Download are we having fun yet? leisure and consumption in the post

ARE WE HAVING FUN YET? LEISURE AND
CONSUMPTION IN THE POST-APARTHEID CITY
BELINDA DODSON
Research Associate, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
E-mail: [email protected]
Received: April 2000; revised June 2000
ABSTRACT
Recent international literature across a range of disciplines describes how leisure and
consumption have become major forces in contemporary society. Such developments have
social, economic and geographical implications. At a time when these global changes are
combining with dramatic local transformation, there is an urgent need for South African
scholars to engage with international debates on leisure and consumption. The end of apartheid
has allowed people to avail themselves of leisure and consumption opportunities from which
they were previously excluded, yet the shift from public- to private-sector provision is imposing
new geographies of deprivation and exclusion. The situation is further complicated by the
country's increasing incorporation into global patterns of consumption. This paper seeks to
initiate debate and set out an agenda for research on the role of leisure and consumption in
shaping South African society and geography.
Key words: Leisure, consumption, South Africa, post-apartheid, theoretical review, research
agenda
INTRODUCTION
International trends, as revealed in a growing
literature across a range of disciplines, demonstrate a shift away from a focus on work and
production and towards leisure and consumption as major forces in contemporary society
(Baudrillard 1970 (trans. 1998); Bourdieu
1984; Featherstone 1991; Zukin 1991, 1995;
Shields 1992; Sorkin 1992; Rojek 1993, 1995,
1997, 1999; Miller 1995; Urry 1995; Chaney
1996; Slater 1997; Hearn & Roseneil 1999).
Indeed the very boundaries between production and consumption have themselves become blurred in the emerging `new economy',
where what is produced is as likely to be an
intangible good in the service or entertainment sector as a traditional, material, industrial product. The associated phenomenon of
the `new middle class' with their `leisure lifestyles' has been the subject of much research
and analysis by sociologists as well as geogra-
phers (Featherstone 1991; Shields 1992; Slater
1997). While this research has been largely
concerned with the developed world, the
increasingly global reach of social, economic
and cultural exchange make these debates
relevant almost everywhere (Howes 1996).
This `new society', together with the `new
economy' which is both its foundation and
its product, renders problematic many of
the dualities that geographers, sociologists,
planners and administrators have long taken
for granted. For example, as leisure and
culture become ever more drawn into the
economic realm of consumption, the boundaries between work and leisure, economic and
cultural, public and private, if not entirely
removed, are at least destabilised. This is true
not just conceptually and functionally but
also spatially, as the distinctions between
workplace and home, public and private
space, local and foreign, become blurred.
These economic and social transformations
Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie ± 2000, Vol. 91, No. 4, pp. 412±425
# 2000 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG
Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA
LEISURE AND CONSUMPTION IN THE POST-APARTHEID CITY
thus have implications for urban form as well
as urban function.
Until its own dramatic socio-political transformation in the 1990s, South Africa was
isolated from many of these developments,
materially and intellectually. Even today, high
levels of unemployment and poverty might
make a focus on leisure and consumption seem
an irrelevant indulgence. Yet South Africa is
now fully and inescapably implicated in global
social, economic and cultural systems. From
both a theoretical and pragmatic viewpoint,
then, it is appropriate that we begin to think
through the applicability to the South African
context of these international developments
and the associated intellectual debates. This
paper is intended more as a challenge and a
prod to other scholars than as a systematic
treatment in its own right. It points to some of
the key international literature of recent years
and suggests a research agenda that might
lead to an improved understanding of current
and future developments in South Africa's
cities.
CONSUMPTION ALL-CONSUMING
`They had revolutions; we have retail' (Out
Front 2000).
This simple sentence sums up the shift that
seems to have taken place over the second half
of the twentieth century: from ideology to
lifestyle; from class-based to identity politics;
from production to consumption as the
primary driving force of social and economic
change. Although contested both in its explanation and its `newness' (Jackson 1995),
the broad contours of this shift are now widely
recognised. Among its earliest theorists were
Jean Baudrillard (1970) and Pierre Bourdieu
(1984). Bourdieu provides a useful account of
consumption's mutually constitutive social
and economic dimensions:
The new bourgeoisie is the initiator of the
ethical retooling required by the new
economy from which it derives its power
and profits, whose functioning depends as
much on the production of needs and
consumers as on the production of goods.
The new logic of the economy rejects the
ascetic ethic of production and accumu-
413
lation . . . in favour of a hedonistic morality
of consumption, based on credit, spending
and enjoyment. (Bourdieu 1984, p. 310)
To Bourdieu as to Baudrillard, this `new'
consumption goes beyond traditional goods
and services. As Ritzer (1998) explains in his
introduction to the English translation of The
Consumer Society, consumption as viewed by
Baudrillard is truly all-consuming:
Baudrillard seeks to extend consumption
from goods not only to services, but to
virtually everything else. In his view, `anything can become a consumer object'. As a
result, `consumption is laying hold of the
whole of life'. What this communicates is
that consumption has been extended to all
culture; we are witnessing the commodification of culture. (Ritzer 1998, p. 15)
This extension of an understanding of consumption is a key feature of Baudrillard's work.
