| This thesis explores the agency of gardens in the post-apartheid landscape of South African townships, where daily life is impacted by poverty, racial segregation, HIV/AIDS, and violence. Amid these challenging circumstances, township residents commonly make and tend gardens. Contemporary scholarly research demonstrates that garden making can be a mentally and physically sustaining endeavor, cultivating hope and purpose. Gardens can be places of respite, escape, and memory; microcosms of desired realities; and opportunities to express defiance, resistance, and pride. The practice of gardening in the township context is conceptualized as a tactical operation, performed to negotiate adverse realities of everyday life. Further, gardens are positioned as a vital component of "intimate infrastructure," defined as the physical manifestation of practices that support wellbeing of individuals and cohesion of community structure---a network of spaces marked by activity, vernacular ingenuity, and cultural exchange. This inquiry employed an ethnographic fieldwork methodology, supported by a literature review of formative precedent studies and concepts. The fieldwork occurred during March-July of 2009, in Khayelitsha, the largest settlement east of Cape Town in a region known as "the flats". The investigation took the form of "walks and talks," facilitated by a Xhosa guide and interpreter, to observe and document garden spaces and practices. "Khayelitsha" meaning "New Home" in isiXhosa, is a disenfranchised black township created under apartheid (literally "apartness" in Afrikaans). Apartheid was the South African government's systematic and forceful racial segregation of non-white peoples into rural "homelands" or urban "townships". Although apartheid was officially dismantled in 1994, its legacy is entrenched in the physical articulation of space, social structures, and collective memory of modern-day South Africa. Khayelitsha is a sprawling, yet densely populated settlement, home to a burgeoning half million people. While poverty and struggle through adversity define everyday life in Khayelitsha, it is also a vibrant place where people continue to pursue fulfilling and inspired lives. This tensioned environment positions Khayelitsha as a poignant place for the exploration of garden making and an unfurling of the intimate infrastructure that lies critically beyond the scope of our traditional understanding of infrastructure.;Keywords: cultural landscape studies, defiant gardens, vernacular gardens, intimate infrastructure, post-apartheid ethnography, South African townships, Khayelitsha... |
