Siân Butcher

My research explores the mundane forms of urbanization through private development that shape our built environments and their politics, particularly in the spaces between elite gated communities and informal settlements in cities of the Global South. My recent and current research focuses on developer-driven housing for a growing Black middle class on the edges of Johannesburg, South Africa. I am interested in what these suburban, middle-class-in-the-making spaces can teach us about post-apartheid socio-spatial change; about race, space and inequality, and about urban political economy and urban politics.

Globally, housing for a growing middle class in emerging markets has become a new asset class for investors. Yet despite its apparent financialization, producing these assets requires confronting locally-embedded developers, financial institutions, state agencies, planners, residents and land itself, in all their political and material complexity. My research unpacks the making of greater Johannesburg's greenfield 'affordable' suburbs through qualitative research methods and a heterodox set of theoretical tools, including geographical political economy of housing and land, critical development studies and theorizing on practices of the state, planning, land and race in cities of the Global South. Rather than a natural function of supply and demand, or a repetition of subprime housing experiences elsewhere, this approach helps to understand how urban development is made and legitimated in place, through particular grammars of inclusion and exclusion.