Rentierism and Class Differentiation in an Informal Johannesburg Settlement

Informal settlements are often portrayed as marginal spaces, excluded from formal economies and property regimes — a framing that obscures the social differentiation within them. This article examines how the landlord–tenant hierarchy structures inequality in Zandspruit, an informal settlement on the periphery of Johannesburg. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research, it shows how land and housing operate as income-generating assets, producing a divide between landlords — typically long-standing residents who lease backyard rooms or subdivided plots — and tenants — often newer arrivals or migrants reliant on insecure wage work and rental housing. Situated within South Africa's history of racialized dispossession and post-apartheid labour-market precarity, the article brings theories of rentier capitalism into dialogue with anthropological work on distribution. It shows how grassroots rentierism, grounded in popular notions of ownership and legitimacy rather than formal title, involve intra-local distribution and extraction that intensify inequalities within marginalized urban communities. The article demonstrates how class differentiation is reproduced through rent extraction within local distributional circuits, rather than solely through employment.