Dis-locating public space: Occupy Rondebosch Common, Cape Town

Abstract

We argue here that public space research might benefit theoretically from the Southern Turn in urban studies. Our first objective is theoretical and methodological: unpack the idea of public space to make it suitable beyond its original location. Détienne's work on Comparing the Incomparable, combined with Staeheli and Mitchell's notion of "regimes of publicity" offer the theoretical tools for such a displacement. We end up thinking about public space as various, context-specific configurations of loosely structured, juridical, political, and social elements that take on new shapes and are prone to partial dislocation when dislocated. We test this model by displacing it to a piece of vacant land-Rondebosch Common in Cape Town. In so doing, we deal with our second objective: offering a detailed empirical analysis of the Occupy Rondebosch Common 2012 events, which relates to broader public space debates in contemporary, liminal, South Africa. "We are the 99%"-this Occupy Wall Street motto resonates somewhat differently, but no less strongly, when heard from the majority world, also known as the South. Occupy Wall Street was the spark for analyzing majority claims and how they use public spaceagain showing how actual events shape political thought, but also how much our theorizations tend to rest on iconic Western cases and concepts. Public space is such a

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“…However, the way they crop up offer us another metaphor, that of the spring: forced deep underground for centuries, circulating through the cracks and fissures of oral history and colonial texts, Khoisan place names are now forced back to the surface by very different dowsers (Giraut et al, 2008). (Ernstson, 2012;Houssay-Holzschuch and Thébault, 2017).…”

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