PILED-up furniture, mattresses and other belongings from evicted residents have become a common sight on the inner-city street corners of Johannesburg in the past few years. Though evictions have come to a halt recently, the politics surrounding evictions reveal how the right to define urban space in Johannesburg is negotiated.

A recent court decision ruled that alternative housing for the evicted residents had to be provided before an eviction could take place. This has brought evictions to a halt since it is almost impossible to find alternative accommodation due to the general lack of housing in the city.

For the residents whose households were threatened by eviction, this ruling, naturally, has a huge impact. It means that they can continue their life in the city close to the marketplaces where a large proportion of the residents earn a living. As long as evictions are halted, the ruling means that the poor residents of the inner city have gained the right to define their urban space.

We need to shed light on the abstract and less visible struggle for the right to define urban space and who belongs to it, using the case of a high-rise inner-city residential building that until recently was threatened by evictions.

From 2002 and until the recent court ruling, the 10-storey residential building, Manhattan Court in the Joubert Park area, was threatened by evictions. Every now and then rumours would circulate among the residents that the next day, or the day after that, the Red Ants would be coming to evict everyone from the building. When I visited the building on such days, I would find the majority of the residents at home. People would cancel any activity to be there. They were alert and prepared to defend their homes.

As part of a pilot project in co-operative housing in 1995, the residents of Manhattan Court were given subsidies by the state. For many residents, this was a sign of the democratic and social rights gained as a result of the 1994 elections. In addition, the residents believe that the state can’t claim the subsidies back. The threat of eviction is therefore perceived as a violation of their democratic and social rights.

However, the subsidies were not granted unconditionally: a number of obligations were attached to them. Subletting of flats, withholding payment of rentals and service bills, appointing new managers, breaking away from the co-operative housing project — the “Seven Buildings Project” — and running shebeens from the flats are among the offences the residents have engaged in. According to the city bylaws and the agreements related to the subsidies, all these actions can lead to eviction.

The threat of eviction is indirectly posed by the local government. Though private security companies and Red Ants carry out evictions, it is the local government and its focus on urban renewal and security that has paved the way for these evictions. The local government is facing the challenge of fighting crime in the city and restoring the many dilapidated buildings in the area. In an attempt to reach these ends, local government enforced the city bylaws and created an interdisciplinary task force in 2002, comprising police and the water and electricity departments.

As a result, criminals can now be targeted, not only for their criminal activities, but also through evictions if they are not paying rent or water and electricity bills. The task force is also intended to investigate and evacuate decaying and derelict buildings that pose a life hazard to the residents. For the local government, it is a question of the survival of the city.

The focus on the reduction of the crime rate and restoration of the decaying buildings through the joint force of police and service departments serves to link crime and urban renewal in a new way. This link reflects a view of decay and underdevelopment as destabilising, dangerous and potentially generating violence and crime. Security has become the key word, and the linking of crime and urban renewal justifies an exclusion of the urban poor from the inner city.

Within the social movement the Inner City Forum (ICF), the residents of Manhattan Court accuse the local government of reproducing apartheid oppression. By evoking these images of previous oppression, the residents and the ICF try to paint as immoral the local government and the politics related to evictions.

For the residents, the threat of eviction is surrounded by a schism, where the state (represented by the African National Congress) on the one hand is believed to be able to solve the problem. On the other hand, the state (represented by the local government) indirectly poses the threat of eviction.

To understand this schism, it is useful to distinguish between the sublime state and the profane state. The residents vest their hopes for a resolution to the threat of eviction in the ANC, which they associate with the struggle against apartheid and the introduction of democracy and social rights: the sublime ANC. Opposed to this is the local government, representing the everyday threat of eviction and the violation of social rights: the profane ANC.

The two dimensions of the state exist simultaneously — the residents of Manhattan Court put their hopes in the sublime ANC, but feel threatened by the profane dimension of the party at the same time. Before the court ruling put evictions on hold, the profane dimension of the ANC threatened to extinguish the sublime ANC for a group of poor and already marginalised residents in the inner city. But even though the threat of evictions is at present out of the way, it doesn’t mean that the struggle to define inner-city space is over.

Just as the residents’ response depends on their perception of whom they are dealing with, so the state is struggling to figure out whether it is dealing with law-abiding citizens or immoral criminals. In other words, both citizens and state try to paint the other as immoral, either by comparing political practices to apartheid politics or by criminalising the poor.

A central aspect of the struggle for the right to define urban space and who belongs to it is the ability to define the status of the other. The recent court ruling can thus be interpreted as favouring the perception of evictions where no alternative housing is provided as debauched.

From this perspective, it matters little that the residents are still contravening the bylaws, because in practice they have succeeded in defining evictions as morally wrong, at least for the time being.

Rasmussen is a Danish researcher and a contributor to a recently published book, The Security-Development Nexus (HSRC Press). His chapter, Struggling for the City: Evictions in Inner-City Johannesburg, is based on his extensive fieldwork in Johannesburg’s inner city.