemed "illegal" and "uncivil" by the state, citizens view these actions as a legitimate form of "citizenship‐in‐action" in the context of rapid urbanisation and poverty, and are frustrated by perceptions of state neglect. Using the analytical framework of infrastructural citizenship, the paper reveals how this state–society disjuncture represents a citizenship mismatch that is embodied in infrastructure, rather than a material product of state disinterest or citizen destruction per se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the lens of South Africa’s informal settlements, this paper explores the intersections between plans, practices and materiality. These three arenas are each presented as uniquely agentic, contributing to plural configurations. In doing so, this work questions a prevalent tendency to frame governance/government solely as relationships between state and non-state actors. By reintroducing the agency and power of matter and materiality, not as adjunct or background, but as a critical technology of government and/in place, this work contributes to a growing debate within the (emerging) urban socio-technical systems literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nearly 70 % of sub-Saharan Africa's urban population live in informal settlements and populations are expected to double by 2030. Based on the constitutional right to adequate housing and growing public pressure and dissent, the South African government has begun a process of large-scale formalisation through the provision of housing and infrastructure to informal areas. A disjuncture has however occurred and conflicts have arisen between what are understood as modernist ideas of how cities should appear and function (formality) and an alternate, organic and flexible mode of thought (the informal). This conflict is seen by some authors as a 'clash of governmentalities' which goes deeper than a simple lack of dialogue, inadequate participation and/or a disinclination to see others' points of view. For a number of years, calls have been made for a way to organise these governmentalities and perspectives, understand what goes on at their interface and unpack the complexity that exists between them. Integral Theory and its AQAL (All Quadrants, All Levels) framework are fast becoming a sought-after arena of academic discourse. It deals specifically with complex interactions and perspectives and offers a methodology that draws together a number of already existing separate paradigms and perspectives into a unified, interrelated framework. This paper uses the AQAL framework and Integral Theory as a tool to map the differing governmentalities (rationalities, techniques and practices) that exist in the upgrading of informal settlements in Cape Town and understand their relationship and interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For much of the winter of 2012, communities in shack settlements across Cape Town took to the streets in some of the most active civil disobedience protests since 1994. Knowing that the mainstream political terrain often seeks to obfuscate and mislead the public about the true nature of these protests, this paper investigates claims by politicians from the Democratic Alliance (DA) that these protests were being coordinated by the Youth League of the African National Congress (ANCYL). These big political players moralize the debate, shifting the focus from the perfectly legitimate issues of service delivery and demands for meaningful engagement. Speaking directly to community members of Sweet Home Farm, an informal settlement of 15,000 people in the Philippi area, revealed a yawning chasm between what official players are saying about Sweet Home and the actual realities on the ground. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper aims to show the reverse side of the (football) medal. The N2 gateway project in Cape Town is presented, by government and media, as a ‘flagship’ project of the new Breaking New Ground strategy, to fight the housing backlog of 400,000 houses in the city. But I want to argue that the fast-tracking of the project has to be understood as a beautification strategy to prepare the city for 2010. Massive slum eradication and the construction of ‘beautiful formal housing opportunities’ between the airport and the mother city are becoming a painful reminder of the forced removals under the apartheid regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]