| Focusing on three materially poor, physically peripheral urban neighborhoods in the City of Tygerberg, this dissertation uncovers the complex nature of state restructuring and urban transformation in post-apartheid South Africa. Through a detailed analysis of state policies and projects for the delivery of low-income housing and crime prevention in these three neighborhoods, this work demonstrates that in these processes, the state (its institutions, officials, and projects) and urban residents and community organizations have negotiated the complexities of racial identities and the politics of place rooted in the geography of the post-apartheid city and its history of inequality configured in patterns of segregation. Using life histories, interviews, participant observation, and policy analysis, I highlight the ways neighborhoods and communities interact with and access the state and its resources in uneven ways and in place-specific contexts. Post-apartheid projects for urban reconstruction have therefore required state restructuring and a new way of relating to residents, community organizations, and neighborhoods to recreate the socio-political fabric of the city to overcome the legacies of apartheid inequalities. This work combines insights and arguments drawn from the literature on states and development with urban social and political geography to address a geographical contribution to understanding state formation and community development through the documentation and conceptualization of an architecture of state-society intersections that analyses the complex ways in which both state and society mediate processes of transformation in an urban context. |
