New beginnings: A chance to rise from the ashes

That’s a wrap on discovering the ins and outs of Cape Town’s Urban Political Ecologies! 

I hope you’ve enjoyed exploring and learning about Cape Town through the rather intangible lens of Urban Political Ecology, where we’ve learnt how Cape Town exists in a fragile system of political and socio-ecological flows, evident in water security, access to sanitation, air pollution, alcohol flows, and finally the consequences of COVID-19 (Heyen, 2013). We’ve begun to address the complex and political flows that underpin how the city’s rather uneven urban landscape has utilised and distributed resources, and how the city’s socio-political legacies of Apartheid still influence the distribution of resources (Gottdiener, 2010). 

An arial view of Cape Town’s uneven urban divide

With regards to the most critical and on-going issue, the COVID-19 pandemic, the disruption of urban metabolic flows has become increasingly evident. Cape Town’s struggle to effectively mitigate the spread of COVID-19 has had a vast array of consequences, from the rapid spread of disease in informal settlements and long-term socio-economic damage (Lawhon et al., 2014).  

Cape Town’s new and improved efforts to support resource supply in informal settlements

The future of Cape Town’s flows

As Cape Town faces the ongoing threat of environmental and climate disasters, the city, and its regional authority, must evaluate and rethink the management of urban flows that influence the city’s impact on the environment, heighten existing systemic inequalities, and even influence political engagement and resistance (Swyngedouw and Kaiks, 2014). By using UPE models to address the problems this blog series has identified, Cape Town has the opportunity to create a sustainable city that is capable of providing equal opportunities soon! 

Thank you for coming along on this blog series’ ride, and I hope you (and Cape Town) have a far better 2021!

Word count: 

273

References: 

Gottdiener, M., 1994. The Social Production Of Urban Space. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Heynen, N., 2013. Urban political ecology I. Progress in Human Geography, 38(4), pp.598-604.

Lawhon, M., Ernstson, H. and Silver, J., 2013. Provincializing Urban Political Ecology: Towards a Situated UPE Through African Urbanism. Antipode, 46(2), pp.497-516.

Swyngedouw, E. and Kaika, M., 2014. Urban Political Ecology. Great Promises, Deadlock… and New Beginnings? – (L’ecologia política urbana. 

Grans promeses, aturades… i nous inicis?). Documents d’Anàlisi Geogràfica, 60(3).