Worlding Cape Town by design: Encounters with creative cityness

Abstract

Considering the ongoing global proliferation of the urban ‘creativity fix’ and its inclination to further push local governments towards entrepreneurial governance logics and market-led development imperatives, there is a sustained need to understand how the creative city paradigm is being grounded, renegotiated and put into practice in so-called ‘Southern’ cities. To analyse Cape Town’s creative city trajectory and its eventual emergence as the ‘first African World Design Capital’ in 2014, this article brings together three strands of contemporary urban scholarship. First, it utilizes the notion of ‘worlding’ to foreground the complex and multi-scalar processes that shaped Cape Town’s ‘politics of becoming’ a creative city. Second, it draws on the related and growing body of work that engages with globally mobile urban policies, their modes of circulation, adoption and transformation in different socio-political and spatial contexts. Finally, in using this relational framework to analyse Cape Town’s creative-to-design city journey, it contributes to a ‘second wave’ of scholarship on creative city-making that focuses on understanding its heterogeneous manifestations and varied local effects – that is, the diverse and situated expressions of creative cityness in the broader context of a globalizing cultural political economy. Overall the article suggests that future research has much to gain from understanding the creative city paradigm as a powerful ‘worlding device’ that produces place-based responses, which are as much ambitious and aspirational as they are fragile and necessarily incomplete.

Keywords

Urban theory creative city policy mobilities post-colonial theory design Cape Town South Africa

Introduction

More than two decades after the creative city first entered popular urban policy and governance debates – most notably in the UK and USA – its geographic scope has expanded substantially. This ‘viral spread’ (Peck, 2012: 464) and rise towards a powerful global urban development orthodoxy is demonstrated by the fact that by 2009, over 80 cities and metropolitan regions in 35 countries across all continents had created a total of 235 policies or strategies for the promotion of ‘urban creativity’ (Evans, 2009: 1010; see also UNESCO’s rapidly growing Creative Cities Network).

Considering this ongoing proliferation of an urban ‘creativity fix’ (Peck, 2007) and its inclination to further push local governments towards entrepreneurial governance logics and market-led development imperatives, a growing number of scholars has sought to understand how the creative city paradigm has been grounded, renegotiated and put into practice in so-called ‘Southern’ cities (Cohen, 2015; Dinardi, 2015; Lee and Hwang, 2012; Zheng, 2011). However, as the siren call of creativity continues to reverberate in urban development strategies across the globe, many local administrators and politicians caught up in context-specific problem statements, competing socio-political demands and varying governmental traditions have struggled with putting their own aspirational rhetoric into practice (Lindner, 2018; McLean, 2014b). Even places like Austin, Texas, one of the early adopters and most powerful ‘zone[s] of verification’ (Peck, 2012: 465) for Richard Florida’s notorious creative class theory, continues to struggle with its poor institutional articulation more than a decade down the line (Grodach, 2012).

Hence, recent writings on global urban policy mobilities rightly point out the need to pay much closer attention to the divergent local politics and often drawn-out renegotiations of ostensibly ‘fast’ policy paradigms like the creative city (Clarke, 2012; Wood, 2015a). At the same time, scholars working on, and from, cities in the so-called ‘global South’ have been vigorously emphasizing the need to develop and apply alternative vocabularies of urban analysis (Parnell and Oldfield, 2014; Robinson and Parnell, 2011; Roy, 2015), to better understand the aspirational ‘glocal’ dynamics and intricate ‘politics of becoming’ associated with (creative) city-making in different locales (Ponzini and Rossi, 2010).

In heeding this call, the following argument weaves together three strands of contemporary urban debate: first, it utilizes the notion of worlding, put forward by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong (2011) to foreground the complex and multi-scalar processes that shaped Cape Town’s ‘politics of becoming’ a creative city (Ponzini and Rossi, 2010). Second, it draws on the related and steadily growing body of work that engages with globally mobile urban policies, their modes of circulation, adoption and transformation in different socio-political and spatial contexts. Finally, in using this relational framework to analyse Cape Town’s creative-to-design city journey, it seeks to contribute to a ‘second wave’ of creative city scholarship that focuses on understanding its heterogeneous manifestations and varied local effects – that is, the diverse and situated expressions of creative cityness in the broader context of a globalizing cultural political economy (Beukelaer, 2015; Dinardi, 2015; McLean, 2014a).

