Academic Research on Shack Settlements & Cities

Contemporary Research on South African Shack Settlements & Cities

• Shack Tenure in Durban by Catherine Cross, 1994
• Integrating the City UNESCO interview with John Abbot, 2000
• Durban: Towards a City Without Citizens by Antoine Bouillon, 2000
• The Impact of the Transition from Informal Housing to Low-Income Housing Projects in South Africa by Warren Smit, 2000
• Housing for the Urban Poor in Cape Town: a postapartheid dream or nightmare?, Eric Bahre, 2001
• Modernity's abject space: the rise and fall of Durban's Cato Manor, by Jeffrey Popke, 2001
• A Legacy of Control? The Capital Subsidy for Housing, and Informal Settlement Intervention in South Africa, by Marie Huchzermeyer, 2003
• Policy Aspects for Informal Settlements by Marie Huchzermeyer, 2003
• 'Creative Destruction': Early Modernist Planning in the South Durban Industrial Zone, South Africa by Dianne Scott, 2003
• A Legacy of Control: The Capital Subsidy for Housing, and Informal Settlement Intervention in South Africa by Marie Huchzermeyer, 2003
• Informal Settlement Practice in South Africa’s Metropolitan Cities, Study into the Support of Informal Settlements For the Department of Housing, Pretoria, August 2004
• 'Middle Class Neighbourhoods or African Kraals?' The impact of informal settlements on white identity in post-apartheid South Africa by Richard Ballard, 2004
• Dislocating modernity: Identity, space and representations of street trade in Durban, South Africa, by Jeffrey Popke & Richard Ballard, 2004
• Study Into the Support of Informal Settlements Study Commissioned by the Department of Housing and undertaken by the University of Witwatersrand School of Architecture and Planning Together with Independent Experts, 2004
• The Suffering Body of the City by Frederic Le Marcis, 2004
• Dislocating modernity: Identity, space and representations of street trade in Durban, South Africa, by Jeff Popke & Richard Ballard, 2004
• Reaching the poor: An analysis of the influences on the evolution of South Africa's housing policy by Sarah Charlton & Caroline Kihato, 2005
• Bunkers for the Psyche: How Gates Communities Have Allowed the Privatisation of Apartheid in Democratic South Africa by Richard Ballard, 2005
• The Struggle for In Situ Upgrading of Informal Settlements – Case Studies from Gauteng by Marie Huchzermeyer, 2006
• Informal Settlements as Spaces of Health Inequality: The changing economic and spatial roots of the AIDS pandemic from apartheid to neoliberalism by Mark Hunter, 2006
• Reification and the Dictatorship of the Water Meter, by Alex Loftus, 2006
• Working the Socio-Natural Relations of the Urban Waterscape in South Africa by Alex Loftus, 2007
• Urban Land Markets: How the Poor Access, Hold and Trade Land by Urban LandMark, 2007
• Spaces of Resistance: Informal Settlement, Communication and Community Organisation in a Cape Town Township, Andrew Skuse and Thomas Cousins, 2007
• Settlement Informality: The importance of understanding change, formality and land and the informal economy by Marie Huchzermyer, 2008
• Housing Struggles, Land Occupations and Eviction Processes: Negotiating lived experience in Zille Raine Heights, Cape Town, by Jessica Thorn, 2008
• Social Justice and the Right to the City, Martin Murry, 2008
• Disposable People at the Peri-Urban Fringe, Martin Murry, 2008
• The parallel claims of gated communities and land invasions in a Southern city: polarised state responses, Charlotte Lemanski & Sophi Oldfield, 2008
• The Reverse Side of the Medal: About the 2010 FIFA World Cup and the Beautification of the N2 in Cape Town, Caroline Newton, 2009
• Fire and Ice: Unnatural disasters and the urban poor in Post-Apartheid Johannesburg, Martin Murry, 2009
• A Progressive Policy Without Progressive Politics: Lessons from the failure to implement 'Breaking New Ground' by Richard Pithouse, 2009
• eMatinini – Place of Tin The Provision of Public Housing in South Africa: The Impact and Effect of Transit Camps on Residents and its Place in the Provision of Housing, by Lenny Cohen, 2009
• Insurgent Planning: Situating Radial Planning in the Global South, by Faranak Miraftab, 2009
• Land tenure and vulnerability: the social consequences of the in situ upgrade of informal settlements, a South African case study, Kamna Patel, 2010
• Rebellion of the poor: South Africa’s service delivery protests – a preliminary analysis by Peter Alexander, 2010
• The Difference that Place Makes: Some Brief Notes on the Economic Implications of Moving from an Informal Settlement to a Transit Camp, by Mark Hunter, 2010
• Pounding at the Tip of the Iceberg: The dominant politics of informal settlement eradication in South Africa, Marie Huchzermeyer, 2010
• Claiming the Right to the City Contesting Forced Evictions of Squatters in Cape Town during the run-up to the 2010 FIFA World Cup, by Rosalie de Bruijn, 2010
• Contradictions in the Gender-Poverty Nexus: Reflections on the Privatisation of Social Reproduction and Urban Informality in South African Townships”, by Faranak Miraftab, 2010
• Informal Settlement Upgrading in Cape Town’s Hangberg: Local Government, Urban Governance and the ‘Right to the City’, by Walter Fieuw, 2011
• A Politics of Land Occupation: State Practice and Everyday Mobilization in Zille Raine Heights, Cape Town, Jessica Thorn & Sophie Oldfield, 2011
• Flagship Slum Eradication Projects: Flas and controversies in the N2 Gateway Project in Cape Town and Kiberia-Soweto in Nairobi, by Marie Huchzermeyer, 2011
• Here to work: the socioeconomic characteristics of informal dwellers in post-apartheid South Africa, by Mark Hunter & Dorrit Posel, 2012
• Young women from informal settlements report on their experiences of accessing sexual and reproductive and other health services from clinics, Melissa O'Reilly & Laura Washington, 2012
• Hosting the World, Chris McMichael, 2012
• Spatial reorganisation, decentralisation and dignity: Applying a Fanonian lens to a Grahamstown shack settlement, by Sarita Pillay, 2012
• Colonial Present: Legacies of the Past in Contemporary Urban Practices in Cape Town, South Africa, by Faranak Miraftab, 2012
• Humanism, creativity and rights: invoking Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city in the tension presented by informal settlements in South Africa today, by Marie Huchzermeyer, 2013

