Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 2
·
November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
75
Starting from these foundations I decided to observe Cape Town as an urban chronotope
made up of the intersection between the temporalities of its regulars and the city’s spaces.
Taking Long Street as a spatial reference and the Champions League Final as a temporal
reference, I asked my interviewees to go back over the most significant events in their lives in
the city, taking inspiration from this event. I was inspired by Situation maps, the ideas of Guy
Debord (1955), and the research method that Andrew Irving (2004, 2006) used on the
relationship between HIV-positive individuals and the city’s urban spaces. I asked my
interviewees to identify urban spaces of the city that they considered significant as connected
(directly or indirectly) to episodes in their lives. These areas were taken as mnemonic and
emotional zones in which situations, emotions and particularly important memories could be
evoked. I started my interviews by asking the interviewees to tell me how they spent the night
of the final. I then asked them to tell me briefly about their experience in the city and to
identify some places in it that had a particular significance for them. I then decided to go back
to those places with them, taking pictures of the places and recording the interviews. The
memory of the evening spent watching the final was thereby taken as a narrative pretext to go
back over the most meaningful moments of their experience in Cape Town. This let me create
urban pathways starting from Long Street and going through the whole city. Long Street was
seen as an urban chronotope in which the different memories of the city’s inhabitants
intersected and overlapped each other.
Louis and his Return from London
With fifteen minutes to go till the kick-off, Long Street was deserted. Most people were
crammed into the bars and clubs in front of the big screens showing the events in London.
Only the homeless were drifting around the street; they seemed almost to be the guardians of
a space which, without their presence, would have been abandoned. The public space of the
street and the private space of the bars were two territories which confronted each other in a
‘war of meanings’.
The former territory belonged to the street kids who knew its every nook and cranny;
they knew the rules which governed it, even those which were invisible to passers-by, who
were completely unaware of them; they knew the tricks through which it was possible to
survive, and lived it as if it were their own. The latter belonged to the owners and managers of
the bars and clubs who protected their space through their drink prices and the right to control
admission. These two kingdoms seemed separate and unconnected; yet, in reality, they were
interdependent and often in conflict with each other.
On the evening of the final I noted how some homeless people were trying to follow the
match from outside the bar, engaged in a war of nerves with the security man who was trying
to shoo them away. But as soon as he was distracted, they moved in close again. These people
participated in the event by listening to the sounds and voices coming from the paying public
with whom they were attempting to establish communication through hand gestures in order
to ask about the score.
A few months later, I discovered that Louis too was a member of this group of
‘spectators’ who were excluded from the bars and clubs. Thirty-five-year-old Louis had
