Making Visibilise Empowerment as Topological Resonances: Analysis of a Participatory Mapping and Enumeration Project as Strategy for Active Waiting for Housing in Khayelitsha

Abstract

Informal settlement livelihoods in South Africa are characterised by a structural waiting for housing improvements (Oldfield and Greyling, 2015). Participatory mapping and enumeration (PME) are  key tools for Capetonian non-governmental organisations  to tackle urban injustice and improve livelihoods (Cinnamon, 2020). Unfortunately, PME evaluation and empowerment dynamics are often  reduced to the PME final output (data, cartographic artefact, etc.), which overlooks the empowerment practices inherent to PME tools. Based on a PME project implemented by a local Capetonian NGO, by community members living in S section informal settlement in Khayelitsha, and a PhD framed around an action-research methodology (Barella, 2023), this paper explores PME as an empowering strategy for “activating” the waiting phase for housing. Grounded in the empirical work the presentation theorises empowerment as a “topological resonance” (Simone and Pieterse, 2017), namely, as the sum of transformations that enable power leverage to be made visible and to make the most out of the long waiting for housing and livelihood improvements – moving away from a solely economic interpretation of the concept. Empowerment as topological resonances is then tailored to the empirical observations through the conceptual sub-dimensions of “translation” and “connectedness”, which have emerged throughout the S section PME project.