Also central is the idea of culture, both in the
sense of a pervasive culture of consumption
and in terms of culture itself increasingly
becoming a commodity for consumption. Indeed many of these ideas entered geography
in what has been described as the discipline's
`cultural turn' of the late 1980s and early
1990s (Barnett 1998). Not only did culture
re-enter geography, but geography re-entered
cultural studies as the implication of space
and place in new patterns of consumption and
commodification ± including the commodification of place itself ± became ever more
apparent. In his editorial introduction to
Acknowledging Consumption (1995), anthropologist Daniel Miller asserted that `consumption
has become the vanguard of history' (p. 1),
presenting a fundamental challenge to the
basic premises of a range of disciplines,
including geography.
Among the best guides to the geographical
outcomes of `consumer society' are Peter
Jackson and Nigel Thrift's contribution to
Miller's 1995 Acknowledging Consumption and
Mike Crang's chapter, `Geographies of Commodities and Consumption', in his 1998 textbook, Cultural Geography. Jackson and Thrift
identify a number of ways in which geography
is involved in consumption behaviours and practices: in the sites and patterns of consumption;
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414
in the chains that link the production of goods
and services to multiple locations of consumption; and in the spaces and places of contemporary consumerism. Recent changes in these
geographies have created a `new consumer
landscape' (Jackson & Thrift 1995, p. 207) of
gentrified inner cities, theme parks, shopping
malls and `festival marketplaces'. This landscape will be as recognisable to residents of
Johannesburg or Cape Town as to those of Los
Angeles or Toronto. Yet Jackson and Thrift
criticise the existing geographical literature
on consumption for falling victim to `the
tyranny of the single site' (p. 211), and a
limited range of sites at that. Instead, they
argue, we need to pay greater attention to
multiple sites of consumption as well as to the
functional and spatial links between production, distribution and consumption. Here
they identify a number of important recent
changes: an increase in the length of commodity chains, which more and more are
global in scale; an increase in the pace of
activity in and along these chains; and their
growing complexity, including geographical
complexity as they come to involve an evergreater number of places and interactions
between them. Each of these changes can be
seen in South Africa, whose (re)incorporation
into global commodity chains, at production
and consumption ends as well as points
between, has been especially rapid ± and thus
particularly dramatic in its social and geographical impact.
Geographers' discussions of the spaces and
places of consumption have included both
`real' sites of consumption (department
stores, shopping malls, the high street) and
the evocation of place in consumer advertising. Increasingly, these two senses of place
are conjoined: spaces of consumption can be
read as `three-dimensional advertisements'
(Jackson & Thrift 1995, p. 223), while places
themselves are packaged, marketed, advertised and consumed as products (Urry 1995).
Such sites of consumption, both real and
symbolic, can be criticised on a number of
counts. Not least is the way in which the
production process, including the people
involved in it, is largely and quite deliberately
rendered invisible to the ultimate consumer.
Indeed many of those producers are economi# 2000 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG
BELINDA DODSON
cally excluded from consuming the goods they
themselves produce. Festival marketplaces and
shopping malls, with their ersatz streetlife and
impression of freedom and accessibility, can
in reality be profoundly undemocratic and
exclusionary places (Goss 1993). In an earlier
work, Jackson (1989) wrote of the `growing
confidence of the ``consumption classes'' and
the increased alienation of the impoverished
and despairing ``underclass'', each with its
own distinctive geography' (p. 5). Such criticisms ring especially true in a markedly
unequal and spatially divided society such as
South Africa's.
In exposing these connections and contradictions, it is easier to read consumption's
signs in the resulting material landscape than
it is to understand the human agents who give
it form and purpose. Far from being mere
dupes, consumers play an active and creative
role, shaping, altering and sometimes resisting
both the practices and the landscapes of
consumption (Sack 1992; Jackson & Thrift
1995; Slater 1997; Jackson 1998a). Crang
(1996) and others have begun to do some
significant theoretical and empirical research
on the complex `entanglements' between
consumers and consumption systems, including the relationship between consumption
and the `cultural politics of identity' (Jackson
& Holbrook 1995, p. 1913). The changing
nature and geography of such entanglements
in the South African context, particularly
since the end of apartheid, presents a number
of intriguing avenues for research. Even more
neglected in geographical and other studies of
consumption are the non-consumers: those
whom the consumption-driven economy excludes, marginalises or displaces. This neglect
is starting to be addressed, with a developing
research focus on the themes of power,
resistance and marginalisation (Hearn &
Roseneil 1999). Again, this is an obvious
subject for further enquiry in South Africa.
