ABSTRACT
This collection of essays examines the fertile, contested and surprising intersec-
tion between notions of space, memory and identity in the post-apartheid city.
Our approach has been to view cities as sites of memory and desire (and also
sites of fear and forgetting); as contested spaces given to plays of power and
privilege, identity and difference; as palimpsests of historical experience, in which
underlying strata disconcertingly erupt into those above; and as lived spaces in
the everyday performance of urban life. As the title and unifying theme for this
work we have taken the suggestive notion of ‘desire lines’, a term from planning
used to describe those well-worn ribbons of earth that you see cutting across a
patch of grass, often with pavements nearby. In the words of John La Plante, the
chief traffic engineer for T.Y. Lin International, an engineering firm, desire lines
‘indicate yearning’ (Brown 2003). We use the notion of desire lines in a more
general way to indicate the space between the planned and the providential, the
engineered and the ‘lived’, and between official projects of capture and contain-
ment and the popular energies which subvert, bypass, supersede and evade
them. In particular we have found this conceptualisation useful in looking at
South Africa because here, as in many other colonial contexts, modernist plan-
ning coincided with forms of racialised population control. Desire lines, often
crudely drawn onto city layouts in red ink, became the modus operandi for
government-led segregationist practices.
