[DEBATE] : On Cape Town

Wed Sep 12 16:00:17 BST 2007

David

I am one of the poor souls! Still a student! So please send me a copy. I
look forward to the book. 

Regards

Ebrahim  

-----Original Message-----
From: David McDonald [mailto:dm23 at queensu.ca] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2007 7:48 AM
To: 'debate: SA discussion list '
Subject: [DEBATE] : On Cape Town

A great article Sean.  I too, have lived in Obs off-and-on for many years
and it has gotten worse as it gentrifies further.  This, of course, reveals
(neo)liberalism for what it really is...sound progressive but act
regressive.

My book on Cape Town is coming out next month for those interested in
reading further.  I've attached the cover info below.

Because it is being published in New York it is quite expensive, but I will
have some copies available for free for people/organizations that cannot
afford to buy it.  If you know of a person/organization that you think would
be suitable please send me their mailing details ASAP.

Regards,

David

World City Syndrome: Neoliberalism and Inequality in Cape Town

David A McDonald

Routledge, New York, 2007

The literature on world cities has had an enormous influence on urban theory
and practice, with academics and policy makers attempting to understand, and
often strive for, world city status.  In this groundbreaking new work, David
A McDonald explores Cape Town’s position in this network of global cities
and critically investigates the conceptual value of the world city
hypothesis.

In some respects, Cape Town is an ‘ideal’ world city, reflecting the
service-oriented spatial economies of new global systems of production and
consumption.  And yet, the world city framework is an inadequate tool for
understanding uneven capitalist development.  Drawing on marxist urban
theory, McDonald argues that Cape Town must be understood as a neoliberal
city, wracked by the socio-spatial inequalities inherent to market-oriented
reforms.  Despite the pro-poor rhetoric of local and national government in
post-apartheid South Africa, Cape Town has arguably become the most unequal
city in the world, due in part to a ‘world city syndrome’ that deepens these
inequalities and plagues its urban planning.

Drawing on more than a dozen years of fieldwork, McDonald provides a
comprehensive overview of the city’s institutional and structural reforms,
examining fiscal imbalances, political marginalization, (de)racialization,
privatization and other neoliberal changes.  The book concludes with
thoughts on alternative development trajectories.

"This is a theoretically pathbreaking, if politically heartbreaking, account
of post-apartheid Cape Town and the betrayed promises of integration and
equality.  It also offers a formidable, often brilliant, overview of the
debate on neoliberalism." -- Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums,
Professor of History, University of California, Irvine.

“McDonald’s aim of merging his scholarship with the concerns of real people,
struggling over real issues, is impressive.  In this book he advances our
understanding of the challenges facing a new Cape Town in a new South Africa
by eloquently exemplifying the sensitivity and insight that sustained
commitment and rich experience on the ground can give rise to.  A sobering
but deeply illuminating account.” -- John Saul, Professor Emeritus, Social
and Political Science, York University, Canada.

“With rigour and precision, McDonald takes apart the neoliberal model that
dominates Cape Town’s post-apartheid trajectory. He shows how this so-called
development strategy sets us on the path to increased social, spatial and
economic inequality. But it is really in the alternatives that the book
comes to the fore. Drawing on a sophisticated reading of Marxism in
conversation with Keynesianism, McDonald presents an agenda for reforming
Cape Town that directly challenges the present received wisdom and
foregrounds a raft of eminently sensible strategic counter-hegemonic
interventions. The book is at once compelling as it is intellectually
courageous and builds on McDonald’s pioneering theoretical expose on urban
neoliberalism in South Africa”.  --  Ashwin Desai, Research Fellow,
Institute of Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University, South Africa.

David A McDonald is Associate Professor and Director of Global Development
Studies at Queen’s University, Canada.  

-----Original Message-----
From: debate-bounces at lists.kabissa.org
[mailto:debate-bounces at lists.kabissa.org] On Behalf Of Sean Jacobs
Sent: September 11, 2007 7:16 PM
To: debate at lists.kabissa.org
Subject: [DEBATE] : On Cape Town

[Note: this piece appeared in the Cape Times today, Sept 11, 2007. This 

is the version before I sent it to the paper's op-ed page -- Sean]

Sean Jacobs

The Curve was a club on Lower Main Road in Observatory, a neighborhood 

with pretensions of being the home of bohemian Cape Town. “A strange 

place,” was how Ntone Edjabe, a DJ whose long sets of Fela-tinged 

Afrobeat were the highlight on Saturday nights, described The Curve. 

What made it unique, according to Ntone, was that it was, “
 a darkie 

vibe in a joint owned and frequented by whities who feel there should 

be a darkie vibe in their neighbourhood.”

