The Borderscapes of Bellville: City-Making in the Face of Increasingly Hostile Refugee Policy

Abstract

This paper utilises the concepts of differential inclusion and the borderscape to analyse how drastic restrictions in South Africa’s urban refugee regime are impacting refugee infrastructures of liveability and urban space in Bellville, a suburb of Cape Town. Bellville is now a significant pole of refugee and migrant cultural, economic and social life in the city whose emergence was facilitated in part by post-apartheid South Africa’s adoption of a progressive urban refugee protection regime in the late 1990s. While imperfect in practice, its individualised rights-based structure provided asylum seekers and refugees a scaffolding for which to gain a foothold in the city and participate in urban life. However, since the early 2010s, increasingly restrictive practices and policies, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, have reduced the protection space and access to documentation. Drawing upon literature from urban, human and legal geography, the paper maps the transformations in urban practices and migration infrastructures by comparing the experiences of newcomers with more established residents. Through centring the experiences of newcomers, it demonstrates how refugees’ everyday practices and contestation of restrictive border policies are key aspects of the production of urban space in Bellville. Empirically, the paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork done in Bellville from 2022-2024 consisting of interviews, focus groups, participant observation and engagement with the Scalabrini Centre of Cape Town, a local NGO that provides paralegal advice and advocacy for migrants and refugees.