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Community Leadership in Urban Informal Neighbourhoods: Micro-Politics and Micro-Administration in Informal Settlements in Cape Town

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Abstract

With the diversity of non-state governance actors in the urban Global South, detailed insights are needed into various categories of actors at the local scale. This paper concentrates on community leadership, which has arguably been neglected in urban studies. While it has been shown that a central aspect of community leadership is the constant need to negotiate legitimacy in relation to both state institutions (the top) and the constituency (the bottom), this paper focuses on relationships at the bottom. Community leaders are viewed as a form of government involved in several historically developed practices of dealing with community-specific concerns. Based on insights from field visits to informal settlements in Cape Town, four sets of practices are described: intermediary practices, internal conflict mediation, migration business regulation and mobilisation. Through engaging in these practices, leaders are constructed as community activists, public servants, regulators of order, administrators and political representatives. This indicates that in spaces of informality, governance might take forms similar to formal governments, albeit lacking a separation or clear boundary between administrative and political leadership. Adding to the theorising of community leadership in urban studies, this paper demonstrates the usefulness of acknowledging and analysing administrative aspects of community leadership in addition to the political ones.

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Notes

  1. Here, Roy (2009) disagrees with theorists like Appadurai (2002) who suggest that the governmentality from the bottom (the grassroots) and the top (government) are fundamentally different.

  2. The vast debates around the concept of social capital will not be addressed thoroughly in this paper. For studies applying social capital in urban South African communities, see Esau (2008, 2009).

  3. The difference between social and political capital is another issue that cannot be explored in this paper, but Bénit-Gbaffou and Katsaura (2014) make an interesting point in exploring political capital rather than the highly debated concept of social capital in community related research.

  4. Brint (2001) further suggests eight subtypes, including virtual communities, which also highlight the complex and changing dynamics between place and interest, but this typology will not be applied in this paper.

  5. See Parry and Bryman (2006) for an overview of leadership theory from the 1940s to the social constructive turn in the 1980s.

  6. Notably, the line between such community policing and vigilantism is often blurred (Buur and Jensen 2004).

  7. They functioned as subsidiary forms of local government, coexisting with formal apartheid authorities, and spread from the rural areas to townships and informal settlements across South Africa with the arrival of the first magistrates, during urbanisation in the late nineteenth century (Burman and Schärf 1990).

  8. This also resonates with the research finding that the ward council system is dysfunctional especially in low-income neighbourhoods; some of the reasons being that they are not operative and that the role and power of ward councillors are unclear (see e.g. Bénit-Gbaffou 2008; Staniland 2008; Esau 2008).

  9. Crime statistics show that the Nyanga police district, within which two of the settlements of this study are located, has the highest rates of murder and rape in South Africa (CoCT 2009).

  10. Providing “proof of residency” is one of the ward councillor’s duties, but in many cases this job is handed over to informal settlement leaders.

  11. A shebeen is an alcohol outlet or pub without a license to operate. Shebeens are common in most informal settlements. For a discussion of community-based regulations of shebeens, see Drivdal and Lawhon (2014).

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Acknowledgments

This article was developed from my doctoral research at the Centre of Criminology at the University of Cape Town. I am deeply indebted to my supervisors Clifford Shearing and Jan Froestad for their guidance and advice. The financial sponsorship through participating in the project “Flooding in Cape Town Under Climate Change Risk” funded by International Development Research Centre is gratefully acknowledged.

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  1. University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

    Laura Drivdal

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Drivdal, L. Community Leadership in Urban Informal Neighbourhoods: Micro-Politics and Micro-Administration in Informal Settlements in Cape Town. Urban Forum 27, 275–295 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12132-016-9289-5

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