Liberation and looted malls: fractured urbanism and suburban nationalism in South Africa in the time of Covid

Abstract

In 2003, Ivor Chipkin (2003) published a study which found that the provision of improved physical infrastructure (taps, housing, new schools, etc.) did not necessarily improve social cohesion in communities with broken homes and gangsters. Physical infrastructure provision, he argued, was not the same as development. It did not on its own make communities more cohesive, democratic and tolerant. The South African concept of ubuntu, or human togetherness, he argued, did not come naturally; it had to be cultivated as part of a programme of social upliftment and empowerment. He used fieldwork from the Cape Flats in Cape Town to show that accommodating street gangsters and their families in better housing units had not stopped them from being gangsters. In fact, on the contrary, the housing programme seemed to be rewarding them for being gangsters.