ABSTRACT
For visiting architects – modern day Herbert Bakers fresh from Ghana or China say – or tourists not too jetlagged to notice, the drive into the city from the airport on the aptly-named ‘Settlers Way’ N2 highway reveals the past 100 years of Cape Town’s troubled history in stark built form. It is a story told from the present – the uneasy present of land invasion and forced evictions, ‘slums’ and suburbs, and the gap between expectation and ‘service delivery,’ between policy and the complex spatial architecture of community – back in space and time to the originating conditions of architecture and order in Imperial Cape Town. Just outside the airport a fading billboard proclaims: ‘N2 Gateway: From Shacklands to Dignity. Houses! Security! Comfort!’ and it speaks volumes about the ongoing complexities of where and how people are to live (Figure 8.1). Hidden behind the cheerful and transformative tableau presented in the faded billboard – the pictured transformation from shacklands to neat and ordered cottages – is an unlikely African National Congress vision to eradicate informal settlements by 2014. This quasi-policy 1 of slum eradication is intended to work not only through indirect processes of economic development but literal forced removals and a growing ambition to criminalize land invasions and informal settlements. 2 The historically familiar strategy of ‘slum eradication’ marks a post-liberation return of repressive tactics. Those in power today want an aesthetic order overlaying the city as a proxy salve for the glaring failure of the State to equalize social disparities. The N2 Gateway project, not coincidently, started with the 2010 Soccer World Cup in mind; it illustrates the continuing tropes of ‘gateway’ and the aesthetics of order that played out in Imperial Cape Town and their longevity in post-apartheid Cape Town.
