Housing struggles as political practice in post-apartheid Cape Town: reading Levenson’s Delivery as Dispossession

Abstract

ABSTRACT Levenson's new book Delivery as Dispossession offers a careful reading of land occupations in Cape Town that takes us from landless communities in the city to courtrooms. His study focuses on two occupations in the Mitchell's Plain area with contrasting fates, which his empirically rich analysis explains in relation to the occupiers’ strategies and self-representation to the state. It is an important political sociology that contributes to how we understand the post-apartheid state and contemporary Cape Town through the inadequacies of its public housing project. It also theoretically reframes understandings of the state-subject relations in a manner that demonstrates the importance of local political organisation and the refusal of the poor to be managed as populations without political voice, as objects merely of a planning apparatus. My review essay seeks to elaborate some of its key interventions, and to pose some questions of its framing of historical continuities and changes.