Dear Colleagues

I would like to voice concern with a press release by SDI, also posted on Shelter Norway’s website, about the Nobel Peace Prize nomination of Jockin Arputham. It appears below. I am not questioning the nomination, but the arguments put forward in the press release cannot remain unchallenged.

I’ve copied Mike Davis into this e-mail, as he might like to comment on the way one point in his book ‘Planet of Slums’ is used. In the interpretation of the press release, it is Davis’ notion that violence is guaranteed to arise from within the planet’s ‘slums’, which are therefore a threat to western society. The press release uses this (and reference to western military concerns) to justify or at least highlight the importance of SDI’s pacifying strategies of dialogue rather than ‘confrontation’. The press release, in the tradition of SDI tracts and publications, employs a simplistic dualism between ‘dialogue’ and ‘confrontation’, one good, the other bad; one beneficial, the other damaging; one supportive, the other exploitative;  one promoted by SDI, the other by ‘middle class rights based activists that “never give anything back”’.

As the largest, most democratically organised shack dwellers movement in South Africa (carefully employing a wide range of strategies from dialogue to rights-based action to protest) yesterday announced its return to the Constitutional Court to challenge persistent unlawful repression by a large municipality, the SDI’s simplistic duality must be exposed as a myth. This is particularly important as SDI presents this mythical duality to western donors as well as to governments in the countries in which it has replicated its savings and enumerations structures. It also packages these as best practice for international agencies in which the SDI has increasing influence. Of greater concern is the damage that a press release such as this one does to the public’s perception of those supporting and those engaged in serious rights-based and urban legal work.

Best regards

Marie

 

Marie Huchzermeyer

Professor, School of Architecture and Planning

University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag 3

Wits 2050, South Africa. Tel: +27-11-7177688