Contemporary Research on Shack Settlements, Shack Dwellers' Struggles & Cities Elsewhere

• The Myth of Marginality by Janice Perlman, 1976 (Brazil)
• What Would a Non-Sexist City Look Like?, Dolores Hayden, 1980
• Un-civil Society: The politics of the 'informal people' by Asef Bayat, 1997 (Iran)
• Street Politics: Poor people's Movements in Iran, by Asef Bayet, 1997
• From`Dangerous Classes' to `Quiet Rebels': Politics of the Urban Subaltern in the Global South by Asef Bayat, 2000 (Iran)
• Towards a Dictatorship Over the Poor: Notes on the penalization of poverty in Brazil by Loïc Wacquant, 2003
• City Requiem: Culcutta, by Ananya Roy, 2004
• The Politics of the Governed, by Partha Chatterjee, 2004
• Demeaned but Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica, by Obika Gray, 2004
• The Myth of Marginality Revisited: The Case of Favelas in Rio de Janeiro, 1969-2003 by Janice Perlman, 2005
• Together with the state, despite the state, against the state: Social movements as ‘critical urban planning’ agents, by Marcelo Lopes de Souza, 2006
• Constructing the 'Right to the City' in Brazil by Edésio Fernandes, 2007
• State of the World's Cities 2006/7, United Nations
• Barrio Women and Popular Politics in Chavez’s Venezuela, Sujatha Fernandes, 2007
• Myth of the Abuja 'Master Plan', COHRE, 2008
• Cities for All: Proposals and Experiences towards the Right to the City, Ana Sugranyes and Charlotte Mathivet, 2010
• Favela by Janice Perlamn, 2010
• Urban Development on the Basis of Autonomy: A Politico-philosophical and Ethical Framework for Urban Planning and Management, by Marcelo Lopes de Souza, 2010
• Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces, by Raúl Zibechi, 2010
• Red October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia, by Jeffery Webber, 2011
• Rebel Cities, by David Harvey, 2012
• Slum politics: Community leaders, everyday needs, and utopian aspirations in Recife, Brazil, by Martijn Koster and Pieter A. de Vries, 2012,
• The Urban Peripheries: Counter-Powers from Below?, by Raul Zibechi, 2012

Mike Davis' Planet of Slums and Responses

• Mike Davis, 'Planet of Slums' [paper], New Left Review, 2004
• Slavoj Žižek, 'The Free World…of Slums' In These Times, 2004
• Mike Davis. 'Planet of Slums' [book], 2006
• Richard Pithouse, 'Thinking Resistance in the Shanty Town', Mute Magazine 40, 2006
• Vyjaynnathi Rao, 'Slum as Theory: The South/Asian city and globalization' International Journal of Urban & Regional Research, 2006
• Jan Breman, 'Slumlands', New Left Review 40, 2006
• Tom Angotti, 'Apocalyptic anti-urbanism: Mike Davis and his planet of slums', International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Volume 30.4 December 2006 961–7
• David Cunningham, 'Slumming it: Mike Davis' Grand Narrative of Urban Revolution', Radical Philosophy 142 March-April 2007.
• Jeremy Harding, 'It Migrates to Them', London Review of Books, Vol. 29 No. 5, 8 March 2007.
• Alan Gilbert, 'The Return of the Slums: Does Language Matter?', International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2007
• Tom Meyer, Review, 'Planet of Slums', 2007
• Leo Zeilig and Claire Ceruti, 'Slums, resistance and the African working class', International Socialism: A quarterly journal of socialist theory, 2007
• Richard Pithouse, Review, 'Planet of Slums', Journal of Asian & African Studies, 2008

David Harvey's Organising for the Anti-Capitalist Transition and Responses in Interface, 2010

• Organizing for the anti-capitalist transition, David Harvey
• A new and unsettling force: the strategic relevance of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign, Willie Baptist
• The interests of the movement as a whole": response to David Harvey, Laurence Cox,
• Educating resistance, Anna Selmeczi
• Which right to which city? In defence of political-strategic clarity, Marcelo Lopes de Souza