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Urban geographers increasingly incorporate the potential of so-called informal livelihood activities to provide resources that can be creatively managed in the transformation of urban space, particularly to the benefit of less well off and marginalized residents. This paper reports a case study in Rustenburg, North West Province, South Africa, where city managers began to promote inclusive development in the early 1990s, just prior to the formal dismantling of the apartheid system. The findings reveal that Rustenburg's urban transformation process, over a decade later, continued to reproduce repressive practices that limit the informal livelihood activities of the urban majority. Apparently efforts of well-meaning city managers to implement a sustainable and inclusive development process are often rendered futile at the point of actually defining the constituents of urban socioeconomic transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]