This project builds on scholarship about landscape and memory in Cape Town by looking at how “nature” historically structured the material making of the cityscape, and the racially-heterogenous socio-natural commons that emerged in the city during the 20th century. It proposes contemporary perceptions of Cape Town as a ‘heritage landscape’ are rooted in the city’s transformation by the improving politics of visibility between 1872 and 1948. Bracketing the decolonization of historic urban sites, as well as the enviro-politics of ‘natural resource conservation’, the project explores the ongoing entanglements of the nonhuman and the human that produced this quasi-natural cityscape. Combining notions of “biopower” and “commoning” to position human activity within a taskscape of corporeal-material environmental exchanges, the project focuses on dispersed non-continuous “landscape infrastructures” of various kinds that originated during this period. These infrastructures not only helped shape civic identity and landscape culture in Cape Town, but potentially perform substantive ‘memory work’ today, as an everchanging source of roles and narratives. The project seeks to expand the affective registers of heritage environments beyond those associated with purely human histories via a syncretic environmental history of earth, air, water, plants and people that enriches understandings of the intersection between colonialism, landscape and memory.
