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Focusing on the South African city of Durban,Security in the Bubblelooks at spatialized security practices, engaging with strategies and dilemmas of urban security governance in cities around the world. While apartheid was spatial governance at its most brutal, postapartheid South African cities have tried to reinvent space, using it as a \"positive\" technique of governance. Christine Hentschel traces the contours of two emerging urban regimes of governing security in contemporary Durban:handsome spaceandinstant space. Handsome space is about aesthetic and affective communication as means to making places safe. Instant space, on the other hand, addresses the crime-related personal \"navigation\" systems employed by urban residents whenever they circulate through the city. While handsome space embraces the powers of attraction, instant space operates through the powers of fleeing. In both regimes, security is conceived not as a public good but as a situational experience that can. No longer reducible to the after-pains of racial apartheid, this city's fragmentation is now better conceptualized, according to Hentschel, as a heterogeneous ensemble of bubbles of imagined safety.

Point Place stands near the city center of Durban, South Africa. Condemned and off the grid, the five-story apartment building is nonetheless home to a hundred-plus teenagers and young adults marginalized by poverty and chronic unemployment. In Street Life under a Roof , Emily Margaretten draws on ten years of up-close fieldwork to explore the distinct cultural universe of the Point Place community. Margaretten's sensitive investigations reveal how young men and women draw on customary notions of respect and support to forge an ethos of connection and care that allows them to live far richer lives than ordinarily assumed. Her discussion of gender dynamics highlights terms like nakana --to care about or take notice of another--that young women and men use to construct \"outside\" and \"inside\" boyfriends and girlfriends and to communicate notions of trust. Margaretten exposes the structures of inequality at a local, regional, and global level that contribute to socioeconomic and political dislocation. But she also challenges the idea that Point Place's marginalized residents need \"rehabilitation.\" As she argues, these young men and women want love, secure homes, and the means to provide for their dependents--in short, the same hopes and aspirations mirrored across South African society.

South African cities attract thousands of new residents every year in search of work and a better life. The housing backlog coupled with a shortage of housing subsidies means that for many South Africans there is no alternative but to live in informal housing and shack settlements. Informal settlements are therefore here to stay for the next decade and beyond. Given the importance of these residential areas, research needs to be undertaken to determine how to improve the lives of people living in shack settlements. This theme has received little dedicated attention by South African quality of life researchers in the past and the paper begins to address this by exploring the quality of life of informal dwellers in three distinct city areas in South Africa: Buffalo City, Durban, and Alexandra, Johannesburg. The paper investigates the factors that are most important in improving the quality of life of residents in informal housing as well as the main obstacles to a better quality of life. It uses regression analysis to obtain an understanding of the kinds of issues which shape quality of life in these areas and concludes by suggesting several research directions which would improve our knowledge of quality of life for informal settlement residents.

The failure to provide a safe supply of clean drinking water to over one billion people in the world remains one of the most telling indictments of development policy and practice. A series of studies within political ecology has taken this dramatic failure as an entry point into broader questions around the operation of power in the contemporary world. From basic questions around who is to blame for this catastrophic failure, to broader questions around the consolidation of forms of rule, this work provides a crucial lens on broader social and environmental questions. This paper provides an overview of recent work on the political ecology of water as well as mobilising a series of case studies from the author's own research in Durban, South Africa.

This paper examines the participation of women in local government in the Durban Metro Area in the postapartheid era. The primary purpose is to ascertain the degree of representation of women in local government structures and their influence on decision-making processes. The paper further attempts to determine the gender sensitivity of the male counterparts and their level of collaboration with female councillors. The gendered needs of women in local government and the various problems they experienced in office are highlighted. Finally, strategies to increase the participation of women in local government as well as to eradicate impediments, which they encounter, are advocated. The paper revealed that women have been under-represented in local government. Women who are elected into local government are discriminated against on grounds of gender and often race. They tend to be side-lined and marginalised in decision-making and in positions of power.

