A mall for all? Race and public space in post-apartheid Cape Town

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 16, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 351-379

  Houssay Holzschuch, Myriam ^a   Teppo, Annika ^b  

^a UNIVERSITÉ DE LYON   (France)

^b UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI   (Finland)

Author keywords

Cape Town; Mall; Post apartheid; Public space; Publicization; Race

Indexed keywords

APARTHEID; CONSUMPTION BEHAVIOR; EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS; PUBLIC SPACE; RACE; RACIAL IDENTITY; URBAN AREA;

AFRICA; CAPE TOWN; SOUTH AFRICA; SOUTHERN AFRICA; SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA; WESTERN CAPE;

EID: 68849098218     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1474474009105052     Document Type: Article

References (147)

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4. For a summary of the apartheid city, see Ron J. Davies, The spatial formation of the South African city, GeoJournal, Sup. Iss., 2 (1981), pp. 59-72. For an insight into apartheid's control geographies in Cape Town, see John Western, Outcast Cape Town (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1996);
5. Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch, Le Cap, ville sud-africaine: Ville blanche, vies noires (Paris, L'Harmattan, 1999);
6. Annika Teppo, (The making of a good White. A historical ethnography of the rehabilitation of poor Whites in a suburb of Cape Town (Helsinki, University of Helsinki, 2004).
7. According to the Population Registration Act of 1950, every person was a member of a racial group: White, African or Coloured, later to be complemented with the fourth category of Indian. The grounds for this classification were related to physical appearance and general acceptance. This categorization was also hierarchical: Whites were regarded as the dominant group, and enjoyed many privileges, while Africans were in the worst position with Coloureds falling somewhere in between. The respective quality of the spaces allocated, even between African and Coloured townships, reflected this racist hierarchy.For a thorough explanation of racial categories, see A.J. Christopher, Atlas of Apartheid (Johannesburg, Witswatersrand University Press, 1994), p. 103-5. For the racial composition of Cape Town's population today, see Figure 3. In this paper, and while aware of the political implications of each term, we will follow the usual conventions and use the above categories as they are understood in the South African context.
8. Philippe Gervais-Lambony, Afrique du Sud, les temps du changement, Hérodote 111 (2003), pp. 81-98
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14. Ibid., p. 252.
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18. See, for instance, Claudia Barril, Marion Carrel, Juan-Carlos Guerrero and Alicia Marquez, eds, Le public en action: Usages et limites de la notion d'espace public en sciences sociales (Paris, L'Harmattan, 2003);
19. Jean Baudrillard,ed., Citoyenneté et urbanité (Paris, Editions Esprit, 1991);
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21. Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Berlin, Luchterhand, 1962).
22. See, e.g. Craig J. Calhoun, Habermas and the public sphere (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1992);
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25. Eric Laurier and Chris Philo, A parcel of muddling muckworms: revisiting Habermas and the English coffee-houses, Social & cultural geography 8(2) (2007), pp. 259-81; Mitchell, The right to the city.
26. Nicholas K. Blomley, Unsettling the city: urban land and the politics of property (New York, Routledge, 2004);
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30. See Isaac Joseph, Le Passant considérable, Essai sur la dispersion de l'espace public (Paris, Méridiens, 1984);
31. Joseph, La ville sans qualités (La Tour d'Aigues, Éditions de l'Aube, 1998).
32. une pluralité d'usages ou de perspectives, our translation. Joseph, La ville sans qualités, p. 34.
33. Don Mitchell and Lynn A. Staeheli, Clean and safe? Property redevelopment, public space, and homelessness in downtown San Diego, in Setha M. Low and Neil Smith, eds, The politics of public space(London, Routledge, 2006), pp. 143-75;
34. Lynn A. Staeheli and Don Mitchell, The people's property? Power, politics and the public (New York, Routledge, 2007).
35. Staeheli and Mitchell, The people's property? Power, politics and the public.
36. Ibid., p. 141.
37. M.W. Swanson, The sanitation syndrome: bubonic plague and urban native policy in the Cape Colony,1900-1909, The journal of African history XVIII(3)(1977), pp 387-410
38. See, for instance, Wayne Dooling, The making of a colonial elite: property, family and landed stability in the Cape Colony, c.1750-1834, Journal of Southern African studies 31(1) (2005), pp. 147-62.
