Shaking Up the City by Tom Slater

Author:Tom Slater [Slater, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Architecture, Urban & Land Use Planning, Political Science, Public Policy, City Planning & Urban Development, Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Human Geography, Sociology, Urban, Poverty & Homelessness
ISBN: 9780520386228
Google: Ems4EAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2021-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

Everyone in the District died a little when it was pulled down. Many died spiritually and emotionally. Some like my mother also died physically. . . . Many were forced to move to small matchbox houses in large matchbox townships which with brutal and tactless irony were given names by the authorizes such as Hanover Park and Lavender Hill to remind us of the past they had taken away from us. There was one essential difference between the old places and the new ones. District Six had a soul. Its centre held together till it was torn apart. Stained and tarnished as it was, it had a soul that held together. The new matchbox conglomerates on the desolate Cape Flats had no soul. The houses were soulless units piled together to form a disparate community that lacked cohesion. . . .

They had taken our past away and left the rubble. They had demolished our spirits and left broken bricks. They had destroyed our community and left dust and memories. And they had done all this for their own selfish and arrogant reasons. They had sought to regulate our present in order to control our future. And as I stood there I was overwhelmed by the enormity of it all. And I asked aloud, “ ‘What men have the moral or political right to take away a people’s past? How will they answer on that day when they have to account for this? For the past will not be forgotten.’ ” The south-easter [a strong wind regularly affecting Cape Town] swept the voices of accusation and recrimination into all the houses into which the people had been driven. . . . And the people on the bleak Flats whisper and remember what greed and intolerance have done to them. And they tell their children and their children’s children because it must never be forgotten. (1986, 126–27)

Following the forced removals of tens of thousands of people due to the color of their skin, their quality of life and their life chances deteriorated dramatically. The deeply entrenched and serious social problems that affect the neighborhoods of the Cape Flats today can be traced to the prolonged and damaging psychological distress caused by apartheid-era forced removals, to the geographical fragmentation of the identity and heritage of the communities that were bulldozed, and to decades of abandonment and disinvestment in apartheid’s dumping ground (Jensen 2008; Samara 2011; Salo 2018). While a majority of township residents now make a life in the best way that they can in the context of profound neglect, disinvestment, and stigmatization, many of these areas are quite literally dominated by disaffected and abandoned youths who have very few economic and social alternatives available to them other than membership in brutal criminal gangs. The result is a constellation of some of the most segregated and violent urban areas in the world, with homicide rates equivalent to or surpassing those of war zones (Pinnock 2016; Walker 2018).

The young man who drove me home—the grandchild of a family displaced from District Six—told me a great

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