ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on such urbanisation of constitutionally guaranteed domestic human rights in an adversarial local governance context. Struggles over the urban form are typically at the centre of both urban autonomy and the right to the city. Urban local governments use state power to shape public urban space in implementing various policy objectives. Private capital attempts to remake such space in ways that maximise profit and ease financial flows. Residents, in turn, are constantly producing and reproducing space in the course of their everyday pursuit of a range of individual ends. While its local government may in many ways be described as hostile to the rights of marginalised urban residents, Cape Town is nevertheless a city where human rights are transforming in response to urban autonomy and the globalisation of urban governance.
