Building Apartheid Coetzer, Nicholas
2013, 20160422, 2016-04-22, 2013-06-28
eBook
Through a specific architectural lens, this book exposes the role the British Empire played in the development of apartheid. Through reference to previously unexamined archival material, the book ...uncovers a myriad of mechanisms through which Empire laid the foundations onto which the edifice of apartheid was built. It unearths the significant role British architects and British architectural ideas played in facilitating white dominance and racial segregation in pre-apartheid Cape Town. To achieve this, the book follows the progenitor of the Garden City Movement, Ebenezer Howard, in its tripartite structure of Country/Town/Suburb, acknowledging the Garden City Movement's dominance at the Cape at the time. This tripartite structure also provides a significant match to postcolonial schemas of Self/Other/Same which underpin the three parts to the book. Much is owed to Edward Said's discourse-analytical approach in Orientalism - and the work of Homi Bhabha - in the definition and interpretation of archival material. This material ranges across written and visual representations in journals and newspapers, through exhibitions and events, to legislative acts, as well as the physicality of the various architectural objects studied. The book concludes by drawing attention to the ideological potency of architecture which tends to be veiled more so through its ubiquitous presence and in doing so, it presents not only a story peculiar to Imperial Cape Town, but one inherent to architecture more broadly. The concluding chapter also provides a timely mirror for the machinations currently at play in establishing a 'post-apartheid' architecture and urbanity in the 'new' South Africa.
World City Syndrome McDonald, David A.
2008, 20120806, 2007, 2012-08-06, 20080101, Letnik:
18
eBook
The literature on 'world cities' has had an enormous influence on urban theory and planning alike. From Manila to London, academics and policy makers have attempted to understand, and to some extent ...strive for, world city status. This book is a study of Cape Town's standing in this network of urban centres, and an investigation of the conceptual appropriateness of this world city hypothesis. Drawing on more than a dozen years of fieldwork in Cape Town, McDonald provides an historical overview of institutional and structural reforms, examining fiscal imbalances, political marginalization, (de)racialization, privatization and other neoliberal changes. By examining and analyzes these reforms and changes, McDonald contributes the first radical critique of the world city literature from a developing country perspective.
Based on interviews with women who are HIV positive, this sobering pandemic brings to light the deeply rooted and complex problems of living with HIV. Already pushed to the edges of society by ...poverty, racial politics, and gender injustice, women with HIV in South Africa have found ways to cope with work and men, disclosure of their HIV status, and care for families and children to create a sense of normalcy in their lives. As women take control of their treatment, they help to determine effective routes to ending the spread of the disease.
In 1937 a group of young Capetonians, socialist intellectuals from the Workers' Party of South Africa and the Non-European Unity Movement, embarked on a remarkable public education and cultural ...project they called the New Era Fellowship (NEF). Taking a position of non-collaboration and non-racialism, the NEF played a vital role in challenging society's responses to events ranging from the problem of taking up arms during the Second World War for an empire intent on stripping people of colour of their human rights to the Hertzog Bills, which foreshadowed apartheid. The group included some of the city's most talented scholar-activists, among them Isaac Tabata, Ben Kies, A C Jordan, Phyllis Ntantala, Mda Mda and members of the famed Gool and Abdurahman families, whose aim was to disrupt and challenge not only prevailing political narratives but the very premises - class and race - on which they were based. By the 1950s their ideas had spread to a second generation of talented individuals who would disseminate them in the high schools of Cape Town. In time, some would exert their influence on national politics beyond the confines of the Cape. Among these were former minister of justice, Dullah Omar, academic Hosea Jaffe, educationist Neville Alexander and author Richard Rive. This book is a testament to how the NEF was at the forefront of redefining the discourse of racialism and nationalism in South Africa.
After the #fall Shepherd, Nick
City (London, England),
20/7/3/, Letnik:
24, Številka:
3-4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
On March 9th 2015, Chumane Maxwele, a student at the University of Cape Town, threw a bucket of shit at a statue of Cecil Rhodes, prominently sited at the main pedestrian entrance to the university. ...A month later, following concerted protest action by the student-led social movement, #RhodesMustFall, the statue was removed. In this paper I situate the Rhodes statue and the events of #RMF into historical relation with the broader memorial and symbolic landscape of the Groote Schuur estate, the landscape of which the University of Cape Town forms a part. I argue that an imperial legacy is deeply inscribed in this landscape in architectural form, the organization of space, forms of the gaze, and embodied habitus. The University of Cape Town upper campus was conceived in terms of two architectural tropes, the idea of the Temple-on-the-hill, and the idea of the site of prospect. These, in turn, derive from Rhodes Memorial, slightly further up the slope. In this context, the Rhodes statue was the most obvious materialization of a more generalized coloniality, which remains a part of the ambiguous legacy of the Groote Schuur estate and the University of Cape Town.
•Disconnected state-civil society knowledge flows and disconnected socio-ecological systems inhibit efforts to build socio-hydrological resilience to water risks.•Cape Town’s marginalized urban ...spaces, while physically located at the periphery, are in fact central to the city’s urban social-hydrological systems.•Ignoring marginalized urban spaces does not only disproportionally affect Cape Town’s impoverished communities, but also effectively undermines the socio-hydrological resilience of Cape Town as a whole.
