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153 5 The Production of Criminality on the Urban Periphery Throughout the townships, the policing of crime and gangsterism contributes to multiple insecurities for residents, working against the very development agenda it is meant to anchor. The previous two chapters attempted to show exactly why this form of security governance has survived the transition from apartheid to neoliberalism, how it produces insecurity, and the consequences for communities and the broader urban renewal agenda. In this final chapter we turn to the other piece of the governance equation, the relationship of the local neoliberal state to underdevelopment. Here, too, security and the police often figure prominently, although the lack of development itself should not be reduced to the repressiveness of the state’s response to crime alone. Instead, underlying the continued underdevelopment of the Cape Flats is the shift referred to in chapter 1, from township residents as victims to township residents as problems. The shift, driven in large part by the imposition of a market-driven accumulation economy on a city still struggling with powerful historical tensions and deep inequalities, has subsequently shaped and been shaped by the current urban governance regime. Within this regime, the state in the townships both transforms and retains core features of the apartheid era through the relationship that continues to hold between security and development. We have seen how development policy that centers the fight against crime has been securitized through policies such as the Cape Flats Renewal Strategy (CFRS) and aggressive policing practices. The war on crime, however, should be viewed as only one, albeit central, aspect of a broader securitization of governance rooted in efforts by city and provincial leaders to fortify the neoliberal core and simultaneously impose a form of neoliberal discipline in the townships. This securitization of development has subsequently generated urban renewal initiatives that produce criminality and reproduce insecurity. 154 · The ProdUCTion of CriminaliTy on The Urban PeriPhery We have examined the role of the state in relation to the policing of crime; in what follows we look more closely at its relationship to underdevelopment . Wherever it is found, underdevelopment represents a form of insecurity even as it produces secondary insecurities, but it is typically the latter, and only some of these, that concern hegemonic governance regimes. Neoliberal governance in Cape Town has two important consequences for the posture of the state toward the periphery, both of which link underdevelopment to criminality. First, the lack of progress on development has not been met with passivity on the part of township residents. On the contrary , postapartheid Cape Town has seen frequent and often violent clashes between residents and state authorities, or private sector proxies, over the implementation of neoliberal urban policies that reflect deeply undemocratic planning and policy processes, as well as a not so thinly veiled rearticulation of apartheid-era socioeconomic injustices. These are not the only recent conflicts that we can tie to underdevelopment—as evidenced by the spate of xenophobic violence that roiled the city in 2008 and the alleged link between local operatives allied with the African National Congress (ANC) and attacks on organized shack-dwellers from the Kennedy Road settlement in Durban the next year—but they are especially relevant here because they are between the formal governance structures responsible for urban renewal in their official capacity and township communities.1 Mirroring the response to remobilized communities across the nation, the local state has not only been quick to deploy security forces to confront protestors, but has also explicitly framed many of these actions and those who carry them out as criminal.2 In doing so, the state connects gangsters, other “real” criminals, and many community activists, perhaps the most visible township residents from the vantage point of the urban core, through a discourse of criminality , obscuring, or perhaps misrepresenting, the larger, more fundamental conflict between the city’s neoliberal agenda, security, and the demands of communities for socioeconomic development. Considered alongside the troubling rise in complaints by residents against police, the choice by state actors to respond to protests in this way suggests that securitization, itself embedded in neoliberal governance, has generated a form of punitive containment aimed at entire communities.3 The second important consequence of neoliberal governance for the state’s approach to the periphery is the absence of youth development. Youth unemployment figures and other indicators of underdevelopment have been discussed earlier, but the deeper story here is of a systematic neglect [3.145.151.141] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...

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