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Geographical Limitations of Neo-liberalism: Urban Planning and theOccluded Territoriality of InformalSurvival in African Cape TownYonn Dierwechter aa Urban Studies Program, University of Washington , 1900Commerce Street Tacoma, WA, 98402-3100, USA E-mail:Published online: 12 Mar 2007.

To cite this article: Yonn Dierwechter (2006) Geographical Limitations of Neo-liberalism: UrbanPlanning and the Occluded Territoriality of Informal Survival in African Cape Town, Space andPolity, 10:3, 243-262, DOI: 10.1080/13562570601110658

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Geographical Limitations of Neo-liberalism:

Urban Planning and the Occluded Territoriality

of Informal Survival in African Cape Town

YONN DIERWECHTER

[Paper first received, October 2005; in final form, September 2006]

Abstract. Urban political geography lacks theoretical work on the territorialityof the informal economy, notwithstanding the empirical significance of infor-mal city-building all around the world. With reference to the hypothesis ofgrowing neo-liberalism in post-apartheid cities, this paper explores the terri-toriality of informal-sector governance in Cape Town, using a theorisationthat foregrounds place/space dialectics. An analysis is offered of informal-sector practices and the administrative strategies of the local state, particularlythe urban planning system. While support for the neo-liberal hypothesis is pre-sented, the paper argues for the geographical limitations of neo-liberalism as aterritorial strategy of the post-apartheid state.

One of the key concerns within contemporary critical human geography[is] the superimposition and hyperextension of abstract space onto theconcrete spaces of everyday life (Boyle, 2005, pp. 181–182).

All spaces should be seen as complex interrelations between modes ofordering and forms of resistance so that the ‘effects of power and resist-ance are intertwined’ (Murdoch, 1998, p. 364).

The post-apartheid city continues to look remarkably like its predecessor,the apartheid city (Christopher, 2005, p. 2305).

1. Introduction: Mapping Urban Neo-liberalism

Neo-liberalism appears to be the political ideology of our times. It is not the onlyideology on offer these days, as the hardly vanquished discourses of sustainabil-ity, social democracy, Bin Ladenism, communitarianism and various stripes ofauthoritarianism each suggest. However, neo-liberalism is still, it might be plau-sibly argued, the most consequential of these discourses—the Big Force in theterritoriality of global economic relations, where the power to influence thecharacteristics of local capital accumulation and social redistribution across aremarkably diverse range of societies now resides.

Yonn Dierwechter is with the Urban Studies Program, University of Washington, 1900Commerce Street Tacoma, WA 98402-3100, USA. E-mail: yonn@u.washington.edu.

Space and Polity, Vol. 10, No. 3, 243–262, December 2006

1356-2576 Print=1470-1235 Online/06=030243-20 # 2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080=13562570601110658

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Interpreted as a normative and applied commitment to freeing up over-regulated economic forces that, when fully liberated, more efficiently allocategoods, services and capital for broadly shared material growth, the politics ofneo-liberalism focus on dismantling the expansive architecture of the contempor-ary state at various levels of governance (Koelble, 2004). For its detractors andcritics—most geographers, it seems, but not all social scientists—this involvesthe unwarranted marketisation of public policy arenas like health care, educationaladministration, infrastructure development, environmental regulation and familyincome support. In contrast, those who sympathise intellectually with neo-liberalobjectives and policy values seek to scale back what they believe is the overambi-tious, and incompetently administered, scope of state activities (while downplay-ing the history of state successes). Although he defends the crucial importance ofstate capacity, Fukuyama nonetheless provides helpful examples of the neo-liberalperspective on state largesse and economic health

The Mexican government’s share of GDP expanded from 21 per cent in1970 to 48 per cent in 1982, laying the groundwork for the debt crisis thatemerged that year. The state sectors of many sub-Saharan Africancountries engaged in activities like running large state-owned corpor-ations and agricultural marketing boards that had negative effects onproductivity (Fukuyama, 2004, p. 6).

The counter-reaction to these trends, Fukuyama further notes, began withReaganism and Thatcherism in the capitalist core but diffused to other regionsof the world through influential institutions like the IMF, the World Bank andthe US government.

In recent years, critically oriented geographers of urban regions have effectivelyrescaled neo-liberalism, charting the location and nature of ‘neo-liberal space’ in thecomplex meshwork of the metropolitan landscape (for example, Keeling, 1999;Rogerson and Boyle, 2000; Brenner and Theodore, 2002a, 2002b; Jessop, 2002;Peck and Tickell, 2002; Swyngedouw et al., 2002; Weber, 2002). Unsurprisingly,most of this research explores North Atlantic societies, particularly those ofBritain and the US. However, a small, but fast-growing, literature on the neo-liberal spaces of post-apartheid cities is now appearing (Maharaj and Narsiah,2002; Smith, 2004; McDonald and Smith, 2004; Robins, 2002; van Heusden andPointer, 2006). The post-apartheid literature is poignant because the African NationalCongress (ANC) under Nelson Mandela had hoped originally for something ratherdifferent: i.e. growth through redistribution for a long-disenfranchised, increas-ingly urban and disproportionately poor Black majority (Peet, 2002). This radicalaspiration for redistribution embodied the political philosophy of Charterism, avariant of African socialism conceived in the mid 1950s, as well as the broaderanti-apartheid movement, with its extremely strong social equity and racial justiceorientation (Marais, 1998). And yet by 1996, little more than two years into thepost-apartheid era, “the [ANC-led] government had embraced a standard neo-liberal strategy as a central piece of its anti-poverty strategy” (Cheru, 2001, p. 505).

