Tracing the metabolism of the everyday: Livelihoods and informality in Delft, Cape Town

The next The Faces of the City seminar will be presented by Dr Suraya Scheba.

Scheba is from the African Centre for Cities & Environmental and Geographical Sciences Department at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. 

The seminar is based on a paper which explored everyday practices of ‘informality’ as performed in Delft, a low-income community within the City of Cape Town, drawing on an ethnographic study carried out in 2016. The primary aim of the study is to build understanding of the practices and processes through which people gain access to livelihoods, land and services, within the context of urban precarity.

This interest is given form through examining the confluence of everyday practices, within public and private spaces, including street trade, home- based enterprises and the home. Furthermore, through building understanding, the study findings also offer insight into the spatiality, actor networks and infrastructure that these practices engender as well as a reflection into the capacity of everyday political subjectivity to carve out spaces of belonging within the city in relation to structural logics of urban development.

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