In the spirit of what Ong and Collier have termed ‘mid-range theorizing’ (Ong and Collier, 2005), the notion of creative cityness is promoted as a rubric of inquiry from which to talk across these three strands of debate and emphasize their common epistemological tenets. Namely, a commitment to relational urban analysis, the ability to pay attention to and account for time and place-specific contingencies through a mix of qualitative methods, including ethnographic data collection, and the capacity to therefore focus on situated practices of neoliberal policies and subject formation beyond orthodox readings of both political economy and post-colonial frameworks (Lindner, 2018; McLean, 2014a; Roy, 2011).

Based on this analytical framework, this article shows that Cape Town presents a fracture zone for prominent creative city logics (or normative prescriptions of creative cityness, so to speak). Especially early government-driven attempts of landing the creative city in Cape Town remained by and large fragmented, small-scale and short-lived, because popular imaginaries like the creative class and the cultural and creative economy frequently rubbed up against the competing demands and divided politics of a post-apartheid city navigating its first decade of democracy.

In late 2010, however – following its tenure as a major host city of the 2010 FIFA World Cup – the City of Cape Town, led by the public–private Cape Town Partnership, bid for the title of World Design Capital 2014, which it was awarded in October 2011. As I will show below, Cape Town’s emerging ‘design city’ imaginary is fundamentally built on and intricately linked to preceding creative city efforts. However, I also argue that the impetus of an international award, coupled with the discursive shift towards design, was ultimately decisive for building broader public legitimacy and gaining substantial political traction for realizing Cape Town’s creative city ambitions.

To be sensitive towards both the mobility of the creative city as a global urban policy paradigm and the local idiosyncrasies that shaped how it was put into practice in Cape Town, I pursued a mixed-methods approach to capture the relational situations in which policy knowledge is assembled. To ‘study through’ (McCann and Ward, 2012) these sites and situations, I followed a three-pronged approach summed up by Wood (2015c: 391) as ‘“following the people”, […] “following the materials” and “following the meetings”, that is the conferences, workshops and seminars where the people and materials mingle’. Thus, between October 2010 and February 2014, I conducted a total of 61 semi-structured interviews with political and administrative representatives of the City of Cape Town and the provincial government of the Western Cape, various special purpose vehicle organizations representing different creative industry sectors, as well as numerous civil society, arts and culture groups and practitioners. Further insights were gained from participant observation of 47 events such as public forums, press briefings and walking tours, as well as policy, print and digital media analysis gathered at and around these events.

The article proceeds in three steps. In the first section, it provides a brief overview of contemporary creative city research. Here, I argue that a ‘second wave’ of scholarship has emerged, one that is less concerned with policy proclamations and governance rationales and focused more on understanding the heterogeneous manifestations and situated expressions of what I call creative cityness. I then contend that this kind of research can benefit from adopting post-colonial and relational approaches of urban analysis, such as notions of ‘worlding’ and urban policy assemblage (McCann et al., 2013).

The next section then uses this conceptual framework to detail and explain the rather roundabout ways in which Cape Town arrived at its own creative city rendition in the form of its ambitious project to become ‘the first African World Design Capital’ in 2014. In the final part, I discuss the case of the ‘design stormings’ as an example of how the hegemonic narrative of design also produced openings – however limited – for critique and dissent.