South Africa also provides an interesting
context in which to make cross-cultural
comparisons of consumption, such as those
described in Appadurai (1986) or Howes
(1996). Appadurai's notion of `the social life
of things', which places commodities in
cultural perspective, has been the inspiration
for a wide range of studies by sociologists,
LEISURE AND CONSUMPTION IN THE POST-APARTHEID CITY
anthropologists and cultural historians as well
as by geographers. There is ongoing debate,
for example, as to whether the globalisation
of consumption leads to homogenisation or
creolisation (Howes 1996; Jackson 1998a). This
debate has three central themes: the ways in
which Western commodities (such as Coca-Cola)
are received, transformed and consumed by
non-Western cultures; the ways in which
`exotic' commodities (such as tropical fruit
or `ethnic' music) are consumed in Western
cultures; and the way in which cultural
difference itself has become commodified
(Jackson 1998a; Howes 1996). Although a
clicheÂ, there is much truth in the representation of South Africa as `a world in one
country' (itself a slogan in the country's
packaging for tourist consumption), thus
providing a rich laboratory for such crosscultural research.
In outlining an agenda for geographical
research on consumption, Peter Jackson concludes:
A geographical understanding of commodity cultures should therefore involve both
an exploration of the physical movement of
goods and services . . . and an appreciation
of the commodification of cultural difference. This is undeniably a broad agenda,
but it provides ample scope for bringing
together the geographies of production
and consumption, and maybe ultimately
transcending the unhelpful distinction
between `the cultural' and `the economic'.
( Jackson 1998a, p. 105)
Indeed that very distinction may be breaking
down. As Slater (1997, p. 32) puts it, `culture
is now organizing the economy in crucial
respects', blurring the boundary between the
cultural and the economic. One of the
important ways in which this is occurring is
in the consumption of experiences such as
leisure and tourism, and it is to these forms
of consumption that discussion now turns.
LEISURE AS CONSUMPTION
Sociologist Chris Rojek (1985, 1989a, 1989b,
1990, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1999) has perhaps
gone further than any other single scholar in
theorising leisure, which over the past decade
415
has moved from the margins to the very centre
of sociological enquiry. Geographers, too,
have begun to pay more attention to leisure
in recent years (Crouch 1999). Rojek (1985,
1989a, 1989b, 1993, 1995, 1999) provides a
historical account of leisure practice and
theory, relating leisure to broader processes
of material and social transformation. The
very definition of leisure is seen as a product
of the rise of capitalism and the associated
alienation of labour (Rojek 1993). He and
other scholars, such as Murdock (1994) and
Reid (1995), therefore relate recent changes
in the perception and practice of leisure to
those wider changes in the global economic
system variously referred to as post-Fordism,
post-modernism or late capitalism. According to Rojek (1993), leisure has become
`equivalent to mere consumption' (p. 133).
This he sees as part of a generalised `dedifferentiation', including a breakdown of the
distinction between leisure and work:
In particular, the received idea of leisure as
freedom from work looks decidedly unconvincing, as does the whole work/leisure
distinction. For `work' and `leisure' can no
longer be seen as terms whose meanings
are unambiguous. Instead they must be
seen as terms in which a variety of meanings, none of them authoritative, merge
and collide. (Rojek 1993, p. 96)
Thus `[o]ld workspace becomes reallocated to
leisure functions . . . leisure activity requires
some of the characteristics of work activity'
(Rojek 1993, p. 134). Of course such observations come as no surprise to feminist
scholars, who have long pointed out that the
notion of a clear division between work and
leisure, either in terms of time or in terms of
space, is a decidedly masculinist view (Wearing
1998).
Along with the de-differentiation of work
and leisure, the divide between leisure and
consumption has been similarly destabilised
(Tomlinson 1991). This is happening in three
key ways. First, conventional retail consumption (i.e. shopping) has become a major
leisure activity in its own right (Jackson 1991;
Shields 1992). Second, spaces of consumption
such as shopping malls have also become sites
for various forms of leisure activity. This
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416
occurs sometimes by deliberate design, such as
in `festival marketplaces' which include other
forms of recreational activity and cultural
consumption in addition to conventional
retail (Britton 1991; Knox 1991); but often
simply by the appropriation of spaces of
consumption for other purposes, as exemplified by teenage `mall rats' (Mitchell 2000).
Third, leisure itself has become commodified:
increasingly it is something that is packaged,
marketed, purchased and consumed (Rojek
1993, 1995) ± membership in an exclusive gym
or golf club, for example. All three processes
are at work in South Africa, but in highly
uneven ways both socially and geographically.
New leisure practices pose a challenge to
leisure theory. Although describing the idea of
post-modern leisure as an oxymoron, Rojek
(1995) nevertheless acknowledges the contribution of post-modern or post-structuralist
theory to an understanding of contemporary
leisure. Most people's experience of leisure
today is ambiguous, messy, transitory, fugitive
and conditional (Rojek 1995); its geography
correspondingly untidy and fragmentary. These
trends have required a corresponding shift
in the way that leisure is understood and
analysed. Sociologists' understandings of leisure
have moved from a broadly structuralist
approach in the 1980s, emphasising struggle
and resistance (Clarke & Critcher 1985; Rojek
1985), to a much less coherent mix of poststructuralist approaches (Botterill & Tomlinson 1991; Brackenridge 1993; Henry 1994;
Collins 1995). Geographers, too, have changed
the way they look at leisure, as changes in
leisure practice have brought about new
geographies, with new patterns of ownership
and access and new meanings and uses of
space (Crouch 1999).
