social geographies and street

life dualities

walking the line between dispossession and resilience, structure and agency

life histories and daily moments: embodying dual

tensions of structural imposition and agency

A

Marge faces a seemingly impossible situation; she is a woman who has been failed at nearly all levels of her life. As a child she had experiences of abuse from her elders and was raped multiple times by a family member. Marge remembers her family wanting nothing to do with her and her allegations and soon left her desolate and on the street after she fell pregnant at a young age and gave birth.

Marge explained that the manner to access health services or information over her children is often confusing to her, well conveyed information on how to access follow up support hardly ever provided. Because of these bureaucratic structures, Marge feels as if she is a failure whenever she is in need to access state support but steps back from doing so because of the hurdles involved.

Marge has attached herself to various partners over the years, adopting their behaviour and norms, and entering into their groups. According to her friends her exaggerated antisocial behaviour and dependency on alcohol is reinforced when her partners leave her or pass away, deepening her reliance on alcohol and her depression that is masked with outbursts of bravado and ‘dutch courage’.

Marge often struggles to express how dire her situation feels to her, with alcohol induced violent outbursts becoming her only form of release. As her reliance on alcohol deepens with every significant negative moment, her outbursts against friends, passer-by’s and CCID guards only intensify; targeting in her depressed and drunken state as responsible for perpetuating her position. The seemingly impossibility of this situation is not lost to Marge; she can only convey the complexity of her life through rare, private moments of uncontrollable sobbing when she is sober early in the morning.

B

Marge’s life is punctuated by daily moments of resilience and perseverance. A natural born fighter, Marge proudly declares she “don’t take mos kak from no one”. Despite her vulnerable position as a woman street person, Marge has shaped herself to counter this assumption and become a woman to be reckoned with; shaped by her many rough and traumatic experiences on the street. She employs generous amounts of bravado to verbally beat down any person who oversteps their boundaries with her. She is well aware of the effect her loud, abrasive vocal demonstrations has on people, employing it liberally to get her way in most situations.

She can however also employ sweet talk in the right situations to get a bit extra ‘klein geld’ from passing office workers or her favourite policeman who parks nearby. Marge is well aware of the areas of the east city that are most patrolled by the CCID; these artificial. geographies play no part in her keeping her daily routine and going about her business. With the threat of being harassed by CCID officers ever present, the need for a liberal swig of alcohol gets her up in the morning It numbs the countless emotional traumas, lowers her inhibitions and gives her the courage to attempt to put the officers in their place; an action very few men in the area would be courageous enough to mimic. Having a morning drink becomes a tool for Marge to prepare for the day and give her courage to deal with harassment to come.

Mapping these narrative moments:

street people’s senses of

place and space

narrative points and common place

hotspots perceived likelihood of risk of displacement

or harassment by CCID safety and security

“They like us to think they’re the boss, but they’re stupid. They’re not

as clever as me. But at the end of the day I have no option. They put pressure on me, I’m a good man, but then I’ll have no choice. The CCID is forcing us to survive. That’s instinctive, like an animal. To be human is to be rational; to live. And we do live! This is our lives. We live here. We don’t survive, we live. But they’ll make us survive and become criminals; I’ll break into cars, like this one right here. I don’t

want to go back to jail, but I’ll do what I must if I have to survive.”

These forms of support only serve to entrench structural marginalisation for entrenched street people groups

through failing to provide essential outreach services at the foundation and early secondary levels.

Foundation level No-strings-attached services

Trust building

Basic outreach services

Development of PIEs

Very high support need, specifically

catered care outreach services

Current organisational

care and support

structure for street

homeless in Cape Town

Ideal organisational care

and support structure for

street homeless in Cape

Town

Second level, stage 1: Continued support essential

Still vulnerable to fall back to the

foundation

Still relatively high outreach support

needs

? ?

Second level, stage 2: Introducing reconnections

Long-term shelter options

Lower support needs, more general

services required

Tertiary level: Reconnections and housing

Social work counselling to reconnect

with broken families if possible

thinking forward

connection making at two levels:

social-cultural

• Forms of mapping (visual and written word narratives) beyond artificially designated boundaries

• See place making differences between groups BUT also overlaps and nexus points of shared place making

• Informing place making activations, fostering empathy

organisational

• Attempting to make the first steps to rebalance the organisational care and support structure

• Finding relatively disparate groups doing good work at the foundation level, fostering connection making between them

• Towards fostering context sensitive, first step care outreach places