The right to the city in post-apartheid South Africa: Abahlali baseMjondolo’s struggle for land, housing and dignity

Fifty percent of the world’s population live in cities today, but predictions of the sustained urbanization trend estimates that this number will increase to seventy percent by 2050. Meanwhile, the consequences of the urban divide and the demarcations between people in the increasingly fragmented societies could be demonstrated in the case of South Africa. In Durban an estimated 800,000 of the city’s 3,44 million population, live in informal settlements in order to benefit from the city as a key generator of economic growth and human development. Against this background, the aim of this thesis is to understand how shack-dwellers organized in Abahlali baseMjondolo, frames the right to the city in the context of the post-apartheid project. By exploring collective memories of apartheid, employed in communicating the movement’s interpretation of present events, social experiences of violence, repression and dispossession are understood. At the same time, through an emancipatory interpretation of the Freedom Charter, the movement seek to negotiate citizenship claims of land and service delivery which has continuously been denied through the state’s criminalization of the poor and landless. Hence, through the struggle for land, housing and dignity the movement articulates the right to the city through a “living politics” based on political autonomy, participatory democracy and dignity, while demanding the inclusion of anyone’s experience and intelligence. By understanding how the social movement draws on the past to interpret present events while negotiating citizenship, a profound vision of urban life is articulated from below in the context of rapid urbanization