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Paper short abstract

Based on long-term ethnographic research, this paper discusses the concept of the “meantime” as a temporal horizon of urban precarity. The “meantime” is a common denominator for grassroots initiatives that work on imagining and realising housing alternatives in post-apartheid Cape Town.

Paper long abstract

Three decades into South Africa’s new democracy, colonial and apartheid infrastructures continue to make Cape Town one of the most polarised and unequal cities in the world. The city’s most disadvantaged, predominantly black, working-class communities remain suspended on obscure housing waiting lists, in precarious occupations, and in flood- and fire-prone informal settlements. Against this backdrop of ingrained spatial inequality and continuous displacement, this paper proposes the notion of the “meantime” as both a spatio-temporal horizon of urban precarity and a site of grassroots experimentations. While liberatory promises of the post-apartheid era have been repeatedly deferred, this paper identifies the “meantime” as a key temporal heuristic defined by deferral and delay, but also by alternative designs and creative experimentation. Based on long-term ethnographic and collaborative research with community architects, residential communities, and housing activists, I examine how these groups mobilized and drew upon various alternative designs, pedagogies, and visions, such as public housing upgrades, adaptive reuse models, and incremental building typologies, to reimagine Cape Town’s most rigid and segregated housing environment. Working and designing with and in the “meantime” was a common denominator or shared condition for many of these housing and activist initiatives. In conclusion, the paper offers a discussion about whether these “meantime” initiatives can be read as tactical alternatives and stopgap interventions to address South Africa’s long-failed, exclusionary public housing standards, or whether they perpetuate a postcolonial political ecology in which the status quo of precarious infrastructures, spatial inequality, and infrastructural insufficiency is only indefinitely managed and maintained.