Upgrading informal trading: impacts on livelihoods and cohesion in Khayelitsha

This chapter grapples with the problem of poverty and inequality in South Africa through a case study examining the impact of a major violence prevention intervention on the livelihood strategies of urban traders and the forms of cohesion that underpinned them. The initiative in question is Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading (VPUU) programme, which sought to reduce violence through urban upgrading and the formalisation of space and social relations in the township of Khayelitsha, Cape Town. Drawing on international development policy discourse, the intervention was informed by an imaginary of a managed city characterised by ordered and economised social relations and self-regulating, economic-rational actors. We explore how attempts to formalise the city, in an effort to reduce violence and create new forms of citizenship, can have an ambiguous impact on social cohesion and the livelihood strategies of urban traders if it imposes a normative conception of the ideal Western city and an imaginary of the economic rational actor.