By 2001, a multiracial (still mostly white) crew of journalists, NGO 

workers, graduate students and émigrés, would gather there for the 

regular fix of worldbeats. By then the club had gained “so much colour” 

that whites began to “stand out like Cape Town in a post-’94 South 

Africa.”

But by mid-year the owners were rumoured to be getting uneasy. Ntone 

remembers an eventful evening that year when word got to him that “Mr 

Curve” did not like these developments: “Only the vibe was supposed to 

be darkie, not the crowd. Right before me, he passes his index finger 

across his throat in a self-explanatory gesture. For a second I’m 

tempted to obey the order. Literally. Then my co-DJ steps in and Fela 

lives 30 extra minutes. Only until 3 am. The following week the Curve 

will host a trance party instead.”

I lived in Observatory at the time and was a regular at the Curve. The 

gig represented for me what I began to like about the city I barely 

tolerated until then (I grew up on the Cape Flats, went to a still very 

white University of Cape Town and had also lived briefly in Chicago and 

Boston). Unlike most of Johannesburg, on the surface the city’s 

downtown and nearby suburbs such as Woodstock (well, the section above 

Main Road) and Observatory, appeared to be thriving, both during the 

day and at night. (This was, of course, before tourist-driven economic 

growth or gated markets were at the center of developments projects in 

the city).

The time felt right (we were mostly in our late 20s and early 30s) and 

we rode the wave of a national mood of opportunity, interaction and 

upward mobility. The afterglow of “liberation” and the remarkable 

transformation of South Africa was still something to marvel about. 

Since 1994 the size and relative wealth of the black “elite” and what 

passed for a middle class had expanded rapidly. And from our vantage 

point, this was also happening in parts of Cape Town and its surrounds 

where spaces stubbornly reserved for whites, even long after apartheid 

had ended, were slowly opening up to multiracial (well, our) crowds.

We were certainly a very political crew (many of our jobs demanded it; 

I worked at the Institute for Democracy or Idasa, for example), but 

leaving that Tamboerskloof-Observatory stretch would often bring back 

the reality at the heart of Cape Town, which visited us only 

occasionally in the form of a manager at the Curve.

We understood that our reality, for all its mixing, was an exception in 

Cape Town. And still is.

In fact, most of us were aware that many people who might like to party 

at places like The Curve would not be able to get there late on a 

Saturday night since public transport, as under apartheid, basically 

existed (as it does now) in order to ferry large numbers of mainly poor 

black people from the townships or inner city to the city center and 

the suburbs for work (domestic work, the service economy, office 

cleaning, etc) or to do their shopping. One survey reports that 46% of 

households in Johannesburg spend more than 10% of their disposable 

income on public transport. I can’t imagine it being any different for 

Cape Town. At any rate, public transport is clearly not about 

convenience or leisure.

Bus and train services under apartheid and since 1994—despite huge 

subsidies (about R5 billion a year)—are not designed as a convenient 

means to get people around. In fact, a minibus taxi industry, one that 

is barely regulated, carries the bulk of the responsibility for public 

transport -- it is estimated that the minibus taxi industry carries 

more than 65 % of passengers a day.

We also knew (and still do) that the minibus taxi system as it is, is 

very lucrative but, more importantly, very precarious: characterized by 

unsafe and unlicensed drivers, frequent accidents, violence between 

rival operators, and arbitrary change of routes (not much has come from 

the state’s effort to “recapitalize” -- overhaul the permit system and 

replace the broken down fleet of taxis on the road). And that system 

basically shuts down at night. If you don’t have a private car, you 

can’t get around.

And if you are spending all your money on transport, are too tired to 

go out or don’t feel too welcome in the former white suburbs, then the 

changes are less that you’d enjoy Observatory, Woodstock, or Long and 

Kloof Streets in central Cape Town (Unless, you wanted to frequent the 

strip-mall parts of the Waterfront with its long line of fast food 

joints. But even there, where people ostensibly mix, they don’t really 

interact).

Today, six years after the demise of the Curve, Cape Town sadly still 

lacks a coherent local government public transport policy.

So while young, black professionals like my myself and my fellow black 

partiers at The Curve -- a very small part of the population -- can 

“integrate” white middle class neighborhoods and parts of downtown, the 

same can not be said for larger integration.

And no real changes seem to be in the works. I have not seen any of the 

city’s more recent plans for a public transport system, but if there is 

a stopgap effort, I bet it is linked to the 2010 World Cup. And I 

suspect that the security and comfort of visiting fans, rather than 

that of local residents, will be a priority of the government and 

tourism industry.

I now live in Brooklyn, New York, but still regularly visit Cape Town. 

