Walking the City of Cape Town: (un)happiness

Abstract

This dissertation examines the politics of happiness in the postcolonial city, situating Cape Town as a critical site for interrogating its meanings, limits, and possibilities. While happiness has often been framed as a measurable state of well-being or a commodity of neoliberal governance, this study contends that such reductions obscure its deeper affective and political dimensions. Drawing on thinkers including Hegel, Spinoza, Deleuze, Arendt, Ahmed, Jay, and de Man, I advance the notion of political happiness as an anti-disciplinary object—one that unsettles established methods of measurement and resists capture by institutional metrics. Methodologically, the research moves between philosophical analysis, historical inquiry, and lived urban encounters. The apartheid city provides both archive and laboratory: its spatial legacies, student protests, and affective atmospheres constitute points of encounter through which happiness is reimagined as an event rather than a possession. This reframing allows happiness to be understood less as a psychological state than as an incorporeal becoming, a surface effect of encounters that can affirm or diminish our collective power to act.