Desire Lines

Space, Memory and Identity in the Post-Apartheid City

Noëleen Murray, Nick Shepherd, Martin Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781135992682
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This ground breaking new work draws together a cross-section of South African scholars to provide a lively and comprehensive review of the under-researched area of heritage practice following the introduction of the National Heritage Resources Act.

Looking at the daily heritage debates, from naming streets to projects such as the Gateway to Robben Island, Desire Lines addresses the innovative strategies that have emerged in the practice of defining, identifying and developing heritage sites.

In a unique multi-disciplinary approach, contributions are featured from a broad spectrum of fields, including the built environment and public culture and education. Showcasing work from tour operators and museum curators alongside that of university-based scholars, this book is a comprehensive and singularly authoritative volume that charts the development of new and emergent public cultures in post-apartheid South Africa through the making and unmaking of its urban spaces.

This pioneering collection of essays and case studies is an indispensable guide for those working within or studying heritage practice.

Part I



Planning Fictions

Chapter 1: Planning Fictions
The Limits of Spatial Engineering and Governance in a Cape Flats Ghetto

Steven Robins

When a tornado swept through Manenberg, a working-class, coloured community on the Cape Flats in 1999, a senior city official told reporters that this was a Godsend; it was divine intervention. Manenberg had for many years been the nerve centre of Cape Town’s gang and drug underworld, and the destruction of a number of three-storey flats in Manenberg was seen as an opportunity to raze these buildings and rebuild the area from ground zero. It was widely believed that Manenberg’s rental flats had become gang strongholds, and by building freestanding, low-income houses and introducing individual home ownership, it would be possible to rebuild Manenberg as a virtuous community of responsible property owners. Not only would this undermine de facto gang control over access to a significant section of the City of Cape Town’s (CCT) rental stock, but the ‘rent-to-buy’ housing scheme would reduce residents’ dependency on a paternalistic local state. However, the scheme encountered violent resistance from former backyard shack-dwellers and unemployed residents who were excluded from participating in this housing programme. In addition, many back-yarders were violently opposed to the fact that outsiders from various parts of Cape Town qualified for homes as part of the programme. Following the destruction of property at the construction site, the CCT successfully sought a court interdict preventing a group of community activists from approaching the building site.

The developments after the Manenberg tornado raise a number of questions: Why did this ‘progressive’ CCT housing and tornado rehabilitation Programme find itself in direct conflict with the so-called beneficiaries? How did city planners and officials come to believe that individual home ownership could dramatically transform the social fabric of this working-class neighbourhood characterised by exceptionally high levels of unemployment, crime, gangsterism and violence? What kinds of utopian visions animated such faith in modernist socio-spatial engineering? And, finally, what is it about modern states that seems to result in the endless recycling of these planning fictions?

STATES OF SURVEILLANCE AND FICTIONS OF CONTROL?

James Scott’s influential book, Seeing Like a State (1998), attempts to understand statecraft as a process of rendering populations ‘legible’. Scott argues that this has been achieved through a series of disparate state practices of surveillance and control including sedentarisation, the creation of permanent names, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure, the standardisation of language and legal discourse, the design of cities and the organisation of transportation. These practices have functioned ‘as attempts at legibility and simplification’:

Much of early statecraft seemed similarly devoted to rationalizing and standardizing what was a social hieroglyph into a legible and administratively more convenient format. The social simplifications thus introduced not only permitted a more finely tuned system of taxation and conscription but also greatly enhanced state capacity. They made possible quite discriminating interventions of every kind, such as public-health, political surveillance, and relief for the poor.

(Scott 1998: 3)

Scott concludes that these state interventions tend to fail because they are designed and implemented as top-down, standardised packages that ignore the complexity of informal social processes. Nonetheless these state technologies of surveillance and control appear to have had some successes in the advanced capitalist countries of the North. It is less clear, however, to what degree these state technologies and practices have been effective in colonial and postcolonial countries in the developing world.

