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180 Conclusion Apartheid, Democracy, and the Urban Future Policing and urban renewal in Cape Town today are part of a lineage of governance strategies bound up with unresolved social tensions that have evolved over decades. These tensions have produced the social and spatial terrain with which now confront us. They run beneath this divided city, holding it together while always threatening to tear it further apart. What I have attempted to show here are some of the mechanisms through which these tensions are reproduced. To do so, I have argued that neoliberalism plays a central and defining role in the organization of urban governance while trying to avoid making claims, directly or by implication, that somehow sociospatial divisions, the conflicts they reflect and regenerate, and the response to these by the political and economic elite are inherently or exclusively a function of market accumulation processes and the actions of those who so eagerly attempt to implement them in pursuit of world city status. It is important for the analysis to be clear that the new city is built on the foundations of the old, which have yet to be dismantled, and that in both of these sharp inequalities, repression, and sometimes violent conflict constitutes integral features of everyday life. At some point, however , we must let go of this conceptual abstraction that allows us to speak so easily of new and old; the challenges may be familiar, yet references to the past steadily lose their explanatory power. This becomes troubling if the result is a reinterpretation of divided Cape Town in which the city is taken largely as a creation of 1994, its historical baggage simply swept away. But it can be an opportunity if we acknowledge that the contradictions and conflicts of the past persist not simply as an effect of inertia; rather, they are powerful forces with the creative capacity to mutate and survive what are otherwise quite transformative eras. Cape Town was once a colonial city, then it became an apartheid city. After 1994, the hope was that it would become a liberated city. From the vantage point of the present, however, this possible future appears as a receding horizon. Instead, quite a different city has emerged, ApArtheiD, DemocrAcy, AnD the UrbAn FUtUre · 181 one in which making distinctions between past and present inequalities is of questionable value because such distinctions imply a linearity that is unsupported by the reality with which we are confronted today. Indeed, it may be more useful to speak about what organizes inequalities today than to search for their origins, for it is through organizing processes that “make sense” of them or harmonize them with prevailing ideologies that these inequalities are positioned to survive. And whatever their nearest historical antecedents may be, their existence today is refracted through mutually reinforcing discourses of market rationality, liberal democracy, and security, gathered around, articulated through, and deployed by what I refer to as a regime of neoliberal urban governance. In the long history of South Africa, this regime is very new, and it may turn out to be short lived. For now, however, it is central to the governance of inequality in the city and, it follows, to the all-important project of representing social inequality within the context of a somewhat altered political and economic dispensation. In this conclusion, therefore, I return to the comparison of the city center and the townships and attempt to draw out the lessons it may hold for our understanding of neoliberal governance regimes in the city and beyond. Cape Town’s Central Business District (CBD) and the Cape Flats are shaped by parallel processes that form part of a broader governance strategy driven by local, national, and transnational discourses, actors, and institutions . The net effect of these processes is to organize and manage the distribution of people and resources in the city under the rubric of development or urban renewal. Although the success of these efforts is always partial, contingent, and unstable, this strategy has been central to the reproduction of the very sociospatial segregation it is meant to overcome. Urban renewal, including the campaign against crime, has been a resounding success in the city center, whereas efforts across the Cape Flats have thus far made little headway in reducing social and economic instability. Further, whereas urban renewal in the CBD is a coordinated, relatively well-planned process that has been sustained over years, on the Cape Flats it is too often piecemeal, derailed by changes in political...

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