ABSTRACT IN ENGLISH: Post-Apartheid South Africa has witnessed an outpouring of testimony to past and present inequities, using varied means and to varied effect. This paper addresses challenges faced by people engaged in social justice work as they devise evidence specifically for political ends. Political evidence poses several challenges to people consciously engaged in transforming their social conditions. I ask how various forms of political evidence and testimony to post-Apartheid racism are produced in the neighbourhood of Wentworth, Durban - a mixed industrial-residential landscape saturated with petrochemical pollution. People engaged in political work in Wentworth struggle to demonstrate evidence of environmental racism against official dissimulation. Wentworth's residents often face the limits of legal-juridical notions of evidence exemplified in compensatory disputes. I explore how evidence is mobilized in political work through specific tools and authorizing discourses that privilege compensation alongside other forms of activist witnessing of social inequality. Certain kinds of evidence are deemed more legitimate as political evidence, whether or not these kinds can help transform persisting inequalities after Apartheid. While official dissimulation points to the limits of narrowing the focus to compensation, official silencing also highlights emergent forms of witness to legal, racialized social inequality. Wentworth speaks to innovations in political evidence in the wake of a racially fragmented archive, and in relation to new forms of state-sanctioned racism. // ABSTRACT IN FRENCH: L'Afrique du Sud post-apartheid a vu se multiplier les témoignages d'iniquités présentes et passées, présentés par différents moyens et avec différents résultats. L'auteur s'intéresse ici aux difficultés rencontrées par ceux qui oeuvrent pour la justice sociale lorsqu'il s'agit de concevoir des preuves à des fins spécifiquement politiques. La preuve politique crée plusieurs défis aux personnes qui s'engagent consciemment dans la transformation de leur condition sociale. L'auteur s'interroge sur la manière dont différentes formes de preuve politique et de témoignages de racisme post-apartheid sont produites à Wentworth, un quartier de Durban à la fois industriel et résidentiel, saturé de pollution pétrochimique. Dans ce quartier, les militants tentent d'apporter la preuve d'un racisme écologique face à la dissimulation officielle. Les habitants de Wentworth se heurtent aux limites des notions juridiques et légales de preuve notamment dans les demandes de dédommagement. L'auteur étudie la façon dont la preuve est mobilisée dans le travail politique par des outils spécifiques et des discours d'autorisation, privilégiant le dédom-magement, parallèlement à d'autres formes de témoignages d'activistes sur les inégalités sociales. Certains types de preuves sont jugés plus légitimes que la preuve politique, qu'ils puissent ou non aider à transformer les inégalités qui persistent après la fin de l'apartheid. Bien que la dissimulation officielle fasse apparaître les limites d'une vision limitée au dédommagement, elle met également en lumière des formes émergentes de témoignages sur les inégalités sociales juridiques et racialisées. Wentworth appelle à des innovations en matière de preuve politique sur fond d'archives racialement fragmentées, en relation avec de nouvelles formes de racisme cautionnées par l'État. Reprinted by permission of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland

Durban, the busiest port and second largest industrial hub in South Africa, has a developmental vision that sees its residents living in 'acceptably serviced housing' and enjoying a 'generally high quality of life that can be sustained'. This vision is in response to South Africa's transitional aspirations to move from an inequitable apartheid state to a democratic society with greater socio-economic parity. Since 1998 the eThekwini Municipality, which is the local authority responsible for the city of Durban, has conducted annual surveys to monitor the changes in the quality of life of Durban's people. Structured questionnaire interviews were administered in 14 300 dwellings between 1998 and 2005. The samples drawn each year were representative of the city's demographics and covered a wide range of housing types. Results indicate that parity of life satisfaction between race groups is as far apart in 2005 as it was in 1998. The paper undertakes trend analysis, from a local government perspective, of key objective and subjective variables in the surveys. It identifies the domains that have the greatest impact on satisfaction with life, and reports the salient issues for black householders, who have the lowest level of life satisfaction.