What the hypothesised neo-liberal turn means (or does not mean) for thegeography of South African cities and urban regions therefore provides a fertileresearch agenda. In broad terms, Maharaj and Narsiah (2002) suggest thatthe macroeconomic consolidation of neo-liberalism in the late 1990s demands a‘paradigm shift’ in how we approach and spatialise the post-apartheid city.Classic themes in urban studies remain important in the new cultural and

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institutional context of post-apartheid South Africa: for example, residentialsegregation and integration, poverty and inequality, housing policy, governanceand political conflict and municipal financing, to name a few (Seekings, 2000).But following Maharaj and Narsiah, much of this work should now also be inter-preted in the light of neo-liberal policy agendas.

This interpretation is gaining momentum, in Cape Town no less than elsewhere(Miraftab, 2004; Foster, 2005). In her recent study of water delivery, for example,Laila Smith (2004) argues that Cape Town’s civil engineers have recently shiftedtheir administrative models from privatisation to corporatisation. Both modelsshare a private-sector ethos that champions neo-liberal principles like cost recov-ery, efficiency and competition rather than social-democratic values like equity,voice and redistribution. However, corporatisation is more consequentialbecause it ‘internalises’ neo-liberalism within the state, whereas privatisation‘externalises’ it to third-party providers—guilt by deed, that is, rather than byassociation.

Other scholars of South African cities broach cognate themes. Narsiah (2002)charts privatisation “as a sub-discourse of neo-liberalism” in Durban. Extendingthe relatively early disappointment of Marais (1998), Bond (2000, p. 1) seeslittle more than an “elite transition”, where the private macroeconomics of neo-liberalism have replaced not only the public geopolitics of apartheid but also itsantithesis: a “popular-nationalist-anti-apartheid project” that might renew Charter-ist values, such as large public housing programmes as economic developmentand social justice tools. Drawing on Foucault to interpret crime-laden commu-nities in Cape Town, Robins (2002, p. 666) analyses new spaces of governmentalitywith direct reference to “the contracting and retreating neo-liberal state (and itssecurity apparatus)”. Still other studies look at new relationships betweenneo-liberal values and urban services, such as waste collection (Miraftab, 2004),water and sanitation (Bond, 2003) and health care (Foster, 2005).

None of this research necessarily implies that neo-liberalism is irreversiblyembedded in urban South Africa. Indeed, Swilling et al. (2003, pp. 305–306)suspect that the “global-babble” of neo-liberalism is “simplistic, linear urbandevelopment” incompletely projected onto “the nonformalised, creolised, hotch-potched social orders and territories” of South Africa’s post-apartheid cities. Thisis an evocative reading of South African space. It suggests that, while urbanneo-liberalism is far-reaching, it is also vulnerable to challenges ‘from below’—athesis that highlights the concomitant need to explore social resistance whenmapping the ‘modes of ordering’ associated with a particular state’s geo-historicaltransformation (see van Heusden and Pointer, 2006).

Within the context of the broader debates about the territorial reach of urbanneo-liberalism in post-apartheid South Africa, this paper theorises recent empiricalrelationships between urban planning and the informal food economy within keyAfrican neighbourhoods of the Cape Town urban region. Focused on the regu-lation of land uses, urban planning is a key technology of the state’s territorialaspirations. In contrast, as will be discussed, informal economic actors areusually defined by the regulations they avoid, including planning and healthrequirements (Perera and Amin, 1993). In consequence, informality is often the‘dark matter’ of the urban universe; manifestly important but just beyondtelescopic reach; crucial to contemporary forms of urban capitalism, asSassen-Koob (1986), Castells and Portes (1989), and de Soto (1989) have posited,but also part of “another city, one no longer fueled by capital” (Lake, 2003,

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p. 462). Informal food traders in African Cape Town are especially interesting actorsto consider, though, because they were actually taken into account explicitly in theearly post-apartheid years. Specifically, post-apartheid planners in metropolitanCape Town re-imagined informal trading as constitutive of the economic andphysical landscape—creative rather than corrosive elements of the post-apartheidcity (Dierwechter, 2004).

This paper focuses on attempts to reterritorialise the spatial practices of infor-mal food traders, using dialectical theory and time-geography to map challengesassociated with the construction and subsequent management of new wholesal-ing and retailing facilities. The analysis offers partial support for the neo-liberalhypothesis just discussed—for what Boyle (2005, pp. 181–182) thinks of as “thesuperimposition and hyperextension of [the] abstract space [of neo-liberalism]onto the concrete spaces of everyday [informal] life”. At the same time, followingMurdoch’s view (1998) that space is always the outcome of ‘modes of orderingand forms of resistance’, the analysis focuses on the time-geography complexityof informal life to highlight also the territorial limitations of neo-liberalism. Theresult, it is argued, is an occluded territoriality, where attempts at ‘neo-liberalordering’ encounter ‘non-formalised, creolised, hotchpotched social orders andterritories’ of the post-apartheid city. When we explore the territoriality of the infor-mal economy, then, we see that neo-liberalism within the urban planning systemis actually running into similar territorial problems as apartheid ideology.

