Urban aesthetics, nuisance, and refugees: local business litigation and urban law in South African cities

While there has been important attention to the interconnections between urban inequalities and migration politics and middle-class residents as urban political actors, there remain opportunities to analyse how local businesses utilize urban law and aesthetics concerning migrant governance in the Global South. I argue that local businesses in South African cities utilized legal strategies related to concepts of embodied nuisance and transposed informality against Refugee Reception Offices (RROs) in their vicinities. Given ambivalent court mandates to uphold private property law and confront social inequalities, legal interpretations of municipal zoning and bylaws become particularly important for legal arguments concerning nuisance and informality. Consequently, local businesses were able to utilize urban law to pursue instrumental and symbolic interests concerning control over urban space, highlighting the importance of middle-class actors and interconnections of urban politics and migration governance in shaping and reproducing social, temporal, and spatial geographies of cities of the Global South.