Modernity's Abject Space: The Rise and Fall of Durban's Cato Manor

Abstract

In the wake of South Africa's second democratic elections, academics, researchers, and policymakers continue to contribute to the task of charting the contours of postapartheid society. At the same time, a number of scholars have been engaged in a critical reevaluation of the legacies of apartheid. This task is a crucial one for, as Aletta Norval (1995) has suggested, it is only by tracing out the particular strategies of apartheid discourse that the postapartheid order can move beyond the logics of racial and spatial difference that characterized the policies of the past. Such policies had a particularly salient impact upon the structuring of urban space in South Africa, and recent years have seen a number of studies examining the evolution and functioning of the`apartheid city'.One feature of this work has been a move away from the traditional view that the apartheid city is an exceptional case, a racist distortion of more`normal' urban processes and policies evident elsewhere in the world (Parnell, 1997). Instead, it has been increasingly recognized that local interventions in the urban environment in South Africa should be seen as part and parcel of the more general phenomenon of 20thcentury modernism (Parnell and Mabin, 1995;Thornton, 1996). One facet of this South African modernism was an increasing engagement with a discourse of urban planning, and its associated concerns with the orderly management and control of industrial growth and productivity. Thus, a number of studies have examined the emergence of apartheid urban policies in relation to the broader discourses of modernization and planning which guided the morphology of urban areas in the industrial West

The “Politics of the Mirror”: On Geography and Afro-Pessimism

“…Such "spatial discourses" operated as a means to make the space of the colony legible to the European gaze, and hence subject to appropriation and control, as recent work has shown in places such as Egypt (Mitchell 1988), German Southwest Africa (Noyes 1992), South Africa (Robinson 1996;Papke 2001), Zanzibar (Myers 1998),…”

The Politics of Garbage in Oaxaca, Mexico

“…Many social scientists have also used this term in the context of social and spatial exclusion (McClintock 1995;Sibley 1995;Cresswell 1996;Popke 2001). While this notion implies exclusion and marginalization, it goes beyond conventional views of these concepts.…”

Beyond the Post-Apartheid City: De/Segregation and Suburbanization in Windhoek, Namibia

“…1 8 In this paper a third, additional aspect of integration is proposed as a vital step in the creation of more equitable Namibian cities, namely the questioning of the socio-cultural uses of space currently accepted as normative. This is an issue that has been explored by Popke (2001; see also Popke and Ballard 2004) with respect to the development of Cato Manor in Durban during the 1940s. Here, the "domesticated spaces of white suburbanization" wrestled with the "chaotic spaces of Cato Manor" (Popke 2001, 747) since the latter neighborhood was encroaching upon adjacent white residential areas.…”

“…These urbanites live on urban fringes and suffer from poverty, overcrowding and high levels of crime. Post-apartheid urban development strategies, as most urban practitioners and scholars agree, need to help overcome the social divisions and spatial marginalization produced and naturalized by apartheid urban planning policies (e.g., Dewar and Uytenbogaardt 1991;Urban Foundation 1991;Dewar 1995;Mabin 1995;Mabin and Smit 1997;Mabin 1998;Le Roux 1998;Simon 1999;Frayne 2000;Popke 2001;Robins 2002;du Pisani 2006;Omenya forthcoming). How these legacies should be overcome is, however, a matter of contention.…”