Privatising Cape Town: From Apartheid to Neo-liberalism in the Mother City
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the most remarkable features of the post -apartheid political landscape in South Africa is the increasingly hegemonic nature of neo-liberal thought and practice. This ideological dominance is most noticeable at the national level but has trickled down to urban policy-making as well. This paper documents the new urban neo-liberalism in the city of Cape Town. Based on extensive interviews, policy analysis and a critique of the track record of local government since 1996, the paper provides the first comprehensive overview of the character and extent of neo-liberalism in a large South African city. The empirical data are coupled with an analysis of the structural and ideological pressures from the national and international levels that have given rise to this policy focus, and an assessment of the room for alternative policy manoeuvre at the local level. We argue that there is considerable potential for policy autonomy in Cape Town, but that non-neo-liberal policy alternatives have been largely ignored, abandoned or intentionally shut out by the majority of senior decision-makers in the city, making for a self-reinforcing loop of neo-liberal discourse and practice at different levels of government in South Africa and with international funding bodies and advisors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".