The Changing Faces of Urban Civic Organisation (Reflection) (Report‪)‬

The article and the context Looking back from the 2000s at urban politics in South Africa in previous decades, observers are struck by both the continuities and the changes. On the one hand, as Doreen Atkinson has written, 'for a "Rip van Winkel" who had fallen asleep in 1988 and awoken in 2005, it might appear as if the "rolling mass action" of the end-of-apartheid period had simply continued into the dawn of democratic government in South Africa' (Atkinson 2007: 53). On the other hand, the political landscape has changed completely, with the construction of democratically-elected, non-racial local government, with ensuing and dramatic changes in public policy.