My most recent visits were in December last year (for one month) and in 

June this year. On this last trip, my younger brother David and I drove 

to the township where we grew up. I hadn’t done it in a while. I was 

struck again by the unemployment, the drug abuse (my brother estimated 

that at a troubling number of young people in the street where we grew 

up, are using “tik”). But most of all I was depressed by the housing 

crisis. The housing stock has been neglected for a decade or so. 

Overcrowding is rife. Shacks and extensions of either plastic, wood or 

tin to two-bedroom council houses (built in the 1970s for nuclear 

families), are a necessity for families with grown children. Many of my 

peers, now married, divorced, or single parents, still live with their 

parents through no fault of their own. No new houses have been built.

Certainly the provincial and city governments are aware of the housing 

crisis.

In March this year, for example, the provincial government announced 

statistics that would be a scandal in any other democracy. According to 

the province, by conservative estimates (an annual growth rate of only 

one percent), Cape Town housing backlog was expected to reach 460 000 

by 2020. That same report also suggested that if the city spends 

R1-billion every year on building houses, “the demand for formal 

housing would only be met by 2033.” Should the city spend half of that 

amount every year, the demand for “site and services” (meaning squatter 

camps with a standpipe and electricity supply) would only be met by 

2017. Waal [STET] Street also announced that 51 percent of housing 

applicants lived in shacks, 31 percent in backyards and 12 percent 

shared homes with other people. These people’s positions are made worse 

by poverty and unemployment. “Of the applicants, 79 percent earned less 

than R1 500 per month and 18 percent between R1 500 and R3 500.” 

Finally, the report noted that 63 percent of applicants listed their 

status as unemployed.

City and provincial officials would be quick to point out that they 

(well private firms supported by banks) are building plenty of low cost 

houses: in Delft, Khayelitsha and near Blue Downs. Anyone with 

knowledge of Cape Town and its jobs knows this is a daily commute of 

two hours. It is also de facto racial segregation and class-based 

apartheid. Apart from privately developed gated communities close to 

the city, Cape Town has a habit of expanding existing racial ghettoes. 

And the end of apartheid has not stopped this practice. So another 

coloured ghetto is built next to an existing one. Another “African” 

ghetto is constructed next to an existing African ghetto. Urban sprawl 

appears to be criteria for successful tender. Moreover, what results is 

that poverty--manifested by unemployment, bad schools, and 

gangsterism---is trapped in the townships far away from the city center 

and the op-ed pages of the main newspapers or the talk shows on AM 

Radio. (By the way, as my friend Herman Wasserman who is researching 

the rise of the tabloids reports that, ironically, they cover the 

townships more sensibly than most of the “real” papers). It’s worth 

mentioning that police statistics, reportedly, prove that the homicide 

rate has dropped in almost all urban areas of the country, except the 

Western Cape and are mostly concentrated in these townships.

This month my brother is visiting me in Brooklyn. This has presented 

ample opportunity for me to go on about price hikes and service 

problems with the public transport system and the broken schools, warn 

him about New York’s overeager police and lament the destruction of 

thriving neighborhoods by gentrification.

David instead minds the walking (he misses his car), but can’t stop 

talking about the use of public space. Watching working class families, 

hipsters, professionals and young students, all share the local parks 

on weekends, or accompanying my daughter and me to the park daily where 

we chat with other families, some of whom live in the nearby housing 

projects, he remarks on how this is completely absent in Cape Town.

Sadly, in tackling the real problems of Cape Town, one can’t count on 

its recent and current political leadership. The ANC’s new friends in 

business seduce the party (Brett Kebble paid its electricity bills and 

disputes over the allocation of tenders appear to drive wedges among 

provincial party activists and Nelson Mandela’s name gets affixed to 

Cecil John Rhodes’). Its leadership contests degenerate into ugly 

ethnic politicking and the party papers over its deficiencies with 

empty slogans (example: “Home For All”). The Democratic Alliance, 

meanwhile, governs (if you can call it that) with a cynical eye on the 

mainstream media (which loves press statements and stunts) and the 

white suburbs. In doing this, they poorly imitate Nicolas Sarkozy and 

Tony Blair’s politics by media, for the status quo and in the interests 

of the middle and upper middle classes.

Ntone, by the way, kept his creativity intact and now publishes and 

edits Chimurenga, a small, but growing literary magazine out of Cape 

Town that is gaining props for its off-center takes on postapartheid 

South Africa and the continent. Late last year, Ntone decided to do an 

issue on Cape Town. The cover of the special issue, except for the 

magazine’s masthead and its slogan (“Who no know go know” culled from 

Fela of course) was pure white. As for the owners of The Curve, they 

moved to Johannesburg and opened the Colour Bar. It too closed soon 

after.

* Sean Jacobs teaches African Studies at the University of Michigan in 

Ann Arbor. He blogs as Leo Africanus. He misses Cape Town whenever he 

is not there and sometimes when he is.