This question is taken up in Timothy Mitchell’s Colonizing Egypt (1998). Mitchell draws on a Foucauldian analysis of the modern disciplinary state to investigate new forms of colonial state power based on the re-ordering of space and the surveillance and control of its occupants. According to Mitchell, the Panopticon and similar disciplinary institutions were developed and introduced, in many instances, not in France and England, but on the colonial frontiers of Europe, in places like Russia, India, North and South America, and Egypt. Nineteenth-century Cairo, for example, provided an excellent opportunity to establish a modern state based on the new methods of disciplinary powers including military reform, the supervision of hygiene and public health, compulsory schooling, agricultural reforms involving controls over movement, production and consumption, and the rebuilding of Cairo and other Egyptian towns and villages to create a system of regular, open streets that were conducive to surveillance and control (Mitchell 1998: x).¹

James Scott, Tim Mitchell and Foucauldian analyses of development discourse more generally (see Escobar 1995; Ferguson 1990) tend to stress the omnipotence of state discourses and the docility of subject-citizens, who appear in these writings as passive victims of an all-encompassing modern state apparatus. The Manenberg case study, however, draws attention to problems with Foucauldian analyses of disciplinary institutions and the surveillance state. Everyday life in ‘unruly’ places such as Manenberg draws attention to the limits of state power and control, for example, by highlighting the agency and resistance of citizens who are exposed to state interventions. In other words, these are anything but the docile subject-citizens assumed in much Foucaultian analysis.

The post-apartheid state has encountered countless problems in its attempts to ‘reclaim the townships’. These problems include urban land invasions, high levels of crime and violence, and the non-payment of rental, rates and levies for water and electricity. One of the most serious problems faced by the state is how to deal with ‘informal’ and illegal activities that are increasingly sustained by a political economy of criminal syndicates and gangs involved in drug trafficking and other illegal activities. Working-class communities are no longer the romanticised spaces of heroic resistance to apartheid. Instead, many of these poor communities have become, from the perspective of the state, ‘unruly’ spaces of dysfunction and disorder.

Attempts by the CCT to re-establish governance in Manenberg were directed through a variety of interventions including the introduction of individual home ownership, ‘oil spot’ strategies of policing and crime prevention, and the ‘hardening’ and protection of public facilities. In other words, significant aspects of the city’s intervention involved what Sally Merry (2001) refers to as ‘spatial governmentality’. Starting from the premise that ‘houses are much more than bricks and mortar’, this chapter examines the micro-politics and development discourses of housing and urban renewal in Manenberg following the tornado that swept through the neighbourhood in 1999. It shows how housing interventions are often deeply embedded in ideological conceptions of ‘development’ that seek to create good governance and virtuous consumer-citizens out of the raw material of bricks, mortar and ‘the unruly masses’.² It will become clear that, despite claims to the contrary, low-income housing and urban planning in South Africa has always been ideologically charged, and planners, policymakers, city managers and activists have engaged with urban development interventions in relation to politically charged questions of race, ethnicity, citizenship and governance.

Manenberg regularly features in the media as a space of ‘social pathology’ and dysfunctionality, a representation that is reproduced through almost daily violence and gang killings. It is also associated with the highly militaristic and hierarchical prison gangs such as the ‘28s’ and ‘26s’ that have in recent years transformed themselves into sophisticated corporate structures connected to multinational drug cartels and crime syndicates such as ‘The Firm’, the ‘Hard Livings’ and the ‘Americans’. Drug trafficking, alcohol sales and distribution, gunrunning, taxis and sex work are the major sources of revenue of this multibillion-dollar industry. With its extremely high levels of unemployment and poverty, Manenberg has become a ripe recruiting ground for the foot soldiers of the drug kingpins, the merchants and hitmen.

It was within this scenario that planners, policy-makers and senior managers identified Manenberg as one of Cape Town’s six ‘zones of poverty’³ that required ‘special treatment’. The devastation unleashed during the tornado provided a unique opportunity to intervene in the social fabric and spatial design of Manenberg. The city’s Department of Community Development (Devcom) was responsible for the implementation of the tornado rebuild and urban regeneration programmes in Manenberg.⁴ In line with statutory development frameworks, CCT defined its major tasks as: (1) to re-establish governance in a gang-ravaged part of Cape Town; (2) to bring marginalised citizens into the mainstream market economy; and (3) to create conditions conducive to citizen participation in everyday political life (Devcom director Ahmedi Vawda, personal correspondence; see Chipkin 2005).

