Laura Nkula-Wenz
I am an urban geographer based in Cape Town, South Africa. I am currently working as the lecturer and student affairs coordinator for the international MA program "Critical Urbanisms", jointly hosted by the University of Basel, Switzerland and the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. I am also working as a course convener for Stanford University's Bing Overseas Study Program in Cape Town, and as a freelance consultant on curriculum development in planning education, particularly around issues of corruption and professional integrity. My research interests revolve around questions of globally mobile urban development paradigms and their adaptation in 'Southern' cities, cultural urban policy in Africa, postcolonial urban theory and practice, and curriculum development.
Supervisors: Prof. Paul Reuber and Prof. Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch
Supervisors: Prof. Paul Reuber and Prof. Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch
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Thesis
Full thesis can be downloaded via the following link:
https://miami.uni-muenster.de/Record/02ab8ae9-1f64-48ee-993f-1d42076e1175
Book Chapters
After a brief look at the frequent traveller logbook of the creative city paradigm (Landry 2000; Florida 2002) and the role international cultural accolades play in its
worldwide dissemination and translation, the chapter will explore how the WDC idea came to be ‘grounded’ (Cochrane & Ward 2012) in Cape Town. Reconstructing its travel patterns through the evidence collected from qualitative interviews, media coverage analysis and participant observation helps to uncover the entangled pathdependencies, knowledge channels and personal networks, as well as the diverse array of interests and political rationales involved. Moreover, it reveals the ways in which the global WDC brand has been locally appropriated as a new legitimising label for large-scale government actions that include, but also go beyond, re-enacting a creative city script. The rather erratic and unfi nished nature of this process to date also leads me to question the popular neoliberal notion of ‘fast policy formation’ as ‘the importation of off-the-shelf program techniques from other locations’ (Peck 2002, p. 344). In a rather patronising manner, this implies a more linear modus operandi of prefabricated policy – ‘download, plug and play’ – than the fumbling ‘mix and match’ I encountered while following Cape Town’s route towards its appointment as WDC. My observations support Clarke’s (2012, p. 34) suggestion that much ‘more could be made of the local politics of fast policies’. Furthermore, they resonate with the growing body of academic work that seeks to look beyond neoliberalism as the prime theoretical vantage point, as it often tends to obstruct a broader epistemological engagement with the diverse urban dynamics of post-apartheid South Africa (Parnell & Pieterse 2010; Morange 2011; Parnell & Robinson 2011).
Continue reading in Haferburg, C. & Huchzermeyer, M. (Hrsg.) (2014): Urban Governance in Postapartheid Cities. Stuttgart:Schweizerbart; Durban: UKZN Press, S. 251-270
Book Reviews
Op-eds
Conference Presentations
of the Western hemisphere but can by now also be spotted in many urban planning
schemes, city development frameworks and ‘place-making‘ strategies and practices
in the metropolitan global South.
Unlike cities such as London, Barcelona or Amsterdam, who’s creative and cultural
economies are well researched and their programmes and policies often referenced
as best practice examples to be copied throughout the world, little is known about the
scale and scope let alone the different context and impact of creative and cultural
economies in African cities such as Nairobi, Dakar or Cape Town.
The city at the southern tip of Africa provides a particularly interesting setting: Having
been the prime example for the spatial implementation of apartheid’s racist divide et
impera policies, Cape Town remains to this day heavily affected by the resulting
deep urban divide. However, in spite of the continuing socio-spatial polarization, the
city has developed into an international hub for the creative and cultural economy
with an internationally recognized film production industry, a thriving performing and
visual arts sector, even becoming a recent bidder for the world’s design capital in
2014.
The paper presents work-in-progress material from my current PhD research and
highlights issues evolving around the ambivalent interplay between the contested
economic, political and spatial urban environment and the ‚glocal‘ amalgam of the
city‘s growing creative economy. Furthermore it seeks to discuss the ways in which
the originally Western notion of the ‘creative city’ is challenged by different social and
cultural practices deriving from the current post-colonial/post-apartheid state of Cape
Town.
The creative city idea has unequivocally become a new planning orthodoxy, materialising itself in various shapes, forms and ‘glocalized’ narratives across the globe. The aim of my on-going research project is to scrutinize it’s manifold meanings and consequences – in terms of policy, politics and spatial practice - for post-apartheid Cape Town, adding to the as of yet limited scholarship contextualising these issues against the backdrop of distinct urban experiences in the global South.
