Not entirely displacement: conceptualizing relocation in Ethiopia and South Africa as “disruptive re-placement”

Residents’ lived experiences of movement into state directed housing frequently evidence contradictory outcomes. Often, movement is articulated in terms of displacement, noting its profoundly negative outcomes. However, displacement does not always fully capture contradictions, particularly where housing programmes form part of wider developmental strategies, themselves ambiguous in practice. Adopting a relational analysis, the paper argues for consideration of new sites of settlement relative to previous locations through a critical evaluation of place, as well as accounting for dynamism of urban change over time. Framings must capture residents varied and contradictory lived experiences and the relationality of place experiences. Contributing to work in this field, this paper calls for a broader analytical framing, named here as “disruptive re-placement”. Drawing on two different housing programmes, in South Africa and Ethiopia the paper charts movement into, and living in, state-led housing in three case study areas within three cities. It employs a ‘lived experiences’ methodology to understand these relocations, drawing on residents’ accounts of disruptive re-placement to examine the materialities of planned state-provided formal housing; the spatialities of disruptive re-placement; the economic and socio-political dimensions of these processes and the significance of temporality in shaping disruption. A continuum of disruptive and injurious re-placement, and a critique of the developmental state is used to articulate a just urban agenda in relation to relocation practices.