In 2017 and 2018, Cape Town faced historically unprecedented water shortages. With the imminent possibility of running out of water, the city’s leadership prioritized reducing water demand and expanding new water sources, while also reinvigorating the goal of seeking to build system-level water resilience for the longer term. Beyond the context of Cape Town, the crisis captured global attention, highlighting ongoing and future water security challenges, the realities of climate change, and the critical need to foster transitions towards more resilient water futures. Given that much of the discourse and implementation around water resilience remains squarely focused on the biophysical and engineering aspects of water supply and distribution systems, despite repeated calls for the need for greater attention to issues of equity and power, there remains little understanding of the ways that persistent inequities might serve or inhibit possibilities for urban socio-hydrological (or water) resilience. This paper draws on examples from Cape Town to argue that patterns and legacies of inequality, marginalization, and exclusion erode and inhibit possibilities for water resilience. Providing needed empirical evidence on the nature of these linkages, we theorize that deeply rooted inequities and related dynamics act as “counter-currents”—trends that undermine and present persistent challenges to efforts to enhance socio-hydrological resilience. Documenting examples of disconnections between the state and civil society as well as disconnected socio-ecological systems, we argue that these persistent inequities mean that efforts to achieve socio-hydrological resilience are likely to remain elusive. It is only by foregrounding these processes that it will be possible to make cities more resilient in the face of ongoing and future water-related risks, uncertainties, and climatic and environmental change.
This paper develops infrastructural citizenship as an analytical framework that bridges geography's sub‐disciplinary silos. While urban geography promotes infrastructure as a core lens for ...understanding the city, recognising that political struggles are mediated through infrastructure, discourses of citizenship are rarely employed. Similarly, while political and development geography promote citizenship as vital in understanding socio‐political life, often framed by citizen‐led action to secure basic rights and services, critical debates on urban infrastructure are typically overlooked. Consequently, despite the growth in studies recognising the politicised nature of urban infrastructure and the centrality of citizenship to urban life, the multiple ways that citizenship and infrastructure relate in diverse urban settings has received limited critical attention. This paper demonstrates how urban dwellers' relationship to public infrastructure in the domestic spaces of the home and settlement, and the temporal scale of the everyday, offers a representation of broader political identities and perceptions, framed through the language of citizenship. In South Africa, despite 25 years of significant post‐apartheid public investment in housing and services, frustration at poor service delivery and beneficiary (mis)use of public infrastructure remains dominant. While citizens adapt and consume public infrastructure in ways deemed “illegal” and “uncivil” by the state, citizens view these actions as a legitimate form of “citizenship‐in‐action” in the context of rapid urbanisation and poverty, and are frustrated by perceptions of state neglect. Using the analytical framework of infrastructural citizenship, the paper reveals how this state–society disjuncture represents a citizenship mismatch that is embodied in infrastructure, rather than a material product of state disinterest or citizen destruction per se.
This paper develops infrastructural citizenship as an analytical framework for bridging geography's sub‐disciplinary silos. It reveals that how urban dwellers experience public infrastructure in the domestic spaces of the home and settlement, and the temporal scale of the everyday, offers a representation of broader political identities and perceptions, framed through the language of citizenship. Research on housing adaptations in a state‐subsidised settlement in Cape Town, South Africa, reveals the embodiment of citizenship in infrastructure; for while urban dwellers “see” the state in their everyday lives through their access to public infrastructure, the state conceptualises low‐income urban dwellers primarily in infrastructural terms – as consumers, complainers, and demanders.
Around South Africa, the major cities are being narrated around entrepreneurialism, which emphasises competitiveness, innovation and partnership between local government and private corporates in the ...marketing of the city within and beyond the national borders. A large fraction of the population living in those cities is made up of immigrants from other African countries, who are frequently subjected to economic-driven xenophobic violent attacks by local citizens. African immigrants mostly operate in the informal sector and largely remain on the fringes of the city mainstream economy and social fabric. This article interrogates the extent to which the interventions implemented in the City of Cape Town in South Africa by the authorities, within the framework of reimagining the city as a world city, contribute either to the spatial inclusion or the exclusion of African immigrants’ petty trade activities in the design of urban development. The central argument to the article is that, in the pursuit of the entrepreneurial strategy advocated by the City of Cape Town, there are strong indications that some of these interventions are constraining and repressive, exacerbating the economic and social exclusion of African immigrants. Besides, these interventions have tended to increase the social hostility toward immigrants. Against the repressive law enforcement measures for regulating the urban space, there has been, however, a somewhat progressive public shift toward more accommodating efforts that have benefitted African immigrant business owners. The article is informed by the theoretical perspective on entrepreneurial urban governance and data from empirical sources are used in support of the arguments. The results reported show that in the city of Cape Town, the occupancy of any space for trading purpose is restrained by a bundle of by-laws. In responses to the variety of interventions, business owners have displayed different reactions ranging from compliance to subversive acts including resistance or negotiated arrangements have been at time used to influence the direction of other interventions.
Cape Town after Apartheid is a critical case for understanding a transnational view of urban governance, especially in highly unequal, majority-poor cities. Tony Roshan Samara’s closely observed ...study of postapartheid Cape Town affords valuable insight into how security and governance technologies from the global North combine with local forms to create new approaches to social control in cities across the global South.
Amaphela, meaning cockroach in isiXhosa, are a form of paratransit that provide township dwellers in Cape Town, South Africa with flexible, inexpensive and relatively comfortable transportation in ...combination with other formalised and semi-formalised services. While this shared mobility practice has received scant attention through the lens of paratransit and transportation geographies, amaphela have completely evaded analysis through the lens of mobility studies. The flexibility and informality of amaphela services can be understood through both utopian or dystopian lenses: It can be seen as a threat to order, formality, safety and reliability in the modern South African city; or it can be celebrated for the unique and creative ways that they negotiate township space while serving the public through flexible and affordable demand-driven service. This paper concludes that amaphela services in Cape Town thrive in an intermediate zone of adaptive infrastructure and governance to fulfil their mobility role.
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