麻豆传媒AV

Citation

Hamilton-Smith N (2023) Swept under the Table? The challenges of climate change in ‘high crime’ informal settlements. European Society of Criminology, Florence, 06.09.2023-09.09.2023.

Abstract
This paper presents findings from a Global Challenges Research Fund project that focussed on identifying the impacts of climate change on three informal settlements in Cape Town. The project was a collaboration between the Universities of 麻豆传媒AV, Cape Town and the Western Cape, together with the non-profit company, the Sustainable Livelihoods Foundation. The context for the work was indeed challenging, a global pandemic, and a city marked by rapid growth in economic and housing informality, with communities poorly prepared to face the impacts of climate change, a pattern consistent with urbanisation across many majority world contexts (Satterthwaite et., al., 2020). The settlements in this study suffered variously from extreme climate-related events, such as water scarcity, fires, and floods. A project priority was working with community co-researchers not only to co-produce evidence regarding complex dynamics of climate impacts on urban settlements, but also to mobilise this evidence to suggest context-specific solutions to inform and influence the City of Cape Town’s strategies and actions. Crime and insecurity in these settlements were not a central focus for data collection, but their presence deeply permeated the findings, both exacerbating the negative impacts of existing climate-related pressures and events, whilst also presenting substantial potential barriers to identified solutions. Of equal significance was the extent to which the criminalisation and marginalisation of these communities had distanced them from the ‘formalised city’, making it difficult to strengthen connections between residents and officials. However, and somewhat counter-intuitively, this paper argues that the police themselves might have a key role here, not through tackling crime and insecurity through conventional criminal justice, but in line with the approaches advocated by Berg and Shearing (2018; 2020), through building a role for themselves as key players in the governance and implementation of a harms-focussed approach to the climate emergency.