Cape Town

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Cape Town is the second-largest city in South Africa, with a population of over four million people. Established by Dutch colonists in 1652, it is a diverse and complex city, with a long history of segregation and inequity. The city continues to be characterized by high levels of inequity, most tangibly manifested in the presence of informal settlements. Much of this inequity is along racial lines as a result of enforced spatial segregation during colonial and apartheid times. Since South Africa’s transition to democracy in the 1990s, the city has continued to evolve, with significant urban regeneration initiatives (such as the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront) and with major governance reforms (with the fifty-seven local government bodies and regional government body that existed in the early 1990s being merged into one local government body in 2000). Cape Town has been the site of much research, from a range of perspectives. During the apartheid era, this research largely focused on the implementation of apartheid segregation and the resistance to apartheid, whereas since the 1990s, the focus has been on the implementation of developmental local government, continued inequities, and the roll-out of neoliberalism. Research from a “developmental local government” perspective has focused on government reform and the large amount of service delivery (for example, housing delivery) that has occurred since the 1990s. Another major focus of research has been on the implementation of neoliberal urban strategies and the resistance of civil society to this (although some scholars of “southern urbanism” would argue that the importance of Neoliberalism in Cape Town and other cities in the Global South has been overemphasized by scholars from the Global North). Given its location in a magnificent setting with unique levels of biodiversity, tourism and the urban interface with the natural environment have also become major topics of research. Probably the most effective reflections of life in Cape Town have been in fiction and popular nonfiction works, so it is important to also consider these as well. The bibliography is structured in the following sections: History of Cape Town (to 1990); Overviews of Post-Apartheid Cape Town (after 1990); Poverty, Inequality, and Exclusion in Cape Town; Place and Space in Cape Town; Governance of Cape Town; Neoliberalism in Cape Town; Crime and Violence in Cape Town; Tourism in Cape Town; Cape Town and the Natural Environment; and Fiction and Popular Works about Cape Town.