Space In Cape Town Research Articles

Public Space in Cape Town

Public space ‘failure’ is often attributed to ‘poor’ design. Perceptions such as these open the way for vanity projects at the expense of interrogations of the less glamorous issues that may lead towards practical solutions. Design over-emphasis and the notion that open space is a ‘nice to have’, further detracts from its many important roles, particularly for vulnerable communities living in Cape Town.This article considers the challenges of delivering open spaces capable of playing multiple roles. Budget availability for maintenance and management, socio-economic issues, planning and institutional complexity and fragmentation, insufficient or incorrect community engagement, lack of inter-sectoral collaboration within professions, and single use design; are some of the challenges that underlie public space failure – in addition to design.Resolving these challenges is important because of public space’s critical role. Public space is the ‘glue’ that holds cities together. It is part of stormwater management, provides access to economic opportunities, improves safety, structures food access and agriculture and supplies ecological infrastructure for climate adaptation. Whilst design is not the biggest challenge, good design, appropriate norms and standards, integrated built environment practice, monitoring and evaluation metrics, can enable pathways for change necessary to affect a transition towards resilience.

Exploring Interdisciplinary Cooperation in the Relationship Between Urban Management Strategies, Modes of Production and the Production of Urban Space in Cape Town, South Africa

Exploring Interdisciplinary Cooperation in the Relationship Between Urban Management Strategies, Modes of Production and the Production of Urban Space in Cape Town, South Africa

Waste, Reclamation and the Production of Racialised Space in Cape Town, 1882–1913

ABSTRACT Waste has been a generally overlooked material for historians of Cape Town. However, this article contends that it is through attendance to the material demands of waste with waste management infrastructure that the city landscape has been and continues to be produced. I examine this through four interconnected viewpoints, focussing on the years 1882 to 1913. First, in the late nineteenth century demands to manage waste justified the centralisation of planning power within the Cape Town City Council, increasing their ability to curate the city landscape. Second, through consistent reclamation, waste physically extended the shape of the city and allowed for its spatial and social reconfiguration. Third, in the attempts to isolate the city's black population after plague, the infrastructure set initially for waste management was instructive in the selection of the specific site for the newly prescribed ‘Native Location'. Finally, as technological development in the twentieth century allowed the city’s wealthier residents to distance themselves further from their detritus, waste came to greater effect the social and spatial scripts for the performances of race and class in relation to space. In all of this, I contend that as the city makes waste, the waste, in turn, makes the city.

‘This land is not for sale’: Post-1994 resistance art and interventionism in Cape Town's precarious publics

Abstract The control, regulation and commodification of space has been fundamental in reinforcing structural racism and social identities. In a city such as Cape Town, where colonial architecture and heritage as well as apartheid racial zoning forms part of the spectacularisation of the city, racial conflict seems to have deepened. Through discussing public protest, artistic public interventions and live art, we argue that young black artists in South Africa are heralding a new phase of post-1994 resistance art which exposes conflictual cultural politics of public space in Cape Town rather than a healing democracy and multi-culturalism. As protesters and activists, artists deface the myth of a reconciled non-racial post-Apartheid society by targeting officially sanctioned art. Drawing from Faranak Miraftab's notion of ‘invited’ and ‘invented’ spaces as well as Chris Dixon and Angela Davis' concept of prefigurative politics, we argue that precarious South African publics are experienced as a ‘battleground’ rather than a space for liberal deliberation and democracy. New resistance art, therefore, tends to be protest-centred in engaging with the conflictual nature of the city.

