Planning ‘Suburban Bliss’ in Joe Slovo Park, Cape Town

Africa ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 511-548 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Robins
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Housing Development ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
The Everyday

AbstractJoe Slovo Park, a housing development in a white middle-class suburb of Cape Town, was designed to replace the shack settlement of Marconi Beam with an orderly working-class suburb. This article focuses on the vicissitudes of post-apartheid housing development schemes, and raises troubling questions about the failure of planners, policy makers and developers to take into account the complexities of the everyday lives they sought to transform. Had they done so they might have anticipated the ‘re-informalisation’ of the newly formalised suburb. The article explores the disjunctures between the planners' model of ‘suburban bliss’ and the reality. The messy, improvised character of low-income housing development in South Africa is contrasted with their Utopian and technocratic vision. This is not to deny that dreams embodied in blueprints may often be shared by the intended ‘beneficiaries’, only that for a variety of social, economic and cultural reasons poor communities are generally unable to realise such ideal visions of modern urban living.

scholarly journals Why Is There Learning Disabilities? A Critical Analysis of the Birth of the Field in Its Social Context

2010 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Sleeter
Keyword(s):  
Learning Disabilities ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Low Achievers ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Minority Children ◽  
Degree Of Protection ◽  
White Middle Class

This chapter presents an interpretation of why the category of learning disabilities emerged, that differs from interpretations that currently prevail. It argues that the category was created in response to social conditions during the late 1950s and early 1960s which brought about changes in schools that were detrimental to children whose achievement was relatively low. The category was created by white middle class parents in an effort to differentiate their children from low-achieving low-income and minority children. The category offered their children a degree of protection from probable consequences of low achievement because it upheld their intellectual normalcy and the normalcy of their home backgrounds, and it suggested hope for a cure and for their ability eventually to attain higher status occupations than other low achievers.

Decently transgressing: expressions of female heterosexuality and the discourses of (hetero)sexual pleasure in South Africa

Sexualities ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 136346072110374
Author(s):  
Letitia Smuts
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
South African ◽  
Sexual Pleasure ◽  
Sexual Agency ◽  
South African Context ◽  
The South ◽  
Heterosexual Women ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
African Context

This article explores sexual agency and pleasure among heterosexual women in South Africa. By focussing on Tupperware-style sex-toy parties, this article offers a glimpse into a ‘hidden’ world of white, middle-class women living in Johannesburg. What is revealed in this ethnographic account is that these gatherings promise women new ways of enjoying sex, while remaining within the boundaries of heteronormative notions of (hetero)sex. I use the term ‘decently transgressing’ to capture the ways in which the women in this study make sense of their (hetero)sexual selves and how they negotiate their (hetero)sexual agencies, particularly in relation to past and present heteronormative discourses within the South African context. The findings show that there are tensions between women wanting to embrace their own sexual agency and desires, yet at the same time being limited by certain heteronormative norms.

Leaving Gangs in Cape Town: Disengagement as Role Exit

2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 507-535
Author(s):  
Dariusz Dziewanski
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Life History ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Death Sentence ◽  
Gang Violence ◽  
Role Exit ◽  
Security Challenges ◽  
The World ◽  
Study Offer

A lack of scholarship on gang leaving in Cape Town, South Africa creates the impression that joining gangs is a death sentence. However, this paper shows that gang members can disengage, even amidst the scarcity of an emerging city. It combines life history research with Ebaugh’s (2013) role exit theory in an analysis of the disengagements of 24 former gang participants. Research considers the various stages of out-of-gang transitions, profiling the drivers and impediments to gang exit. Specific focus is placed on understanding how violence both catalyzes and challenges out-of-gang transition during the differential processes of disengagement. Findings indicate a lengthy and challenging transitional process from the point the first doubts emerge to the time a person successfully becomes an ex-gangster. Progress through different phases of gang exit is generally uneven and unpredictable, and carried out in a context with significant social, economic, and security challenges. Still, those interviewed for this study offer compelling examples to show that disengagement is possible. Their journeys yield insights that can be leveraged to design better informed efforts to reduce gang violence—whether in Cape Town, or in other similarly inequality prone and insecure cities around the world.

PATCHWORKED MEDIA: MOBILE DEVICES AND CREATIVE PRACTICE IN CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marija Anja Venter
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Mobile Devices ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Mobile Technologies ◽  
Global Network ◽  
Material Reality ◽  
Development Trajectories

There has been a recurring narrative in research that revolves around mobile technologies and society, particularly in relation to Africa: that these technologies have the potential to reconfigure and revolutionise the development trajectories of entire countries (Donner & Locke, 2019). But if these narratives are to be the case, then, indeed, the role that mobile devices can play in production (in this case of art, media, and design) is going to have to be something that allows people in the global South to earn a living. This paper presents an exploration of the creative practices, with a focus on mobile creative practices, of a cohort of Extended Curriculum Program (ECP) Visual Design students from a university in Cape Town, South Africa (2014). All of these students came from low-income, resource constrained contexts in the townships that surround Cape Town. In questioning whether mobile technologies can help young South African creatives forge careers or attain resources that could help them do so, the role of mobile technologies is complicated. While these devices offer new emerging creative affordances, and in some cases, can offer means to generate income, the material reality is a different story. I conclude by arguing that instead of these devices offering access to a global network, they, at best, provide the means for young creatives, such as those featured in this study, to a forge a media patchwork.

