Worlding Cape Town by design: Encounters with creative cityness

Creative city detours

One of the earliest transitions that occurred in interpreting the meaning of creativity for the newly inaugurated post-apartheid state was the shift from a developmental ‘healing through creativity’ – as prominently advocated by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the early 1990s – towards creativity as part of a market-liberal macroeconomic growth strategy in the form of cultural industries and entrepreneurship. As one former creative industries manager in the provincial government recalls:

The first plan of action was how to get this country healed and ready and psychologically in shape to be a nation. So that was a good enough argument. But then after five or ten years and the money and the emphasis on other aspects like education and housing and, you know, the drain of the fiscus etc. the cultural industries title then was introduced as a way in which you could present the argument where artists also had to take a stand and take some responsibility for their survival […] that it wasn’t just enough to set up a little dance group and have kids dancing in the township and keep them off the street after school and the government needs to continuously pay for that. (Interview with former Head of Provincial Creative Industries Unit, 18 January 2011)

Nonetheless, even though the process of adopting a creative economy policy had been stalled at the national level, it had put culture and creativity as potential drivers of local development firmly on the radar of provincial and municipal government practitioners, particularly in the country’s largest metros of Johannesburg and Cape Town. By 2007, Johannesburg had teamed up with the British Council and the University of the Witwatersrand to embark on a cumulative Creative Industry Mapping study following the British Department for Culture, Media and Sports (DCMS) model and attesting to the fact that ‘former colonial relationships still exercise power in local policy making’ (Wood, 2015b: 1077). In comparison, Cape Town’s approach remained rather prudent and localized as it focused on a selected set of sub-sectors such as film and crafts, with the former seen as a boon for foreign direct investment and the latter as a potential generator of low-skilled jobs in line with the city’s primary local economic development needs.

According to numerous respondents, this sector-based approach was heavily influenced by the neoclassical thinking of American economist Michael Porter, whose ideas of cluster-based local economic development strategies laid out in his bestselling book, The Competitive Advantage of Nations, had become ‘a big fashion’ (Interview with SPV Director 21 November 2012) within South African local government circles since the early 2000s. ² Between 2001 and 2009, this cluster approach prompted the creation of a plethora of local public–private partnership organizations (so-called ‘special purpose vehicles’ or SPVs ³ ) for several sub-sectors of the local creative economy, such as the Cape Craft and Design Institute, the Cape Town Film Commission and the Cape Town Fashion Council.

While most of these neo-corporatist political intermediaries were newly created, the visual and performing arts SPVs were the result of co-opting existing arts and culture organizations into this role. Furthermore, even though both municipal and provincial government initially committed funds to all creative industry SPVs, the lack of long-term financial investment coupled with an increased emphasis on self-entrepreneurial funding logics eventually led to serious economic insecurities for most and eventual closure of many of the ‘creative sector’ SPVs, especially those representing traditionally subsidized sectors of cultural production, such as visual and performing arts. Another major consequence of this patchy public support was that, even though SPVs were expected to collect data on the composition and economic contribution of their respective sectors, except for the film sector, such research never materialized. Thus, to this day it remains difficult to gauge the actual depth and breadth of the different creative and cultural industry sectors in Cape Town, let alone account for their long-term development dynamics and (socio-)economic contributions. This, in turn, severely curtails the ability of cultural practitioners, arts organizations and even the local Department of Arts and Culture itself to effectively advocate for culture as a fourth pillar of sustainable urban development, considering other large-scale and comparatively well-quantified service delivery backlogs in the city.

It is, however, no secret that Cape Town’s local creative and cultural industries both reflect and shape broader patterns of spatial inequality and racialization (Booyens, 2012). The most important centres of cultural consumption remain concentrated in wealthy suburbs and the central business district. Public arts funding is still skewed towards supporting established forms of cultural expression popularly perceived as ‘white’, such as the national ballet or opera (Minty, 2006). Many sectors are only slowly showing a greater racial stratification in key positions (for a fascinating study of how entrenched racial differences play out in the local craft sector, see Daya, 2014).

Nonetheless, apart from simply following international local economic development policy trends, interurban policy learning coupled with personal advocacy also played a prominent role in putting Cape Town’s creative economy on the political agenda. Like many prominent local government representatives, the then Head of Economic Development and Tourism in the provincial administration had spent several years working as a government envoy in London in the early 2000s, the time in which the creative industries had moved ‘from the fringes to the mainstream’ of the UK’s economic and urban development policies (DCMS, 2001: 3). As she elaborates:

So when I came back from London I was very mindful of the creative industries and the prospects that it offered. I also understood how the word creative industries was birthed; essentially by Maggie Thatcher and it was one of the way[s] that the cultural industries, or the cultural [uhm] the arts and culture sector justified funding. In that they then showed the economic impact of their interventions to justify the subsidies that they received. So, we were quite excited about the prospects. (Interview with former Head of LED, 22 February 2012).

