Building Apartheid: On Architecture and Order in Imperial Cape Town

摘要

This volume, the fourth title in the Ashgate Studies in Architecture series, is a substantial achievement due to Nicholas Coetzer's thorough scholarship drawing on archives and other primary sources to support a historical study of architecture, housing, and urban planning in Cape Town, South Africa, from the late nineteenth century to 1948, when apartheid officially began. Coetzer argues that the project of legal exclusion known as apartheid began fifty years before it was enforced through legislation. The book is admirable for its highly articulate portrayal of the social, political, and cultural contexts that, through architecture and the ordering of urban and suburban spaces, "were actively constructing Cape Town and South Africa into a territory of the British Empire-mapped out, ordered and remade through architecture into a landscape legitimizing their continued control and exploitation of the land and its people" (215). The book is strong in its historical treatment of pre-apartheid Cape Town through a postcolonial lens, though not an overly determined one. Perhaps the most compelling aspect of this study is the revelation that the seemingly innocuous humanist and scientifically based decisions around the aesthetics and ordering of space in pre-apartheid Cape Town gave rise to a dehumanized landscape and "unfold[ed] without contradiction from Empire to apartheid" (216), laying "the solid foundations onto which the ugly edifice of apartheid was built" (13).