The remainder of the discussion is developed in three sections. The next sectionlays out a theoretical framework for mapping the geography of urban neo-liberalism in Cape Town. This framework deploys dialectical thinking, drawingon Lefebvrean approaches to the spatial constitution of places. Here, the practicalutility of time-geography as a mapping tool is specifically addressed. The paperthen turns to an analysis of the territoriality of informal food trading. The mainobjective of this section is to highlight the dialectical and heterogeneous natureof everyday trading routines, using the ‘travel stories’ of two traders as indicativemaps; projects plans for the piecemeal transformation of these routines are alsodiscussed. The conclusion offers final thoughts on the insights this experiencehas for the broader conversation about the post-apartheid geography of urbanneo-liberalism in South Africa.

2. The Dialectics of Place/Space and the Time-geography of Encounter

One way to theorise the empirical geography of urban neo-liberalism is to empha-sise the dialectical relationship between space and place. Critical geographers ofurban regions have engaged in dialectical thinking for many years. Marxianapproaches stand out (Harvey, 1985). But other traditions of dialectics are avail-able. For example, Thrift and Pred (1981, p. 283) have suggested that TorstenHagerstrand’s time-geography approach is “fundamentally dialectical” becauseit emphasises the processes or flows that constitute things (like cities). Theutility of time-geography is developed further in a moment.

Here, it is first suggested—with Lefebvre (1991) and others writing in thedialectical tradition—that we proceed by thinking about urban regions as concreteplaces and neo-liberalism as (only partially) constitutive spaces. Although oftenused interchangeably, the concepts of place and space should be analyticallydistinguished when thinking about post-apartheid cities. Consider the following.An armchair, a street, a city—each is a place constituted by social practices of

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various kinds at various scales. As these social practices are also simultaneouslyspatial practices, ‘city-places’ are shaped by multiple spatialities (or moresimply spaces). For example, an armchair is both home space and labour space.Changing the scale, a neighbourhood is both used and exchanged space—a coretension that many political theorists find helpful in explaining the ‘contestedground’ characteristic of city growth and societal change (Davis, 1991).Amongst other implications, this theorisation of an armchair, neighbourhood orcity explicitly rejects mechanistic, Newtonian methods of research that “[breakup] thoughts and problems into pieces . . . arranging them into their logicalorder” (Capra, 1982, p. 37). Things do not exist to engage in relationships; theyexist as a result of relationships.

David Harvey (1996, pp. 48–57) elaborates at length upon this way of thinkingin his book, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Harvey’s theorisation ofdialectics includes the following four propositions

— Relations and flows manifest themselves as ‘things’ [like bodies, chairs, citiesor regions].

— Things [like these places] are constituted out of the flows, processes andrelations within fields which constitute structured systems or wholes.

— Things which many researchers treat as irreducible and therefore unproble-matic are seen in dialectical thought as internally contradictory by virtue ofthe multiple processes that constitute them [like used-and-exchanged neigh-bourhoods].

— By virtue of this multiplicity, things [like cities] are internally heterogeneous.

Following Harvey, geographical reality is the constantly contested and often con-tradictory outcome of place/space dialectics. One way to map this ontology ofplace, space and ultimately urban politics is to consider Henri Lefebvre’s (1991)much discussed but rarely fully applied epistemology as laid out in his famouswork, The Production of Space. Harvey makes considerable use of Lefebvre. ButAndy Merrifield (1991) offers the most relevant discussion of this epistemologyfor present purposes, not only because he links Lefebvre to other traditions of dia-lectical thought but also because he emphasises place rather than only space inLefebvre’s work.

Following Merrifield, but without losing sight of Harvey’s work, Lefebvre the-orises place as the temporary ‘thingification’ of space—or more properly the ‘thin-gification’ of multiple spaces coming together at particular places in particularways (Figure 1). Here, Lefebvre’s famous triptych—representations of space,spatial practices and spaces of representation—provides different ‘moments’ inthe multiple, flowing relations (economic, political, cultural, ecological, symbolic,etc.) that constitute places dialectically at varying scales (see Harvey, 1996;Swygnedouw, 1999). Greatly simplified, these relations crystallise through pro-cesses of bureaucratisation/hierarchy, commodification/markets and alterity/difference (or resistance to both). So read, they work together if often antagonisti-cally to figure place—or, more properly, they each speak to the ‘thingification’ offlows crashing into each other at particular places, including the place of theurban body (see Soja, 1996; and the Rodney King riots). African Cape Town issimultaneously global, political, planned, resisted, lived, represented andmanaged—i.e. ‘internally heterogeneous’. It is this internal heterogeneity ofplace that generates the spatial politics of resistance.

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One of the major implications of theorising place spatially, dialectically and het-erogeneously is that any single set of practices—including those associated withneo-liberal discourses —must jostle with other practices simultaneouslyworking through and on particular places. Accordingly, we may speak of thegrowing empirical importance of ‘neo-liberal space’ (understood as Lefebvreanpractices and/or representations); but we must take care to assume—as a theoreti-cal proposition—that neo-liberal space constitutes particular places without chal-lenges. Indeed, a dialectical reading of place as the thingification of multiple,contradictory spaces suggests the constant openness and contestability of places(see Massey, 2005). This is the principal message of Lefebvre’s famous book. Herecognises the awesome power of capital even as he holds out for a politics ofspatial possibility and cultural renewal.

