Cape Town A City Imagined

Nineteen writers, nineteen views of Cape Town. Each recreate the city that has shaped them, going beyond the iconic picture postcard image of Cape Town. They explore, often with startling honesty, the complex personal relationship that each writer has with the city.

In A city imagined, the editor has asked a number of South Africa's writers to produce a piece of writing in which they express their relationship to Cape Town and, above all, their sense of the unique genius or spirit of this city.

"The overriding strength of this book is that it places people--ordinary people--at the centre of memory, at the centre of historical and contemporary experience, and thus at the centre of reimagining and owning the city of Cape Town. It is as they speak--what they choose to say, what they choose to remain silent about--that we become aware of the possibilities of the city, if it really did embrace all its people, in all of their diversity." --Mike van Graan, from the foreword Cities are not only made of buildings and roads, but they are also constructed through popular imagination and memory as evidenced in this collection of oral and visual histories drawn from the people who live, work, and creatively express themselves in Cape Town, South Africa. The collected works move beyond apartheid history to analyze the reflective ways in which people are coming to terms with that history through memory work, performance, and memorialization.

Post-Apartheid Gothic: White South African Writers and Space analyzes the representation of space in recent works by South African writers. By combining analytical tools borrowed from Gothic studies with geocritical and postcolonial approaches, Mélanie Joseph-Vilain assesses the literary mechanisms utilized by Damon Galgut, Henrietta Rose-Innes, Lauren Beukes, Justin Carwright, and Lynn Freed to negotiate the complexities of post-apartheid identities in their fiction. Joseph-Vilain argues that the literary representations of emblematic places, real or imagined (the home, the farm, the city or the “non-places” of dystopia), express and reveal anxieties linked to the sharing of space in post-apartheid South Africa. The text successively (re-)visits the places that have been shaping South African white writing since Olive Schreiner’s African Farm—in other words, its topoi, both in the etymological sense of “place” and in the literary sense of recurring themes or arguments. Joseph-Vilain argues that these Gothicized topoi have provided writers with tools to explore the deep anxieties generated by the redefinition of South African society as the Rainbow Nation. While focusing specifically on the South African avatars of the Gothic and their interaction with local forms and genres like the plaasroman, the text also discusses the impact of globalization on South African literary, cultural, social, and political identities.

This love letter to the cities of the world—from the airline pilot–author of Skyfaring—is "a journey around both the author's mind and the planet's great cities that leaves us energized, open to new experiences and ready to return more hopefully to our lives" (Alain de Botton, author of The Art of Travel). In his small New England hometown, Mark Vanhoenacker spent his childhood dreaming of elsewhere— of the distant, real cities he found on the illuminated globe in his bedroom, and of one perfect metropolis that existed only in his imagination. These cities were the sources of endless comfort and escape, and of a lasting fascination. Streets unspooled, towers shone, and anonymous crowds bustled in the places where Mark hoped he could someday be anyone—perhaps even himself. Now, as a commercial airline pilot, Mark has spent nearly two decades crossing the skies of our planet and touching down in dozens of the storied cities he imagined as a child. He experiences these destinations during brief stays that he repeats month after month and year after year, giving him an unconventional and uniquely vivid perspective on the places that form our urban world. In this intimate yet expansive work that weaves travelogue with memoir, Mark celebrates the cities he has come to know and to love, through the lens of the hometown his heart has never quite left. As he explores emblematic facets of each city’s identity— the road signs of Los Angeles, the old gates of Jeddah, the snowy streets of Sapporo—he shows us with warmth and fresh eyes the extraordinary places that billions of us call home.

Essay from the year 2011 in the subject History - Africa, grade: 1, University of the Western Cape (Department of History), course: The Making of the South African City, language: English, abstract: Life in big cities and the urban space that the cities create within their confinements are shaped by the complex interconnections between all the different people inhabiting the urban space, what the people created architecturally and what has been there before humans arrived – the nature. The interplay between the people themselves and between the people and the space is what makes urban spaces fascinating, on the one hand, and necessarily complex, on the other hand. More complexity is added when the people living in these spaces seem to be culturally different, i.e. having different ideas, attitudes and ways of dealing with their situations. South African cities are marked by very different cultures, not only shaped by the obvious and devastating effects of European colonisation but political systems like apartheid and also through the sheer mass of different cultures among its inhabitants. Cape Town and Johannesburg belong to the biggest South African cities and have that complexity at their heart. As the people themselves, who live in urban areas, and their connections among themselves and nature and are making up these urban spaces it is important to take their individual narrations about cities like Cape Town and Johannesburg into account. In order to get information about urban spaces, these individual stories and the experiences of individuals in the city can paint a “more realistic reconstruction of the past”, as Thompson argues, and in fact also about the present life in urban spaces (24). Consequently, in the following essay I will focus on different narrations of Cape Town as an urban space. I will compare several short narrations of people’s lives and experiences in Cape Town, which Watson compiled in a book called A City Imagined, to two interviews that I conducted with two Captonians (a man in his sixties and J., a young man aged 23) and will, when appropriate, relate this to a collection of stories about Johannesburg, entitled From Jo’burg to Jozi, edited by Heidi Holland and Adam Roberts.

Although cities constitute the key contributors to unsustainable development, especially due to their ecological and equity impacts, they are also viewed as the vehicle for the transition to a sustainable future for humanity both in terms of technologies as well as policies and lifestyle changes. This book introduces the theoretical principles which underpin the required transition to sustainable cities in general and Cape Town in particular. The subsequent fourteen chapters tackle more specific areas of interventions and the key constraints towards realisation of related transition interventions in the city of Cape Town.

Originally a concern primarily of social studies and economics, poverty has emerged as a significant thematic focus and analytical tool in literary and cultural studies in the last two decades. The "new poverty studies" are dedicated to analyzing representations of poverty and the poor in literature and the visual arts, in the news media and in social practices. They aim at exploring the frameworks of representation that impact the affective and ethical responses of audiences to disenfranchised groups such as the poor. The contributions to this volume focus on representations of poverty in the Anglophone postcolonial world, exploring, for example, contemporary discourses on poverty in the UK, filmic representations of Nairobi slums or the agency of the poor in literature from India.