Students: Military Urbanism: Unconscious Geographies of Segregation in Cape Town

Cooper Union (USA) / Instructor: Diana Agrest and Lydia Xynogala (2013). Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union, Studio: MArch II Program Advanced Research Studio.

This project attempts to unearth the unconscious of Cape Town’s urban divisions. With the enactment of the Group Areas Act in 1950, South African cities were carved into racially segregated sectors by urban planners and politicians. Apartheid was no isolated project, however. Long before bulldozers bit the soil, lines dividing Capetonians from the elements, and from one another, were drawn in the sand. The idea that the city’s divisions are rooted as much in the soil, as they are in social dynamics, is this project’s impetus.

An outpost that started life as a seventeenth century refreshment station for ships en route to the East, grew into a colony, and eventually a nation. Colonial land appropriation displaced the nomadic Khoi’s seasonal transhumance, eroding an animistic connection to the landscape. Geography was subsequently implicated in a tradition of ethnic and economic marginalization.

In Cape Town’s urbanism, isolation and appropriation are strategies used to regulate access to opportunity (arable soil, industry, trade, education, healthcare and residence). The tactics used to execute these strategies are architectural in their power to separate insiders from outsiders. Walls, moats, gates, towers, islands, esplanades, buffers, mazes, satellites and grids have been used as spatial weapons to graft exclusionary politics onto Cape Town’s terrain.

The strategies of isolation and appropriation emerged from two key structures of the early Dutch East India Company settlement at Table Bay – a Slave Lodge, and a productive Garden.

At the Slave Lodge bodies were disciplined for economic exploitation through a careful management of their domestic environment. Under close surveillance, in suffocating confinement, slaves were housed near work sites where their movements could be regulated. Apartheid-era Group Areas similarly maintained domination through the geographical isolation of Cape Town’s working populace on the low-lying Cape Flats. This containment region is as easy to monitor as it to lock down by severing the umbilical transport lines that connect its isolated neighborhoods to more central places of work.

As the lifeblood of a precarious settlement, the Dutch East India Company’s Garden was a constant source of consternation and required jealous guard from the adjacent fort (later Castle of Good Hope). Appropriation implies a displacement of circumstance. By enclosing manicured security, threats beyond the garden fences are displaced. Likewise, the contemporary securitization of private city spaces, fortified residential enclaves, and closely monitored entertainment complexes testify to a persistent fear of violence associated with “other” poorer elements of the city’s population. Cape Town’s economic outsiders remain trapped outside the fences of opportunity and mobility.

These two early structures (the Company Garden and the Slave Lodge) represent in microcosmic form the essential operational templates for larger urban projects conducive to socio-economic exclusion. This project identifies the motifs of the Fortified Garden and the Guarded Lodge, at metropolitan and regional scales, in violent episodes that have shaped Cape Town’s urban morphology since the mid-seventeenth century. The ambitions and anxieties of subsequent regimes were projected into these same patterns to nourish a tradition of military urbanism in Cape Town.

Acknowledgement: This work has been influenced by the book by Stephen Graham, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism, London: Verso, 2010.

Van Biljon Urban Wall

Fortress Cape Town – Enclosed residential areas in red. The Cape Flats (“apartheid’s dumping ground”) shown here as a sunken zone within the landscape (black). A wall of industry and transport infrastructure (grey) isolates the Cape Flats from the rest of the metropolis.

DRAWING SOURCES/CREDITS:

Topographical information used to generate contour lines were extracted from the ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer, Version 002) Global Digital Elevation Model (GDEM) in ArcGIS, using data obtained from NASA via the online Reverb|ECHO portal. ASTER data used to generate the imagery is cited as per the Land Processed Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC) citation policy (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/citing_our_data):

Acknowledgement for LP DAAC tools and/or services: ASTER GDEM is a product of METI and NASA. The ASTER Global Digital Elevation Model V002 was retrieved from the online Reverb|ECHO tool, courtesy of the NASA EOSDIS Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC), USGS/Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, website: http://reverb.echo.nasa.gov.

Citation for dataset: METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry of Japan) and NASA (United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration), 2011, Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) Global Digital Elevation Model (GDEM). Version 002. NASA EOSDIS Land Processes DAAC, USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center, Sioux Falls, South Dakota (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov), accessed 20 June 2013, at dataset landing page http://dx.doi.org/10.5067/ASTER/ASTGTM.002.

Van Biljon Funambulist 1

Appropriation: Displacement of Khoi transhumance by expansion of Dutch freehold farming (circa 1660-1690).

DRAWING SOURCES/CREDITS:

Locations of Dutch freehold farms (orange) redrawn from: Guelke, L. (author); Bonner, D. (cartographer); Maisoneuve, A. (relief shading). The Southwestern Cape Colony 1657-1750 – Freehold Land Grants [map]. University of Waterloo Department of Geology Publication Series, Occasional Paper Number 5. With graphic scale. Waterloo, Ontario: Department of Geology, University of Waterloo, 1987.