This initial tale of ‘creative awakening’ among a few key local government practitioners – even though their responses remained mostly fragmented, small-scale and short-lived – is relevant in two regards: first, because it provides a first-hand illustration of how the contextual professional experience of globally mobile senior government actors can function as an inroad for policy trends from elsewhere (for a similar experience with the adoption of the Bus Rapid Transit System in different South African cities, see Wood, 2015a). Second, because the example of how the director negotiated her experience within the local institutional context clearly speaks against the often too readily assumed omnipresence of Richard Florida’s creative class hypothesis as the primary driver of creative city imaginaries. Especially since Florida had based his creative class hypothesis squarely on Porter’s cluster theories and both may be considered different strands of the same market-liberal plait, shouldn’t his propositions have slotted right in?

To elaborate, although a handful of my respondents made use of the term creative class during interviews, pressed for its conceptual origin and meaning barely anyone made the connection to the American creative city ‘guru’ and his concepts. The absence of such a decisive ‘Florida moment’ (Peck, 2012: 464) that has often been diagnosed elsewhere may be explained as follows. Contrary to the hegemonic power often ascribed to the creative class discourse, those few local practitioners who had in fact engaged directly with Florida’s ideas upon their emergence in the early 2000s quickly realized that these stood in stark contrast to their own experience of the creative economy as it unfolded within the developmental setting of the local post-apartheid state. For example, a local design practitioner commented in a public talk:

Let’s for a minute bear in mind the relevance of this talk of the creative class to the realities right here at home. You can’t eat ideas. Bridging the digital divide won’t create a roof in itself. What’s different here at home, is that instead of using our creative talents to buy more time to have more leisure or freedom as in the ‘West’, the challenge is to use the abundance of time that we have, that is, our vast labour resources, to creatively develop massively productive solutions using […] appropriate technologies. (Haast, 2004)

Overall, though, until 2009 neither cultural economy nor creative class-based creative city ‘scripts’ were able to sustain any long-term traction within local government and gain more broad-based political buy-in. If anything, existing initiatives likes the Provincial Creative Industries Unit were swiftly dismantled in the aftermath of the 2009 general elections, which saw the oppositional Democratic Alliance take over the Western Cape Province from the ruling African National Congress. However, even though these early attempts at putting the creative city to work in Cape Town were by and large fragmented, small-scale and short-lived, the public–private partnership organization Cape Town Partnership continued to drive a local creative city agenda through its ‘Creative Cape Town’ programme. Under its charismatic stewardship, the economistic sector-based creative industries approach became folded into a more comprehensive creative place-making strategy that also dovetailed with the organization’s key role in preparing the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Consequentially, it was also Creative Cape Town who first drew local government’s attention to the WDC award and successfully lobbied it to bid for the title, thus setting the stage for Cape Town to re-imagine itself as the ‘first African design city’.

Worlding Cape Town by design

While the intricate governmental path-dependencies between the 2010 FIFA World Cup and the WDC bid have been unpacked elsewhere (Wenz, 2014), what I want to show here is how the WDC 2014 process provided a space to ground and renegotiate the creative city paradigm in a way that resonated with both the city’s global ambitions and its local socio-political imperatives.

Awarded biennially by the Montreal-based World Design Organisation (till 2017 known as the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design), the year-long WDC accolade claims to provide ‘a distinctive opportunity for cities to showcase their accomplishments in attracting and promoting design, as well as highlight successes in urban revitalization strategies’ (ICSID, 2014: 6). The title was first awarded to Torino as a pilot city in 2008. Later winners were Seoul (2010), Helsinki (2012), Cape Town (2014), Taipei (2016) and Mexico City (2018), while Lille has been designated for 2020. In comparison to UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network, which is essentially a loose inter-city policy networking platform, the WDC designation is structured around seven prescribed signature events, ⁴ which form the milestones of a year-long programme to be developed and financially backed by each winning city. ⁵ In March 2011, Cape Town submitted its bid alongside 56 other cities, and was later shortlisted alongside Dublin and Bilbao. It was officially awarded the title on 26 October 2011 at the International Design Association’s congress in Taipei, where Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille was present to accept the award.

As the first city on the continent to successfully bid for the award, Cape Town had presented what many of my respondents referred to as a ‘distinctly African’ bid. In this regard it is important to note that Cape Town has traditionally engaged with its continental location in an at best disdainful, at worst outright hostile, way (Mario Matsinhe, 2011). However, reframing its ‘African-ness’ from a lament to an essential asset of its creativity was key to positioning the city as the ostensible epicentre of ‘developmental design’. Also referred to as ‘social design’ or ‘design for development’, the key promise is that products and processes can and should be designed to meet the perceived needs of the ‘developing world’ rather than merely to cater to consumption-driven ‘first world desires’ (Borland, 2011). This promise to transform the fate of ordinary residents through the professed power of design was also at the heart of Cape Town’s programmatic slogan, ‘Live design. Transform Life’ (City of Cape Town, 2011).