I Fight for a Living

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Moore
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Middle Class ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Sporting Culture ◽  
Collective Group ◽  
White Manhood ◽  
Jim Crow Era

At its heart, I Fight for a Living is a book about black men who came of age in the Reconstruction and early Jim Crow era--a time when the remaking of white manhood was at its most intense, placing vigor and physicality at the center of the construction of manliness. The book uses the stories of black fighters’ lives, from 1880 to 1915, to explore how working-class black men used prizefighting and the sporting culture to assert their manhood in a country that denied their equality, and to examine the reactions by the black middle class and white middle class toward these black fighters. Through these stories, the book explores how the assertion of this working-class manliness confronted American ideas of race and manliness. While other works on black fighters have explored black boxers as individuals, this book seeks to study these men as a collective group while providing a localized and racialized response to black working-class manhood. It was a tough bargain to risk one’s body to prove manhood, but black men across the globe took that chance.

"A City of Picture Buyers": Art, Identity, and Aspiration in Los Angeles and Southern California, 1891-1914

2010 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-50
Author(s):  
Jasper G. Schad
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Southern California ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
White Middle Class

In less than twenty-five years, Los Angeles and other southern California urban centers evolved from culturally sterile communities into vibrant art centers. That remarkable transformation resulted from a combination of social, economic, and political changes that drew residents to landscape paintings. They enjoyed widespread popularity because residents invested them with meanings that transcended art. They became icons of identity, bolstered visions of an unspoiled suburban Eden, and helped southern California's white middle-class to cope with the mounting stress of modern urban life.

scholarly journals A Critical Review of Bilingual Education in the United States: From Basements and Pride to Boutiques and Profit

2017 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 14-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nelson Flores ◽  
Ofelia García
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Bilingual Education ◽  
Low Income ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Structural Barriers ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Immersion Programs ◽  
Middle Class Families

ABSTRACTIn this article we connect the institutionalization of bilingual education to a post–Civil Rights racial formation that located the root of educational inequalities in the psychological condition of people of color in ways that obscured the structural barriers confronting communities of color. Within this context, bilingual education was institutionalized with the goal of instilling cultural pride in Latinx students in ways that would remediate their perceived linguistic deficiencies. This left bilingual educators struggling to develop affirmative spaces for Latinx children within a context where these students continued to be devalued by the broader school and societal context. More recent years have witnessed the dismantling of these affirmative spaces and their replacement with two-way immersion programs that seek to cater to White middle-class families. While these programs have offered new spaces for the affirmation of the bilingualism of Latinx children, they do little to address the power hierarchies between the low-income Latinx communities and White middle-class communities that are being served by these programs. We end with a call to situate struggles for bilingual education within broader efforts to combat the racialization of Latinx and other minoritized communities.

scholarly journals In bodies and homes: Gendering citizenship in Southern African cities

Urbani izziv ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol Supplement (30) ◽  
pp. 37-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie Oldfield ◽  
Netsai Sarah Mathsaka ◽  
Elaine Salo ◽  
Ann Schlyter
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Body Politics ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
African Cities ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Urban Contexts ◽  
The City

How do the everyday contexts in which ordinary women struggle to access and maintain a place on the peripheries of the city shape experiences of citizenship? This paper explores this question in George, a periurban Lusaka neighbourhood in Zambia and through experiences of Zimbabwean migrant women’s negotiation of a place on the peri-urban edges of Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa. In the logics of citizen-subjects, the experiences of these groups of women should be poles apart, the first with rights imbued in citizenship, the second migrants without. Here instead, we demonstrate the ways in which gendered political subjectivities embed in the hard, lived realities of home. In placing gender and everyday body politics at the forefront of our analysis, the paper makes visible the micro-realities of making home. We demonstrate that an assumed recursive relationship between citizenship and home, as a physical and social place in the city, is problematic. Building on debates on citizenship and its gendering in post-colonial African urban contexts, we demonstrate instead that citizenship and its gendered contestations and emergent forms in Southern African are crafted in quotidian activities in homes and everyday city contexts.

scholarly journals Higher SARS-CoV-2 Seroprevalence in Workers with Lower Socioeconomic Status in Cape Town, South Africa.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Alexandra Shaw ◽  
Maynard Meiring ◽  
Tracy Cummins ◽  
Novel Chegou ◽  
Conita Claassen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Lower Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Serum Samples ◽  
High Background ◽  
Lower Socioeconomic ◽  
Antibody Positivity ◽  
High Degree

Abstract Background: South Africa has a high degree of inequality between population groups. The first wave of COVID-19 may have affected people in lower socioeconomic groups worse than the affluent. The SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence and the specificity of anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests in South Africa is not known. Methods: We tested 405 volunteers representing all socioeconomic strata from the workforce of a popular shopping and tourist complex in central Cape Town with the Abbott SARS-CoV-2 IgG assay. We assessed the association between antibody positivity and COVID-19 symptom status, medical history, and sociodemographic variables. We tested 137 serum samples from healthy controls collected in Cape Town prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, to confirm the specificity of the assay in the local population.Results: Of the 405 volunteers tested one month after the first peak of the epidemic in Cape Town, 96(23.7%) were SARS-CoV-2 IgG positive. Of those who tested positive, 46(47.9%) reported no symptoms of COVID-19 in the previous 6 months. Seropositivity was significantly associated with living in informal housing, residing in a subdistrict with low income-per household, and having a low-earning occupation. The specificity of the assay was 98.54%(95%CI 94.82%-99.82%) in the pre-COVID controls.Conclusions: There is a high background seroprevalence in Cape Town, particularly in people of lower socioeconomic status. Half of cases are asymptomatic, and therefore undiagnosed by local testing strategies. These results cannot be explained by low assay specificity.

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