A narrative is considered in this thesis as a system of logical and ideological references used to understand a specific topic. Urban narratives represent the frames of reference used to look at urban transformation. On one hand, narratives are useful terms to frame the context. On the other hand, “labelling cities, placing them in hierarchies or dividing them up according to levels of development” can have serious consequences (Robinson 2006a, 1). In other words, a narrative which defines an urban place is not just a descriptive instrument, but it can become so entrenched in people’s mind-set as to influence their own living66. Hence, observations and results of every research are inevitably influenced by the geographical and theoretical frames of reference in which the study is placed. The paragraphs below describe both dominant and alternative imaginaries about contemporary cities and the stance of the author. The dominant approaches of the global and the mega-city can be defined as telescopic approaches to urban issues.
In contrast, defining a city as ordinary represents an alternative frame of reference. It is fundamental to clarify the frame of reference of this study in order to challenge the paradox of African cities and to evaluate the narrative of separation and the role of public space.
Sakia Sassen introduced the concept of global cities taking into account mainly the economic factors, and referring mostly to cities in the first world. “Global cities are not only nodal points for the coordination of processes; they are also particular sites of production […]. The things a global city makes are services and financial goods” (Sassen 1991, 5). In her book67, she analyses economic restructuring as class and spatial polarization, underlining phenomena of economic inequality, a polarized income distribution and a process of high-income gentrification (Sassen 1991, 279). What is missing is the recognition of social aspects in addition to economic ones, especially when talking about inequalities68. Her studies have had a great impact internationally, demonstrating and proving how the term global cities captures the existing “global organization and increasingly transnational structure of key elements of the global economy.
Her key point is that the spatially dispersed global economy requires locally-based and integrated organization, and this, she suggests, take places in global cities"
(Robinson 2002, 535). The narrative proposed by Sassen underlines specific aspects of contemporary cities. However, other scholars have criticised her univocal point of view. Firstly, the preferred first world perspective is considered
66 For example, the book Orientalism (Said, 1979) describes the process of creating the image of “the Orient” as an exotic other compared to the European culture. This is a case in which the image constructed of the other tends to become a reality for both.
67 Particularly in chapter 9.
68 She admits the partiality of her analysis writing: “Employment and earning statistics […]
provide only a partial description of socioeconomic conditions” (Sassen 1991, 245).
the right one by the author. Implicitly, any other perspective is treated as wrong69. Secondly, reality is described through formal economic indicators70, leaving out social, cultural and spatial ones.
According to prevailing imaginaries, the concept of global cities exists as a counterpart to mega-cities, which are rapidly shaping a “planet of slums” (Davis 2006). Global cities are world-class cities, commonly rich and placed in the first world. Mega-cities comprise all the others: a growing network of cities distinguished by poverty, disease, violence, toxicity, waste, informality, and commonly located in the global south. Brought to its extreme, this dichotomous narrative continues to promote development for the global south71 with the aim of copying the right model implemented in the developed world72. Slums are shown as the spatial configuration of mega-cities and as a huge challenge to be faced (UN-Habitat 2003)73. This vision culminates in the apocalyptic planet of slums described by Davis. Critics to Davis underlined his anti-urban and pessimistic approach. However, what is relevant of his work is that he has deliberatively shocked his audience by bringing what is normally considered marginal as the core of urban future. He overturned the perspective.
This research recognizes as truthful the description of some physical aspects characterizing informal settlements described by Davis (such as lack of basic services, substandard housing, overcrowding, unhealthy living conditions, insecurity of tenure). At the same time, UN-Habitat suggests a re-thinking of prosperity and underlines the need to move “away from the dominant perspective, which is outdated and unsustainable […]”, which creates “highly segmented urban forms, socially and economically segregated spaces, endless urban
69 At the same time “Sassen’s inclusion of one Asian city – Tokyo – broke the dichotomy between Western and Asian cities, and began undermining urban studies’ Western-centre focus”
(Haila 2016, 11).
70 Informal economy is treated as an illegal and outside problem: “the literature on the informal sector has mostly focused on Third World countries and has, wittingly or not, assumed that as a social type such sectors are not to be expected in advanced industrialized countries. […]
Since much of the expansion of the informal economy in developed countries has been located in immigrant communities, this has led to an explanation of its expansion as being due to the large influx of Third World immigrants and their assumed propensities to replicate survival strategies typical of their home countries”. Therefore, informal economy is labelled “a third world import”
(Sassen 1991, 285).
71 This perspective is known as developmentalism approach and refers to the global south as Third World or developing countries.
72 Using Robinson’s words: “Opposing tradition to modernity is the first and largest error of existing accounts of the modern. And viewing the embrace of novelty as innovative in Western contexts but imitative in others is its second profound error” (Robinson 2006a, 7).