The move to post-structuralism does not
mean that leisure theory has abandoned its
critical stance. Feminist scholarship in particular has made an important contribution to
developments in leisure theory. In her book
Leisure and Feminist Theory (1998), Betsy Wearing identifies the project for post-structuralist
feminist leisure theory as being `to open up
spaces for women and men to move beyond
rigid gender, class, race, age and ethnic definitions of the self . . . and to envisage spaces
which extend people's horizons and provide
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BELINDA DODSON
the potential for personal and political
growth' (p. 188). Leisure can thus be seen as
a realm in which women (and other marginalised groups) can challenge social constraints
on their roles and identities:
If we define citizenship in its most general
sense, as the right to participate fully in
contemporary social, political and cultural
life and to help shape its future forms, it is
immediately clear that questions of leisure
are central. The domain of leisure provides
many of the key spaces for participation
and many of the symbolic resources that
allow differences to be negotiated with
insight and understanding. (Murdock 1994,
p. 246)
It is perhaps this wider sense of leisure in the
practice of citizenship that is most relevant in
the South African context, where there are
certainly many `differences to be negotiated'
and few literal or metaphorical playing fields
on which such negotiation can take place. The
following passage describes 1990s Britain, but
could equally have been written to describe
Cape Town, Durban or Johannesburg today:
Major locations for leisure ± cinemas,
shopping complexes, heritage trails ± are
more likely to have beggars squatting in the
shadow of the entrances or sitting outside
on pavements and benches, than at any
time for decades. Inside, these spaces are
increasingly surveyed by video cameras and
patrolled by security guards. Managements
everywhere reserve the right to remove
anyone who does not `belong'. They may
be pleasure grounds for those who can
afford to enter them, but they are exclusion
zones for those who cannot. They have
become fortresses of fun. (Murdock 1994,
p. 242)
This raises questions of leisure as human need
or even right, and to debate over the consumer as opposed to the citizen as the target
of leisure provision. In Murdock's words, `new
times' for some are `hard times' for others,
with all the Dickensian and decidedly un-postmodern implications of the latter term. The
geographical outcomes of this are considered
in more detail below. First, we turn to what
is perhaps the epitome of leisure as con-
LEISURE AND CONSUMPTION IN THE POST-APARTHEID CITY
sumption: the consumption of place through
travel and tourism.
TOURISM: CONSUMING PLACES
Like leisure, the meaning and practice of
tourism has undergone significant change in
recent decades. To Crouch (1999), leisure and
tourism have become effectively indistinguishable, to the extent that he chose to title his
book Leisure/Tourism Geographies and refers
throughout to `leisure/tourism' as a unified
concept. Certainly `[t]ourism is no longer a
differentiated set of social practices with its
own and distinct rules, times and spaces' (Urry
1994, p. 234). And as leisure and tourism
converge in practice, however incompletely or
contradictorily, so they coincide (or collide)
in space, whether in real, material places or
in the virtual realms of television or cyberspace.
This `de-differentiation' of tourism from
leisure is but one aspect of transformation in
the tourist sector. Indeed changes in tourist
practice have led to the development of what
some describe as `post-tourism'. To Urry, an
important characteristic of post-tourism is
its ironic playfulness: `the post-tourist knows
that they are a tourist and that tourism is a
game, or rather a whole series of games with
multiple texts and no single, authentic tourist
experience' (Urry 1990, p. 100). Undertaken
ostensibly in pursuit of difference, tourism
ultimately and inevitably weakens the contrast
between `home' and `abroad'. Post-tourism
recognises this as a fact of life, such that the
`quest for authenticity is a declining force in
tourist motivation' (Rojek 1997, p. 71). Geographer Ian Munt (1994) identifies another
(or, as he puts it in his title, `an ``Other''')
version of the post-modern tourist. While
concurring with Urry and Rojek that there is
a move away from authenticity, he makes the
claim that there is a simultaneous countertrend towards a heightened desire for authenticity. He relates this to the `frenetic struggle
undertaken by the new middle class in
establishing and maintaining social differentiation' (p. 102). Significantly for tourism
in and to South Africa, Munt identifies the
Third World as `conveying authentic experiences that are culturally and environmentally
417
sensitive; practices that have emerged as the
symbols of middle-class lifestyles' (p. 119).
Of whatever stripe, the post-tourist is still
very much a consumer of culture. Indeed
there has been a marked growth in cultural
tourism since the mid 1980s and tourism is
`increasingly packaged in terms of cultural
values and experiences' (Craik 1997, p. 118).
Another example of de-differentiation, `[t]ourism and culture now plainly overlap and there
is no clear frontier between the two' (Rojek &
Urry 1997, p. 3). Such combining of tourism
and culture is often a strategic activity employed as a strategy for local economic
development, seeking synergies between leisure,
tourism and cultural consumption (Zukin
1995). One manifestation of this is the
dramatic expansion of urban tourism (Page
1995; Tyler et al. 1998). Yet the sharing of sites
and activities amongst a range of leisure,
tourism and cultural consumption functions
has both complementary and contradictory
aspects, and has the potential to generate as
much conflict as synergy (Zukin 1995).
