Community self-surveys: appropriating a technology of rule

Abstract

The rapid growth of urban populations in cities of the global South, gives rise to major conflicts between those attempting to gain a foothold in urban areas and those attempting to govern these places. This can be conceptualising as a ‘conflict of rationalities’ between techno-managerial and marketized systems of government administration, service provision and planning, and increasingly marginalized urban populations surviving largely under conditions of informality. The ‘interface’ between these conflicting rationalities is frequently a site of struggle the outcomes of which can take various forms and can warp technologies of rule and strategies of ‘improvement’ in various ways. The community self-survey ‘movement’ provides one such example of struggle over a technology of rule which can potentially yield important learning outcomes. The paper explores examples of self-enumeration in shack-dwelling populations in Cape Town (South Africa) where this has been used to engage with the local state.