Van Biljon Khoi Phantom

Phantom of Khoi transhumance pattern (black) superimposed on Dutch agricultural settlements (orange) by 1750.

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Van Biljon Hedge

Appropriation: Van Riebeeck’s Hedge excluding Khoi from the nutrient-rich soils of the Liesbeeck Valley (circa 1660).

DRAWING SOURCES/CREDITS:

Locations of Dutch freehold farms (orange) interpreted from: Guelke, L. (author); Bonner, D. (cartographer); Maisoneuve, A. (relief shading). The Southwestern Cape Colony 1657-1750 – Freehold Land Grants [map]. University of Waterloo Department of Geology Publication Series, Occasional Paper Number 5. With graphic scale. Waterloo, Ontario: Department of Geology, University of Waterloo, 1987.

Base drawing for layout of Table Bay settlement with fort redrawn from: Pistorius et al. 1656 [a map redrawn from a 1956 map of the settlement at Table Bay, Algemeen Rijksarchief VEL 820]. With graphic scale. In: Pistorius, P.; Bezzoli, M.; Marks, R.; Kruger, M.; Harris, S. (2002) Texture and Memory – The Urbanism of District Six (Second Edition). Cape Town: The Sustainable Urban and Housing Development Research Unit, Department of Architectural Technology, Cape Technikon.

Van Biljon Funambulist 4

Left: Economic Prisons – slums of District One (left) and District Six (right), convenient sources of labour, located near harbour building sites. Right: Guarded Lodges – new prisons/quarries established to supply labour for large infrastructural development (harbour expansion).

DRAWING SOURCES/CREDITS:

Base drawing (grid layout, topography and street blocks of Cape Town circa 1856/1861 with Castle of Good Hope) redrawn from: Pistorius et al. 1862 [a map redrawn from a 1862 survey of Cape Town by William Barclay Snow, Cape Town City Council Map Collection). With graphic scale. In: Pistorius, P.; Bezzoli, M.; Marks, R.; Kruger, M.; Harris, S. (2002) Texture and Memory – The Urbanism of District Six (Second Edition). Cape Town: The Sustainable Urban and Housing Development Research Unit, Department of Architectural Technology, Cape Technikon.

Van Biljon Funambulist 5

Left: Suburban flight – property owners vacate burgeoning Districts One and Six, to be replaced by a working populace.

Right: The creation of central Cape Town’s slums (circa 1860s) through real estate speculation, located near sites of work (harbour construction).

DRAWING SOURCES/CREDITS:

Base drawing (grid layout, topography and street blocks of Cape Town circa 1860 with Castle of Good Hope) redrawn from: Pistorius et al. 1862 [a map redrawn from a 1862 survey of Cape Town by William Barclay Snow, Cape Town City Council Map Collection). With graphic scale. In: Pistorius, P.; Bezzoli, M.; Marks, R.; Kruger, M.; Harris, S. (2002) Texture and Memory – The Urbanism of District Six (Second Edition). Cape Town: The Sustainable Urban and Housing Development Research Unit, Department of Architectural Technology, Cape Technikon.

Van Biljon Funambulist 3

Top Left: Plague in Cape Town (1901) – infected properties were concentrated in slum districts (One and Six) near the harbour. The plague provided a pretext for the forced removal of Cape Town’s black population to the first racially segregated township at Ndabeni. Top Right: Black and Coloured plague victims rounded up and contained at Ebenezer Road and the central railway station. Bottom: Black and Coloured plague victims removed from city centre and quarantined at the Ndabeni Plague Camp, Cape Town’s first (planned) racially segregated township.

DRAWING SOURCES/CREDITS:

Base drawing (grid layout and street blocks of Cape Town circa 1901) redrawn from: Pistorius et al. 1897 [a map redrawn from W Thom, Cape Town City Council Map Collection). With graphic scale. In: Pistorius, P.; Bezzoli, M.; Marks, R.; Kruger, M.; Harris, S. (2002) Texture and Memory – The Urbanism of District Six (Second Edition). Cape Town: The Sustainable Urban and Housing Development Research Unit, Department of Architectural Technology, Cape Technikon.

Location of infected city blocks from: Bickford-Smith et al. Plague Map [map]. In: Bickford-Smith, V.; Van Heyningen, E.; Worden, N. (1999) Cape Town in the Twentieth Century – An Illustrated Social History. Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, p. 20.

Van Biljon Funambulist 2

Chain gang construction teams (circa 1848-1854) connect the isolated Cape Town with the mineral riches of the South African interior. Hard roads skirt the windswept Cape Flats, effectively priming the former coastal plain to become apartheid’s human dumping ground. Establishment of remote new convict stations indicated in white.

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