One of Devcom’s key strategies was to use individual ownership of low-income houses as a means towards rebuilding moral and political community and breaking the stranglehold of gangs that controlled many council rental flats (‘courts’). A key element in this strategy was to replace rental housing with individual home ownership. Council flats were perceived to reproduce the conditions of welfare dependency that contributed towards the disintegration of the nuclear family, which was deemed responsible for systemic social problems in Manenberg. Devcom’s argument was that the Manenberg community was ‘dysfunctional’ because family units tended towards disintegration and were therefore unable to socialise youth into adulthood (see Chipkin 2005; Salo 2005). Devcom’s task, then, was to create the conditions for ‘proper’ governance and citizenship in what was deemed to be a ‘dysfunctional’ community.⁵

City strategists assumed that it would be possible to re-establish governance and improve the neighbourhood through a combination of individual home ownership and urban spatial design innovations. For instance, one of the problems identified with Manenberg’s flats was that gangsters had open access through the courtyards. Barriers were subsequently built around existing courtyards and new houses in order to limit access to outsiders. It will be shown that the planners’ over-emphasis on physical form and spatial design did not take into account the structural dimensions of the political economy of gang violence. Neither was this spatial design approach able to counter the socio-cultural dimensions of gang culture by addressing the ‘distinctive milieus for social interaction from which individual [gang members] derive their values, expectations, habits and states of consciousness’ (Harvey 1985: 118).⁶

City managers and planners believed that home ownership and spatial design alone could make a significant contribution towards re-establishing governance in Manenberg. The scheme that was introduced, however, was challenged by community activists, poorer residents, illegal sub-tenants and backyard shack-dwellers who were initially excluded from the scheme.⁷ The liberal individualist conception of the ‘consumer-citizen’ (or ‘citizen-customer’) clashed with deeply embedded community structures, neighbourhood and gang networks, and communal solidarities of residents, especially within poorer sections of the community. Community activists claimed that the city was undermining community interests and ‘community consciousness’. The city council’s attempt to create a ‘new citizen identity’ through home ownership was bound to encounter obstacles given the political economy of gangs, drug trafficking and everyday violence in Manenberg.⁸

THE STRUCTURAL DIMENSIONS OF GANG VIOLENCE AND ‘DYSFUNCTIONAL’ COMMUNITIES

In terms of CCT thinking, home ownership would facilitate the creation of a secondary housing market and the improvement of the built environment, thereby acting as a catalyst for urban regeneration programmes. It was believed that housing development could contribute towards improving the built environment and the social fabric and moral economy of Manenberg. The city’s scheme sought to establish a secondary housing market that would kickstart a cycle of upward mobility through the creation and expansion of poor people’s investment in their asset base. This would in turn stimulate the local economy and increase the rates base (Community Development Report 2000). In other words, along with safety and security projects and economic development programmes, housing would become a key catalyst for a systemic programme of urban regeneration.

The Manenberg Disaster Committee (MDC), a civic organisation that emerged in response to the 1999 tornado, challenged the city council’s housing scheme by claiming that it ran counter to community interests. It appeared that the city council’s senior managers and planners did not properly understand the political and economic structures that reproduced poverty, crime, violence and ‘dysfunctional’ patterns of behaviour associated with places like Manenberg. Council management failed to understand and acknowledge the structural and institutional obstacles to attempts to re-establish governance and incorporate ‘the poor’ into the market economy.

For decades, the city council has been dominated by engineers and planning technocrats for whom the provision of basic services (water, electricity and refuse collection), rather than communi...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: SPACE, MEMORY AND IDENTITY IN THE POST-APARTHEID CITY
• PART I: PLANNING FICTIONS
• PART II: SITES OF MEMORY AND IDENTITY
• PART III: BURIAL SITES
• PART IV: TRANSIT SPACES
• AFTERWORD: LINES OF DESIRE
• NOTES
• ILLUSTRATION CREDITS