As someone who has lived in the Bay Area in California for over a half decade now, you don’t have to tell me about corny neighborhood renaming schemes spearheaded by property developers. After a year or so of living in an apartment on the border of North and West Oakland, banners began to appear on the lampposts reading “KONO,” apparently short for Koreatown-North Oakland. Aren’t these agents of gentrification supposed to be the creative class? Seriously, that’s the best they could come up with? Then there’s the two or three blocks along Telegraph Avenue downtown renamed “Uptown.” See, former mayor Jerry Brown was involved in the building of an all-inclusive apartment complex, complete with gym and hideously incongruous signage over the past couple of years, and it’s only fair that we reimagine these blocks as a “neighborhood.”
What’s
with this obsession with pretending parts of the central business
district qualify as a neighborhood or community? Ask Cape Town’s
creative class, as this city is Richard
Florida’s
fantasyland. As I was leaving one of my favorite bookstores today, I
noticed some new window decals across the street at the mock
Portuguese coffee chain Vida e Caffè. (At the risk of pedantry,
someone needs to tell the genius behind the name that caffè is
Italian; the Portuguese is café.)
Across the sliding glass doors, a number of names were listed along
with an injunction to “name this hood” by going
to nameyourhood.co.za.
The options
are awful: Roodehek or Buitenkant after nearby roads; Soro, or South
of Roeland Street; Hamro after the triangle between Hatfield, Mill,
and Roeland; a couple of names after nearby shopping centers; Little
Gardens, even though this area is across the City Bowl from Gardens
itself; and a half dozen others. One of the potential names is La
Guma, after a novelist once imprisoned in the neighborhood. By far
the worst is “Creative Quarter,” currently tied with La Guma for
second place, behind Little Gardens.
Who’s
behind this endeavor? According to the website,
the committee includes “journalists, historians, designers and
entrepreneurs.” But once you click to see who’s actually
involved, the “historian” is actually the director of the Jewish
Museum, who received an undergraduate degree in history, but went on
to get an MBA. The “journalists” all appear to be radio hosts,
and every other person on the list works either for the City, or more
likely, is in business. In short, hardly a diverse group representing
the “stakeholders” in this project, this is a textbook instance
of growth
machine-style
urban politics. And I’d be remiss not to mention that close to 60
percent of the panel is white.
Lest
you leave this blog thinking you’re going to have to call a chunk
of District Six the “Creative Quarter” in the near future, the
plot thickens. Another business-driven coalition, the Cape Town
Partnership (CTP), is simultaneously behind the drive to rename
roughly the same area “The
Fringe.”
While formally registered as a non-profit, the CTP is the chief force
behind Cape Town’s City Improvement District (CID) model of urban
development. One
recent academic paper describes
the CTP as “a bilateral partnership between the City and the
business owners of the CBD.” The same authors describe the
objectives of the CTP as twofold: “to respond to the needs of large
companies, and to the international tourism industry in the CBD by
fostering urban regeneration.”
So
again, we see textbook growth machine politics, complete with City
Improvement Districts, subsidies for business to remain in the area,
and an emphasis on “creativity,” with that word standing in
for what used to be called entrepreneurship. Seriously though, for a
City that still calls District Six “Zonnebloem” – the
post-removals whitened name, Afrikaans for “sunflower” – you’d
think there’d be a bit more sensitivity. After all, the District
Six Museum isn’t but a block or two from the aforementioned Vida e
Caffè. But no, these ouens insist
on calling this place “The Fringe.”
Why a fringe?
Is this the barrier between the CBD and the parts of Woodstock that
can’t be fully gentrified? Perhaps this is the fringe of the CBD
itself, the last stop on the way to leaving the confines of
“improvement.” Or else perhaps I have it backward. Maybe this is
the fringe as the outer reaches, the periphery, that which is beyond
the norm. Is this growth coalition serious then, calling central
District Six a “fringe”? It was only fifty years ago – less in
some areas – that this was the center of so-called Colored life in
Cape Town. There’s a veritable industry of memorialization
surrounding the place, and the best they could come up with is
something that peripheralizes the area and doubles as a signifier of
its bohemian nature?
The erasure
of District Six from popular memory almost seems to be a coordinated
program for these people. The Name Your Hood campaign was
distributing brochures in the area, and it included a brief history
of the neighborhood. Unsurprisingly, it begins with Dutch heritage in
the 18th and 19th centuries, and then immediately jumps to the
1960s (one mention) and 1980s (one mention). The only sign even
suggesting that something foul went down here is the concluding
mention of Alex la Guma and Dulcie September, though it’s simply
mentioned that they were imprisoned here as anti-apartheid activists.
The history conveniently skips the fact that all Colored people were
forcibly removed from the area over the course of two decades, with
District Six renamed “Zonnebloem” and an all-white Technikon
constructed down the road.
This
is all part of Cape Town as World Design Capital 2014. A couple of
years ago, Cape Town was voted World Design Capital by the
International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID),
which, despite the misleading name, is essentially a PR operation for
industrial design firms. Indeed, ICSID’s own website describes
itself as “a non-profit organisation that protects and promotes the
interests of the profession of industrial design.” Funny enough,
the WDC2014 offices – a “pop up” office in their own jargon –
are located in
the “Fringe District.”
Next
time you see deceptive billboards advertising Cape Town as the “World
Design Capital” or seemingly innocuous campaigns that purport
to foster a sense of community, know these operations for what they
are. Far from a conspiracy theory, this is straightforward City
Improvement District (CID) politics, public-private partnerships, and
urban boosterism: textbook neoliberal urban policy. The CID concept
has long gone hand in hand with removing “crime and grime” from
the central business district, both in Cape Town (since 2000) and in
Johannesburg (since 1992), and attracting businesses by any means
necessary. In practice, this has meant the reproduction
of the apartheid city and augmented
repressive apparatus,
all under the banner of “improvement,” “design,” and
“creativity.”
Marx describes this
phenomenon well in The German Ideology: “For each new class
which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled,
merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest
as the common interest of all the members of society, that is,
expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of
universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally
valid ones.”
If you were
to criticize someone from the CTP, or anyone from the City really, as
representing the narrow interests of property developers and design
firms, you can be sure you’ll catch some confused stares. They’ve
been so successful in promoting this World Design Capital nonsense
– the concept is so hegemonic – that most people in
Cape Town seem to think it’s a prestigious design award, as opposed
to a scheme originating in the heart of businessland.