The geographical implications of these social,
economic and cultural changes in tourism are
manifold and complex, still being worked out
in different ways in different places and thus a
field wide open for further research. Britton's
discussion of the commodification of place for
tourist purposes (1991) and Urry's The Tourist
Gaze (1990) and Consuming Places (1995) are
helpful guides. Britton (1991) identifies three
ways in which places are turned into tourist
attractions, and thus commodified:
The tourist production system . . . can take
advantage of existing cultural attractions or
`curiosities' by co-opting them for the
purposes of accumulation into tourist
products . . . It can create its own attractions, such as all-inclusive recreation resorts, theme parks, or ship cruises. And
tourism itself can be (voluntarily) co-opted
into other commercial ventures in order to
enhance the market profile, commercial
returns, or social legitimation of the venture: trade expositions, shopping centres
and the rehabilitation of the downtown
areas of cities are examples. (p. 464)
Tourism thus not only `reflects the defining
dynamics of capitalist society [but] assimilates
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418
place and territory into those dynamics'
(Britton 1991, p. 466). Geography is therefore
fundamental to a critical understanding of
contemporary tourist practice. `[T]he study of
tourism assists us to recognise how the social
meaning and materiality of space and place is
created through the practice of tourism itself,
and how these representations are then packaged into the accumulation process' (Britton
1991, p. 475). In studying these processes,
attention must be paid not just to the material
landscape outcomes but also to the flows of
capital and the labour processes that create
and sustain those outcomes. Such a critical
geography of tourism must recognise `the
social relations embodied in tourism practices
and processes' (Kinnaird & Hall 1994, p. 2),
including issues around race and gender. As
an international tourist destination of growing
significance, and with tourism identified as a
major growth sector in the national economy,
South Africa is an obvious location for tourism
research of this nature.
Perhaps the ultimate de-differentiation of
tourism from `everyday life' is expressed in the
idea that, in a sense, we are all tourists now, as
technology, transnationalism and globalisation bring the world even to those who never
leave home. In the words of Dean MacCannell
(1992, p. 2): `The adaptations of international
migrants and refugees are as much a part of
emerging world culture as the resorts and
Pizza Huts for tourists which have recently
been built on the beaches of their former
countries.' This presents a fundamental challenge to conventional definitions of tourism,
tourists and travel, of `home' and `abroad',
`local' and `foreign', demanding a corresponding rethinking of tourism research.
Certainly South Africa, source and destination
of significant numbers of international migrants as well as tourists, is caught up in this
rearrangement of the global human mosaic,
with its complex reworkings of society and
space, place and landscape.
GEOGRAPHIES OF LEISURE, TOURISM
AND CONSUMPTION
The various and intersecting processes of
de-differentiation described above have a
number of geographical outcomes. One is
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BELINDA DODSON
what has been termed `disembedding' or
`abstraction' from place: `The growth of
postmodern shopping malls, leisure centres
and supermarkets provides the same aesthetic
and spatial references wherever one is in the
world' (Rojek 1995, p. 146). Certainly there
are common patterns and forms associated
with these new geographies of leisure, consumption and tourism. These have received
the most comprehensive academic treatment
in the North American context (Davis 1992;
Sorkin 1992; Zukin 1991, 1995), but can
increasingly be identified in cities around
the world. Mike Davis's (1992) description of
Los Angeles, for example, with its `mall-aspanopticon-prison' and `urban enclavization'
(p. 244) could just as well describe Johannesburg.
Yet the suggestion that there is an inexorable process of global gravitation towards the
American model of consumption practices
and landscapes ± `malling, theming, merging
of leisure and retail and so on' (Crewe & Lowe
1995, p. 1895) ± can easily be exaggerated.
Whereas earlier writing foresaw inevitable
homogenisation into a global consumer culture and landscape, recent work sees more of
a dialectic, with simultaneous homogenisation
and heterogenisation creating a variety of
place-specific hybrids and juxtapositions. The
outcomes of these competing tendencies
depend on the particular interactions between
cultural and economic forces in particular
places, and warrant detailed empirical research in diverse local contexts. Even where
there are physically similar, copycat forms in
the built environment, from shopping malls to
tourist resorts, different social and cultural
interpretations attach to such places in different localities, or even between different
groups of people in a single locality. There is
also a `time geography' to such places, with
their occupants, meaning and use changing
depending on the time of day, week or year.
As Pico Iyer observes, instead of the global
order `being smoothed down into a tepid
whole . . . the world is more divided than ever,
in part because of our illusions of closeness'
(Iyer 2000, p. 30). Part of that illusion is the
apparent ubiquity of the globalised consumer
landscape, which masks (rather than erases)
local distinctiveness.
