Abstract
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. 

About the presenter
Hannah Dawson is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Johannesburg. Her research grapples with the social, economic, and political shifts stemming from mass unemployment, and the ways in which the future of work and welfare is being imagined – and transformed – in South(ern) Africa. She has approached this through a range of projects, including a study on how young people are making lives and livelihoods outside of wage employment, digital technologies and the changing nature of work, and popular demands and policy-making around more expansive cash transfers. Hannah has a DPhil (PhD) in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford, and an MPhil in International Development from the same institution.