‘Worlding’ the creative city

As mentioned above, the footprint of the creative city as an urban policy paradigm has reached global proportions, expanding well beyond its initial Anglo-American purview. UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network¹ is increasingly attracting African, Asian and Latin American members; at the other end of the spectrum, artist-driven civil society organizations such as the Pan-African Arterial Network have also launched their own Creative Cities programmes (Arterial Network, 2017). The continuing emergence of self-declared creative cities from Buenos Aires to Bandung, and Pointe Noire to Pekalongan, should command attention, not least because of the well-known and certainly warranted critiques of the creative city script as a handmaiden of urban neoliberalization (Chatterton, 2008; Peck, 2005, 2009).

While the creative city has been popularly portrayed as a discrete set of urban policy ‘solutions’, it rather constitutes an elastic ‘field of policy’ (Pratt and Hutton, 2013: 90), evidenced by the wide spectrum of sometimes competing political rationales put to work under this label in flexible combination (Evans, 2009). In the words of Rose (1999: 28), the creative city paradigm has been able to ‘confer a kind of mobile and transferable character upon a multiplicity’.

However, after the creative city and its Anglo-American pundits have been alternately celebrated and dismissed, lauded and critiqued, applauded and condemned, it seems that critical urban scholarship has reached an impasse: first, because its vocal and valid objections appear to have gone largely unheard by most politicians and urban development practitioners (Borén and Young, 2013); and second, because in many places the talk about the creative city has outpaced local institutional capacities to interpret and actually implement it (Markusen, 2006). These two predicaments inform the growing desire to avoid a state of analysis paralysis by building on the nuanced digest of critical debates over the past decade without rejecting the important role creativity can play in city-making more generally.

While acknowledging the contribution made by those who eloquently called out the ‘Florida syndrome’ and its neoliberal boosterism (Peck, 2005), this ‘second wave’ of scholarship focuses on the creative city as a multifarious paradigm within the broader context of an urbanizing and globalizing cultural political economy. In other words, instead of merely looking at the presence/absence or success/failure of popular creative city markers, this line of inquiry is concerned with the more heterogeneous manifestations and situated practices of assembling what I call creative cityness – for example, through exploring diverse expressions of vernacular creativity (Edensor et al., 2009; Leslie and Rantisi, 2011; Mbaye, 2015), critical intersections between race, gender and social justice in creative city-making (Catungal et al., 2009; Leslie and Catungal, 2012; McLean, 2014a), the conjuncture of remote, small-town, suburban or working-class environments with cultural and creative industries (Ingle, 2010; Jayne, 2004; Lorentzen and van Heur, 2013; Luckman et al., 2009), urban social movements struggling for the right to the creative city and testing new tactics for political dissent (Dzudzek and Lindner, 2012; McLean, 2016; Novy and Colomb, 2012) or attempts to revisit the creative economy and rewrite the creative city ‘script’ from different localities beyond the West (Barrowclough and Kozul-Wright, 2008; Booyens, 2012; Grodach and Silver, 2013).

Taken together, this diverse set of studies shows that the creative city’s persuasiveness as a ‘path-shaping imaginary’ (Grodach, 2012: 93) might be better understood not by the undeniably high speed of its global circulation and frequent sojourns in city marketing brochures, but through its propensity to get pulled in and mixed up with broader socio-political, economic and cultural objectives, at times even becoming retrofitted to support directly competing local agendas (Lindner, 2018; Luckman et al., 2009). This focus on spatial fluidity and the situated assemblage of knowledge and expertise also resonates strongly with McCann and Ward’s (2015) call for policy mobility research to critically reconsider normative dualisms of success/failure and absence/presence in favour of more relational urban analysis. Furthermore, as McCann et al. (2013: 582) have argued, this concept of assemblage urbanism is also closely related to the notion of worlding, with both seeking ‘to re-theorize the relationships between the urban and the global’.

For my own analysis, thinking of Cape Town as a ‘worlding city’ that continuously draws in ‘parts of elsewhere’ (Allen and Cochrane, 2007: 1171) while simultaneously casting itself out into the world has helped me to better understand its creative cityness as an ‘ambitious experiment – inherently unstable, always contested and always incomplete’ (McCann et al., 2013: 584). Furthermore, what has made the notion of worlding such a prolific heuristic of post-colonial urban analysis is that it implies a real sense of local autonomy in relating one’s city to the world, a privilege that so-called ‘Southern’ cities had traditionally not been afforded in mainstream urban theory and analysis (Robinson, 2006; Roy, 2009).

