Meth, P.J. orcid.org/0000-0002-2273-5134, Buthelezi, S. and Rajasekhar, S. (2019) Gendered il/legalities of housing formalisation in India and South Africa. Environment and Planning A, 51 (5). pp. 1068-1088. ISSN 0308-518X
Abstract
Urban interventions, such as state-led housing provision in India and South Africa, establish new legal landscapes for urban residents (formerly slum/informal dwellers), who become home owners, legal occupiers of spaces, ratespayers and visible citizens although not in ways that are necessarily contingent. These material-legal processes are also acutely gendered underscoring wider calls for a feminist approach to legal geographies. Informed by a comparative empirically driven study, this paper explores how in both contexts, urban interventions work to enhance gender equality through improving women’s material shelter in the city, and introduce tenure security, often prioritising very poor women. Yet, their implementation is riddled with slippages as well as operating within a broader poverty–patriarchy nexus. This means that these legally framed benefits have occurred alongside complex and perverse outcomes including unemployment, gendered tensions and acute loss of privacy for some. Housing interventions produce uneven legal geographies, with persisting gendered inequalities and poverty distorting residents’ abilities to benefit from material-legal interventions aimed at improving their lives.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2018 The Authors. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
Keywords: | Gender; housing upgrading; formalisation; legal; illegal; slum / informal housing; violence |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Urban Studies & Planning (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number BRITISH ACADEMY (THE) SG133010 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 25 Jul 2018 10:52 |
Last Modified: | 11 Aug 2020 10:53 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/0308518X18792898 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:133370 |