Suchergebnisse

This paper addresses what it means to live with acutely restricted access to the city in the process of seeking urban asylum in post-apartheid South Africa. Our concept of apportionment specifies the gendered and racialised diminishment of space and time in the context of exclusionary and everyday violence. We focus on how the delineation and reduction of space and time is feminised, through the working lives of refugee and asylum-seeking women from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who live in Cape Town. Their embodied experiences incorporate the resonance of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, further sharpening their careful movements across Cape Town's segregated geographies. Drawing on our conversations with non-governmental organisations and self-employed women over a nine-month period in 2020, we highlight how the deferral of refuge compounds precarity, significantly affecting women and those who are sexually minoritised. In connecting how state apportionment maps onto urban apportionment we reveal how an ecology of violence – of spatialised segregation, xenophobia and sexual violence – establishes a corporeal power that constrains access to the city. Crucially, these women deploy counter practices of apportionment and their precisely attuned navigations add to our understanding of the agile repertoires of working the city.

This paper provides an ethnographic reading of how Congolese women, in particular aslyum seekers with temporary permits, navigate Cape Town's informal urban economy. We argue that the intersections of temporary permit status and gender, as well as the particularities of diaspora flows and settlements, compound the precarity of everyday life. We engage with how precarity shapes and is shaped by what we define as "working practices." These practices include the everyday livelihood tactics sustained on shoestring budgets and transnational networks. We also show how, in moments of compounded crises – including the COVID-19 pandemic – marginal gains and transnational networks are rendered more fragile. In these traumatic moments, working practices extend to include the practices of hope and reliance on prayer as social ways of contending with exacerbated precarity.

As part of a two-year research project focusing on Brick Lane's restaurant and retail sectors, the report highlights the unique contribution of the Bangladeshi community to Brick Lane and its world-renowned curry restaurants. Beyond Banglatown analyses Brick Lane's rapid gentrification over the last 15 years and the impact of its new economies on the UK curry capital, and the Bangladeshi community that has been excluded and displaced by this process of regeneration. The report highlights a steep decline in Brick Lane's curry restaurants, with a decrease of 62% in just 15 years - in the mid-2000s there were 60 outlets compared to just 23 in early-2020. While hipster cafés, vintage clothes shops, delicatessens and boutique chocolatiers have boomed on Brick Lane (also known as 'Banglatown' because of its status as the heartland of the Bangladeshi community in Britain), Bangladeshi-run curry restaurants have plummeted. Beyond Banglatown outlines broader challenges these restaurants have faced including, rising costs (rents, business rates); shortage of trained chefs because of visa constraints; lack of support from business and regeneration agencies; decline in the area's night-time economy; and the reluctance of the new generation of British Bangladeshis to work in the restaurant trade. A dramatic reduction in footfall due to the Covid-19 pandemic has severely exacerbated the situation and threatens the existence of many of Brick Lane's curry restaurants. The report authors call for a range of measures to help the restaurants to survive and evolve, such as government support to weather the Covid-19 crisis, investment and training for restaurateurs and formal recognition of the Bangladeshi community to the history of Brick Lane, and global London.

The Childcare Element (CCE) of Working Tax Credits (WTC) is designed to offer working parents financial support for the payment of childcare costs. Subject to a range of eligibility criteria, working families were able to claim 80% of their total childcare costs via this system at the time of the Pilot. Since April 2011, families can claim up to 70% of their childcare costs. The aim of the Actual Costs Pilot was to assess whether an alternative method of paying the CCE would change customer experiences and behaviour of claiming, and help them report their childcare costs more accurately. It is hoped this evidence may help the government understand how it can support families with children into sustainable employment. The Actual Costs system involved reporting childcare costs every four weeks to the dedicated team in the Tax Credits Office (TCO), and having up to 80% of these costs reimbursed within a limit of total childcare costs at £175 for one child, and £300 for two or more children, as in the standard system.