“This is my locie!” Narratives and memories of place in Salt River

through the lens of the locie drinking establishment

Evan Blake MSocSc candidate

Department of Environmental and Geographical Science

University of Cape Town

Establishing place: Salt River

Presentation literature INTEREST IN

MESSY POLITICS

AND EXP OF SPACE AND

PLACE – ALCOHOL SA

LITERATURE ON SOCIAL

URBANISM – PLACE AND

SPACE

CT LIT

SA AND WORLD

CITIES LIT

CITYNESS LITERATURE

PLACE AND MEMORY LIT

HISTORY & MEMORY IN CT AND SA

THE PLACE OF THE

LOCIE & SALT RIVER

Snapshot of some Cape Town social urban literatures • Gentrification and new urbanism: new spaces of affluence – social politics in changing space – critical positions Responses to this: new patterns of rhythm and unique senses of place emerging from gentrification and urban renewal in parts of Cape Town • Geographies of sexuality Cape Quarter and queer geographies in Cape Town and the lit on the geographies of this area – complexity of the sexuality, place and identity senses of place that emerge from this part of the city – how people negotiate it • Work on memory and popular memory in cape town Experience, narrative and memory of the past are central components to place construction in Cape Town

A theory of ‘Cityness’

“ ‘Citiness’ we understood as made up of excess, simultaneity, speed, appearance,

rapid alternations, relentless change, and indeed ceaseless mutability and

discontinuous eventfulness: transience. An analysis based on political economy alone

can hardly account for the changing inventory and the rich textuality of

Johannesburg’s citiness, its unsettled appearances, and its restlessness: the

simultaneity of order, disruption, and abrupt interruptions; the incessant labor of

framing, reframing, and unframing; of destroying, renovating, and reconstructing; of

juxtaposing and segregating; of reiterating and deleting; of triviality, vulgarity, and

refinement; of shock, ephemerality, and enchantment.”

Mbembe and Nuttall: Writing the World From An African Metropolis, 2004

Memory and Place in Cape Town

“ ‘The city’ – as a complex interplay of real and imagined geographies – locates and shapes identities and this framing impacts on how we act and motivate ourselves to get our or others needs met in the culturally diverse but still racially constructed spaces of Cape Town”

Field: Imagining the City, 2007

The ‘Local’ and the ‘Locie’

Salt River: water colour by Tony Grogan

Lower Main Road by Gavin Collins

Place and the ‘locie’

• Method ‘Walking’, auto-ethnography, participant observation, reflection and reflexivity

• Beyond the locie’s borders Familiar into the unfamiliar

• Within the locie’s borders Shared identity and and collection of different groups around a common sense of place

Place of popular Memory – Conflation of past and present – uchronia

• Social othering

Perpetuating a sense of place that has emerged from loss of relation to place and identity at present in Salt River

The locie as a bastion of place and memory