Search

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 article presents information on schedule for Eighth International Phycological Congress 2005, that will take place between August 13-19, 2005, in Durban, South Africa. The scientific program consists of Plenary Lectures for all delegates, Symposia, Contributed Paper sessions and Poster sessions. The Plenary Lecture each morning is followed by three parallel Symposia each comprising four talks. In addition to the regular Congress Symposia, the Scientific Program will include Contributed Paper Sessions. These sessions will be organized, where relevant and feasible, in conjunction with the Congress Symposia.

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]

Is discrimination based on caste equivalent to racism? This paper explores the complex relationship between genetic, race and caste. It also discusses the debate over the exclusion of a discussion of caste-based discrimination at the 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance held in Durban, South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Among the most destructive legacies of apartheid in South Africa is the violent history of division, discrimination, and control through which the everyday injustices of racial order were experienced. This violence of 'separate development' was inscribed within particular spaces, as the apartheid state attempted to define and control where racially-defined citizens could live, work, and travel. This paper examines the geography of violence and reconstruction in one such space, that of Cato Manor near Durban. The area is known for the large-scale forced removals which took place there in the 1950s, destroying a multi-racial community of Indian and African residents. Although zoned for white residence, Cato Manor remained vacant until the 1980s, when it became a safe haven for refugees fleeing violence in the Natal countryside. In the early 1990s, the area became the focus of a non-racial development effort, which sought to overcome the violent social divisions of the apartheid era. This redevelopment, however, became a site of contestation when former residents of Cato Manor petitioned to reclaim land they once owned there, claims that the city of Durban attempted to nullify in court. The outcome of the land claims trial highlights the tensions between the present dictates of development and the process of negotiating the violence of the past, and suggests that the democratization of planning can be a means of 'working through' the legacies of displacement and dispossession that are so much a part of South Africa's present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]