As I will show below, combining conceptual approaches of urban policy mobilities and worlding is valuable for grappling with Cape Town’s creative cityness in two regards: first, because it draws into view the multiple conjunctions of discursive events, embodied knowledges, aesthetic representations and governmental practices that perpetually reproduce the creative city in place; and second, because in trying to encounter the city on its own terms, it carves out a space – however liminal – for the development of new vocabularies that can help us overcome the much-decried ‘epistemic failure of imagination’ (Parnell and Pieterse, 2014) regarding our understanding of African urbanism.

Becoming ‘creative’ Cape Town

The second part of this article uses the above conceptual framework to illustrate the different ways and means by which Cape Town arrived at its own situated rendition of the globally pervasive creative city paradigm, eventually being crowned ‘the first African design capital’. Heading the call for taking the ‘social life of policies’ (Peck and Theodore, 2012: 23) seriously, I will first discuss how a small number of globally mobile government professionals drew in and collated selected ‘creative city’ policy impressions from elsewhere. In this, I will also show how these were retrofitted in response to the complex political terrain of a city in the throes of early post-apartheid transition, characterized by a conflictual fusion of developmental and neoliberal urban development imperatives. However, as I will show, these early attempts at landing the creative city paradigm in Cape Town were by and large fragmented, small-scale, short-lived and thus largely inconsequential with regards to generating broader political and public traction. This changed significantly in late 2010, when the City of Cape Town, prompted by the influential public–private Cape Town Partnership and its flagship ‘Creative Cape Town’ programme, decided to bid for the title of World Design Capital 2014.

Of course, Cape Town’s emerging ‘design city’ imaginary is fundamentally built on and intricately linked to preceding creative city efforts and stakeholder networks. Nonetheless, I furthermore show that the impetus of an international accolade coupled with the discursive shift towards ‘developmental design’ were essential for gaining legitimacy and broad-based public support – that is, for providing the ‘discursive glue’ (Lees, 2004: 102) that finally made the creative city stick. That the World Design Capital (WDC) process was not merely a launching pad for showcasing Cape Town as a model creative city for the so-called global South, but also produced more heterogeneous expressions of creative cityness, is discussed in the final section.

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)

In 1998, the focus on the commodification and entrepreneurialization of the country’s arts and culture sector was further endorsed through a national report by what was then known as the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology (DACST). Though ‘Creative South Africa: A strategy for realising the potential of the Cultural Industries’ was developed under the auspices of several prominent cultural practitioners, and led to a succession of sector-specific policy drafts such as the National Craft Development strategy, it nonetheless ‘disappeared into some black hole somewhere’ (Interview with Cultural Policy Adviser 8 February 2012). In this it shared the fate of many early post-apartheid policies that were extensively discussed, often passed, but rarely fully implemented. This mixture of initial enthusiasm for innovative policy production versus the apparent lack of follow-through in implementation presents a central and perpetually reoccurring theme of South Africa’s post-apartheid political practice across all levels of government (Marais, 2011; van Donk and Pieterse, 2008). In consequence, even the fate of high-profile, broad-based or resource-intensive policy projects often depended greatly on the professional networks, strategic acumen and tenacity of a few powerful stakeholders. While this is an important point to make with reference to South Africa’s political (dis-)continuities in general, I argue that it also needs to be kept firmly in mind when analysing the genealogy of Cape Town’s creative cityness.

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 SPVs³) 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).

Inspired by this Thatcherite logic, her department then established a Creative Industries Unit that was tasked with bringing the traditional arts and culture sectors further into the fold of local economic development by partnering with and growing the different creative industry SPVs, as well as supporting the growth of existing cross-cutting creative economy ‘clusters’ such as design and IT.

