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Infrastructural subjectivities and subjective infrastructures land, time, value, and the effective work of infrastructure in Dubai and the farm, Western Cape, South Africa
Thesis (DPhil)--Stellenbosch University, 2025.
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Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University
2026
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| _version_ | 1867613789414752256 |
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| access_status_str | Open Access |
| author | Van der Westhuizen, Nicola |
| author2 | Tayob, Shaheed |
| author_browse | Tayob, Shaheed Van der Westhuizen, Nicola |
| author_facet | Tayob, Shaheed Van der Westhuizen, Nicola |
| author_sort | Van der Westhuizen, Nicola |
| collection | Thesis |
| dc_rights_str_mv | Stellenbosch University |
| description | Thesis (DPhil)--Stellenbosch University, 2025. |
| format | Thesis |
| id | oai:scholar.sun.ac.za:10019.1/134844 |
| institution | Stellenbosch University (South Africa) |
| last_indexed | 2026-06-10T12:41:43.824Z |
| license_str | Other — see source repository |
| provenance_str_mv | Harvested via OAI-PMH from SUNScholar — Stellenbosch University Repository |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| publishDateRange | 2026 |
| publishDateSort | 2026 |
| publisher | Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University |
| publisherStr | Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University |
| record_format | dspace |
| source_str | SUNScholar — Stellenbosch University Repository |
| spelling | oai:scholar.sun.ac.za:10019.1/134844 Infrastructural subjectivities and subjective infrastructures land, time, value, and the effective work of infrastructure in Dubai and the farm, Western Cape, South Africa Van der Westhuizen, Nicola Tayob, Shaheed Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Sociology and Social Anthropology. Infrastructure (Economics) -- Social aspects -- South Africa -- Western Cape Human geography -- South Africa -- Western Cape Informal settlements -- Social conditions -- South Africa -- Western Cape Marginality, Social -- South Africa -- Western Cape Ethnology -- South Africa -- Western Cape UCTD Thesis (DPhil)--Stellenbosch University, 2025. Van der Westhuizen, N. 2025. Infrastructural Subjectivities and Subjective Infrastructures Land, time, value, and the effective work of infrastructure in Dubai and the Farm, Western Cape, South Africa. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Stellenbosch: Stellenbosch University [online]. Available: https://scholar.sun.ac.za/items/26b19aee-493c-4432-983f-371a7b284c22 ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Along the coast of the affluent tourist town of Hermanus, an informal settlement known as Dubai interrupts the manicured landscape with rows of tin houses, hand-dug trenches, and makeshift electricity lines. Long denied formal housing, its residents have laid claim to this highly contested coastal land through occupation, building, and endurance. About 160 kilometres to the west, outside the crumbling industrial town of Atlantis, lies the Farm – a self-built white settlement constructed by poor, elderly residents who view themselves as the forgotten remnants of a former white order. Where Dubai is marked by state absence, the Farm is shaped by a fear of being abandoned by the state altogether. Across these spaces, infrastructure is a political and affective terrain through which people assert worth, manage exclusion, and craft futures. This dissertation explores how infrastructure mediates governance, value, and belonging in these two spaces of post-apartheid South Africa. Through ethnographic research conducted for over two years in these self-built settlements in the Western Cape, I examine how infrastructure operates as a terrain of affect, aspiration, and moral order. I argue that infrastructure is a lived relation that shapes how people become legible to the state, how they assert value, and how they navigate moral and material life at the margins of urban planning. Foregrounding the everyday and often mundane practices of residents – laying bricks, tending to gardens, borrowing buckets, and connecting illegal wires – I develop the concepts of infrastructural subjectivities and subjective infrastructures to trace how people govern and are governed through infrastructure. These concepts allow me to theorize infrastructure through three key analytics: land, time, and value. I show how land functions as a moral and political terrain, how time is experienced and seized through routines, rhythms, and deferred promises, and how value is asserted relationally – through care, discipline, and aspiration – even in the absence of formal recognition. These analytic frames allow for a rethinking of urban marginality as more than a singular condition of lack or abandonment, and instead as a field of negotiation, saturated with affect, memory, and political labour. Dubai’s occupation of contested land heightens the stakes of everyday infrastructural practice, as residents’ presence is framed as a disruption to urban development and tourism. The Farm, by contrast, is maintained through a desire to preserve whiteness and reassert moral order amid perceived neglect. Across both sites, residents use everyday infrastructures – like wires, gardens, and fences – to make claims to permanence, dignity, and care. In doing so, they enact forms of governance from below that are shaped by race, history, neoliberal restructuring, and the uneven afterlives of dispossession. This dissertation contributes to urban anthropology by foregrounding how infrastructure organizes not only space and services, but subjectivity and moral legitimacy. It shows how people live through materials, narrate time, and claim space in cities that have long rendered them precarious. AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Geen opsomming beskikbaar nie. Doctoral 2026-01-12T10:32:24Z 2026-01-12T10:32:24Z 2025-12 Thesis https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/134844 Stellenbosch University 196 pages application/pdf Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University |
| spellingShingle | Infrastructure (Economics) -- Social aspects -- South Africa -- Western Cape Human geography -- South Africa -- Western Cape Informal settlements -- Social conditions -- South Africa -- Western Cape Marginality, Social -- South Africa -- Western Cape Ethnology -- South Africa -- Western Cape UCTD Van der Westhuizen, Nicola Infrastructural subjectivities and subjective infrastructures land, time, value, and the effective work of infrastructure in Dubai and the farm, Western Cape, South Africa |
| title | Infrastructural subjectivities and subjective infrastructures land, time, value, and the effective work of infrastructure in Dubai and the farm, Western Cape, South Africa |
| title_full | Infrastructural subjectivities and subjective infrastructures land, time, value, and the effective work of infrastructure in Dubai and the farm, Western Cape, South Africa |
| title_fullStr | Infrastructural subjectivities and subjective infrastructures land, time, value, and the effective work of infrastructure in Dubai and the farm, Western Cape, South Africa |
| title_full_unstemmed | Infrastructural subjectivities and subjective infrastructures land, time, value, and the effective work of infrastructure in Dubai and the farm, Western Cape, South Africa |
| title_short | Infrastructural subjectivities and subjective infrastructures land, time, value, and the effective work of infrastructure in Dubai and the farm, Western Cape, South Africa |
| title_sort | infrastructural subjectivities and subjective infrastructures land time value and the effective work of infrastructure in dubai and the farm western cape south africa |
| topic | Infrastructure (Economics) -- Social aspects -- South Africa -- Western Cape Human geography -- South Africa -- Western Cape Informal settlements -- Social conditions -- South Africa -- Western Cape Marginality, Social -- South Africa -- Western Cape Ethnology -- South Africa -- Western Cape UCTD |
| url | https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/134844 |
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