IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/envira/v52y2020i1p173-199.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Creating a gap that can be filled: Constructing and territorializing the affordable housing submarket in Gauteng, South Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Siân Butcher

Abstract

As the housing bubble burst in overheated property markets around the world, South Africa’s so-called ‘affordable housing market’ appeared to be bucking the trend. From 2010, affordable housing prices were rising and selling quickly, especially in Gauteng, Johannesburg’s city-region, chronically short of actually affordable housing and with a growing black middle class. Touted as ‘SA’s best-kept investment secret’, the affordable housing market offered a lifeline to the property industry and the potential to democratize segregated property markets. Yet, in practice, the tapping of South Africa’s lower-income housing market by capital has been a limited one, narrowly catering to particular subjects and spaces. Drawing on heterodox approaches to ‘actually existing markets’ and qualitative fieldwork conducted in Johannesburg between 2012 and 2013, this paper traces how the boundaries of the affordable housing and mortgage submarket are produced and shift through the investments of multiple communities with their own theories of housing markets and different interests in ‘making the market work’. Despite these investments and contestations, the submarket is narrowly territorialized within developer-driven housing largely in Gauteng for public-sector workers, to optimize the market within mortgage capital’s frameworks of risk, return, race and space. The South African mortgaged affordable housing submarket is not so much in need of market information or constitutive of a new frontier of global finance, as a territorial fix for domestic capital vis-à -vis development imperatives. To investigate struggles over this submarket, I draw together socio-institutional approaches to markets with critical political economy of housing markets and put them into conversation with critical development studies scholarship on markets. This combination allows us to make space for multiple projects of ‘improvement’ and profit in our analyses of market-making, as well as how these are shaped by, and shape, space and conjuncture. I seek to contribute to a growing literature on the geographies of markets from a Global South context where housing is framed as both a market good and constitutional right by examining a case of apparent ‘market failure’.

