Abstract

Through case studies of two South African metropolitan municipalities, Cape Town and Nelson Mandela Bay, the paper explores the way in which the economic advantages at the disposal of local government, referred to as rents, are distributed according to the power relations in cities. The city governance regimes are distinguished in the way that power is structured, the balance between formal and informal institutions, the nature of the rents allocated, and their developmental and spatial outcomes. Cape Town’s growth-oriented model, founded on intimate relationships between developers and the political elite, exercised centralized control over land rights, which were allocated to entrenched property interests. The weaker clientelist regime in Nelson Mandela Bay relied on a diminishing pool of procurement rents to sustain a decentralized patronage-based system. The paper uses a political settlements framework to understand how the configuration of power in each city is sustained by a particular distribution of rents, mobilized through informal institutions, which in turn impact the structuring of the bureaucracy. The spatial and developmental impacts of the case studies indicate that despite the better development outcomes of Cape Town, neither regime specifically advantages the urban poor. The paper concludes by suggesting ways in which political settlements theory can better account for bureaucratic autonomy and impacts on the space economy.