Gentrification, Social Activism and Contestations in Cape Town (South Africa)

The dramatic rise in transnational capital mobility during the last quarter of the twentieth century and which still makes major advances into other non-market parts of the world, during the first quarter of the twenty-first century, is well documented. Thus, in the face of the ever increasingly mobile capital, nation states, have had no choice but adopt policies that are compliant with demands of the market. This has meant that national governments progressively entered into complex state-economy relations in which state institutions are actively mobilised to promote market based regulatory arrangements. These arrangements have often brought the state and the civil society into conflict sometimes over varied and competing notions of the use, meaning, and nature of public space. Thus, against this backdrop, this article deployed the concepts of accumulation by disposition, transnational gentrification, and, spatial transgression, and used desktop data and literature, to understand gentrification processes and the consequent civic action in Cape Town. The article concludes that the contrasting interests amongst social activists, in Cape Town, are likely to hamper meaningful material gains.