Renaissance and revenants in an emerging global city: discourses of heritage and urban design in Cape Town's District One and District Six, 2002-2014

On 10 January 2014, the New York Times placed Cape Town at the top of its list of the "52 places to go in 2014". The hopeful rhetoric of the city as ultimate holiday destination, African creative metropolis, prime global-events location and city of freedom indicates powerful cultural discourses at work. Looking at how Cape Town is simultaneously reinvented and haunted, this thesis poses a set of questions regarding the discourses associated with the reinvention of the city, on the one hand, and the city's unresolved pasts, on the other. Situated at the convergence of two fields, Urban Studies and Heritage Studies, it sets out to investigate the workings of heritage and urban-design discourses in the city of Cape Town over the period of 2002 to 2014. It describes the unfolding of these discourses, and discusses the organisational process of both the 2010 FIFA World Cup and the 2014 World Design Capital in relation to the exhumation of human remains at District One and the restitution of land at District Six. Using as its methodology a combination of embedded ethnographic research, qualitative indepth interviews, desktop and archival research, and a form of embodied research, the thesis points to a historical hinge upon which these discourses shift. Through discourse analysis, it examines what this discursive shift entails, and how it takes place. It points to "moments of poignancy" in the construction of Cape Town's recent urban transformation. As such, this study offers a series of insights into the links between colonial modernity, on the one hand, and the origins of contemporary heritage and urban-design discourses in Cape Town, on the other. It examines the function of official discourse concerning the design of the city, as well as the sudden eruptions of public dissent that disturb this official discourse. The central argument of this thesis is that, through an in-depth understanding of the shifts, transformations and internal workings of the discourses of heritage and urban design, a critique can be made of the way contemporary Cape Town has been repositioned in relation to the city's past, present and future

The Ruins of Cape Town’s District Six

This article gives an account of the praxis of cape town’s district six museum in relation to the restitution and redevelopment of district six. During south africa’s apartheid regime, district six was declared a whites-only area according the group areas act of 1966. Colored and black inhabitants were forcibly removed and their houses were destroyed on the grounds of slum clearance. Twenty years into democracy, we can think of how the materiality of shattered landscape presents ways of connecting to degraded personhoods, in the past and the present. This article portrays how the museum tackles the challenge of naming the heritage of district six outside the logic of cape town as a global city. It points to two moments in which the museum self-consciously put a counter-practice in place against the grain of dominant discourses that give shape to cape town

Stylizing Cape Town : problematizing the heritage management of Prestwich Street

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 93-108)