For all its philosophical strengths, dialectical thinking flies at high altitudes. Itgenerates few mapping tools to carry into the empirical field. For this reason, itis helpful to pull dialectics literally back down to the ground, where poorpeople get out of bed at 4.30 in the morning, stand for hours on street cornersselling sheep offal, bananas or fried hog intestines, and struggle to provide fortheir families. This is where Hagerstand’s time-geography approach comes use-fully into view, not only because it is ‘fundamentally dialectical’, as previouslydiscussed, but also because it captures the spatial intersections between everydaybiography and urban history.

As Thrift (1983) has shown, Hagerstrand’s (1973) time-geography is a ‘contex-tual’ as opposed to ‘compositional’ approach to the study of cities, regions andother built environments. Whereas compositional theory relies on aggregationsof like phenomena abstracted from their otherwise mixed-up empirical habitats,contextual theory emphasises time-space settings, sequences, relations of co-existence and togetherness of seemingly unrelated material—the series of entan-glements that we find in space–time pockets of the world. For Hagerstrand

Figure 1. Theorizing place spatially and dialectically.

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(1983), populations of individuals and things travel through time and space,tracing out paths that he called ‘projects’. Bundles occur when the travels ofmore than one project meet up at particular places or ‘stations’.

Naturally, weaknesses characterise time-geography as a device to map the con-tested dialectics of urban neo-liberalism. Hagerstrand says little about the originaldistribution of time–space resources that individuals draw on—what Gregory(1994, pp. 30–33) calls the structural templates and station configurations thathave long been the concerns of political economy explanations which emphasise,for example, ‘racial Fordism’ (Kraaka, 1996; Beall et al., 2002). Relatedly, asGiddens (1984) worried, we do not have a strong sense of the generativesources of individual projects, a flaw that keeps us from distinguishing self-motivated versus “pre-assigned” tasks (Thrift, 1983, p. 30). Still, time-geography’semphasis on any given individual’s constrained agency highlights the complex,multihued ground of city life that other approaches literally pass over. It is tothis empirical ground of informal African life, and the increasingly neo-liberalplans for the reterritorialisation of this life, that the discussion now turns.

3. The (Occluded) Territoriality of Urban Planning and ‘Informal-sectorDevelopment’ in African Cape Town: the Case of Food Trading

Born from imperial contact along the global trade routes of the 16th century, con-temporary Cape Town is a socially diverse city of some 3 million people. Due to itsmild climate and dramatic topography, it is the country’s most popular tourist des-tination. While Cape Town is a political and legislative hub as well as a regionalmanufacturing centre, its future is increasingly tied to national and globaltourist flows. As in Durban, East Rand, Johannesburg, Pretoria and Port Elizabeth,the territorial governance of these flows is now the responsibility of the Cape Town‘unicity’, a metropolitan government that has wholly replaced the fragmentedpatchwork of local, regional and national authorities associated with urbangovernance under apartheid (Cameron and Tapscott, 2000; Pieterse, 2002a, 2002b).

One of the most pressing challenges for this new authority is to address mean-ingfully the problems of African residents. A minority population in Cape Town,Africans remain considerably poorer and relatively more deprived than othermajor social groups in the city (Table 1). About half of African households in1997, for instance, “could not feed the children in the household at somepoint over the previous year” (CMC, 1997a). In contrast, the figures were only5.5 per cent for Coloureds and a scant 1.8 per cent for Whites. Barely a quarter

Table 1. Social status in Cape Town, by race (percentages rounded to wholenumbers)

Group

Percentageof total

populationa

Percentagewith aphoneb

Percentage unableto feed children

in past yearb

Percentage whose energysource for cooking is paraffin

(not gas or electricity)b

Coloured 48 66 6 Less than 1Black African 31 23 49 47White 19 90 2 Less than 1Other 2 — — —

aSource: StatsSA (2001).bSource: CMC (1997a).

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of African households had telephones in their homes and nearly half used paraffinfor cooking. Finally, in the late 1990s, the median personal income of Cape Town’sWhite males was eleven times higher than it was for African females (CMC, 1997a;see also Cameron and Tapscott, 2000).

However, the generative source of these problems was and remains Africanunemployment (Johnson, 2004). In their survey of Nyanga and other majorAfrican communities in Cape Town, Awotona et al. (1995) found unemployedrates of between 26.5 per cent and 65 per cent, depending on settlement typology,and household dependency ratios of between 2.3 to 1 and 6.6. to 1, also dependingon settlement typology. According to a study by the Foundation for ContemporaryResearch (FCR, 1999), about half the African population at this time had jobs in‘personal services’ or ‘general services’; only 7 per cent worked in more protectedsectors like manufacturing and government. Reflecting the youthfulness of theAfrican population, one-third of household members were still at school. Thetourist economy may alleviate some of these problems. However, without aradical transformation in labour markets, it is likely that at least a third ofAfrican youth will continue to face unemployment upon leaving the classroomat the end of each school year, joining a large pool of Africans already there—aswell as growing numbers of new immigrants from across sub-Saharan Africa.

In such conditions, labour opportunities will be found in the informal economy,where barriers to entry are low (McGee, 1996; Amin, 1996; Thomas, 1995; Williamsand Windebank, 1993; Perera and Amin, 1993). One part of the urban informalsector, which also subsumes land use dynamics, informal labour can refer tounpaid domestic work, underground criminal activity or neighbourhood recipro-city. For present purposes, though, it refers only to “the paid production and saleof goods and services that are unregistered by, or hidden from, the state for tax,social security or labour law purposes, but which are legal in all other respects”(Williams and Windebank, 2001, p. 306).1 It can be lucrative for a few actors,but the vast majority of informal labour in Cape Town is survivalist in nature(Thomas, 1995; Wilkinson, 2000).

