Dreams, Bricks, and Bodies: Mapping ‘Neglected Spatialities’ in African Cape Town

This paper deploys several propositions from Amin and Thrift's recent theoretical work to map emerging geographies of the postapartheid city. Using Cape Town as a case study, the focus is on urban planning and informal sector retailing. After a discussion of the informal food sector, three parameters of urban space that are often apprehended separately are held together: an imagined geography of planning for the efficient and postapartheid city (‘dreams’); a material geography of marketplaces for the developmental transformation of informal retailing (‘bricks’); and a socioeconomic geography of what local officials call “pre-entrepreneurs” (‘bodies’). The author argues that these three geographical features of the postapartheid city are of an emerging and mutually dependent piece; that is to say, they are cocreating each other across scales and domains of reality. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the broader implications for understanding the prospects of the postapartheid city.