Creative Cities, Graffiti and Culture‐Led Development in South Africa: Dlala Indima (‘Play Your Part’)

Abstract

Creative cities and culture‐led development discourses have come under increasing scrutiny as elite‐centric economic development agendas tend to trump ‘civic creativity’ ideals as imagined by Charles Landry. In South Africa, culture‐led development and cultural policy tends to primarily mimic that of the global North, largely focusing on culture as a catalyst for economic and property development. Public art commissioning processes tend to focus on decorative projects as part of urban upgrading, which are often associated with ensuing gentrification and displacement of the urban poor. In contrast to focusing on these kinds of regeneration strategies, this article investigates Dlala Indima, a hip‐hop‐led graffiti project in a rural township in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. This article situates graffiti as a critical social and spatial practice to argue that this case challenges normative cultural planning paradigms. Dlala Indima's work is an alternative approach to cultural development by and for young people who are usually marginalized by the mainstream practice of culture‐led economic development. The project challenges dominant creative cities and culture‐led development discourses in three ways: first, it challenges the normative processes of regeneration; secondly, it grounds participatory practice; and finally, it shifts participation from ‘tyranny to transformation’ through the ubuntu of hip‐hop, the notion of ubuntu being based on the communitarian notion of ‘ubuntu, ngubuntu ngabantu’—‘I am because you are’.

URBAN CELEBRATION IN A BRAZILIAN FAVELA: From an Art Festival to a Youth Movement

“…First, as has been noted throughout this article, Fazendinhando is youth-led (see Figure 3). In line with the cultural initiatives already discussed, as well as many others throughout Brazil (Araújo and Cambria, 2013;Angelini, 2015;Caldeira, 2015), Latin America (McGuirk, 2014) and other countries in the global South (Sitas, 2020), Jardim Colombo's prospects of a better future rely on its creative and politically active youth. What is remarkable is that this generation born and raised in Jardim Colombo feels part of a well-connected national and transnational network of change-makers.…”

“…23 23As Rike Sitas notes, such creative practices are not isolated events nor exclusive to Latin American contexts, but are spreading across disadvantaged communities in global South contexts, proving that an alternative culture‐led form of development genuinely born in Southern countries is possible (Sitas, 2020). …”

Silicon Savannahs and motorcycle taxis: A Southern perspective on the frontiers of platform urbanism

“…This of course aligns with the push by international lenders to use ICT to spur entrepreneurial forms of development (Heeks, 2017). Not unlike the “world class city” (McDonald, 2012) or the “creative city” (Nkula- Wenz, 2019; Sitas, 2020), the “smart city” (Watson, 2015) has been inscribed into both discourses and investment programs in African urban areas, shaping imaginaries and practices alike. From online tax payment systems to “intelligent meters,” smart city investments often aim to use digital platforms to optimize or improve service delivery in cities across the continent.…”

Movement 5. Sensing the Affective Lives of Arrangements

“…By-laws are used to regulate the complex arrangements of space and race in a way that blurs distinctions between the legal, the aesthetic and the atmospheric. Cape Town ' s graffiti by-law, for example, permits approved murals at the edgy-edge of creative neighborhoods, but it bans tagging and the visual voice of hip-hop, essentially criminalizing black youth and expression in the city with prohibitively expensive fi nes and jail sentences (Sitas, 2020 ). At an auditory level, aff ects and atmospheres of blackness have long been the target of public nuisance legislation, which seeks to regulate the movement and behavior of people under the guise of noise control in a problematic, deeply racialized politics of sound.…”