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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Land Restitution's 'Rights Communities': The District Six Case |
Author: | Beyers, Christiaan |
Year: | 2007 |
Periodical: | Journal of Southern African Studies |
Volume: | 33 |
Issue: | 2 |
Period: | June |
Pages: | 267-285 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | South Africa |
Subjects: | interest groups social mobility land reform urban areas Politics and Government Law, Human Rights and Violence Urbanization and Migration |
External link: | https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03057070701292582 |
Abstract: | With the possibility of moving a large population of low-income people who were forcibly evicted under apartheid back into the city centre on prime real-estate, Cape Town's District Six represents a prize case for the ongoing land restitution programme in South Africa. This article discusses political processes and legal frameworks and discourses in the District Six case with a view to understanding the resulting patterns of group formation and mobilization, as well as of social mobility. The land restitution process is seen as working to expand citizenship by engendering a new 'rights community' consisting of those who qualify and are empowered to claim the rights and entitlements set out in the Restitution Act. The article outlines the contours of this 'community' by examining emergent forms of social differentiation and exclusion in the context of land restitution. It argues that in the shift from mobilizing ex-residents to submit claims to settling claims and planning and implementing development, popular political participation is compromized by legal-bureaucratic procedures and technical planning imperatives. Notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract] |