LEISURE AND CONSUMPTION IN THE POST-APARTHEID CITY
What is clear is that de-differentiation in
functional terms does lead to a blurring of
certain geographical forms hitherto considered discrete, such as work, home and
leisure space; public and private space; social
and commercial space:
A major result of this cultural mediation is
now a blurring of distinctions between
many categories of space and time that we
experience every day: when the leisure of
home life is invaded by well-designed
machines, cities appear more alike, and
Saturday traffic jams connected with shopping are worse than weekday morning rush
hours. In general, spaces that used to stand
alone . . . now mix social and commercial
functions, sponsors, and symbols. (Zukin
1991, pp. 39±40)
This has implications for another form of
social mapping: the boundary between public
and private space (Jackson & Holbrook 1995;
Fyfe 1998; Jackson 1998b). Whereas the street
has traditionally been recognised as public
space, a mall, gym, hotel or theme park is
almost always privately owned, with right of
admission reserved. Such spaces can thus can
be controlled and policed as private space
even where they fulfil the traditional functions
of public space. Public space, too, has become
increasingly subject to surveillance. Sharon
Zukin's description of cities in the United
States rings all too true in South Africa today:
`[S]trangers mingling in public space and
fears of violent crime have inspired the growth
of private police forces, gated and barred
communities, and a movement to design public
spaces for maximum surveillance. These, too,
are a source of contemporary urban culture'
(Zukin 1995, p. 2).
Thus geographical de-differentiation at one
level cannot erase the geography of material
inequality and social difference at another,
more fundamental level. For if the convergence of consumption, leisure and tourism is
both the product and the preserve of the new
middle class, it is at the same time a powerful
agent of social differentiation, exclusion and
marginalisation. In an inescapable paradox,
the superficial homogenisation of culture and
landscape is the very means by which inequitable access to opportunities and facilities is
419
reproduced. Perhaps nowhere is this more
true than in post-apartheid South Africa,
subject of the final section of this paper.
LEISURE, TOURISM AND
CONSUMPTION IN POST-APARTHEID
SOUTH AFRICA
Given South Africa's previous peripheralisation through economic, cultural and political
sanctions, the arrival of some of these `new'
geographies has here been especially rapid
and dramatic. New export markets have been
established and old ones re-established. Imports have expanded and broadened, with a
wider variety of consumer goods now available
from more countries of origin. Cultural and
sporting sanctions have been lifted, providing
new (and restoring old) opportunities for
leisure and recreation. International tourism
has boomed since the end of apartheid and
is increasingly viewed as a mainstay of the
national economy (South Africa 1996, 1998).
Similarly, South African passport-holders are
now free to travel to countries from which they
were previously excluded, including most of
the rest of Africa (Crush, this issue). All this
has brought the country into new circuits of
culture and capital, and new markets and
sources, many in the East (and South), have
been added to traditional trading partners,
mostly in the West (or North). The country
has thus become implicated in the globalisation of consumption, displaying many of the
features discussed above.
Of course not all change has been externally generated. The end of apartheid has
brought about social and economic freedoms
that allow South Africans of all races to avail
themselves of local leisure, tourism and consumption opportunities from which they were
previously excluded. The list is long, but
includes sportsfields and stadia, public swimming pools, parks, restaurants, bars, cinemas,
hotels, game reserves and beaches. Not only
can black South Africans now legally use facilities previously restricted to whites, but white
South Africans can more readily access forms
of leisure and consumption associated with
black culture, including food and music. At
the same time the shift from public- to privatesector provision of many leisure facilities is
# 2000 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG
420
imposing new geographies of deprivation and
exclusion, based on wealth rather than race
but still essentially racist in effect. Geographies
of crime and fear also act to discourage
greater inter-racial interaction in leisure and
consumption activity (Bremner 1998). None
of these geographies has yet been fully
explored. Even conventional retail geography
has been ignored, let alone the newer cultural
geographies of consumption so prevalent in
the Anglo-American literature of the past
decade.
The situation begs research by geographers
from a range of sub-disciplines (social, economic, cultural) and employing diverse methodologies, from conventional macro-scale
analysis to detailed ethnographic research at
the micro-scale. Contemporary South Africa
presents wide opportunity for `consuming the
other', with all the attendant issues of appropriation, negotiation and transformation that
such cross-cultural consumption inevitably
entails. Not only are South African cultures,
products and places increasingly being consumed by foreigners, but South Africans
themselves, both black and white, are increasingly consuming cultural commodities from
other African countries. The booming trade in
African crafts, such as at Cape Town's PanAfrican Market, presents an intriguing subject
for geographical treatment. A further topic
inviting study is the phenomenon of crossborder migration to South African towns and
cities for purposes of consumption (shopping) rather than production (labour), typically by women from neighbouring Southern
African countries (Dodson 1998).
