Homeless in the Homeland: Eviction Infrastructures, Documentary Dispossession, and the Criminalization of Homelessness in Post–Fast Track Land Reform Zimbabwe

Abstract This paper argues that homelessness in post–Fast Track Land Reform Zimbabwe is not a residual housing deficit or an unintended consequence of rapid urbanisation, but a politically produced condition generated through eviction-led urban governance. Focusing on Operation Murambatsvina (Clear the Filth), and its afterlives and contemporary renewal imaginaries, the paper shows how displacement has been normalised as a routine instrument for regulating poverty, disciplining informality, and reordering urban space. Rather than treating homelessness as visible rooflessness alone, the analysis conceptualises it as eviction-induced unhousing that includes peri-urban warehousing, repeated displacement, insecure and overcrowded rental arrangements, and chronic exposure to demolition threats. Drawing on a multi-sited qualitative approach that combines policy and by-law analysis, public reports, media materials, and field-based testimonies from Harare’s rough neighbourhoods, the paper demonstrates how law, planning, administration, policing, and infrastructural abandonment converge to produce what we term eviction infrastructures. We further advance documentary dispossession as a key mechanism within this regime, showing how receipts, offer letters, and regularisation promises operate not as stable protections, but as unstable technologies of conditional belonging that keep residents permanently removable. The paper’s central contribution is to show that housing in Zimbabwe has been progressively detached from its function as a basic human need and reconstituted as a conditional good dependent on compliance, administrative legibility, and political recognition. The paper offers a sharper framework for understanding how postcolonial states govern marginal populations through displacement while disavowing responsibility through the languages of legality, order, and urban improvement.