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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Re-using the spaces of confinement: from urban apartheid to post-apartheid without postmodernism |
Author: | Bond, Patrick |
Year: | 1992 |
Periodical: | Urban Forum |
Volume: | 3 |
Issue: | 1 |
Pages: | 39-55 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | South Africa |
Subjects: | future capitalism urban planning |
External link: | https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF03036538 |
Abstract: | As South Africa transforms geographically, the top priority on the agenda today is the very question: how to reuse spaces of confinement? What can stay, what must go, and what new social, cultural, political, and economic practices provide the tools to construct a differently built environment that suits particular and sometimes general interests? This paper addresses the issue of spatial confinement in part by jumping scale from the metropolitan to the regional and back again, with continual reference to the constraints imposed by South Africa's national economic stagnation, as well as to practices of international capitalism that have come to be known as 'postmodern'. During the 1980s, at a time of rapid shifts in architectural fashion, cities and regions once firmly in the grip of the apartheid order also began breaking free from tradition. Yet what becomes clear is that recent developments at these intermediate scales are being influenced by market forces which are incapable of ending spatial confinement, even if they are oriented to changing its form. The point of this presentation, in fact, is that the potential liberatory forces of postmodernity are generally outweighed by the close association of postmodernity with some of the worst traits of capitalism in the throes of crisis. Bibliogr. |