In this, the paper tries to provide a common landing strip for both approaches pro-posed in the session outline: In discussing scenes from my recent qualitative re-search on the making of ‘The Fringe – Cape Town’s innovation and design district’, I want to present a vivid example of how different levels of government, sector repre-sentative bodies, private institutions, artists and other artistically inclined individuals are involved in actively carving out spaces for creative industries in the post-apartheid cityscape. In connection, the artist as entrepreneur is seen as intrinsic dic-tum of the creative industry concept that has lead to the emergence of new social hybrids such as the ‘culturepreneur’ (Lange 2007) that tries not only to mediate but also to merge artistic and economic production in his_her individual social and spatial practices.
The emerging spatial economy of ‘The Fringe’ cannot be analysed without consideration of its surrounding urban context. Its position directly adjacent to the rehabilitation sites of former District Six, infamous for apartheid’s rigorous mass-evictions in 1968, raises questions around appropriation of place, socio-spatial legacy claims and cultural representation. In order to address these difficult questions in a holistic manner and to provide an argument that critically revisits both approaches this paper will enter into a dialogue with the paper of Anne Volvey, who looks at individual art practices in the post-apartheid city through recounting the story of the District Six Sculpture Festival.
status in global urban policy circuits, the intricate ways in which they are translated and reassembled
in the global South, namely in Southern African cities, have not yet been sufficiently
scrutinized.
In order to grasp the experimental formations and erratic flows of governmental technologies
supporting the creative city narrative and the consequences of its sweeping “aesthetisation of
the social” (RECKWITZ 2012), the paper closely attends to the emerging political practices
deriving from Cape Town’s recent designation as World Design Capital 2014.
In October 2012, it was awarded this prestigious accolade after an extensive international bidding
process. Ever since, ‘design’ has become the buzzword with local politicians, planning
elites and creative economists, as the mayoral office has pushed the objective of fostering
‘good governance’ by ‘good design’ to the top of its urban development agenda1. Drawing on
results from long-term empirical fieldwork2, I’d like to offer a two-pronged analysis: Firstly, I
will consider how, by and for whom the global “creative policy fix” (PECK 2011) is adapted
and retrofitted through the use of ‘design//er//ed’ as a floating signifier for several institutional,
spatial and social development projects in Cape Town. These detailed findings will then
serve as basis for a broader theoretical argument around the relational notion of “variegated
neoliberalization” (BRENNER et al. 2010) in the contemporary post-apartheid city and how it
can be studied by enriching policy mobility research with recent epistemological perspectives
on Southern Urbanism.
Papers
Full thesis can be downloaded via the following link:
https://miami.uni-muenster.de/Record/02ab8ae9-1f64-48ee-993f-1d42076e1175
After a brief look at the frequent traveller logbook of the creative city paradigm (Landry 2000; Florida 2002) and the role international cultural accolades play in its
worldwide dissemination and translation, the chapter will explore how the WDC idea came to be ‘grounded’ (Cochrane & Ward 2012) in Cape Town. Reconstructing its travel patterns through the evidence collected from qualitative interviews, media coverage analysis and participant observation helps to uncover the entangled pathdependencies, knowledge channels and personal networks, as well as the diverse array of interests and political rationales involved. Moreover, it reveals the ways in which the global WDC brand has been locally appropriated as a new legitimising label for large-scale government actions that include, but also go beyond, re-enacting a creative city script. The rather erratic and unfi nished nature of this process to date also leads me to question the popular neoliberal notion of ‘fast policy formation’ as ‘the importation of off-the-shelf program techniques from other locations’ (Peck 2002, p. 344). In a rather patronising manner, this implies a more linear modus operandi of prefabricated policy – ‘download, plug and play’ – than the fumbling ‘mix and match’ I encountered while following Cape Town’s route towards its appointment as WDC. My observations support Clarke’s (2012, p. 34) suggestion that much ‘more could be made of the local politics of fast policies’. Furthermore, they resonate with the growing body of academic work that seeks to look beyond neoliberalism as the prime theoretical vantage point, as it often tends to obstruct a broader epistemological engagement with the diverse urban dynamics of post-apartheid South Africa (Parnell & Pieterse 2010; Morange 2011; Parnell & Robinson 2011).
