This long-term research project, funded by the Cambridge Humanities Research Group, The Leverhulme Trust, and the Isaac Newton Trust, explores the relationship between infrastructure and citizenship in cities of the global South. Empirically, research critically examines how the material strategies deployed by state-subsidised housing beneficiaries in Cape Town, South Africa to adapt houses and access infrastructure (sanitation, water, sewerage, solid waste management, electricity), often by avoiding networked ‘grid’ systems, are inherently political strategies of citizenship identity and practice.
While there has been widespread recognition that both infrastructure and citizenship are crucial for understanding the everyday spaces of life in the city, the connections between them are poorly understood and under-theorised. In exploring these connections this research deploys the phrase infrastructural citizenship to explain how citizens’ everyday access to, and use of, infrastructure in the city affect, and are affected by, their citizenship identity and practice. Furthermore, this broad analytical framework provides the foundations for initiating critical connections between the two scholarly fields of urban infrastructure and citizenship.
Contemporary scholarship on citizenship recognises that citizenship is not just about the legalistic contract of rights between the state and its citizens, but includes the ways in which both citizens and the state demonstrate these rights, and consequently citizenship comprises a crucial space of everyday life in the contemporary city. Concurrently, contemporary urban scholarship has highlighted infrastructure as a crucial lens for understanding everyday life, conceptualising infrastructure as more than just the material means through which the urban is able to function, but also inherently social in the way it is both produced and used by urban dwellers. Thus, while infrastructure and citizenship are inherently connected, this is largely only implicitly acknowledged in the literature. For example, there is widespread recognition that those with restricted citizenship rights (e.g. immigrants, homeless, slum-dwellers) often experience weak access to public infrastructure; that understanding infrastructure as a physical representation of broader socio-political processes implicitly includes citizenship practices and acts; and citizenship acts not only often focus on demanding improved access to infrastructure but frequently use infrastructure as a tool of protest (e.g. road blocks, gaining access to services illegally, self-built homes), such as Holston’s insurgent citizenship.
However, despite these clear examples of the connections between infrastructure and citizenship, the relationship is rarely explicitly acknowledged or critically analysed. Consequently, this research uses the phrase infrastructural citizenship, focusing attention on the ways in which citizenship acts and practices are embodied in public infrastructure (and vice versa), in order to deepen understanding of the infrastructure-citizenship nexus in both theoretical and empirical terms. This is important because it explores potential connections between the infrastructural and civic nature of state-citizen relations
South Africa provides a particularly pertinent case study because universal citizenship is still relatively new, and has emerged in a context where post-apartheid urban politics have been framed around infrastructural provision. The post-apartheid government has prioritised housing as a major anti-poverty strategy, with low-income households eligible for homeownership of a newly brick-built fully-serviced house. On initial receipt of housing, beneficiaries express citizenship as embodied by their housing, with physical receipt of a house representing the start of a new identity as a South African citizen. However, there has been insufficient attention paid to the long-term materiality of state housing as a process of change (rather than a static provision), and the ways in which this intersects with beneficiaries’ changing perceptions and practices of citizenship (both everyday and institutional). This research explores how state-housing beneficiaries have physically changed (or neglected) their house in the decade after receipt, and how this connects to citizenship identity (perceptions and practices) over the same time.
Fieldwork
The first phase of primary fieldwork was undertaken in March/April 2016 in a single state subsidised housing settlement. A team of four fieldworkers (recruited and trained in South Africa) undertook a quantitative survey of the changes made to all houses in the settlement. Concurrently, Dr Lemanski undertook qualitative fieldwork: conducting in-depth interviews with housing beneficiaries, community leaders, community-based NGO, public officials, and other interested parties. The initial findings were communicated to all interviewees via a summary document produced and distributed on the final day of fieldwork.
Fieldworkers recording changes in the settlement (March 2016)
Subsequent fieldwork was undertaken in 2018-2019, focused on key informants in the municiapality, and infrastructure diaries with residents in the same settlement.
Findings
The major empirical findings are related to the infrastructural consequences of the large number of households residing in the settlement. A housing community planned by the state to accommodate 650 households in 1999, now hosts at least three times that number. In terms of physical structures: one-third of houses have a brick-built extension, while the remaining two-thirds have populated backyards with informal structures.
Housing extensions (formal and informal) – March 2016
The strain on infrastructure is severe: water, electricity, drainage, solid waste, sanitation. In different ways all of these services are unable to cope with the excess demand, and this has severe consequences on the community (e.g. fire, illegal dumping, blocked drains, sewerage in the streets). This is currently worsening because public authorities are disinterested in responding to this issue in a state-subsidised housing settlement, which are formally planned fully-serviced sites (ie. not ‘slums’), and therefore further policy dissemination is vital.
Infrastructural strain: dumping, informal toilet, electricity overload (March 2016)
Fieldwork revealed that urban dwellers are demonstrating their citizenship rights via infrastructure, but in ways that challenges the state’s normative assumptions of ‘good citizenship’. While the state expects housing beneficiaries to use their homes in very prescriptive ways, demographic demand result in different outcomes. The research begins to reveal the ways in which the legalities of citizenship practice, perceptions of citizenship identity, and expressions of citizenships acts are all embedded in the physicality of public infrastructure as a representation of the state at the local scale. In this specific case study, housing beneficiaries express citizenship as embodied by their housing, with physical receipt of a house representing the start of a new identity as a South African citizen, accompanied by the confidence to criticise the state via infrastructural change. This “ordinary” approach to citizenship (Staeheli et al 2012) allows the inclusion of a broad range of citizenship meanings, from everyday associational life to protest-based conceptualisation of citizenship, in all cases highlighting the role of public infrastructure as the physical means through which citizens demonstrate their citizenship identity, practice and acts.
Scholarly dissemination
Findings from this project have been published in various academic outputs – including journal articles, a book, and several talks.
- Lemanski, C., 2022, ‘Afterword: Citizenship and the politics of (im)material stigma and infrastructure’, Urban Studies 59(3), 663-671 https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980211055301
- Lemanski, C., 2022, ‘Infrastructural Citizenship: conceiving, producing and disciplining people and place via public housing, from Cape Town to Stoke-on-Trent’, Housing Studies 37(6), 932-954, https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2021.1966390
- Lemanski, C., 2020, ‘Infrastructural citizenship: the everyday citizenship of adapting and/or destroying public housing in Cape Town, South Africa’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 45(3), 589-605, http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/tran.12370
- Lemanski, C., 2020, ‘Infrastructural citizenship: (de)constructing state-society relations’, International Development Planning Review, 42(2), 115-125, https://doi.org/10.3828/idpr.2019.39
- Lemanski, C. (Ed.), 2019, Citizenship and Infrastructure: practices and identities of urban citizens and the state, Routledge: Abingdon
Practical dissemination
During 2016-2022, this fieldwork was disseminated in Cape Town with policymakers and community representatives. Dr Lemanski presented the research findings to the City of Cape Town municipal officials at workshops in 2016, 2018 and 2022, where officials were interested in the research findings and provided useful feedback on positioning the research findings within the broader city policy framework.
In addition, Dr Lemanski ran a workshop in the low-income community where fieldwork was undertaken in March/April 2016. Almost all community leaders attended, and provided constructive feedback on the empirical findings in terms of their own experiences as residents and leaders. This meeting has helped to develop Dr Lemanski’s profile in the community, and provides a foundation for ongoing communication over the research.
September 2016: Photo of dissemination workshop with community leaders and NGO workers