Suggested Citation

  • Siân Butcher, 2020. "Creating a gap that can be filled: Constructing and territorializing the affordable housing submarket in Gauteng, South Africa," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 52(1), pages 173-199, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:envira:v:52:y:2020:i:1:p:173-199
    DOI: 10.1177/0308518X19885391
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308518X19885391
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/0308518X19885391?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Donald Mackenzie & Fabian Muniesa & Lucia Siu, 2007. "Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics," Post-Print halshs-00149145, HAL.
    2. Manuel B. Aalbers, 2009. "The Sociology and Geography of Mortgage Markets: Reflections on the Financial Crisis," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 33(2), pages 281-290, June.
    3. Cally Ardington & David Lam & Murray Leibbrandt & James Levinsohn, 2004. "Savings, Insurance And Debt Over The Post‐Apartheid Period: A Review Of Recent Research," South African Journal of Economics, Economic Society of South Africa, vol. 72(3), pages 604-640, September.
    4. Luis F. Alvarez León & Leqian Yu & Brett Christophers, 2018. "Introduction: The Spatial Constitution of Markets," Economic Geography, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 94(3), pages 211-216, May.
    5. Brett Christophers, 2014. "Wild Dragons in the City: Urban Political Economy, Affordable Housing Development and the Performative World-making of Economic Models," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(1), pages 79-97, January.
    6. Sarah Charlton, 2018. "Confounded but Complacent: Accounting for How the State Sees Responses to Its Housing Intervention in Johannesburg," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 54(12), pages 2168-2185, December.
    7. Ana Cristina Fernandes & Andreas Novy, 2010. "Reflections on the Unique Response of Brazil to the Financial Crisis and its Urban Impact," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 34(4), pages 952-966, December.
    8. Gary A. Dymski, 2009. "Afterword: Mortgage Markets and the Urban Problematic in the Global Transition," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 33(2), pages 427-442, June.
    9. Jamie Peck, 2013. "Disembedding Polanyi: Exploring Polanyian Economic Geographies," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 45(7), pages 1536-1544, July.
    10. Elvin Wyly & Mona Atia & Daniel Hammel, 2004. "Has mortgage capital found an inner‐city spatial fix?," Housing Policy Debate, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 15(3), pages 623-685.
    11. Paavo Monkkonen, 2012. "Housing Finance Reform and Increasing Socioeconomic Segregation in Mexico," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 36(4), pages 757-772, July.
    12. Charlotte Lemanski, 2011. "Moving up the Ladder or Stuck on the Bottom Rung? Homeownership as a Solution to Poverty in Urban South Africa," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(1), pages 57-77, January.
    13. Jamie Peck, 2013. "For Polanyian Economic Geographies," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 45(7), pages 1545-1568, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Christian Berndt & Norma M. Rantisi & Jamie Peck, 2020. "M/market frontiers," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 52(1), pages 14-26, February.
    2. Paul Langley, 2020. "The folds of social finance: Making markets, remaking the social," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 52(1), pages 130-147, February.
    3. Jesús M. González-Pérez, 2022. "Evictions, Foreclosures, and Global Housing Speculation in Palma, Spain," Land, MDPI, vol. 11(2), pages 1-26, February.
    4. Ingmar Pastak & Anneli KÄHRIK, 2021. "SYMBOLIC DISPLACEMENT REVISITED: Place‐making Narratives in Gentrifying Neighbourhoods of Tallinn," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 45(5), pages 814-834, September.
    5. Laura Aufrère & Philippe Eynaud & Lionel Maurel & Corinne Vercher-Chaptal, 2020. "How to conceptualize an alternative to platform capitalism according to the re-embedding process of K. Polanyi ? [Comment penser l'alternative au capitalisme de plateforme dans une logique de réenc," Working Papers hal-02536020, HAL.
    6. Iain White, 2020. "Rigour and rigour mortis? Planning, calculative rationality, and forces of stability and change," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 57(14), pages 2885-2900, November.
    7. Priti Narayan & Emily Rosenman, 2022. "From crisis to the everyday: Shouldn't we all be writing economies?," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 54(2), pages 392-404, March.
    8. Nick Bernards, 2019. "Tracing mutations of neoliberal development governance: ‘Fintech’, failure and the politics of marketization," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 51(7), pages 1442-1459, October.
    9. Pablo Mendez, 2016. "Professional experts and lay knowledge in Vancouver’s accessory apartment rental market," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 48(11), pages 2223-2238, November.
    10. Rajiv Sharma & Eric Knight, 2016. "The Role of Information Density in Infrastructure Investment," Growth and Change, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 47(4), pages 520-534, December.
    11. Xiaobo Su & Zhigang Chen, 2017. "Embeddedness and migrant tourism entrepreneurs: A Polanyian perspective," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 49(3), pages 652-669, March.
    12. Hannah Stokes-Ramos, 2023. "Rethinking Polanyi's double movement through participatory justice: Land use planning in Puerto Rico," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 55(8), pages 1970-1988, November.
    13. Premilla D’Cruz & Ernesto Noronha & Muneeb Ul Lateef Banday & Saikat Chakraborty, 2022. "Place Matters: (Dis)embeddedness and Child Labourers’ Experiences of Depersonalized Bullying in Indian Bt Cottonseed Global Production Networks," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 176(2), pages 241-263, March.
    14. Monika Grubbauer, 2020. "Assisted Self‐help Housing in Mexico: Advocacy, (Micro)Finance and the Making of Markets," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 44(6), pages 947-966, November.
    15. Gareth Bryant & Ben Spies-Butcher, 2020. "Bringing finance inside the state: How income-contingent loans blur the boundaries between debt and tax," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 52(1), pages 111-129, February.
    16. Daniel G Cockayne, 2018. "Underperformative economies: Discrimination and gendered ideas of workplace culture in San Francisco’s digital media sector," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 50(4), pages 756-772, June.
    17. Christian Berndt & Marion Werner & Víctor Ramiro Fernández, 2020. "Postneoliberalism as institutional recalibration: Reading Polanyi through Argentina’s soy boom," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 52(1), pages 216-236, February.
    18. Damien Cahill, 2020. "Market analysis beyond market fetishism," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 52(1), pages 27-45, February.
    19. Rob Krueger & David Gibbs & Constance Carr, 2018. "Examining regional competitiveness and the pressures of rapid growth: An interpretive institutionalist account of policy responses in three city regions," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 36(6), pages 965-986, September.
    20. Torik Holmes & Josi Fernandes & Teea Palo, 2021. "‘Spatio-market practices’: conceptualising the always spatial dimensions of market making practices," AMS Review, Springer;Academy of Marketing Science, vol. 11(3), pages 316-335, December.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:envira:v:52:y:2020:i:1:p:173-199. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.