Tom Slater, Municipal Housing and Community in Cape Town: Lessons from the Bloemhof Flats, 12.12.2024, 5pm-7pm CET

21 November 2024

Zoom* and Salle Goguel, 27 rue Saint-Guillaume 75007 Paris

Municipal Housing and Community in Cape Town: Lessons from the Bloemhof Flats

In this talk I explore how experiences and memories of a Cape Town municipal housing project sustained people who were forcibly displaced from that project under apartheid in South Africa. Archival study of the Bloemhof Flats in Cape Town’s District Six, and group interviews with its former residents, inform an exploration of the relationships between municipal housing and community formation, and its impact on people’s lives, both under apartheid and in its wake of material hardships. Against the political motivations that underpin the ongoing stigmatisation of municipal housing, evidence from the Bloemhof Flats demonstrates how municipal housing can serve as a cradle for dignity, family, reciprocity, kinship, and hope. I trace how residents appropriated state mechanisms of social control to form a community so strong that it has lasted well beyond the apartheid system, even though the spatial and material dimensions of that community were taken so brutally from its members.

Speaker:

Tom Slater is Professor of Urban Planning at Columbia University. Trained as an urban geographer, he works in the style of institutional political economy and researchers a range of urban issues, particularly gentrification and displacement, territorial stigmatization, critical urban theory, and housing justice movements. He is the author/co-author of 6 books and over 75 scholarly articles, and over the last decade, he has delivered lectures in 20 different countries. His work has been translated into 9 languages, and he has held Professorial Fellowships at the University of Trento, Italy; the University of Cape Town, South Africa; and the University of Chile-Santiago. He sits on numerous editorial boards and is a former Editor of the Journal of Urban Affairs and The Sociological Review.

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