Bureaucracy and Provisionality: Competing Logics of Housing Delivery in Post-Apartheid South Africa

• In Event: 485 - Section on Sociology of Development Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 05. States, Bureaucracy, and Civil Society

Abstract

Moving beyond a simplistic narrative of the neoliberal retrenchment of social spending, an emergent body of scholarship has identified “new welfare states” across the global South. Yet this work has focused entirely on cash disbursement programs, ignoring a second major component: housing delivery. This is especially true in the case of post-apartheid South Africa, which has distributed more formal housing than any other modern democracy. As a corrective, this paper explains the novelty and genesis of the post-apartheid delivery apparatus. Post-apartheid housing distribution is organized in terms of coexisting modes of delivery: bureaucratic and provisional. The apartheid delivery apparatus, by contrast, remained solely bureaucratic. A desperate bureaucracy attempts to conciliate impatient residents on a case-by-case basis. It regularizes the distribution of transitional housing on an ad hoc basis in the instrument of temporary relocation areas (TRAs), consolidating the provisional mode of delivery. However, TRAs are overwhelmed by the sheer number of cases, and transitional housing becomes permanent. The internal tensions within each mode result from the responsiveness of municipalities to residential demands. Thus democratization (rather than its absence) explains both the contradictory nature of each mode of delivery, and the coexistence of these twin modes of delivery in contrast to housing delivery under apartheid.

Author

• Zachary Levenson, University of California-Berkeley