Infrastructural citizenship: conceiving, producing and disciplining people and place via public housing, from Cape Town to Stoke-on-Trent
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This paper critically examines how state-subsidised homeownership is used by the state to produce and discipline a normative ideal of ‘good’ citizenship. Using the framework of infrastructural citizenship, cases studies from South Africa and the UK demonstrate how public housing provides a physical mediator for the politicisation of the citizenship contract. Analysis is framed by in-depth research in two public housing programmes: in Cape Town, a state-subsidised housing settlement where low-income households were awarded homeownership of newly-built fully-serviced houses; and the Stoke-on-Trent £1 housing scheme, where the local state subsidised homeownership of newly-refurbished inner-city houses. In both public housing schemes the state conceived subsidised homeownership as a tool to produce people and place, and the paper reveals how citizen responses in each settlement frequently deviate from state expectations. In using divergent empirical examples, the paper demonstrates the global significance of public housing for citizenship production and destruction, and reveals global South/North comparative juxtaposing as a legitimate process for knowledge creation.
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1466-1810
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Isaac Newton Trust (17.24(h))