39. Racially mixed neighborhoods where Whites and Coloureds lived together endured in Cape Town until the mid-1960s. Africans had to live in designated and racially homogeneous areas from 1910 onwards.
40. Shamil Jeppie and Crain Soudien, eds, The struggle for District Six, past and present (Cape Town, Buchu, 1990).
41. Christopher, The atlas of changing South Africa.
42. Christopher, Atlas of apartheid.
43. Jeppie and Soudien, eds, The struggle for District Six, past and present.
44. Deborah Posel, The making of apartheid, 1948-1961: conflict and compromise (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991);
45. Graham Watson, Passing for White: a study of racial assimilation in a South African school (London, New York, Tavistock Publications, 1970).
46. Heribert Adam and Kogila Moopley, The negotiated revolution. Society and politics in post-apartheid South Africa (Johannesburg, Jonathan Ball, 1993).
47. See, among others, Patrick Bond, Cities of gold, townships of coal: essays on South Africa's new urban crisis (Trenton, NJ, Africa World Press, 2000);
48. Christoph Haferburg and Jürgen Oßenbrügge, eds, Ambiguous restructurings of post-apartheid Cape Town. The spatial form of socio-political change (Münster, LIT Verlag, 2003);
49. Véronique Dupont and Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch, Fragmentation and access to the city: Cape Town and Delhi in a comparative perspective, in Philippe Gervais-Lambony, Frédéric Landy and Sophie Oldfield, eds, Reconfiguring identities and building territories in India and South Africa (Delhi, Manohar, 2005), pp. 277-314;
50. Grant R. Saff, Changing Cape Town: urban dynamics, policy and planning during the political transition in South Africa (Lanham, MD, University Press of America, 1998);
51. Jeremy Seekings, Are South Africa's cities changing? Evidence from the mid-1990s. Review essay, International journal of urban and regional research 27(1) (2003), pp. 197-202;
52. Ivan Turok, Persistent polarisation post-apartheid? Progress towards urban integration in Cape Town, Urban studies 38(13) (2001), pp. 2349-77.
53. Guénola Capron, ed., Quand la ville se ferme, quartiers résidentiels sécurisés (Paris, Bréal, 2006);
54. Karina Landman, Privatising public space in post-apartheid South African cities through neighbourhood enclosures, GeoJournal 66 (2006), pp. 133-46.
55. A.J. Christopher, The slow pace of desegregation in South African cities, 1996-2001, Urban studies 42(12) (2005), pp. 2305-20;
56. Anthony Lemon and David Clifford, Post-apartheid Transition in a Small South African Town: Interracial Property Transfer in Margate, KwaZulu-Natal, Urban studies 42(1) (2005), pp. 7-30.
57. Gervais-Lambony, Afrique du Sud, les temps du changement.
58. Turok, Persistent polarisation post-Apartheid?.
59. D. McDonald and L. Smith, Privatising Cape Town: from apartheid to neo-liberalism in the Mother City, Urban studies 41 (2004), pp. 1461-84, p. 1461.
60. Narsiah, Neoliberalism and privatisation in South Africa, p. 3.
61. Williams and Taylor, Neoliberalism and the political economy of the new South Africa.
62. Bond, Cities of gold, townships of coal; Vanessa Watson, Change and continuity in spatial planning: metropolitan, planning in Cape Town under political transition (London, Routledge, 2002); McDonald and Smith, Privatising Cape Town, p. 1480.
63. Céline Vacchiani-Marcuzzo, Mondialisation et système de villes: les entreprises étrangères et l'évolution des agglomérations sud-africaines (Paris, Thèse de géographie, 2005).
64. Rafael Marks and Marco Bezzoli, Palaces of desire: Century City and the ambiguities of development, Urban forum 12(1) (2001), pp. 27-47;
65. Noëleen Murray, Nick Shepherd and Martin Hall, Desire lines: space memory and identity in the post-apartheid city (New York, Routledge, 2007).
66. Pirie, Reanimating a comatose goddess.
67. Concepts such as Homi Bhabha's hybridization, Ulf Hannerz's creolization or Amselle's branchements (plug-ins or connections - our translation) - mindful of not presupposing the existence of pure cultures - help to unravel models, layout, and practices in these public spaces. See Homi Bhabha, The location of culture (London, Routledge, 1994);
68. Ulf Hannerz, Sophiatown: the view from afar, Journal of Southern African studies 20(2) (1994);
69. Jean-Loup Amselle, Branchements. Anthropologie de l'universalité des cultures (Paris, Flammarion, 2001).
70. Mike Davis, City of quartz: excavating the future in Los Angeles (London; New York, Verso, 1990);
71. Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a theme park: the new American city and the end of public space (New York, The Noonday Press, 1992).
72. Charlotte Lemanski, A new apartheid? The spatial implications of fear of crime in Cape Town, South Africa, Environment & urbanization 16(2) (2004), pp. 101-11.