73 One of the first and most important publication on this topic has been published by UN-Habitat in 2003. Not by chance, it is called The challenge of slums. Global report on human settlements 2003.
Cities with slums or slum cities? “In 2010, UN-Habitat made the distinction between cities with slums where the divide between rich and poor is quite clear and slums cities in which the rich and the poor live side by side. […] Slum cities rather than cities with slums, we are told, are prevalent throughout sub-Saharan Africa” (Huchzermeyer 2011, 7).
3.1 Lived cities 31 peripheries […] – all largely steered by private, not public interest” (UN-Habitat 2013b, 10). The description of negative features depends strictly on the continuous comparison with the dominant Western perspective, without grasping the nuances of reality and its space. Focus is given to symptoms. The risk of this narrative is to omit the fundamental understanding of causes, which goes beyond physical and legal aspects74.
In recent years, there has been an increasing amount of literature which tries to dismantle the two above-mentioned dominant narratives75. These mainstream narratives are called telescopic by Amin (2013) since they tend to focus on specific aspects of cities – considered as prevailing. As a consequence, they forget about the real complexities of cities. Amin argues that “two powerful urban imaginaries” exist: “one from a colonizing minority with powerful allies and the other form advocates of a contained majority, both ironically tracing similar subjectivities of survival and reward” (Amin 2013, 477). These kinds of urbanism76 – that we can also call narratives – are defined as “telescopic urbanism, with its interest in discrete territories rather than the relational urban topography. […] With no regard for the city as a social whole, it dismantles the politics of shared turf, common interests and mutual obligations, in the process negating the poor anything more than their own enclaves and efforts, exonerating the rich, powerful and influential from doing anything about slum/squatter city, and dissolving any expectation that the contract between state and society should extend to the poor, now in any case reconfigured as the resourceful” (Amin 2013, 484). Amin calls for a radically different urban imaginary, one that thinks “the city once again as a provisioning and indivisible commons to which the poor have equal entitlement on a human rights basis” (Amin 2013, 477). On the contrary, according to the theories of global and mega-cities, the poor, the slum cities or the cities of the south of the world are simply off the maps77. For this reason, new approaches to urban theory have come out as a response. The most relevant one for this study is known as the ordinary city approach, that has become popular thanks to Jennifer Robinson (2006a).
74 About cause-effect relationship see chapter 3.2.3.
75 These alternative visions, which aim to “bring the city back, and […] work on planning concepts such as just cities, network society, partitioned cities, mongrel city, ethnocratic cities and urban informality” were considered at the margin of the theoretical debate by Yiftachel (2006, 214). Today, their growing attention set them in the contemporary academic discourse, even if they are still considered non-mainstream.
76 These categories are called the business consultancy city and the human potential city (Amin 2013). They reflect in a way the paradigm of the global and the mega-cities narratives.
77 “While global cities, mainly in the First World, are seen as command and control nodes of the global economy, the cities of the global South are scripted as megacities, big but powerless.
Off the map, they are usually assembled under the sign of underdevelopment” (Roy and Ong 2011, 308). “Vast territory that has become increasingly peripheral, increasingly excluded from the major economic processes”: these cities are defined as off the map (Robinson 2002, 536).
“The ordinary city approach brings the city as a whole back in to view or, more properly, the city in all its diversity and complexity” (Robinson 2006a, 10).
In this case, the frame of reference is wide and all-inclusive instead of telescopic.
It focuses on an “overlapping network of interventions” (Robinson 2002, 545) rather than emphasising a limited range of economic or political aspects. The starting point for Robinson is the “geographical division of urban studies between urban theory, broadly focused on the West, and development studies, focus on places that were once called third world cities” and the “persistent alignment of theory/ development dualism with the West/ third world division in urban studies”
(Robinson 2002, 531). Beginning with the denial of this categorization, the author refers to all cities as ordinary, as “dynamic and diverse, if conflicted, arenas for social and economic life”. This approach “forms the basis for a new, post-colonial framework for thinking about cities, one that cuts across the long-standing divide in urban scholarship” (Robinson 2006a, 1). Similarly, Yiftachel has stated the need to re-engage planning theory towards south-eastern perspectives in order to
“constitute the basis for alternative knowledge [which] may not only be relevant to their own regional settings, but may also become a source of reverse flows of theoretical knowledge, as northern-western cities increasingly face south-eastern phenomena” (Yiftachel 2006, 216). Some years later, Roy and Ong underlined the necessity for “new approaches in global metropolitan studies, those that can trouble both political economy and postcolonial frameworks […] in the production of knowledge about the urban condition” (Roy and Ong 2011, 307).