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)

In other words, compared to a conventional cultural and creative industries approach that could be more easily aligned with broader cluster-based local economic development strategies popular at the time, the rhetoric thrust of the creative class and its prominent emphasis on developing high-level urban amenities in order to attract creative talent from elsewhere was regarded as incommensurable with local realities of competing demands in infrastructural investment and high-levels of structural unemployment.

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)

It is evident that both respondents see the WDC as a prime opportunity to invigorate Cape Town’s own modelling power as an emerging African creative city. In a remarkable spin, Cape Town’s creative cityness that is indivisibly rooted in its contested experience of ongoing post-apartheid transformation is no longer regarded as a drawback. Instead, it is reconstituted as a unique selling point that serves to legitimize its claims as a leading creative city and thus as a continental if not global reference point.

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)

While the fact that the ‘design storming’ prompted such a swift and decisive response from the mayoral office is remarkable, its limitations should also not be withheld. First, while the promised pilot project was indeed carried out, it was conducted in a different informal settlement outside of Khayelitsha, thus forfeiting the chance of continuing the conversation with the local community. Second, critical voices also remarked that even more members of the affected community should have been involved and that the short timeframe was prohibitive in terms of generating deeper structural effects like skills transfer, ownership, and so on (Davis, 2012). Finally, while the ‘design storming’ sessions were arguably one of the flagship projects in the run up to Cape Town’s tenure as WDC, it is perhaps most telling that no further sessions were held in 2014, the year the city held the title, and that the open-source ‘Design Storming Toolkit’ is still pending release. However, my intention with this example was neither to overstate nor to cross-examine its significance within the much more complex and contested project of struggling for social and spatial justice in post-apartheid Cape Town.

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).

Conclusion

The WDC is notably one of the more prominent entries in what is nowadays a catalogue of global titles, accolades and commitments that Cape Town uses to position itself globally.⁶ In 2017, Cape Town also joined UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network as a ‘Creative City of Design’, staking a further claim towards its position as the preeminent creative city on the continent.

In this article, I have detailed and explained Cape Town’s intricate creative-to-design city journey, showing how earlier fragmented and short-lived engagements with popular creative city concepts were refracted through the lens of design and folded into Cape Town’s ambition of becoming the ‘first African World Design Capital’ in 2014. To make sense of this rich empirical story, I have brought into conversation three strands of contemporary urban scholarship, arguing that the current ‘second wave’ of creative city research can benefit from adopting post-colonial and relational approaches of urban analysis, namely notions of ‘worlding’ and urban policy assemblage (McCann et al., 2013).

Furthermore, I have advanced the term creative cityness to describe this emerging rubric of inquiry, which is concerned with understanding the heterogeneous manifestations and situated practices of creative city-making beyond its mere policy proclamations. For me, the term also highlights the multifarious nature of the creative city as ‘a storyline that [has] to be adapted, modified, and continuously rewritten to create a fit with the specificity and historicity of a given location, and other rationalities of governance already in place’ (Lindner, 2018: 104). In turn, it helps us not only to take into view the multiple temporalities of grounding the creative city as a globally mobile policy paradigm (Wood, 2015a), but also to account for the more situated and mundane practices of creative city-making as neoliberalized processes that continuously exceed themselves. Thus, future research, particularly that aimed at so-called ‘Southern’ cities, has much to gain from understanding the creative city paradigm as a powerful ‘worlding device’ that produces place-based responses, which are as much ambitious and aspirational as they are fragile and necessarily incomplete.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Rike Sitas, António Tomás, Sylvia Croese and Liza Cirolia for offering their thoughts and critical reading on earlier drafts, and the three anonymous reviewers for their shrewd comments. I also remain indebted to my doctoral supervisors Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch and Paul Reuber for their guidance and unwavering support during this research. All remaining errors and omissions are my own.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was kindly supported by the German National Academic Foundation through its doctoral programme; the German National Academic Exchange Service through a short-term Post-doctoral grant; and the FAZIT Foundation.

Notes

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