IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/jdevst/v54y2018i12p2168-2185.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Confounded but Complacent: Accounting for How the State Sees Responses to Its Housing Intervention in Johannesburg

Author

Listed:
  • Sarah Charlton

Abstract

The South African state’s ‘will to improve’ poor people’s lives through free home-ownership is unsettled by subsequent unauthorised housing usage and adaptions. Despite insight into and empathy for these non-compliant activities amongst some state housing practitioners, the dominant state position is to denounce them without analysing their drivers and significance. This position is enabled by the state’s selective use of knowledge, confidence in the housing project as is, and avoidance of discomforting signals. The ‘will to improve’ is not matched by a deep ‘will to know’, in part because the capacity to act under difficult circumstances is argued to depend on a form of ‘not knowing’.

Suggested Citation

  • 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.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:jdevst:v:54:y:2018:i:12:p:2168-2185
    DOI: 10.1080/00220388.2018.1460465
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00220388.2018.1460465
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/00220388.2018.1460465?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
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. 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.
    2. Li Pernegger, 2021. "Effects of the state’s informal practices on organisational capability and social inclusion: Three cases of city governance in Johannesburg," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 58(6), pages 1193-1210, May.
    3. Raffael Beier, 2021. "FROM VISIBLE INFORMALITY TO SPLINTERED INFORMALITIES: Reflections on the Production of ‘Formality’ in a Moroccan Housing Programme," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 45(6), pages 930-947, November.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:taf:jdevst:v:54:y:2018:i:12:p:2168-2185. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/FJDS20 .

    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.