Imagined homes, concrete houses, and bureaucratic subjects: Citizen-state encounters in Eastridge, Cape Town

Eastridge is a low-cost housing development in Cape Town constructed and managed by the Cape Town Community Housing Company, a state-owned but privately managed company. The residents of Eastridge, most of whom have been living in their houses for 23 years, were recently declared ‘unlawful occupants’ in houses they expected to be the legal owners of years ago. Through a protracted struggle to receive permanent legal title over their homes the residents of Eastridge encounter the state in ways that are destabilising and violent at the same time as being intimate and mundane. Using ethnographic and oral history data gathered from three households in Eastridge I explore the ways in which families encounter and navigate the complex network of institutions, sites, agents, and artefacts that make up the imagined ‘state’ (Wafer and Oldfield, 2015). I argue that these everyday encounters with the state produce both the specific identity of the imagined state as well as particular forms of citizen subjectivity. The aim of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of the landscape of political possibility through which citizens navigate by investigating the everyday encounters between citizens and the state. This is done through an analysis of everyday practices of homemaking, family relations, and getting by from day-to-day in a context of uncertainty.