Being Special: Nostalgia through Special Rates Areas and Community Improvement Districts in Cape Town Suburbs

Authors

  • Zarreen Kamalie University of Cape Town

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15273/jue.v8i2.8684

Keywords:

crime, nostalgia, specialness, restorative nostalgia, reflective nostalgia, Special Rates Area, Community Improvements Districts, homelessness

Abstract

This paper explores how memories and nostalgia inform the rationale of implementing Community Improvement Districts (CIDs) or Special Rates Areas (SRAs) as a means of crime prevention and urban maintenance in two formerly ‘whites-only‘ Cape Town suburbs; Rondebosch and Mowbray. Through an exploration of the remembering, the maintenance and the resuscitation of an idealized past in a suburb that remains predominantly white after years of racial and economic exclusion, this paper interrogates the role of long-term resident nostalgia in post-apartheid South Africa in maintaining spatial apartheid. Using Svetlana Boym‘s (2001) framework of nostalgia, particularly ‘restorative nostalgia‘ and ‘reflective nostalgia,‘ to interpret the memories of residents interviewed, this paper argues that it is nostalgia for an idealized past and a remembered specialness that sustains mentalities that give rise to spatially exclusive SRAs and CIDs. In this paper, public and social media discourse analysis and resident interviews allow us to understand residents‘ memories and discussions around crime and urban degeneration and homelessness in Rondebosch. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to questions about spatial exclusivity in residential spaces in the post-apartheid era, particularly in a city that retains the legacy of spatial apartheid.
Vol 8, No 2 (2018)

Downloads

Published

2018-10-08

Issue

Vol. 8 No. 2 (2018)

Section

Articles

License

By sending potential submissions to the editors, you grant The Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography a royalty-free, perpetual, license to: use, reproduce, store, adapt, translate, and publicly display such submissions for any purpose.  In addition to the grant of the above license, you hereby consent to your name appearing as the contributor of any submission where applicable, and to the disclosure and/or display of such information and any other information which appears in or is associated with a submission. Further, you acknowledge and agree that The Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography is not responsible for any loss, damage, or corruption that may occur to your submissions, and acknowledge and agree that any submissions you provide for display on the website will be considered non-confidential. If your manuscript is rejected, the above license is revoked, and your submission (manuscript, name, and associated documentation) will be stored only in the correspondence records of The Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. You may submit your manuscript to other publications, but must withdraw if selected for publication in The Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Your paper itself is published using a strict Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 Unported License that allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can‘t change them in any way or use them commercially. You retain the right to grant other permissions.