Tourism, both international and domestic,
adds another layer to an already complicated
and contested picture. As elsewhere in the
world, urban and cultural tourism are expanding sectors, adding to the traditionally strong
nature-based tourism epitomised in the
Kruger National Park. Also in line with international trends, the tourist market has here
become increasingly fragmented and diverse,
whether in demographic, economic or geographical terms, demanding an ever-wider
range of tourist accommodation and type of
tourist experience. Apartheid itself has become subject to the tourist gaze, for example
in guided tours of Robben Island, excursions
# 2000 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG
BELINDA DODSON
to black townships, and in museums such as
Johannesburg's Museum Afrika and Cape
Town's District Six Museum (Goudie et al.
1999). While acknowledging the largely untapped potential of cultural and `alternative'
forms of tourism, most of the tourism research
to date has been firmly within an economic
paradigm. Its primary concerns are how
tourism might best be mobilised as an agent
of development and empowerment, such as in
the Government's spatial development initiatives (SDIs) and small, medium and micro
enterprise (SMME) strategies (Rogerson
2000). Cultural geographies of tourism remain barely explored, although tourism is
surely an area of research in which the
separation between the cultural and the
economic is artificial and counter-productive.
There is, therefore, scope for various types of
research, from quantitative demographic and
economic analyses to qualitative ethnographies
of both the producers and consumers of the
tourist experience.
There have been some tantalising forays
into these new geographies of consumption,
leisure and tourism (Hall 1995; Ndebele
1998; Van Niekerk 1998; Dirsuweit 1999;
Goudie et al. 1999; Moore 1999). Not all of
these have been formally `academic'. The
following passage, for example, captures
the unsettling combination of homogenised
global consumer lifestyle with gritty local
reality that characterises contemporary Johannesburg:
In the nowhere city which is Jo'burg we, the
people of the leisured classes, always seem
to be taking our bodies to where they've
been before . . . Along the bleak, billboardencrusted thoroughfares and freeways of
this city we take them to safe places, walled
or otherwise enclosed, implicitly or explicitly exclusive, places which provide the
flattering illusion of meaningful being and
dwelling. We travel in our burglar- and
bullet-proof cars from our walled and wired
houses to the well-patrolled labyrinths of
Westgate, Eastgate, Northgate, all those
lookalike bunker-faced shopping malls.
Or, if we consider ourselves too cool for
trolleys, we take our bods out to some leafy
suburb or other, to a carefully preserved
LEISURE AND CONSUMPTION IN THE POST-APARTHEID CITY
villagey street, where we cling to our tables
in cutesy coffee bars or linger in secondhand bookshops before they disappear, like
countless others before them, into even
safer neighbourhoods. We'll follow them
there too and protect them all over again
for as long as they last, sipping our sidewalk
cappuccinos, sheltering behind our newspapers and our cellphones. And so we try to
shut out the beggars and the parking
attendants gesturing to us endlessly with
bland knowingness from the margins of
our guarded field of vision. (Van Niekerk
1998)
Van Niekerk goes on to provide an insightful
account of Johannesburg's northern-suburbs
`gym space', popular preserve of the South
African urban middle class, both `old' and
`new'. Again, it is worth quoting her at length:
Always having come in from the cold of
the nowhere city, we always have to turn
ourselves out again, taking our bodies back
to where they've been before ± vulnerable,
shootable, lootable, rape-able, first-world
bodies suspended for ever in a multiplestop flight . . . It is this added dimension of
fear characterizing life in the city that lends
extra poignancy to the highly artificial and
privatized social space in which the pseudocommunity of body-maintainers tinker away
at their fitness and longevity programmes.
Here a double optics of panorama and
reflection flatters the gaze of the insecure.
The windows offer an almost all-round view
of the city; the mirrors in between cast back
the images of the inmates. And so the gym
is at the same time a safe and cosy nest,
closed in on itself, and an open and safe
vantage point from which to take in the
cityscape. (Van Niekerk 1998)
Shopping malls are another significant venue
for the South African middle classes at leisure.
Although accessible to the urban black bourgeoisie, and thus providing a superficial
illusion of racial integration, a mall cannot
be seen as truly deracialised public space.
Private security firms and an array of surveillance technology protecting consumers from
crime and people deemed `undesirable': `the
destitute, the inappropriately dressed, hawkers
421
and youth judged intent on loitering with
intent' (Moore 1999). At one such mall, the
(black) editor of the Daily News was mistaken
for a car thief and beaten up by shopping
centre security guards (Moore 1999). Moore
reads this not as an aberration, but as symptomatic of the way in which post-apartheid
urban space is being reshaped. Market forces,
he argues, are effectively perpetuating apartheid, as the (mostly white) wealthy increasingly confine their leisure and consumption
activity to suburban homes and malls, abandoning inner cities and public transport nodes
to the (largely black) poor. Dirsuweit (1999)
draws similar conclusions in her analysis of
Johannesburg. Both she and Moore see possibilities of rearranging this neo-apartheid
urban geography through imaginative and
committed planning measures, for example
by employing cultural strategies to generate
new symbolic economies in areas such as
Johannesburg's depressed inner-city precincts
(Dirsuweit 1999). The convergence of leisure,
consumption and tourism forms an important
part of Dirsuweit's bold revitalisation proposals, which see Johannesburg as the potential
centre of an African cultural and economic
renaissance.