73. English-speaking literature on the malls from this period includes prominent works such as Meaghan Morris, Things to do with shopping centres, in Susan Sheridan, ed., Grafts: feminist cultural criticism (London, New York, Verso, 1988), pp. 193-225;
74. Jeffrey S.P. Hopkins, West Edmonton Mall as a centre for social interaction, The Canadian geographer 35(3) (1991), pp. 268-80;
75. West Edmonton Mall: landscape of myths and elsewhereness, The Canadian geographer 34(1) (1990), pp. 2-17;
76. Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park; Jon Goss, The magic of the mall: an analysis of form, function, and meaning in the con-temporary retail built environment, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 83(1) (1993), pp.18-47.
77. Goss, The magic of the mall.
78. Lynn A. Staeheli and Don Mitchell, USA's destiny? Regulating space and creating community in American shopping malls, Urban studies 43(5/6) (2006), pp. 977-92.
79. Mitchell, The right to the city; Staeheli and Mitchell, The people's property?.
80. Shannon M. Jackson, Being and belonging: space and identity in Cape Town, Anthropology & humanism 28(1) (2003), pp. 61-84.
81. Marks and Bezzoli, Palaces of desire; Murray et al., Desire lines.
82. Martin Hall and Pia Bombardella, Paths of nostalgia and desire through heritage destinations at the Cape of Good Hope, in Noëleen Murray et al., Desire lines, pp. 245-58;
83. Clifford D. Shearing and Michael Kempa, The role of private security in transitional democracies (Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, Johannesburg, 2001).
84. Goss, The magic of the mall, p. 18.
85. Hopkins, West Edmonton Mall as a centre for social interaction, p. 268-9.
86. Ibid., p. 273.
87. R. Birkby, The making of Cape Town's Victoria and Alfred Waterfront: the inside story of its planning, design, and creation (Cape Town, Victoria and Alfred Waterfront (Pty) Ltd, 1998).
88. http://www.waterfront.co.za/profile/company/introduction.php. Accessed 2 May 2008; Donwald Pressly, L&R Consortium wins V&A bid, Mail & Guardian, 20 September 2006, http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleId=284607&area=/brea king_news/breaking_news__business/. Accessed 7 May 2008.
89. http://www.waterfront.co.za. Accessed 2 May 2008.
90. Christine Chivallon, N. Marne and D. Prost, Artefact de lieu et urbanité: le centre commercial interrogé, Les annales de la recherche urbaine 78 (1998), pp. 28-37;
91. Goss, The magic of the mall; Jon Goss, Once-upon-a-time in the commodity world: an unofficial guide to mall of America, Annals of the Association ofAmerican Geographers 89(1) (1999), pp. 45-75.
92. Houssay-Holzschuch and Vivet, Blurring the line.
93. Such a Lefebvrian analysis of race and public space draws from Eugene J. McCann, Race, protest, and public space: contextualizing Lefebvre in the U.S. city, Antipode 31(2) (1999), pp. 163-84. McCann quotes and uses the Lefebvrian definition of abstract space, a space of quantification and growing homo geneity, a merchandised space where all the elements are exchangeable and thus interchangeable; a police space in which the state tolerates no resistance and no obstacles from Henri Lefebvre, Space: social product and use value, in J.W. Freiberg, ed., Critical sociology: European perspectives (New York, Irvington, 1979), pp. 285-95, p. 293.
94. Jeremy Seekings, The continuing salience of race: discrimination and diversity in South Africa, Journal of contemporary African studies 26(1) (2008), pp. 1-25.
95. Ibid., p. 2.
96. Ibid., p. 6.
97. Jeremy Seekings, «Just deserts: race, class and distributive justice in post-apartheid South Africa, Journal of Southern African studies 34(1) (2008), pp. 39-60, p. 40.
98. Louise Vincent, The limitations of inter-racial contact: stories from young South Africa, Ethnic and racial studies (2008), pp. 1-26.
99. Despite our best efforts and repeated attempts between 2001 and 2005 to meet representatives of the V& A Company head office, no interview has been granted.
100. Teppo, The making of a good White.
101. Vincent, The limitations of inter-racial contact.
102. Jonathan Manning, Racism in three dimensions: South African architecture and the ideology of white superiority, Social identities 10(4) (2004), pp. 527-36. Other authors share this interpretation: see for instance, Shearing and Kempa, The role of private security in transitional democracies.
103. Simon Goudie, Daryll Killian and Belinda Dodson, Postmodern f(r)ictions: history, text and identity at the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, Architecture SA (1995), pp. 26-31.
104. Nigel Worden and Elizabeth Van Heyningen, Signs of the times: tourism and public history at Cape Town's Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, Cahiers d'études africaines 141-142 (1996), pp. 215-36.
105. Sanette Ferreira and Gustav Visser, Creating an African Riviera: revisiting the impact of the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront development in Cape Town, Urban forum 18(3) (2007), pp. 227-46, p. 237.
