Another excellent study of urban life in southern Africa that we’ve had the privilege to index recently, Zachary Levenson’s Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City is impeccably written and based on a decade of participant observation. This book studies the predicament of housing in postapartheid South Africa, where nearly 20% of the urban population lives in informal housing like shacks. In response to the interminable waiting times for government-sponsored accommodations, many end up occupying (squatting) whatever land is available. Seeking to avoid state interference, most occupiers end up involved in dialogue with the state. “Providing a comparative ethnographic account of two land occupations in Cape Town and highlighting occupiers’ struggles, Levenson further demonstrates why it is that housing officials seek the eviction of all new occupations: they view these unsanctioned settlements as a threat to the order they believe is required for delivery. Yet in evicting occupiers, he argues, they reproduce the problem anew, with subsequent rounds of land occupation as the inevitable consequence. Offering a unique framework for thinking about local states, this book proposes a novel theory of the state that will change the way ethnographers think about politics.” Delivery as Dispossession will be published in April 2022. You can find more information about this book and where to order it on the Oxford University Press website, here.