Changing Socio-Spatial Inequalities: Population change and the lived experience of inequality in urban South Africa

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This project will provide an innovative analysis of how people's lived experiences of socio-economic inequality are shaped by the complex dynamics of urban change in South Africa and how such experiences in turn shape the country's urban social fabric. The proposed collaboration between the University of Liverpool (UoL), Southern African Social Policy Research Insights (SASPRI) and the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) comprises an inter-disciplinary team (Geography, Demography, Social Policy and Urban Planning) with complementary areas of expertise in relation to socioeconomic inequality and urban population change. The project relates to all four themes of the call but most strongly to the theme of diversity, migration and practice. South Africa continues to be a deeply unequal society with markedly different standards of living across population groups (or race) and spatially. The current evidence base concerning inequality in South Africa is relatively small, and says little about the changing geographies of inequalities, the associated impacts which are felt on the ground as individuals' 'lived experience' of inequality, and consequences for the urban social fabric of the country. In this project quantitative and qualitative methods are combined to examine the interplay between urban spatial transformation and social attitudes towards inequality, attachment to place, and social inclusion. The three-year research programme has four parts: (i) Mapping the changing geographies of inequality across South Africa. Satellite imagery and the 1996, 2001 and 2011 Censuses will be analysed to generate population profiles across South Africa at small area level over time. Measures of spatial evenness and clustering will be generated to characterise the spatial context of areas.Areas where inequalities (variously defined) have increased will be identified using demographic, social, economic and ethnic/racial characteristics of areas. An area typology will be developed which will inform the identification of areas for the qualitative research in Part 2. (ii) Focus groups will be undertaken to explore the factors and processes that shape people's experiences of inequality, and whether people's experiences of inequality affect their attachment to place and sense of social inclusion. Most groups will be undertaken within Cape Town, with a small number in the Eastern Cape Province due to its long-standing internal migration ties to Cape Town. This qualitative work will also feed back into the construction of new and improved quantitative spatial measures of the lived experience of inequality (Part 1).(iii) Surveying people's experiences of inequality and their attitudes to inequality. A new module of inequality-related questions will be designed for inclusion in the 2017 round of the nationally representative South African Social Attitudes Survey (SASAS).Analysis of data collected through SASAS will provide an additional means of assessing the lived experience of inequalities and provide important dependent variables for Part 4.(iv) Testing whether people's attitudes to inequality are associated with their experiences of inequality using new/refined dependent and independent variables in multilevel regression models. The quantitative spatial measures developed in Part 1 will be linked to the SASAS 2017 data to develop a more nuanced analytical appreciation of how inequality impacts on residents' lives and their attitudes about inequality and redress.The results of this project will offer important new insights which will support national and local government when developing evidence-based policies to tackle inequality. It will enable policies in the areas of housing, urban planning and poverty alleviation to be informed by analysis of the lived experience of inequality, derived from an inter-play of highly context-specific qualitative enquiry and cutting-edge quantitative techniques.