by Rudi Buys
At one end of the city, in Khayelitsha, land invasions threaten a clinic. At the other, in Sea Point, the courts ordered that the land of a school must be used to address apartheid spatial planning.
In-between, homeless people are struggling for shelter. For the past months, during the worst of winter, the Community Chest housed 180 homeless people, at its offices in the city centre.
Recently, the High Court ruled that the City and provincial government failed in its constitutional mandate to address apartheid spatial planning, with its earlier sale of Tafelberg School in Sea Point for private use.
In Khayelitsha, a shack-farming syndicate seized the land surrounding an animal welfare hospital, threatening violence, including death threats to staff.
The three events demonstrate distinct ways that the struggle with land play out in a city plagued with vast socio-economic inequalities.
The notion of “placemaking”, which underpins much of urban spatial planning, offers one way to make sense of this struggle of the diverse communities of the city. Placemaking refers to principles and practices to shape public spaces through a community-based process of design and construction for the benefit of all citizens.
This perspective makes construction much more than projects of engineering, but social and political performances of citizens, communities and the state, which they undertake either collaboratively or by political contest. This means that the three incidents outlined here may be considered as moments on a continuum of “making and unmaking” – unmaking a clinic in Khayelitsha, re-making land in Sea Point, and making a shelter at Community Chest.
However, making a place is not the only tension at play when citizens, diverse communities, political collectives and the state in a city struggle with shared spaces. A second notion of struggle is the making of people.
“People-making”, as a social and political performance, refers to the ways wherein groups of citizens are made to be and considered as political constituencies, such as in the case of the homeless. Authorities, organisations and different communities, in hidden and overt ways, define and then interact with the homeless as “the other”.
In the process, the unique challenges and experiences of individual citizens, families and distinct communities are reduced to a single set of interests – a one size fits all approach, which follows the idea that the people made to be a collective are all the same.
A third notion of making in this struggle is the making of distance. “Distance-making” refers to the construction of social and political hierarchies that follow the making of people. As collectives are made through the hidden and overt, and informal and formal performances of citizens and the state, some communities are made to be people at the centre, and others to be at the margins.
In the social, political and economic landscape of the city, this means that more than the actual placement through spatial planning of different people at different ends of the city, some have a reckoned voice to campaign for a place, and others not.
A fourth notion is the making of narratives. “Narrative-making” refers to how people make sense of their struggle, by constructing a story to articulate its history and future.
The state, political collectives, communities of people and citizens – separately and together – construct and enact narratives of origin, of inspiration and of power. The making of a city, arguably, then is a process to unmake and remake our sense of place, of people, of distance and of narrative.
* Buys is the executive dean of the non-profit higher education Cornerstone Institute and editor of the African Journal of Non-profit Higher Education.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Cape Argus
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