A major component of the African informal economy is the food sector, whichinvolves the production, sourcing and/or retailing of commodities like fruits, veg-etables, dairy, grains and cooked and uncooked meats (Myburgh, 1995). Africanhouseholds in the Western Cape spent on average one-fourth of their income onfood, putting the economic importance of foodstuffs well ahead of expenditureson housing, transport or health care—comparatively better researched issues(CSS, 1997). Roughly two-thirds of the African households purchased foodsfrom formal supermarkets on a regular basis, mostly outside African communities(FCR, 1999). In general, members of the household who worked outside theirneighbourhood purchased food near their places of employment, all over thecity, as part of their commuting patterns. This suggests ample opportunity to‘by-pass’ informal actors altogether. In fact, most African households split theirpurchasing patterns, transferring considerable amounts of cash to the informalfood economy. For commodities like fruits and vegetables, Myburgh andKaraan (1998) estimated that informal traders captured upwards of 95 per centof the total African market. Informal offal traders may capture 80–85 per centof the African market (FCR, 1999).

Urban planning systems that seek policy relevance do not typically ignoresizeable economic activity like this, even if ‘removed or marginal’. In part, thisemanates from negative arguments for planning controls (Klosterman, 1988).

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Informal trading in meats, in particular, includes practices such as backyardslaughtering—‘informal abattoirs’ that circumvent environmental health regu-lations designed to protect populations already overexposed to environmentalhealth risks (CMC, 1998; see also Lewin and Strauss, 1999). So conceived, the plan-ning system is in the business of “structuring [informal] movements” in order to“[protect] the interests of the more immobilised, the more embedded”, whichKevin Cox (2002, p. 6) sees as a key motivation for state territoriality. In the caseof informal abattoirs in African Cape Town, the state is (negatively) pressuredby society to help to eradicate disease vectors that threaten “immobilized,embedded” residents, including children.

However, planning systems are subject to other rationalities and to other theor-etical and practical possibilities (see Harrison, 2006). Consider, for instance, thepost-apartheid observations of an economic development official charged withsupporting small businesses and micro-enterprises, many engaged in informaltrading activities

[In the past] urban managers saw their function as enforcement, the util-isation of space, things other than [economic development]. But peoplehave developed the right kind of perspective. They now see informaltrading as an opportunity. So it’s not just a burden to the city(Small Business Development Co-ordinator, Cape Town City Council,23 February 1999).2

This suggests a more positive motivation for urban planning—and thus a verydifferent territorial relationship between state and society. Here the state seeksto harness “the opportunity” of the informal economy, rather than stamp it outas an environmental health nightmare. One public official described the olderregulatory perspective of the local state this way

The informal trading of food has always been a problem for environ-mental health people. In the 1980s we were really tough on streetfoods. We didn’t go for that, we were anti-street foods. We insisted onrefrigerated trucks and all that. But who could afford that? (IndependentDevelopment Consultant, 16 August 1999).

In the view of urban planners, though, the original shift was not simply to regu-latory tolerance, but to spatial transformation. As a land use planner charged withdesigning new neighbourhood and transit corridor plans detailed the logic

In the townships informal trading is everywhere, like fresh produce, butyour chances of a reasonable turnover are low. You need concentrations,nodes. And the interchanges like around public transport are critical,critical generators of economic activities. The clustering of activities . . .that’s the idea. Facilities using each other. [It’s] a mindset change fromcontrol to a facilitation approach. It used to be that transport inter-changes were designed and then informal traders would come in andbugger it up. So we said, “Look, we’ve got to start with trading andtransport—and build decent public space” (Town Planner, Cape TownCity Council, 19 August 1999).

A second planner put it in similar terms, albeit with an even sharper focus onregulatory powers and the state’s territorial imagination

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Thing’s don’t fit neatly. Facilities don’t’ ‘talk’ to each other . . . I don’t seethat happening in the townships [because] the structural preconditionsare not there. People just transition through, as better opportunitiescome along. Informal traders will go anywhere they want. It’s anarchyof a kind. . . . So I think these markets [for traders] are meant to helpout in that way, to put those preconditions in place (Town Planner,Cape Town City Council, 2 August 1999).

Figure 2 models the basic tenets of this desired transformation, where the ‘pre-conditions’ for ‘facilitation’ rather than ‘control’ might literally be put in place.Here, the geography of the post-apartheid city shortens the supply chains of theinformal food economy by diffusing wholesaling facilities into neighbourhoodspace even as it concentrates retailing ‘bundles’ within neighbourhood spacethrough new facilities. In practical terms, this has actually guided major capitalinvestments in new trading and wholesaling facilities (see CTCC, 1998a, 1998b,2000; CMC, 1998).

A project consultant for the new wholesaling market depicted in Figure 2 elabo-rated at length on the broader urban objectives of the new facility

The concept of a fresh produce market in that area [was supposed] tocreate a little bit of economic activity. And then we had various [neighbor-hood and metropolitan plans] come into being. And town planners . . .did this whole exercise where they identified the need for a new CBDand that the CBD would be linked with the others via various corridors.However, I think it was quite a natural decision to come to, the [informal]fresh produce market was a good vehicle through which we could createsome economic activity in that area. . . . So the problem was really,something needed to be done to stimulate the economy of that area(Contract Consultant, Cape Town, 16 August 1999).

