Women, difference and urbanisation patterns in Cape Town, South Africa

Abstract

A point apparently often lost to policy makers is that those for whom policy is designed have very diverse life experiences. The article focuses on two women's experiences of urbanisation: experiences that are extremely different from one another, despite the common political-economic context in which they occurred. It considers these extreme examples in order to demonstrate that a simple disaggregation by gender is insufficient for understanding diversity of lived experience. In doing so it also indicates the inadequacies of the kinds of urban-transition models that seem still to dominate South African housing and urban spatial development policy. And it suggests that a flexible, differentiated and needs-driven set of policies would be far more appropriate if policy is to accommodate the realities of social differentiation and stratification processes that lie beneath the surface of gender and race divides. It also thereby demonstrates the continuing value of thick descriptive ethnography.