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Architecture and the built environment in Cape Town provide clues and insight into the spatial models that inform continuities and contradictions in the structuring of rules regulating contact and conduct in urban dwellers' daily routines. This paper explores the transition from classical to modernist space in colonial and postcolonial Cape Town to address some of the tensions informing the use of race and gender distinctions to obscure the relations of production behind the organization of domestic space. It is argued that the transcendent nature of classical space is sustained in the modernist moment, but is obscured, in part, through the abstraction of rules separating public and private spheres of the body and the built environment. Transcendence is shifted from the divine to the secular through the incorporation of scientific principles of efficiency and hygiene into the definition and building of proper working-class housing.
Despite all the techniques for appropriating space, despite the whole network of knowledge that enables us to delimit or to formalize it, contemporary space is perhaps still not entirely desanctifled. (Foucault 1986:23)
Introduction
With the dismantling of apartheid and the reconfiguration of spatial boundaries in South Africa, urban space has become a newly contested and newly privileged domain of inquiry. The apartheid regime had once claimed South African cities as distinctly its own, but other, more marginalized, groups are now enjoying new opportunities to control the occupation and development of cities. Nevertheless, despite changes in the navigation and the representation of urban space, and despite open contestation over the boundaries associated with belonging and entitlement, many forms of urban spatial segregation remain firmly in place.
Concern about the future of the urban-built environment has inspired inquiry into the historical foundations of urban planning and reform, inquiry that provides insight into some of the depth and sustainability of urban segregation (Mabin 1998; Parnell 1993; Pinnock 1989; Robinson 1992). The continuities that emerge in colonial, apartheid, and even post-apartheid strategies of urban planning and development suggest elements of a shared model of space, and further suggest a relationship to space that conceals the social relations of its production. Space, as a historically and socially constructed set of boundaries, can be analyzed in terms of the models that evolve out of the constant navigation...