While leisure, consumption and tourism
each warrant separate attention in their own
right, interpreting their overlaps, linkages,
contradictions and synergies should be an
over-arching goal. As a case study, Cape
Town's Victoria and Alfred (V&A) Waterfront
redevelopment is almost paradigmatic of
the `de-differentiation' thesis in practice: by
conscious and deliberate design, leisure, consumption and tourism here converge in a true
festival marketplace. The V&A has already
been the subject of research by geographers
(Dodson & Kilian 1998; Kilian & Dodson
1996a, 1996b) and others (Bickford-Smith &
Van Heyningen 1994). Popular with local
residents, the Waterfront is also well and truly
on the tourist map. Almost every tourist
guidebook includes a description similar to
this one from the 1997 edition of the Rough
Guide to South Africa:
A cocktail of period buildings, neo-Victorian
shopping malls, piers with waterside walkways, and a functioning harbour, as well
# 2000 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG
422
as the magnificent backdrop of Table
Mountain, complement the wide range of
restaurants, outdoor cafes, pubs, clubs,
cinemas, museums and outdoor entertainment. This is one of the most popular
attractions in Cape Town. (p. 86)
Absent from most guidebooks is any mention
of the recent and ongoing contestation over
the redevelopment, for example its perceived
elitism and exclusiveness; the eviction of
aesthetically unpleasing industrial operations
such as fish processing plants and boat repair
works (Kilian & Dodson 1996b); or the antiWaterfront protests by the largely Muslim
organisation People Against Gangsterism And
Drugs (PAGAD) (Dodson & Kilian 1998). A
flyer distributed to Cape Town households in
1997 makes revealing reading:
Many people who live in townships like
Khayelitsha, Manenberg, Guguletu etc.
never have the time nor the money to visit
the Waterfront. They either do not have
the money . . . and/or they are too preoccupied with bread and butter issues
ie they work their backs off so that they
can provide sustenance for their hungry
children. The so-called demise of Apartheid and the promise of a land of milk and
honey has unfortunately not reached them
yet ± it has only reached the zionists and
their allies ± it is no mystery who they
are. (A few decent, militant unapologetic
Muslims 1997)
The situation culminated in the bombing of
a Waterfront restaurant, Planet Hollywood ±
surely an example of what Benjamin Barber
(1996) calls `Jihad vs. McWorld'. Thus, while
the Waterfront represents the potential profits
to be made through the mobilisation of cultural capital, it is also illustrative of a dangerous synergy between economic exclusion and
cultural difference. Similar issues attend any
attempt to replicate the Waterfront's economic success elsewhere in the country. What,
for example, would happen to the black
`informal settlers' living in the Turbine Hall
if Johannesburg's Newtown Cultural Precinct
were to be successfully redeveloped, as proposed by Dirsuweit (1999)? At base, is it
possible for consumption-led urban redevel# 2000 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG
BELINDA DODSON
opment strategies to breach economic and
cultural divisions, or are such strategies
inevitably alienating and divisive, as writers
like Neil Smith (1996) have suggested? The
relationship between urban economic regeneration and social welfare, nowhere straightforward, is rendered all the more complex by
apartheid's all-too-enduring social and geographical legacy.
CONCLUSION
Far from being an intellectual indulgence,
therefore, research into leisure, tourism and
consumption provides a useful means towards
a better understanding of the country's emerging social geography. If leisure, consumption
and tourism are indeed converging, what is
the impact ± material, social, economic ± on
South African cities? What are the associated
geographies of inclusion and exclusion? What
are the implications for the use and control of
public space? South African examples could
also prove to be of wider significance. Does
the international literature help us understand processes of social and urban change in
South Africa, or does the South African case
challenge the emerging theoretical consensus
of functional and spatial de-differentiation?
The answers to these questions are not
merely academic but also of practical and
political significance. As David Harvey argues,
just planning and policy practices `must
confront directly the problem of creating
forms of social and political organization and
systems of production and consumption which
minimize the exploitation of labour power
both in the workplace and the living place'
(Harvey 1996, p. 431, my italics). Without such
a commitment, the alternative is a dystopia of
the dual ghettoisation of rich and poor; of
privatisation, pauperisation and the demise of
even such public space and culture as now
exist. In South Africa, it could be argued that
such a dystopia is already with us, and that
the market has become the post-apartheid
equivalent of the Separate Amenities Act.
Dismantling that dystopia should be part not
just of our work as geographers, but also of
our responsibility as citizens of what was
meant to be a `new', more egalitarian and
democratic South Africa.
LEISURE AND CONSUMPTION IN THE POST-APARTHEID CITY
Acknowledgements
I acknowledge an intellectual debt to Simon Goudie
and Darryll Kilian, supervision of whose MA theses
at the University of Cape Town stimulated my own
enquiry into the geography of leisure and consumption. I am grateful to Chris Rogerson for
inviting me to contribute to this edition of TESG
and encouraging me to write on this particular
topic. Funding for part of this research came from
the South African Centre for Science Development
(CSD).
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