Transforming Cape Town

“An engaging, insightful and at times beautifully written account of post-apartheid transformation in the city of Cape Town. Besteman shows the continuing legacy of apartheid, racial segregation and poverty in South Africa as well as glimpses of new forms of cultural creativity and identity formation that are characterized by empathy, compassion, and hope. Transforming Cape Town deserves to be read by anthropologists and anyone interested in how people confront the challenges of racial exclusion and historical inequality, and how a few bold agents of transformation seek to create new social spaces to cross old barriers.”—Richard A. Wilson, author of The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa “Cape Town and anthropology come alive in Besteman's work. Insightful, dynamic, and well-written, this book opens a 'space of trust' to understanding the pains and creative innovations of transition—of people, politics, and daily survival—in a new light.”—Carolyn Nordstrom, author of Global Outlaws and Shadows of War “Besteman navigates and illuminates post-apartheid Cape Town with uncommon skill. She brings to bear an anthropologist's training, a reporter's eye and ear for the choice remark, the telling detail and a candid sympathy for the disenfranchised, whose lot in South Africa has not necessarily improved under democracy. It's a distressing picture she draws: the persisting mutual ignorance, even reciprocal demonization, across old ethnic and racial lines, alongside the ongoing economic injustice. The revolution in South Africa has been a piecemeal affair, and Besteman's descriptions of the difficulties that even the best-intentioned individuals encounter as they struggle toward creating a general social transformation ring painfully true.”—William Finnegan, author of Crossing the Line, Dateline Soweto, A Complicated War, and Cold New World “Transforming Cape Town is a fascinating account of how people in this divided city engage with democracy, transformation, and the legacies and ongoing realities of radical inequalities. Through conversations with ordinary people, Besteman explores the ways in which apartheid's legacies continue to shape interactions both intimate and public. In doing so, she restores a sense of faith in anthropology as a tool for understanding and critiquing social worlds.”—Fiona Ross, author of Bearing Witness: Women and Truth and Reconciliation

This study provides a window into the lives of ordinary South Africans more than ten years after the end of apartheid, with the promises of the democracy movement remaining largely unfulfilled. Catherine Besteman explores the emotional and personal aspects of the transition to black majority rule by homing in on intimate questions of love, family, and community and capturing the complex, sometimes contradictory voices of a wide variety of Capetonians. Her evaluation of the physical and psychic costs to individuals involved in working for social change is grounded in the experiences of the participants and illu-minates two overarching dimensions of life in Cape Town: the aggregate forces determined to maintain the apartheid-era status quo, and the grassroots efforts to effect social change.

"Cape Towns public cultures can only be fully appreciated through recognition of its deep and diverse soundscape. We have to listen to what has made and makes a city. The ear is an integral part of the research tools one needs to get a sense of any city. We have to listen to the sounds that made and make the expansive mother city. Various of its constituent parts sound different from each other [T]here is the sound of the singing men and their choirs (teams they are called) in preparation for the longstanding annual Malay choral competitions. The lyrics from the various repertoires they perform are hardly ever written down. [] There are texts of the hallowed Dutch songs but these do not circulate easily and widely. Researchers dream of finding lyrics from decades ago, not to mention a few generations ago back to the early 19th century. This work by Denis Constant Martin and Armelle Gaulier provides us with a very useful selection of these songs. More than that, it is a critical sociological reflection of the place of these songs and their performers in the context that have given rise to them and sustains their relevance. It is a necessary work and is a very important scholarly intervention about a rather neglected aspect of the history and present production of music in the city."

Climate change impacts are scale and context specific, and cities are likely to bear some of the greatest costs. In recent years cities have begun to craft their own climate change responses against the backdrop of the reluctance displayed by nation-states in committing to emissions reductions and managing the consequences of climate change. Climate Change at the City Scale presents a fresh contribution to climate change literature, which has largely neglected the role of cities in spite of their increasingly important role in the global economy. The book focuses on the impacts of climate change in the rapidly evolving city of Cape Town, and captures the experiences of the Cape Town Climate Change Think Tank, a hybrid knowledge partnership which has produced research on a range of urban governance, impacts, mitigation and adaptation challenges by the City. Cape Town has long been acknowledged as an innovator in the area of urban environmental management, notwithstanding its limited resources to manage the demand for a more resilient and equitable future. By documenting the work and experiences of the City’s efforts to define its own climate future, the book provides a provocative case study of the way in which the science-policy interface can be managed to inform urban transformation.

This book traces and analyses the role of heritage in the urban transformation of the city of Cape Town. By looking at discourses of heritage and urban design, the book shows how Cape Town positions itself as an emerging global city in the context of a series of global events. The book points at how a heritage focus on the themes of post-colonial and post-apartheid reconciliation, restitution and memory in the city shifts to a focus on creativity, design and the arts. Thereby showing how traumatic remnants of colonialism and apartheid are reframed as “design challenges”. Furthermore, it argues that the idea of a transformed society is projected into a future time and the chaotic present everyday life is left to its own devices. Against this backdrop, the book lays out the opportunities for epistemological reset and decolonial reflection on the city’s deep histories, its embedded injustices and traumas that surfaced.​

Joint Winner of the 2023 ASSAf Humanities Book Award in the Emerging Researcher Category This book showcases a practical starting point for changing how criminologists think about gangs and street culture – offering hope to those trying to exit gang life, as well as those trying to help them do so.

This volume consists of selected papers from the 10th Congress of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies. An Editorial Introduction, giving an overview of the contents, is followed by 14 contributions from different parts of the world. The papers examine the themes of equity and transformation in relation to many educational issues including gender equity, globalisation, the erosion of state provision, the growth of free-market approaches, the weakening of theoretical perspectives, the post-colonial heritage and the emancipatory potential of lifelong learning.