Figure 2. Reterritorialisation of informal trading. Above: Apartheid: diffusedretailing, concentrated wholesaling. Below: Post-apartheid: concentrated retailing,

diffused wholesaling.

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These ideas for the spatial integration of informal activity did not appear ex nihilo.They are tied to a locally crafted theory associated originally with radical aca-demics and anti-apartheid activists who worked for years to reimagine thespatial foundations of a city expressly designed to abstract but not developAfrican labour (Mabin, 1992). Specifically, Dewar and Watson (1981, 1990, 1991),Dewar and Todeschini (1999), Dewar (1995) and Watson (1991, 1993) of theUniversity of Cape Town focused as early as the 1970s on the deleterious relation-ships between modernist planning, on the one hand, and the actually existingcharacter and everyday spatial practices of informal traders and other actors, onthe other. Dewar and Watson argued both technically (and subversively)against the modernist geography of the apartheid city even as they imagined anew kind of city, one that could engage, nurture and ultimately integrate acreolised ‘informality’ rather than wipe it out in the justifying name of somesort of ‘linear urban development’ theory. Specifically, they argued that informalmarkets should form part of the ‘social infrastructure’ of post- and anti-apartheidcities, no different from schools or parks and other social-democraticrequirements.

The practical reality of project implementation in the post-apartheid era, though,has been rather more sobering than originally imagined. As one report noted

Whilst the payment levels for [new market] stalls were [initially] goodthere has been a fall off in payments. A late penalty of R5 has beenimplemented and the Board is calling for a general meeting of thetraders to try and rectify the problem. . . . It is very important that [themarket] achieves 100 per cent payment levels and increases thenumber of traders in the market. To do this the Council is requested toclose down traders operating across directly across the market in unhy-gienic conditions (CTCC, 1998b, p. 2).

An environmental health officer similarly observed

The planners want to put in [informal] markets and things like that—butthere are problems with that kind of approach. Sometimes they just don’twork. Okay, they can work I suppose, but we don’t seem to be learningwhy that is. Look at [one recently developed market]—that’s not reallyworking. They thought they could get 91 traders, but they actuallyhave only 40 or so. Why is that? Because all the traders who say theywill go into the market then go somewhere else.” (EnvironmentalHealth Officer, Cape Town City Council, 3 August 1999).

Faced with resistance to user fees, one newly built meat market promulgated amandatory training programme, suggesting that “the purpose of this training isto help traders improve their individual business skills so they can becomemore efficient, increase the volume of their business and earn more income”(CTCC, 1998b: no page number). The authors of the report further pointed outthat: “A capacity building programme has been arranged with the co-operationof the Department of Trade and Industry . . . to educate . . . traders in businessskills and Company Management”.

While cost-recovery ‘user fees’ are now increasingly common in the operationof ostensibly public facilities all across the world, the suggestion that informaltraders need new skills associated with “Company Management” is especiallyinstructive. As one public official further remarked

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[The City] really wants to get these [informal] markets going and all that,but we don’t want to manage them anymore. We want to get out of thismarkets business. Anyway, you know, private companies can really takeover these marketplaces and do a better job of handling those traders(Town Planner, Cape Town City Council, 2 August 1999).

That a once-radical, anti-apartheid doctrine highlighting a new ‘social infrastruc-ture’ for Cape Town has been whittled down to business-like calls for ‘userfees’, “Company Management” and the administrative efficiencies of theprivate sector suggests that, indeed, neo-liberalism has penetrated into the plan-ning systems of the local South African state. Left-liberal theories have encoun-tered the abstract rationality of neo-liberal policy imperatives and the ‘modes ofordering’ associated with this rationality. At the same, this new mode of orderinghas simultaneously encountered the spatial resistance of the informal trader as asocial and geographical project. The marketplace is not defined simply or evenmainly by the rationalities of an increasingly neo-liberalised planning approach;it also shaped by the spatial practices of informal food traders, whose lives flowthrough these places in far more complex ways than might be supposed (Swillinget al., 2003).

The theoretical framework developed earlier emphasised the flowing hetero-geneity of urban life, where multiple practices co-mingle to constitute discreteplaces in diverse and often contradictory ways. The framework also suggestedthat time-geography helps us to grasp the nettle of these practices, pulling the pro-vocative tenets of dialectical theory back down to earth. Naturally, hundreds ofstories could be mapped even in the same neighbourhood; but the space con-straints of this paper permit us to consider only the following two vignettesfrom the admittedly diverse world of the African food trade.3 Thus, while defini-tive inferences cannot be made, the complexity of the everyday economy can beadequately illustrated. It is this everyday world that ultimately helps us to under-stand, it is argued, the territorial limitations of the city’s ‘simplistic’ and ‘linear’neo-liberalising projects and rationalities.

Using this theoretical framework, then, Figure 3 depicts a single day in the lifeof Mrs N, who resided in New Crossroads, Cape Town in 1999. Via Hagerstrand’sschema, we see the informal city at its most basic: an interwoven ritual that isstructured dialectically by extant formations (themselves the manifestations of athousand other rituals in the urban economy). That is to say, we see life asflowing movement, with time and space both critical resources in the project ofsurvival.

On the left of the schema (identified as projects “a1 – n”), we observe the ‘thick’,socio-spatial legacies of apartheid urbanisation. Because apartheid townships weredesigned to control labour rather than promote development, they are largelybereft of employment opportunities. Great flows of African people decant fromthese neighbourhoods in the morning hours, working in other domains of themetropolis, only to return in the late afternoon and evening on the trains, busesand ‘black taxis’ that network together the city-region. Over several hours, MrsN captures parts of these relatively massive return flows—offering fruits, veg-etables and other items to worker-consumers on their way home for eveningdinner.