A Pan-African Space in Cape Town? The Chimurenga Archive of Pan-African Festivals

ABSTRACT Created in 2002 in Cape Town by Ntone Edjabe, Chimurenga is a multidimensional project that combines a print magazine, a workspace, a platform for editorial and curatorial activities, an online library, and a radio station (the Pan-African Space Station). Based on collaborative ethnographic research with the Chimurenga team, this paper discusses the collection, production and creation of an archive about Pan-African festivals that this collective has developed through their cultural activities. After a brief overview of Festival of Black Arts and Culture (FESTAC) which took place in Lagos in 1977, and the history of Pan-African festivals, I describe the materials collected by Chimurenga and the projects in which they have participated. By following the travelling routes which have led to this informal and unstable collection of materials, I highlight how Chimurenga’s work contributes to challenging the idea of the archive, transformed through their practice into a dynamic and generative medium. I consider how the archive and memory of FESTAC is spread by Chimurenga in global and local spheres, and how it is used to produce new cultural and art forms in the present day, scrambling boundaries between past, present and future to perform a Pan-African transtemporal space in South Africa.

Housing Cape Town’s Forgotten Dead: Conflict in the Post-apartheid Public Sphere<sup>1</sup>

On 28 May 2008, the Cape Town Partnership Company Executive Officers’s newsletter reported on an ‘Interfaith ceremony at Prestwich Place [sic]’ to ‘consecrate’ a new ossuary building recently completed in Cape Town’s central business district. The announcement placed the Ossuary alongside other Partnership initiates and events such as the Harvest Festival, the Creative Cape Town initiative, and the upgrading of the Cape Town Station and the Grand Parade managed through the Partnership and the City Improvement District. The building of the Ossuary is intended to memorialise and bring closure to the contestations over the re-emergence of burial spaces in the city that have taken place in Cape Town since 2004. Presented as a successful ‘partnership’ between the Prestwich Place Project Committee, the City of Cape Town, the South African Heritage Resources Agency, the District Six Museum and Heritage Western Cape, this symbolic act of closure has been hailed a breakthrough in terms of heritage practice by practitioners and city officials alike. In this paper we visit the space of the Ossuary and its associated exhibition in the city, and reflect on the relationship between life space and burial space in Cape Town. Following the official path of the exhibition we pause to attach our own notes – a series of fragmentary interventions which trouble the smooth surface of containment. We use the experience of walking to reflect on the architecture of closure.

The ‘Silent’ Closure of Urban Public Space in Cape Town: 1975 to 2004

This study seeks to show that the closure of urban public space by residents in a South African context is not a recent phenomenon and that successful citizen-driven urban public space closures have been a feature of the urban landscape before the rise of gated communities and monitored urban public space. The primary objective of the study was to analyse and investigate spatio-temporal tendencies relating to the citizen-driven privatisation of urban public space in Cape Town. This objective would be driven by the creation of a comprehensive database of provincially gazetted urban land closures dating from 7 February 1975 to 17 December 2004 within one of the six municipal substructure regions of Cape Town. The secondary objective, but by no means less important, is an identification and analysis of the reasons forwarded, practices employed and techniques utilised by individual citizen-driven applications in two distinctly diverse residential suburbs within the study area.

Urban Strategies and Loophole Tactics Claiming Space in Cape Town and Malmö

David sits at a bar-table placed along one of the big windows in one of Long Streets many coffee shops. It is September and outside the rain is pouring down even though it should be spring and sunshine. Occasional pedestrians are passing by outside in Long Street, one of the most intense tourist streets in Cape Town CBD, central business district. David is only one of the many shop owners in the mostly Victorian houses in bright colours, with verandas and ornamented iron railings. Now he is telling the story about William. William is one of the streetchildren who have become a more and more influential part of the street life - together with street vendors, vagrants, beggars, thieves and informal parking guards. He used to hang outside the coffee shop, begging from the by-passers. Now and then David gave him some food, and he tended to turn up in the mornings when David was alone in the pub to prepare for opening the daily business. One morning David asked if William could help him by sweeping the pavement outside the door in the mornings. Then he would get breakfast in return, an arrangement that William seemed to accept and everything seemed fine for at short while. One day when David went to the bank, though, William was gone when he returned and the broom was lying on the pavement. William never showed up again at the coffee shop and a few weeks later David found him further downtown together with some other street kids, sitting in the street. They where sniffing glue and conversation was impossible. David tried to reach out to him, but was told to go to hell. After that incident, David never saw him again, and has no idea what happened. 1