This point of view clearly agrees with the need to go beyond a telescopic attitude78. Their proposal expands the idea of ordinary city, underlying the constant formation of cities as a site of experimentation and being conscious of a peculiar aspect and a global one at once. The so-called worlding city is described
“as a milieu of intervention, a source of ambitious visions, and of speculative experiments that have different possibilities of success and failure […]; as both a site of emergence and as a mass dream” (Roy and Ong 2011, xv-xvi).
The frames of reference described above have something in common: they all challenge telescopic urbanism. They criticise the division “of urban studies between Western and Other cities: celebrations of urban modernity and the promotion of urban development. Together these have produced a deep division […] demarcating difference in a system of hierarchical relations amongst cities”
(Robinson 2006a, 2). The categories of rich world-class cities – composed of wealthy successful citizens – and poor mega-cities – composed of urban poor – are denied simply because they are products of a colonial approach. “The city is
78 The two dominant approaches which investigate “contemporary cities and urban conditions [are considered]: (a) the political economy of globalization; and (b) the postcolonial focus on subaltern agency” (Roy and Ong 2011, 3). Both models tend to be reductionist since they are focus on economy or politics.
3.1 Lived cities 33 viewed not as an exclusive site of capitalism or postcolonial activism, but as a milieu that is in constant formation, drawing on disparate connections, and subject to the play of national and global forces” (Roy and Ong 2011, 3). Undoubtedly, the colonial past of African countries has shaped and influenced them; but there is a “need to define a new paradigm for the city of the South. While fully recognizing the impact of the colonial and post-colonial relationships […] it is a mistake to continue looking at the city of the South only as the outcome of the industrialized West's political and cultural dominance”. This research agrees with Balbo’s statement, which “uses the expression city of the South first and foremost, to stress the necessity to abolish it” (Balbo 2012, 3). Using Yiftachel words, “the use of binary categories […] is aimed at sharpening the arguments, rather than at describing an objective reality. Needless to say, there are no clear-cut distinctions between North and South, West and East, discourse and materiality or homeland and diaspora. These categories should be seen as zones in a conceptual grid which attempts to draw attention to the main loci of power and identity within an obviously messy, overlapping and dynamic world” (Yiftachel 2006, 212).
North and south, wealth and poverty, formal and informal, local and global aspects need to be considered together in what we can call ordinary lived city.
This thesis emphasizes that these dichotomic approaches are obsolete79 and it underlines the importance of the point of view as the first instrument of the analysis. While acknowledging the great influence of colonialism and globalization, it recognizes the need to elaborate a perspective that focuses not only on dominant viewpoints and common features, but recognises peculiarities of places. This study agrees with Robinson’s proposal to overcome the dualism between theory and development, between modernism and developmentalism, between First and Third Worlds or between the West and the rest of the world, since these hierarchies and categorizations have real consequences. Moreover, cities in South Africa can be defined also as lived cities since space has been mostly moulded by local dweller. The South African architect Heinrich Wolff used the term lived city as opposed to executive city: “The executive city is made by politicians, government, administrators, designers, professionals, laws, building regulations, etc. The executive city tries to shape the future of the city.
The lived city is the physically transformed fabric that comes about through the actions of people in the conduct of their lives, be it as individuals or groups”
(Wolff 2014, 8). South African cities – as cities all around the world – are composed of a mix of executive and lived city, and often the two are clearly distinct. The lived city mirrors the interventions of people in urban spatiality. It is particularly evident in poor areas, but it can happen in every area of the city. At the same time, cities all around the world give evidence of a growing inequality,
79 as underlined already in chapter 3.1.1 and demonstrated here (Robinson 2002 and 2006a, Roy 2005, Yiftachel 2006, Roy and Ong 2011, Balbo 2012 among others)
in economic as well as spatial terms (UN-Habitat 2016). Therefore, the urban poor and the rich coexist just theoretically: they are expected to share the same city, while they frequently use different and parallel spaces. In other words, the two spatial worlds tend not to mingle. On the contrary, they tend to create enclaves dedicated to specific groups. According to Secchi (2013), urbanism has played a role in this process and has precise responsibility in the aggravation of inequalities. Urbanism has contributed to confirm economic dynamics within the spatial structure of contemporary cities. Moreover, new ways of communication and information altered profoundly the way we meet and consequently the way of experiencing urban spaces.
To combat this tendency to separation, the attempt of this research is to look at Cape Town (paradox of coexistence of the urban poor and the rich) as an ordinary worlding lived city, then changing the dominant narrative. It is ordinary because it needs to be analysed and studied as a whole including its huge internal diversity and inequalities. It is worlding since it is composed by a milieu of interventions which are also influenced by national and global forces. And it is lived because most of its space has been created by the action of people living in it. The focus of this research is on poorer areas, always taking into account their relationship with the rest of the city, with international interest and the citizens’
point of view. Policies and architectural practices will be analysed to test how the executive and the lived city coexist; how and if the boundaries between the poor and the rich are defined; and what can happen in the connection spaces between the two.