Contesting violent displacement: the case of Warwick market in Durban, South Africa

While violence traditionally refers to the use of physical force to cause harm to others, in recent years this definition has been widened to include structural forces such as deprivation, poverty, inequality and forced displacement. This paper analyses strategies by Durban Municipality to demolish the century-old Early Morning Market (EMM) and replace it with a mall. More specifically, the following forms of violence will be illustrated: physical violence and brutality; racial stigmatisation; threats to livelihoods; and fear of forced removal and relocation. The municipality presented the mall project as being in the public interest. However, the demolition of the EMM would have destroyed the livelihoods of thousands, who are directly and indirectly dependent on it for their survival, in an environment with high levels of poverty, inequality and unemployment. The proposed spatial reconfiguration of Warwick Junction, with the mall project and demolition of the EMM, was a neoliberal strategy to favour capital/big business, at the expense of poor traders and consumers in the area. Traders inside and outside the EMM were able to organise, mobilise, resist and challenge their violent dispossession by the alliance between the local state and corporate mall developer, and together with legal recourse, were ultimately successful.