Local Officials and the Struggle to Transform Cities: A View from Post-Apartheid South Africa

Book info: Local Officials and the Struggle to Transform Cities: A View from Post-Apartheid South Africa (Kindle, 494 pages) – UCL Press, 2024. Language: English.

An ethnographic exploration of the challenges faced by South African municipalities to make the urban world a better place. Why are even progressive local authorities with the will to improve seldom able to change cities? Why does it seem almost impossible to redress spatial inequalities, deliver and maintain basic services, elevate impoverished areas, and protect marginalized communities? Why do municipalities in the Global South refuse to work with prevailing social informalities, and resort instead to interventions that are known to displace and aggravate the very issues they aim to address?Local Officials and the Struggle to Transform Cities analyzes these challenges in South African cities, where the brief post-apartheid moment opened a window for progressive city government and made research into state practices both possible and necessary. The book interrogates city officials’ practices through a comparative gaze into other ‘progressive moments’ in large cities in Brazil, the United States, and India. It considers the instruments that these officials invent to implement urban policies, the agency these officials develop, and the constraints they navigate in governing unequal cities. Claire Bénit-Gbaffou captures in this book actual officials’ practices through first-hand experience, state ethnographies, and engaged research. This reveals day-to-day practices that question generalized explanations of state failure in complex urban societies as essential malevolence, contextual weakness, corruption, and inefficiency. This book opens the black box of the workings of the state, with the hope of opening paths for the construction of progressive policies in contemporary cities.