The WDC afforded local governance practitioners the opportunity to position Cape Town as an international model city that showcases the ostensible benefits of design for development. As the CEO of ‘Cape Town Design’, the local WDC implementation company, explained: ‘Cape Town may not be a Xerox PARC, but we are a laboratory […] We have valid and authentic things to contribute to solving important global design problems’ (O’Toole, 2014). Another bid committee member concurs:

Cities that have won in the past were those that are part of the developed world – and yet those cities form less than 10 percent of the global population; they are part of the minority world […] In many ways, our bid could be seen as a template for bids in the future. We speak on behalf of the majority world with a powerful voice that resonates across the globe. (Creative Cape Town, 2011: 54)

Both statements thus aptly capture the role of the WDC title as a powerful framing device for strategic ‘spatial imagineering’ (Yeoh, 2005) and ‘elite dreaming’ (Ong, 2011: 17). However, as McCann (2013) and Croese (2018) have rightly pointed out, such ‘extrospective’ forms of policy boosterism are always intricately linked to, and thus need to be read in relation to, the more ‘introspective politics of persuasion’ (McCann, 2013: 14).

In this vein, I want to explore, in due brevity, why the notion of a design-driven creative city could land and capture Cape Town’s public imagination in ways that previous creative city initiatives did not effectively do. Of course, much has already been written about international (mega-)events and awards as powerful devices to catalyse and accelerate local urban development processes, not least in South Africa (Haferburg, 2011; Steinbrink et al., 2011; Wood, 2017). As I elaborate elsewhere, this is certainly also an important part of Cape Town’s WDC story (Wenz, 2014). However, the point I want to make here is that the notion of design and the prominent emphasis of its ‘developmental’ power was equally crucial as the ‘discursive glue’ (Lees, 2004: 102) that made the creative city ‘stick’ in Cape Town.

As alluded to above, in the early post-apartheid years, arts and culture were steeped in the project of reconciliation and democratic nation building and as such were broadly regarded as (deserving) fields for public subsidy. However, considering other pressing socio-political priorities like housing, job creation and poverty alleviation, arts and culture inevitably took a backseat on the local development agenda. While this ultimately promoted the emergence of cultural and creative industry concepts on local economic development agendas, in the minds of many local government practitioners and politicians, the arts and culture sector remained a sink hole for government spending rather than a prime generator of socio-economic innovation (and return on investment).

In comparison, the notion of design – commonly conceptualized as the bridge between art and technology (Flusser and Cullars, 1995) – is more commensurable with and less resistant to strategies of commodification and entrepreneurialization. Like art, design offers aesthetic enchantment while, like science and technology, it promises to hold ‘the pre-eminent solution to all the complex and difficult conundrums of modern life’ (Milestone, 2007: 177). In turn, amplified by the international exposure provided by the WDC project, local city officials were able to firmly cast design as ‘a vehicle for reconstruction’ (City of Cape Town, 2011: 6) and convince their peers and the public of its utilitarian ‘problem-solving’ and ‘solution-driven’ properties.

Of course, seen from this angle, the story of Cape Town’s ‘politics of becoming’ the first African WDC remains largely one of policy boosterism and all-too-common ‘design-led’ place marketing (Bell and Jayne, 2001). However, as Peter Lindner (2018) has convincingly argued, while the utopian character of neoliberal imaginations folded into government-driven creative city projects breeds ‘endless loops of intervention and restructuring’, the perpetual differences between model imaginary and ‘worldly’ practice create ‘spaces for dissent, critique, and more diverse economies that are all too quickly lost from sight, if policies are merely looked at in terms of rationales, guidelines, resolutions, and regulations’ (Lindner, 2018: 99). Hence, to provide a more rounded picture of Cape Town’s heterogeneous creative cityness, there remains another story to tell.

Designs on social justice?

On 30 June 2012 – only eight months after Cape Town had been designated as the WDC 2014 and thus well over two years before the start of its official tenure – around 50 people had gathered on a rainy winter’s weekend under a tent near a community centre in Khayelitsha, Cape Town’s largest township. About half of them professionally identified as ‘designers’ (ranging from architects to interaction designers), the other half were residents and members of a local community organization, who had set the overall topic for the weekend: the challenge of solid waste removal in informal settlements.

