Displaced urbanism: city shack life and the citizenship of the suburban house in the rural Transkei

Abstract

In their book Ekhaya: The Politics of Home in KwaZulu-Natal, Healy-Clancy and Hickel (2014) argue that the values that informed the democratic revolution in South Africa were to a large extent incubated and nurtured in the sociospatial complex of the urban township a social form that was designed by the apartheid state to control Africans but ended up cultivating an appetite for private life, suburbia and individualism. Hickel (2014) argues that the forced removal and resettlement of tens of thousands of families in planned townships designed to accommodate nuclear families fundamentally transformed the structure of kinship and gender relations in urban communities across the country.