City Desired: the desire for a different future

by | Oct 29, 2014 | News | 0 comments

What, you may wonder, could a domestic worker, taxi boss, psychiatrist, urban farmer, environmental officer, spaza shop owner, violence counsellor, architect, school principal, and twin brothers who collaborate as artists have in common in Cape Town as we know it today? asks Michael Morris.

Not a lot, you could be forgiven for thinking, if you went by the habitually pessimistic them-and-us conversation about our “divided” metropolis.

“Tale of two cities” is a metaphor commonly deployed to suggest how Cape Town functions, or limps along.

But what’s striking about the 11 “everyday” people who speak through the City Desired exhibition – from domestic worker to psychiatrist, artist to urban farmer – is that they share the same space and collectively define a common city which, for all its divides, discrepancies and disparate endowments, breathes the same air and functions as an interconnected, indivisible form.

The inescapable corollary is that the future is theirs – ours, as it happens – to shape and share.

This is the foundational idea in the stimulating, interactive exhibition opening at the City Hall next week that wells from much scholarship and thinking about what cities really are, how they function and how they change. By coupling rich data in imaginative ways to the personal stories of people living across the metropolis, the exhibition seeks to explore the “fine grain of a city awkwardly negotiating change”.

This, implicitly, is where fresh thinking can and should be stimulated about the “desired” city of the future.

Co-curators Edgar Pieterse, director of UCT’s African Centre for Cities research unit, and colleague Tau Tavengwa, have no illusions about Cape Town’s deficiencies – the rich-poor divide, and limited racial or class integration in a spatial format bequeathed by an unlamented history.

Yet, they write, “there is so much more to Cape Town… than just a story of inequity and divisions. Across all walks of life and places of residence and work, ordinary people are getting on with the business of life, love and aspiration. Even though it is impossible to ignore the blatant divides… most routine interactions are characterised by openness, generosity, goodwill, humour, and a willingness to experience new ways of being together… a shared desire for an alternate future.”

It is evident in parents investing in their children”s education, or investments in religious, cultural or institutional “attachments”.

And it is precisely “using the tension between what divides people and the shared desire for alternatives” that lies at the heart of the exhibition.

The 10 themes – education, work, transport, vulnerability, housing, well-being, food, climate change, land and diversity – are examined in modules, each accompanied by an essay on one of those “everyday” city dwellers, a portfolio of photographs, a documentary film and a range of data, infographics and mapping, with an interactive element that invites exploration.

Each module is summed up by a question, a provocation and an idea – the objective being to stimulate new lines of thinking about who we are, what problems we face, and how we might share the solution-seeking.

It is, Pieterse points out, deliberately non-prescriptive, but deliberately provocative, too. In this, he argues, is the scope for a kind of activism, an activism of hope.

Pieterse is intimate with the full range of modern Cape Town activism – from being a teen detainee in 1985 to serving as a special adviser to the Western Cape Premier in the second half of the 1990s.

It is thus an accumulated sum of insights he brings to examining the complex urbanism of the modern city.

When the African Centre for Cities was founded at UCT in 2008, he was integral in developing a modus that sought to “break the mould of typical academic research” and to place a greater emphasis on engaging practitioners – officials, academics, professionals and community organisations – “which enables you to get to the nub of what”s to be done and how”.

“If you get public sector bodies engaged in this process, you can change practice,” he notes. And the exhibition is an extension of this approach.

Crucially, the practitioners Pieterse and Tavengwa have in mind are city-dwellers themselves, many of whom, Pieterse knows, do not appreciate their own potential in the remaking of the city.

Much of Pieterse’s work is elsewhere in Africa, and he confesses to being “irritated” by the perennial pessimism so many bring to their conversation about Cape Town.

“Working on the continent puts South Africa into context. Cape Town, especially, is so fortunate, because there is the scope for innovation and recasting everything.”

Solid data about the metropolitan reality is critical to this. But just as important, he argues, is “tapping into the desire for a different future”.

“We tend not to validate that. A key part of it is enrolling an open and interested middle class in solving critical issues. This will come from building relationships. If this isn’t happening at a personal level, where there’s an emotional and experiential connection, we will not shift things. That’s the bottom line.”

City Desired is intended as a step on that path. It is an opportunity, he says thoughtfully, to “lean into the future”.

This article by Michael Morris first appeared in The Weekend Argus

WHAT:  City Desired exhibition, the first of its kind in Africa, opens at 6pm on 30 October and will run until December 10.

WHERE: City Hall, Darling Street, Cape Town 8001

INFO: Edgar.Pieterse@uct.ac.za or Patricia Lucas on 021-650 5428 at the UCT Media Office. For more details visit

City Desired emerges against the backdrop of the World Design Capital (WDC) programme, with its focus on “Live Design, Transform Life”.

PHOTO CREDIT: SYDELLE WILLOW SMITH FOR CITY DESIRED. COURTESY OF AFRICAN CENTRE FOR CITIES

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