About Me

Zachary Levenson is a sociologist studying the politics of housing in post-apartheid South Africa. He’s currently working on a book entitled Delivery and Dispossession: Evictions, Occupations, and Housing Provision in Post-Apartheid South Africa based on years of ethnographic fieldwork in Cape Town. His work has appeared in ContextsInternational Sociology, and Catalyst, among other places, and he is a regular contributor to Africa Is a Country. More broadly, he asks how political sociology allows us to reimagine urban sociological questions. He is currently based at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a fellow at the Institution for the Study of Societal Issues.

Thinking Urban Change in a Southern City
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Thinking Urban Change in a Southern City

I couldn’t quite figure it out. The entire project of housing provision in South African cities seemed to be marked by an almost obsessive sense of calculation, of rational town planning. Most notoriously there is the waiting list. After apartheid, the South African government embarked on a mass formal housing delivery program. In order to […]