In Cape Town, the deep socio-spatial divide of apartheid is not only continuously reproduced through the massive lack of adequate housing opportunities, particularly for the urban poor (Cirolia, 2014). It is equally expressed through the unequal distribution of municipal infrastructure like electricity and sanitation facilities and services like solid waste collection and removal (Swilling, 2010). In Khayelitsha, as in most other townships, refuse collection points are scarce and often consist of open shipping containers. These are only emptied irregularly and defaulting service providers are seldom held accountable by the municipality (Miraftab, 2004).

The ‘design storming’ sought to use ‘participatory design’ to come up with viable alternatives to the inadequate refuse removal situation in Khayelitsha’s informal settlements. The event was jointly organized by the Cape Town Design Network, a loose interest group of design practitioners that had been ‘incubated’ by Creative Cape Town in the wake of the WDC bid, and the Social Justice Coalition (SJC), a local community-based advocacy movement. Before being split into groups, participants were shown around the area by local community members to illustrate the nature and scope of the solid waste problem.

Inspired by ‘hack-a-thons’ known from the IT sector, in which software developers come together over a couple of days to deal with a specific problem statement, ‘design stormings’ in themselves are an interesting refraction of this global form, as they seek to apply the same concept to tackle specific social issues (Davis, 2012). The most relevant theme for my argument is, however, not the embodied performance of ‘design thinking’ for developmental ends during the event itself or the different practical proposals it generated (which would certainly warrant a more in-depth analysis elsewhere). Rather, it is the project’s ability to pry open a small window of opportunity to explore what design could do to advance the local social justice agenda and take local government up on its promise to foster a more inclusive city ‘by design’.

A few weeks prior to the first ‘design storming’, the SJC had already staged a ‘community caucus’ among its constituents in Khayelitsha. Here, it sought to tease out demands and expectations of local residents for the city’s tenure as incumbent WDC, emphasizing that ‘[t]he City, as the signatory of the WDC2014 designation, has a great responsibility to ensure that the capital expenditure put towards the designation will result in a sustainable, dignifying and unifying legacy’ (SJC, 2012).

The result of the caucus was a short seven-point manifesto called ‘Ukuyila Ngabantu/Design by the People/Ontwerp Deur die Mense’. In it the participants formulated seven principles, including the acknowledgement of ‘unsustainable levels of inequality and poverty across South Africa’ and the belief that ‘sustainable design solutions must grow out of meaningful, participatory engagement with affected communities’ (Event transcript, 5 May 2012). However, the SJC also knew that it would be hard to hand over the manifesto to local government and discuss it in any meaningful way. After all, only a few weeks prior to the caucus, mayor Patricia de Lille and the SJC had once again publicly locked heads over the related issue of basic sanitation and the city’s inability to provide adequate janitorial services for its toilet facilities in Khayelitsha. As a result, the lines of communication between the two parties had broken down and the mayor had refused to further engage with the SJC, neither on basic sanitation nor any related matters.

However, since the ‘design stormings’ had been co-organized by the Cape Town Design Network and Creative Cape Town, both organizations that the city considered key stakeholders in the WDC project, the mayor had little choice but to receive the activists and community representatives, and listen to their demands and proposed solutions. After all, not only had she thrown her full political weight behind the WDC 2014 accolade, she had also publicly promised ‘to ensure that design is considered in decision-making and to engage designers on the key challenges of the day’ (de Lille, 28 February 2012, event transcript).

In turn, the ‘design stormers’, including members of the SJC and Khayelitsha residents, were hastily invited to City Hall to present their results directly to the mayor and a senior delegation of city managers. Considering the great publicity surrounding the event and its resonance with the city’s promise of using the WDC as a ‘vehicle for reconstruction’, the mayor later conceded:

I must say I was really impressed when I was brought to a presentation by a group of about 30 designers […] and city members listened to all the design solutions that they proposed and I said to one of the MayCo [Mayoral Committee] members next to me, how I wish I could be working with people like that every day, who actually come with solutions […] So, let’s do a pilot, I will find the money in the City and we will change the way in which we deal with solid waste in informal settlements. That is just an example of how design can be used to transform life but also to make sure that people living in informal settlements live in the same clean environment that we live in the city [centre]. (De Lille, event transcript 13 December 2012)

Rather, I wanted to show how the malleable and expedient character of collective creative practices like the ‘design by the people’ manifesto or ‘design storming’ could – to paraphrase (McLean, 2014b: 2156) – unsettle the creative city by asking difficult and important questions and drawing new communities of practice into the process of re-imagining a more just city. While acknowledging some level of political opportunism on both the side of the SJC and local government, I concur with her that ‘[t]he value of these small acts of consciousness raising should not be dismissed’ (McLean, 2014b: 2170). In turn, I argue that the above example aptly illustrates the variegated ‘politics of becoming’ (Ponzini and Rossi, 2010) that make up Cape Town’s contemporary creative cityness, which is marked by, but not determined by, processes of policy boosterism and urban neoliberalization (Lindner, 2018).