106. Ibid., p. 240.
107. South Africa Tourism, http://www.tourismcapetown.co.za, accessed June 2006.
108. Authors questionnaires.
109. All quotations are taken from the interviews conducted by Jeanne Vivet between January and April 2005.
110. Hopkins, West Edmonton Mall as a centre for social interaction, p. 273.
111. Joseph, Le Passant considérable, Essai sur la dispersion de l'espace public; Joseph, La ville sans qualités.
112. Morris, Things to do with shopping centres, p. 217.
113. Kay Anderson, Race in post-universalist perspective, Cultural geographies 15 (2) (2008), pp. 155-71. See also, among many others, Ruth Frankenberg, White women, race matters: the social construction of whiteness (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993);
114. See also, among many others, Ruth Frankenberg, White women, race matters: the social construction of whiteness (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993)
115. John Hartigan, Establishing the fact of whiteness, American anthropologist 99(3) (1997), pp. 495-505.
116. Teppo, The making of a good White.
117. Lemanski, A new apartheid?, p. 110.
118. Goudie et al., Postmodern f(r)ictions.
119. Belinda Dodson, Are we having fun yet? Leisure and consumption in the post-apartheid city, Tijdschrift voor economische and sociale geografie 91(4) (2000), pp. 412-25.
120. Arun Saldanha, Psychedelic white: Goa trance and the viscosity of race (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
121. Sarah Nuttall, Stylizing the self: the Y Generation in Rosebank, Johannesburg, Public culture 16(3) (2004), pp. 431-52;
122. Elaine Salo, Negotiating gender and personhood in the new South Africa. Adolescent women and gangsters in Manenberg township on the Cape Flats, European journal of cultural studies 6(3) (2003), pp. 345-65;
123. Gustav Visser, The homonormalisation of white heterosexual leisure spaces in Bloemfontein, South Africa, Geoforum 39(3) (2008), pp. 1347-61;
124. Charlotte Bauer and Nosimilo Ndlovu, From rainbow nation to nutty nation, Mail & Guardian 2008 at http://www.mg.co.za/article/2008-04-11-from-rainbow-nation-to-nutty-nati on; Kopano Matlwa, Coconut: a novel (Auckland Park, South Africa, Jacana Media, 2007).
125. Elijah Anderson, The cosmopolitan canopy, The annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 595 (2004), pp. 14-31, p. 15.
126. Eric Laurier and Chris Philo, The cappuccino community: cafés and civic life in the contemporary city (Economic & Social Research Council & University of Glasgow, 2005), pp. 11-15.
127. I.R.A. Bashkow, A Neo-Boasian conception of cultural boundaries, American anthropologist 106(3) (2004), pp. 443-58, p. 453.
128. Hopkins, West Edmonton Mall, p. 13.
129. Hopkins, West Edmonton Mall as a centre for social interaction, p. 277.
130. Ashley Dawson, Geography of fear: crime and the transformation of public space in post-apartheid South Africa, in Setha Low and Neil Smith, eds, The politics of public space (New York, Routledge, 2006), pp. 123-42;Lemanski, A new apartheid?, p. 105.
131. Nigel Worden, Contested heritage at the Cape Town waterfront, International journal of heritage studies 2(1&2) (1996), pp. 59-75;
132. Worden and Van Heyningen, Signs of the times.
133. Murray et al., Desire lines.
134. McCann, Race, protest, and public space, p. 169.
135. Morris, Things to do with shopping centres, p. 195. Original emphasis.
136. Ibid., p. 197.
137. McCann, Race, protest, and public space, pp. 180-1.
138. Henri Boshoff, Anneli Botha and Martin Schönteich, Fear in the city, urban terrorism in South Africa (Institute for Security Studies, Cape Town, 2001).
139. Staeheli and Mitchell, The people's property?
140. Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis: critical studies of cities and regions (Oxford; Malden, MA, Blackwell Publishers, 2000), p. 320.
141. Mitchell, The right to the city, p. 129. On the process of publicization, see also Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds, Making things public, atmosphere of democracy (Karlsruhe/Cambridge, Massachusetts, ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie)/The MIT Press, 2005).
142. Henri Lefebvre, La production de l'espace (Paris, Anthopos, 1974); Lefebvre, Le Droit à la ville.
143. Wilmot Godfrey James, Phillip Dexter and David Chidester, What holds us together: social cohesion in South Africa (Pretoria/London, Human Sciences Research Council/Global, 2004).
144. Guénola Capron, Les centres commerciaux à Buenos Aires: les nouveaux espaces publics de la ville de la fin du XXe siècle, Les annales de la recherche urbaine 78 (1998), pp. 55-63.
145. Sabatier, La publicisation des espaces de consommation privés.
146. Hopkins, West Edmonton Mall.
147. Patricia K. Wood and Liette Gilbert, Multiculturalism in Canada: accidental discourse, alternative vision, urban practice, International journal of urban and regional research 29(3) (2005), pp. 679-91.