ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a chance of making the city anew, in a way that fosters belonging and nurtures civic pride, one can need to first understand the vocabulary of its current incarnation. To read the architecture of urban informality, in South Africa and elsewhere, one must pay attention to not only its facades, its roofscapes, and its morphology. The politics of inviting stories that began inside the informal city - given the conventional interpretation of informality as outside of the structures of legal, economic, and social order - naturally chime with subalternity discourses which have sought to recover, by means of theoretical rather than political tools, the place of the urban insider marginalised by society. Ethnographic study was necessary to be conversant with pressing economic, political, and social issues at several administrative levels, and a policy audit was carried out with a particular focus on Spatial Development Frameworks (SDFs) at municipal and metropolitan scales.
