Planning for the Margins: Mapping Conceptual Implications of Profound Intellectual Disability and Informality through Slovo Park, Johannesburg

Abstract

Disability remains one of the most marginalized considerations within urban planning and social justice research and practice. Disability affords planning the critical conceptual lens of interdependence, moving beyond ideas of individualized independence. Interdependence is an especially salient provocation for how we live in today’s world, shaped by COVID-19 and global crises brought on by climate change, meaningful work and livable wages, generative AI, and future pandemics. This thesis focuses on the challenges of urban planning for and with people with profound and intellectual disabilities in informal and impoverished Global South contexts as an acute, but nonetheless pervasive, example of the need and precarity of interdependence. Drawing primarily from fieldwork in the informal settlement of Slovo Park, Johannesburg, this thesis aims to calibrate what it means to “plan for the margins” in situations of compounded vulnerability and resource scarcity. In doing so, it documents vitally important kin and care networks existentially challenged by neoliberal market forces. It argues that profound disability ought to be a central planning concern, informing how we transform social relations and build infrastructures of care that center deep vulnerability.