Continue reading in Haferburg, C. & Huchzermeyer, M. (Hrsg.) (2014): Urban Governance in Postapartheid Cities. Stuttgart:Schweizerbart; Durban: UKZN Press, S. 251-270
of the Western hemisphere but can by now also be spotted in many urban planning
schemes, city development frameworks and ‘place-making‘ strategies and practices
in the metropolitan global South.
Unlike cities such as London, Barcelona or Amsterdam, who’s creative and cultural
economies are well researched and their programmes and policies often referenced
as best practice examples to be copied throughout the world, little is known about the
scale and scope let alone the different context and impact of creative and cultural
economies in African cities such as Nairobi, Dakar or Cape Town.
The city at the southern tip of Africa provides a particularly interesting setting: Having
been the prime example for the spatial implementation of apartheid’s racist divide et
impera policies, Cape Town remains to this day heavily affected by the resulting
deep urban divide. However, in spite of the continuing socio-spatial polarization, the
city has developed into an international hub for the creative and cultural economy
with an internationally recognized film production industry, a thriving performing and
visual arts sector, even becoming a recent bidder for the world’s design capital in
2014.
The paper presents work-in-progress material from my current PhD research and
highlights issues evolving around the ambivalent interplay between the contested
economic, political and spatial urban environment and the ‚glocal‘ amalgam of the
city‘s growing creative economy. Furthermore it seeks to discuss the ways in which
the originally Western notion of the ‘creative city’ is challenged by different social and
cultural practices deriving from the current post-colonial/post-apartheid state of Cape
Town.
The creative city idea has unequivocally become a new planning orthodoxy, materialising itself in various shapes, forms and ‘glocalized’ narratives across the globe. The aim of my on-going research project is to scrutinize it’s manifold meanings and consequences – in terms of policy, politics and spatial practice - for post-apartheid Cape Town, adding to the as of yet limited scholarship contextualising these issues against the backdrop of distinct urban experiences in the global South.
In this, the paper tries to provide a common landing strip for both approaches pro-posed in the session outline: In discussing scenes from my recent qualitative re-search on the making of ‘The Fringe – Cape Town’s innovation and design district’, I want to present a vivid example of how different levels of government, sector repre-sentative bodies, private institutions, artists and other artistically inclined individuals are involved in actively carving out spaces for creative industries in the post-apartheid cityscape. In connection, the artist as entrepreneur is seen as intrinsic dic-tum of the creative industry concept that has lead to the emergence of new social hybrids such as the ‘culturepreneur’ (Lange 2007) that tries not only to mediate but also to merge artistic and economic production in his_her individual social and spatial practices.
The emerging spatial economy of ‘The Fringe’ cannot be analysed without consideration of its surrounding urban context. Its position directly adjacent to the rehabilitation sites of former District Six, infamous for apartheid’s rigorous mass-evictions in 1968, raises questions around appropriation of place, socio-spatial legacy claims and cultural representation. In order to address these difficult questions in a holistic manner and to provide an argument that critically revisits both approaches this paper will enter into a dialogue with the paper of Anne Volvey, who looks at individual art practices in the post-apartheid city through recounting the story of the District Six Sculpture Festival.
status in global urban policy circuits, the intricate ways in which they are translated and reassembled
in the global South, namely in Southern African cities, have not yet been sufficiently
scrutinized.
In order to grasp the experimental formations and erratic flows of governmental technologies
supporting the creative city narrative and the consequences of its sweeping “aesthetisation of
the social” (RECKWITZ 2012), the paper closely attends to the emerging political practices
deriving from Cape Town’s recent designation as World Design Capital 2014.
In October 2012, it was awarded this prestigious accolade after an extensive international bidding
process. Ever since, ‘design’ has become the buzzword with local politicians, planning
elites and creative economists, as the mayoral office has pushed the objective of fostering
‘good governance’ by ‘good design’ to the top of its urban development agenda1. Drawing on
results from long-term empirical fieldwork2, I’d like to offer a two-pronged analysis: Firstly, I
will consider how, by and for whom the global “creative policy fix” (PECK 2011) is adapted
and retrofitted through the use of ‘design//er//ed’ as a floating signifier for several institutional,
spatial and social development projects in Cape Town. These detailed findings will then
serve as basis for a broader theoretical argument around the relational notion of “variegated
neoliberalization” (BRENNER et al. 2010) in the contemporary post-apartheid city and how it
can be studied by enriching policy mobility research with recent epistemological perspectives
on Southern Urbanism.