These time-space bundles are crucial in the social reproduction of both Mrs Nand the informal food economy as a whole. Indeed, they are the everyday

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geographies of the city. And this takes us back to some of the early, largely unre-solved, debates about informality in the 1970s, when petty commodity productioncritics argued against the long-term growth capacity of economic activities sodependent, in their view, upon the size and shape of the formal economy(Bromley, 1978; Hart, 1973; ILO, 1972; Moser, 1978). Whatever the merits of this‘dependency’ thesis, Figure 3 reveals urban spatial practices that too often fallwell under our theoretical and empirical radar.

For example, projects “b” and “c” depict highly localised (or ‘short’ rather than‘long’) movements and connections. Small children, other ‘informals’, pensioners,the maimed, the dying—all these people who help to rdefine urban life in theSouth and elsewhere move through and reproduce the space-economy too, recy-cling the income of the formally employed. Mrs N taps into parts of these lessintensive flows conducted largely within or across neighbourhood space. Thus,while the big labour flows of the formal, city-regional economy ‘bunch up’ inten-sively at the end of the workday, ‘shorter’, less visible, often foot-oriented, prac-tices are also important in what we might call with Giddens, Gregory, Pred andThrift the structuration of survival.

Mrs N lives near a primary school (“f”) whose spatially and temporally concen-trated children always break for mid-morning and mid-afternoon snacks. Mrs Nmomentarily takes her business to the school grounds in order to capture these twotime-space opportunities, adding a third rhythm to her life. Finally, at the verycentre of her day is an ageing mother, whom she must check up on severaltimes, scooting between ‘stations’ in the area to do so (“g”). None of this wouldbe possible without the sourcing routines that define the early parts of the day.

Figure 3. The time-geography of Mrs N in Cape Town.

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Between 5:00 and 5:15 am, Mrs N catches a taxi to the publicly managed freshproduce market; here she buys goods from both formal and informal suppliers,depending on the freshness and quality of the stock. The later she gets there,the slimmer the pickings. More broadly, Western Cape farmers supply formaland informal intermediaries, avoiding taxes on the latter and directly accessinga large African market. Mrs N returns via a small truck, which she has hiredwith 3 or 4 other traders who live in the same neighbourhood.

Other informal traders face similar realities. Figure 4 depicts a single day in thelife of a second actor, Mr Q, who also resided in New Crossroads, Cape Town, in1999. Like Mrs N, Mr Q relies extensively on the commonly experienced space–time economies of the formal labour market, tapping into the same broad flowsof commuters on their collective way home from work. He similarly relies onthe main fresh produce market and upon the formal and informal mediators ofthe ‘rural’ economy concentrated at this station—extant realities that ‘structure’his daily agency. Unlike Mrs N, however, Mr Q is unencumbered by reproductiveduties. Accordingly, he has a far more complex sourcing ritual because he is con-siderably freer to move around the city for several hours longer than is MrsN. Time is quite literally on his side. Mr Q purchases produce from both themunicipal market and from farmers in the city-region. In simple and simplifyingterms, gender decisively distinguishes these two otherwise similar biographieseven in common spaces and shared structural realities.

Again, Hagerstrand thought of time-geography as something that incorporatesboth biography and history. Every travel story is distinctive to every individual’sbiography, but also captures what is common to groups of individuals living incommon space-times. Here, we see that the informal economy does not sit

Figure 4. The time-geography of Mr Q in Cape Town.

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outside the formal economy, somehow running parallel to it in any dualistic sense.Nor is it sealed off in the townships, where ‘informal’ people do ‘informal’ things.Instead, the informal and formal economies co-produce each other in commonspatial formations that are mapped as time–space segments stretching throughand binding together neighbourhoods, city-regions and even bio-regions—spatial and temporal togetherness of the ‘economy’ and ‘society’. Thus the time-geography of Mr Q is primarily economic in orientation, but the time-geographyof Mrs N is choreography of productive (economic) and reproductive (social)tasks, folding the social and the economic into single operational spaces andthus blurring the easy ‘compositional’ abstractions of a ‘liberal’ economy, on theone hand, and social worlds of home care, on the other – each with their ownbehavioural logics.

The two travel stories mapped here are therefore both simple and complex; theyare simultaneously local, city-regional and bio-regional; they are not wholly infor-mal; they exhibit nuanced interrelations between social, cultural and economic‘worlds’ with broader urban formations; they are about time as well as space;they are profoundly gendered. Accordingly, their territories are hard to manage.All this directly challenges the breezy assumptions of neo-liberal thinking,where nearly everything is supposed to respond to the clarity of marketisationand economic incentives.

