Browsing by Author "Rink, Bradley"

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    Gated nature and its role in creating place attachment and place identity in post-apartheid South Africa: an analysis of Grotto Bay private residential estate
    (2017) Ramsawmy, Sharon; Rink, Bradley; Anderson, Pippin
    This dissertation focuses on a private residential estate, known as Grotto Bay, situated on the West Coast of the Western Cape province of South Africa. It examines the motivations of its participants to move to a non-metropolitan gated community and focuses on the participants' experiences of life in gated nature. In analysing the participants' subjective experiences, this work aims to understand how such experiences contribute to the development of place attachment, against the backdrop of the understanding of whiteness in the post-apartheid landscape. This qualitative, ethnographic research uses semi-structured interviews and participant observation to collect data. To analyse the data collected, this research uses thematic content analysis of texts and observations to identify motivations and link them to the body of literature on gated communities and lifestyle migration in South Africa. Drawing on the Person, Place and Process Framework, this work further probes into an understanding of the processes of place attachment to Grotto Bay, by speaking back to insights from the literature on place attachment, landscape and identity, within the post-apartheid South African context. The findings show that through gating and a migration back to the rural land, the participants of this research have enlisted the natural landscape to root themselves to place and to find a sense of continuity in self and in their identity, by linking the reconstruction of their past with the present and future. The results further indicate that discourses of withdrawal and attachment to place, read through a lens of white privilege, drive the making and re-making of boundaries in the post-apartheid context of South Africa. This work shows that through the privatisation of the rural landscape, Grotto Bay facilitates notions of power and control through the respondents' romantic and nostalgic idealisation of their new social imaginary. The respondents' subjective experiences exemplify the ways in which estates such as Grotto Bay may stand to perpetuate white hegemony and environmental injustice in the post-colonial and post-apartheid contexts.
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    The role of open streets Cape Town street events in shaping everyday mobility in Salt River and Observatory : towards bridging mobile, spatial and social divide
    (2015) Taylor, Frances Jessica; Rink, Bradley
    This study interrogates the role of Open Streets Cape Town's day-long street events in disrupting complex systems and hierarchies of everyday street mobility that maintain the mobile, spatial and social divides of Cape Town. The test was whether OSCT events 1) bridged the mobile divide by replacing car-dominated streets with people-centred public space; 2) bridged the spatial divide by bringing fluidity to the mobility of people between usually isolated public spaces; and 3) bridged the social divide by replacing practices of avoidance and exclusion with an everyday cosmopolitan sensibility. The investigation used mobile methodologies and an embedded approach. OSCT proved to be successful at bridging the mobile divide by creating a shared public space, but had mixed success with bridging spatial and social divides. A greater sensitivity to how existing social and spatial divides can be reproduced during events would improve this. Sager's (2006) freedom of mobility framework was reworked and proved to be useful in monitoring individuals situated differently in the shifting complex of power, identity and everyday life across a changing motilities landscape. The underlying mobility framework revealed a need for developing better street navigation skills to create robust and equitable freedom of mobility for street users, necessary for independence from mediators such as cars, private street security and prejudice ideas about people and places that perpetuate division. OSCT events are useful in opening up people's eyes to what could be, but the value is diminished if there are no ongoing interventions sustaining this new understanding. Interventions that tackle the everyday systems supporting the divisions are needed to supplement the interventions of OSCT events. This will add substance between events and enhance the value of the events themselves.