Urban Metabolisms: What makes for Habitability in the Cape Flats Critical Zone, in Cape Town, South Africa

Cape Town, the legislative capital of South Africa, is renowned for is natural beauty and is ranked as one of the best developed and well governed cities in Africa. However, for whom is the city aesthetically pleasing, developed and well-governed for? When the language of development, growth and progress permeates all spheres of contemporary Cape Town city planning, what does this obscure? What are the lived experiences on the ground? The project takes the Cape Flats, an expansive low-lying area situated to the south-east of Cape Town’s central business district, as a critical zone, where urban metabolic flows shape policy and habitability. The Cape Flats, characterized by a geography defined by a unique combination of maritime geology, endangered biodiversity, wetlands, lakes and rivers, agricultural and mining land, formal and informal residential areas, industrial areas, a waste dump and several wastewater treatment works (WWTW), is marked by “slow violence”, where apartheid spatial planning and environmental degradation and contamination meet contemporary urban precarity. Described as “apartheid’s dumping ground”, the Cape Flats was where people of colour were forcibly relocated under the Group Areas Act of 1950, as well as a site where a significant portion of Cape Town’s waste is disposed of. In thinking about the critical zone, it is then important to think about how biologies, ecologies, society, geologies are shaped by this inheritance of colonial and apartheid city planning. The central question for Cape Flats’ Critical Zones project is therefore: How do Cape Town's modes of development address realities in inherited zones of abandonment and contamination in the Cape Flats critical zone? The project explores how changes in the landscape, under the guise of “development” through the different historical periods under the colonial, apartheid and contemporary neoliberal forms of governance, have shaped the poly-crises evident in the area today. Considering the Cape Flats’ critical zone from aquifer to cloud, the project explores how material flows and urban metabolic processes shape habitability, policy and politics in the area. By paying attention to how disrupted urban metabolic processes impact biodiversity, water and contamination, soil, waste cycles, infrastructure, health and governance, the project proposes an amendment to the approaches in environmental governance from one that seeks to command, predict and control, to one that sees urban ecology as urban metabolisms of flows and relations.