Governance of any kind flattens out and freezes the ‘contextual’ idiosyncrasiesof heterogeneous biographies. Neo-liberal governance, which sees the urbanworld through the ‘compositional’ lens of economic rationality, vastly exagger-ates that tendency. It takes a lot of work to get people to show up, to use newfacilities, to pass through certain nodes/stations and not others, to ‘bend’ theirtime-geographies in new historical directions (Latour, 1988). A central claim ofneo-liberalism, though, is that unalloyed markets obviously allocate goods andservices efficiently when unencumbered by states—that “private companiescan really take over these marketplaces and do a better job”. Yet the problemsoutlined above suggest that neo-liberal rationalities are not as powerful as theymay seem. For “it is in cities and city-regions that the various contradictionsand tensions of ‘actually existing neo-liberalism’ are expressed most saliently ineveryday life” (Jessop, 2002, p. 452, emphasis added). Cities speak to the practicalobstacles which these abstract ideals invariably face in the concrete experiencesof life as actually lived, where the ‘compositional’ economy often ‘folds into’the social, particularly as this implicates diverse gender roles and other respon-sibilities. Faced with these ‘contextual’ realities, which often keep actors fromcommitting to particular places for very long, states manage actually existingneo-liberalism through “supplementary or flanking strategies and policies”(Jessop, 2002, p. 452.). Hence the importance of state strategies like ‘trainingprogrammes’ and closing down traders “operating directly across the marketin unhygienic conditions”, which only generate more antipathy. In this lastcase, the putative balm of ‘free markets’ only really works when aligned withthe ‘flanking’ hammer of state power (see also Popke and Ballard, 2004).

If we accept Murdoch’s proposition that space always intertwines the effectsof power and resistance, then we map both the reach and the limitations of neo-liberalism as a territorial strategy of the post-apartheid state. We map anoccluded territoriality of informal survival—not an ideological tsunami thatwipes out everything in its all-consuming path. Merrifield’s reading ofLefebvre’s place/space theories broadly anticipates this sort of urban geography.

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Because Lefebvre theorises place as the ‘thingification’ of multiple spacescoming together at particular places in particular ways, no space is everreally determinate. There are openings, fissures, possiblities—spaces of resist-ance. In the end, of course, Lefebvre (1991) sees social resistance both tobureaucratisation and commodification as the historical basis for what hecalls in The Production of Space the ‘differential space’ of future cities. Thisemphatically does not suggest that such a transition is around the corner; nordoes it explicate the role of planning, if any. But it does suggest, at the veryleast, that neo-liberal governance is hardly the fait accompli that some deeplyfear and others strongly desire. Juggling both times and spaces, opportunitiesand constraints, economy and society, informal actors may or may not movethrough the preferred spaces of urban governance and spatial management.

4. Conclusions

One of the most important questions in South African urban studies is whether ornot the post-apartheid city is all that different from what came before. In this vein,Christopher (2005, p. 2305) concludes solemnly that “The post-apartheid city con-tinues to look remarkably like its predecessor, the apartheid city” (see also Turok,2001). Given the profoundly unjust nature of the apartheid city, of course, such aconclusion is disheartening. However, there is another way to look at this pre-sumption of spatial continuity. It is hard to cite any political ideology that had amore perverse geographical impact than apartheid—especially in Cape Town(Western, 1981), but apartheid was never as spatially complete as it might seem.In particular, the apartheid state struggled with the urban informal sector,whether manifested as squatter housing or informal labour (Fast, 1996). IndeedFraser (1990) has suggested that the late 1970s squatter community at Crossroads,just outside Cape Town, represents the ‘turning point’ in the state’s influx controlstrategies. In this sense, the territorial limitations of urban ideologies in SouthAfrica are an old story, particularly when we place the “nonformalised, creolisedcity” at the centre of the analysis.

Many years after Reagan, Thatcher and Pinochet; after Clinton ended welfareand Blair began New labour; after the ANC dropped the Freedom Charter andembraced growth, employment and (then) redistribution—after all this, it is soeasy to see how far neo-liberalism has travelled, in South Africa and elsewhere(Pilbeam, 2003). No geography of post-apartheid urbanisation can ignore thesurely multiple effects of this new reality. At the same time, urban political geogra-phy that is now focused on mapping the spatialities of neo-liberalism would dowell to interrogate more closely the territoriality of the informal economy,whose multiple spatialities in South Africa (no less than elsewhere) receive farless attention then is merited by the reality of contemporary life (Santos, 1979;Simon, 1992;Williams and Windebank, 1993; Castells and Portes, 1989; Fewet al., 2004; Cox and Watt, 2002; Valodia, 2001).

This paper has suggested that, when we theorise place as ‘thingified’ bymultiple, often conflicting, spaces, we see not only the territorial reach of neo-liberalism but also its limitations. The wellspring of these limitations lies in thecomplex heterogeneity of ordinary life: in the structuration of labour marketsand individual survival; in the spatial co-mingling, ‘togetherness’ and interpene-tration of culture and economy, production and reproduction, nature and society,gender and class. Informal resistance ‘from below’ may seem pathetically

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undersised when compared with the powers of a global discourse able to draw ona wide array of discursive and material resources. However, apartheid collapsedunder the weight of its own territorial and social limitations. Neo-liberalismmay well face the same future, opening up the possibility for a very differentkind of city from that presently anticipated.

Notes

1. This definition excludes criminal activities that many authors include in informal economicstudies. Examples are prostitution or international drug trafficking, both of which figure impor-tantly in Cape Town’s urban and social politics (Kinnes, 2000).

2. The interview material cited in this article is gleaned from a larger study that focused on the spa-tiality of informal-sector governance. This study included a total of 38 semi-structured interviewsconducted between February and August 1999 (Dierwechter, 2001).

3. These two vignettes are drawn from a larger study of the time-geography of 28 food traders,reported fully elsewhere (see Dierwechter, 2001). Three or four interviews were conducted witheach trader by the author over the course of several days in order to ascertain the daily routinesdiscussed here.

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