The Space of Cape Town

Few places in the world have a space as politically burdened by history as South Africa. This is common knowledge: one of the cornerstones of apartheid — a synonym for separateness — was the organisation, division and regulation of public and private spaces along racial lines. White, Coloured, Black and Indian people all lived in separate zones, divided from other groups by natural or man-made boundaries such as no-man’s-lands, motorways, walls and barbed-wire fences. As a consequence, the space in which one lived defined who one was, and this in turn determined one’s position in society, rights and obligations, life trajectories, and cultural and social outlook. Apartheid space defined people.

The end of apartheid brought an end to this strict enclosure of space, and its immediate effect was a gigantic wave of internal migration from rural areas — the so-called homelands — to the urban zones of Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban. Although space had officially been democratised, these migrants clearly arrived in a space that was anything but neutral. They found their way to the slums spreading around the cities, which now extend for kilometres to form vast zones of poverty and marginalisation. Once again, living in a slum defines people: it defines them as poor, poorly educated and with little prospect of social mobility. The United Nations estimates that by 2050 some fifteen million people will live in the Cape Town area. In all likelihood, fourteen million of them will be desperately poor and will never succeed in crossing the boundaries of their marginal spatial allocation: the lower-class township, a settlement for Black, Coloured and Indian people living or working near white communities.

Space in this country is historically defined and will continue to determine people’s lives for many years. There is no politically or historically neutral space in South Africa, and major urban development projects such as those undertaken for the 2010 World Cup can change nothing fundamental. They already affect tensions and inequalities in urban space and are more likely to exacerbate them. Improving roads and public facilities around sports venues is one thing; bringing roads, water and electricity — along with schools, hospitals, jobs and so on — to millions of people living in slums is quite another. A global mega-event such as the World Cup creates additional conflicts and competition over ownership, legitimate use and the right to enter or pass through urban space. It heightens political sensitivity around the organisation, planning and use of space.

It is within this intensely sensitive environment that Bert Danckaert photographs Cape Town. Although his images show a calm, synchronic and almost geometrically organised spatial environment — the simple present, to use Danckaert’s own phrase — we should remain conscious of its political and historical burden. The forms captured and brought forth in Danckaert’s photographs — the geometry of everyday life, a seemingly nondescript space — are politically marked. This becomes clear when we examine certain details: iron bars across windows and doors, barbed wire on walls, all traces of Cape Town’s no-entry zones. These forms tell us about the right to space, about its desired and undesired occupants and, more broadly, about the continuing social and political demarcation of space in a place as historically burdened as Cape Town. Danckaert’s aesthetic, his focus on the almost abstract forms that organise urban space, characterises that space: Cape Town’s space is formally assigned; it functions along strict lines of division, annexation and exclusion. The present, therefore, is never truly “simple”.

In places such as Cape Town, present space unfolds its history and perpetuates its political function. This naturally leads to growing resistance and intensifying conflict. Spatial demarcation no longer follows apartheid’s explicit categories, but organises a more diverse population through the widening gulf between the “haves” and the “have-nots”. The point, however, is that these gradual social and cultural transformations continue to rely on old and effective instruments of spatial regulation in order to remain on course and assume a concrete material shape. The forms used to organise urban space influence the politics of social division in the new South Africa in much the same way as they did in the old one.

Formalism is a negatively charged word. It evokes associations with modernism, extreme structuralism and top-down Soviet aesthetics. If we now perceive Danckaert’s work as “formalist”, we should remember that this formalism is documentary: it precisely describes the particular role and function of space in that place. Cape Town is in many respects organised spatially in a formalist fashion, with clearly marked lines, routes, boundaries and points of entry and exit. This formalism lies at the heart of Cape Town’s space; it defines the politics of space there and turns the place into a contested zone. Cape Town is also unquestionably one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and its idyllic, delightful locations may quickly distract an outsider from the darker aspects of its space. Danckaert’s camera reveals them, and his photographs formulate complex questions about Cape Town — questions rarely posed in tourist brochures and avoided by local authorities seeking to commodify the city’s splendour. Reflection on this simply present form of space irresistibly prompts reflection on its origins and history, and on its political use and abuse.

translated into Polish by Agata Mendrychowska

Jan Blommaert was Professor of Language, Culture and Globalisation and Director of the Babylon Centre at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and Professor of African Linguistics and Sociolinguistics at Ghent University in Belgium. He collaborated with the University of the Western Cape in South Africa and Beijing Language and Culture University in China, chaired the Max Planck Sociolinguistic Diversity Working Group and wrote extensively on language ideologies and linguistic inequality in the context of globalisation. His publications include Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes: Chronicles of Complexity (Multilingual Matters, 2013), The Sociolinguistics of Globalization (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Ethnographic Fieldwork: A Beginner’s Guide (Multilingual Matters, 2010), Grassroots Literacy (Routledge, 2008), Discourse: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Language Ideological Debates (Mouton de Gruyter, 1999).