Browsing by Author "Rink, Bradley"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Assessing sense of place amongst returnees of District Six, Cape Town
    (University of the Western Cape, 2022) Burgess, Ashleigh Georgia; Rink, Bradley
    District Six was a pre-apartheid community destroyed by racialized forced relocations. Under the Group Areas Act of the apartheid rule, all District Six residents were forcibly relocated and scattered around the city and elsewhere. The area was obliterated and only places of worship were spared destruction. An affluent white inner-city suburb was one of the state's plans, but it was never realized as former residents protested this apartheid development objective. In the wake of the apartheid�s demise, a land restitution programme was enforced as one way of addressing the country's national recovery through the operations of the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights, performed congruently with the Restitution of Land Rights Act (Act 22 of 1994). But this process has been dilatory and intermittent with respect to District Six, characterised as prolonged experiences of disappointment and occasional bursts of increased efficiency. Accordingly, only a handful of claimants have returned to District Six to date. Little is known about how the returnee community have reclaimed a sense of place in the re-settled District Six where only the immaterial memories still remain. This study thus seeks to fill that research gap through assessing sense of place amongst returnees of District Six. The study also recognizes that District Six is part of the corridor of rapid gentrification and seeks to explore how the by-products of gentrification stand to threaten the returnees� reconstituted sense of place. The study adopted a qualitative research methodology approach using the phenomenological/interpretivist approach. The qualitive methods used were semi-structured interviews, photo-elicitation interviews, and fieldnotes. These methods allowed for an in-depth exploration of the returnees� experiences of a sense of place in the re-settled District Six. The findings revealed complex renderings of place in District Six composed of memories and meaning-making from the past and present, contributing to geographical literatures on home, community and place. The findings of this study conclude that the relational geographies of District Six returnees are complex, multiple and ever-evolving while their struggle for home and a new sense of place is incomplete.
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    Assessing sense of place amongst returnees of District Six, Cape Town
    (University of the Western Cape, 2022) Burgess, Ashleigh Georgia; Rink, Bradley
    District Six was a pre-apartheid community destroyed by racialized forced relocations. Under the Group Areas Act of the apartheid rule, all District Six residents were forcibly relocated and scattered around the city and elsewhere. The area was obliterated and only places of worship were spared destruction. An affluent white inner-city suburb was one of the state's plans, but it was never realized as former residents protested this apartheid development objective. In the wake of the apartheid�s demise, a land restitution programme was enforced as one way of addressing the country's national recovery through the operations of the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights, performed congruently with the Restitution of Land Rights Act (Act 22 of 1994). But this process has been dilatory and intermittent with respect to District Six, characterised as prolonged experiences of disappointment and occasional bursts of increased efficiency.
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    The Bakkie Brigade in Cape Town�s urban waste economy: exploring waste mobilities and the precariat
    (University of the Western Cape, 2020) Goeiman, Johnathan; Rink, Bradley
    Solid waste management in South Africa is in a phase of transitioning. This transition entails the valorisation and diversion of recyclable waste away from landfills for the creation of a new secondary recycling economy. However, reclaimers within the Global South have been engaged in valorising waste through market-driven pricing. Localised and �informal� as they are, they remain a significant source of labour for global capital. Their presence runs parallel to the emergence of green models such as the circular economy, coupled with contentious initiatives that aim at formalising and integrating reclaimers. Given the revitalised emphasis on the urban waste economy, inadequate attention has been given to understanding the linkages between the formal processing companies and informal waste reclaimers operating at the level of the street and landfill.
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    Gated communities for the working class: A Cape Flats case study
    (University of the Western Cape, 2023) Majiet, Musfiqah; Rink, Bradley
    Gated developments are proliferating across cities globally, in different forms and contexts. While they have emerged in cities in both the global North and South, the number of gated developments has increased recently in cities in the global South. Uniformly defined on the basis of their physical features, security artefacts and codes of conduct, gated developments have received criticism across a number of disciplines yet are seen as a rational response to increasing crime rates and considered as a safe haven for their residents. In the global South, more than simply safe havens, gated developments are typically perceived as islands of wealth and privilege in a sea of urban inequality. There is a pressing need to understand the gated development model in the context of the global South. In South Africa, the increase in gated developments situated in lower income areas has been scarcely explored. It is on this basis that this study examines an underexplored and recent category of gated development in the South African context: Gated developments in low-income residential areas.
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    Mapping Urban Food Security in Delft: A Bottom Up Perspective
    (University of the Western Cape, 2019) Paulsen, Adrian; Rink, Bradley
    Food security is a complicated phenomenon that consists of the intersections of food and people, and the cultures that people create around food. In general, food security research is concerned with how people access food, how reliable that access is, how affordable that food is, and how culturally appropriate that food is. This analysis tends to ignore the complex relationships people have with food and who these people are. Through the mapping of the Delft food system by remote sensing, surveys and interviews I create a food atlas that consists of maps of the spatiality of food but also maps of feelings, anxieties, fears and resilience, all centred around the people of Delft. The results and discussions of this thesis shows that food security is far more complicated than initially thought and that there are multiple avenues of inquiry into the lives of people who are considered food insecure. My research shows that the people of Delft are food insecure but that this label cannot be applied too liberally as food insecurity has different meanings for various residents and it manifests in various ways. I explore this through the creation of three women who represent three different classes of women who live within Delft.
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    Mobile heterotopia: movement, circulation and the function of the university
    (University of the Western Cape, 2017) Rink, Bradley
    This paper explores the function of the university through the lens of mobility as seen from a South African perspective. Understanding the role of the university as one that requires the movement and circulation of academic bodies in the form of students and staff, and bodies of academic knowledge in the form of teaching, research and academic content, I use a theoretical framework from the interdisciplinary field of mobilities in order to understand the role of movement in the university and to highlight what is ruptured and catalysed by frictions enacted through power geometry, austerity and disruption. Sighted from the perspective of the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, this paper poses a series of provocations that reveal the obligations of presence that comprise the production and transfer of knowledge in the twenty-first-century university. I discuss how disruption and austerity, amongst other embedded mobility limitations, impact on the multiple/intersecting universes of the university; how the austere and disrupted university influences our engagement at various scales from local to global; and, finally, how disruption and austerity act to fix academic bodies in place even as they may allow virtual mobility to replace the face-to-face engagement that is the hallmark of the academic project. This paper demonstrates the critical role of mobility in the institution of the university and concludes that the university is a form of Foucauldian heterotopia mobilising diverse academic bodies and bodies of knowledge.
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    Quartering the city in discourse and bricks: Articulating urban change in a South African enclave
    (Springer, 2016) Rink, Bradley
    Focusing on the urban enclave in Cape Town known as De Waterkant, this paper examines the product and process of �quartering� urban space�shaping urban space as the locus for the symbolic framing of culture. This paper advances recent studies of De Waterkant by applying the concept of quartering to understand urban change in an African context. Complicating existing research on De Waterkant, the findings show that the area has witnessed four distinct quartered identities including an ethnic quartering which was dismantled under apartheid, a Bohemian quartering that changed racial dynamics and improved housing stock, a �gay village� quartering that engaged sexual identity performance as a strategy for place making and most recently a consumer lifestyle quartering that exhibited new notions of citizenship and consumption. This paper advances theorisation of how quartering as a process is articulated through the application of discursive and material tropes to the urban fabric of the city.