This paper will reflect on research currently in progress in Cape Town's De Waterkant neighbourhood-an area also known as Cape Town's 'gay village'. This paper engages the literature of utopia as a framework of analysis for interrogating the performance of community-while at the same time problematising the terms "community" and "utopia" upon which much geographical description of the area is based. This research argues that both 'comforting' and 'unsettling' relational achievements amongst the human and non-human actors in De Waterkant function as building blocks of real or imagined community and further recognises multiple tensions that affect the formation of community and the pursuit of utopia in the South African urban context.

Th is article takes an autoethnographic approach in exploring the micropolitics of mobility with particular reference to race, class, and identity on one South African bus service. For his daily commute between an inner-city Cape Town suburb and a worksite near the metropolitan edge, the author explores personal, embodied, and political dimensions of mobility in a context where race continues to dictate the expected parameters of mobility practice. When socioeconomics might allow for private car ownership and use (and when timegeographies almost require it), the autoethnography at the heart of this article requires the author to question the politics of choosing not to drive; to be a public transport passeng er when one is expected to be a driver. In spite of the author’s intentional status in the member group of bus passengers, experience of six months of everyday bus use sheds light on hidden dimensions of mobility inequality. It contributes toward filling a gap in empirical evidence on contemporary bus passengering and the continuing role of race in contexts of visibly differentiated and differentiating everyday mobility.

No abstract

As a public space, the environment of public transportation services is maintained by an ordered set of rules and conditions. Such rules and conditions are prescribed by law as they are in generally-accepted norms of social behaviour within public space. Through the examination of the Conditions of Carriage that govern bus transportation in Cape Town, South Africa, using Golden Arrow Bus Services, this paper seeks to highlight the myriad ways that urban public space on the move is mediated, negotiated and controlled through rules of conduct that differentiate mobile public space from its counterpart in the environment outside the bus. Understood as a mundane part of the social life of the city and its inhabitants, mobility in the form of public transportation is constituted by micro-communities whose publics are in a constant state of flux and negotiation. Using analysis of the Conditions of Carriage and an ethnographic case study of bus passengering, this paper demonstrates how the Conditions mediate the situated and lived assemblage of actors in mobile public space that is a liminal zone between inclusion and exclusion.

No abstract