Development: A Promised Land Called Cornubia

This chapter shifts the focus from movement to state interventions at the scale of municipal governance by exploring Cornubia, the largest housing development in post-apartheid Durban. The Cornubia development offers us one of the most prominent responses by municipal governments to the ongoing protests by the landless and homeless urban poor that have rocked the country in recent decades. I argue for understanding this state-led housing project within a broader context of an alternative project of global state capitalism, or what I call an “alter-globalization from above.” Unlike hegemonic understandings of neoliberalism in the United States and Britain, where public housing projects were most often being torn down or actively privatized, contemporary neoliberalism in semi-peripheral BRICS countries is increasingly articulated with a renewed interest in development and redistributive politics. Cornubia therefore alleviates poverty for the lucky few by allowing for micro-spaces of desegregation, but it also reinforces inequality, separation, and landlessness for the many by further enriching the same forces of historical dispossession with their roots in the colonial era.