Moving Through the City: Gender and Floods at Play. A case study in Sweet Home Farm informal settlement, Cape Town

This research examines the situation of poor women’s threefold role, as breadwinners, care givers and role in communities in daily survival strategies when floods occur in the informal settlement of Sweet Home Farm in Philippi, Cape Town. These gender-differentiated roles entail different experience and understanding of the flood hazard. As gender and the city co-generate in a recursive manner, mobility before and during the floods will be the focus and tool for evidencing and assessing the gender-city interactions in the context of increased floods events. To that effect, I will study the daily routine patterns of men and women living in Sweet Home Farm, developing survival strategies, gendered, both according to and shaped by their mobility, and see to which extent the environmental hazard of flooding, disrupt their livelihoods?

I will raise this question: Does environmental hazard reinforce gendered social and urban orders? And more specifically here, to which extend do floods reinforce gendered mobility in Sweet Home Farm?

1. Vulnerability to floods is not gender-neutral. Vulnerability to environmental

hazard is understood and experienced differently according to gender.

2. Not only are floods a stressor but they as a matter of fact reflect humanmade

poor infrastructure and almost create the disaster.