The familiar labyrinth: practicing urban disorientation in post-apartheid Cape Town

Abstract

In this article, I discuss how urban disorientation can be used in ethnographic research as an investigative tool to explore the city. In particular, I examine how urban disorientation can be taken as an ethnographic tactic with the purpose of investigating the relationship between the memories of the city's inhabitants and its urban spaces. I argue that, through urban disorientation, we can generate a process of reterritorialisation of a city's places through which we can better explore how inhabitants relate their memories to the urban territory. In 2011, I went to Cape Town with the goal of investigating the processes of signifying the urban territory in this post-apartheid South African metropolis. Taking inspiration from different sources from the arts and social sciences, particularly Walter Benjamin's Berlin Childhood around 1900, I developed a research methodology based on urban disorientation aiming to explore the relationship between the memories of the people of Cape Town and the urban spaces of the South African metropolis. Wandering aimlessly through Cape Town's streets with its inhabitants, I observed how they explored new pathways in their memory through the city's places.