I arrived in Durban, South Africa to study architecture in 1992. By 1999, when I graduated, I had already developed a passion for space, its presence and more importantly its representation in absence. However the conditioning nature of society beckons the individual to recognise primarily the seen, the tangible and the factual realities of life and death. We are taught to value the rational over the irrational, order over chaos, disregarding the fact that there may well be a very high level of order in this chaos that we blindly fear. As a result of this inability of the majority of humankind to open up to alternative truths, we develop highly controlled and organised spaces. Roads, pavements, boundary walls, electric fences, gated communities and armed responsive dwellings are clear indications that space has become highly regimented where the urban dwellers prefers to hide behind a veneer of cultivation, fear and the pride that we have become civilised but detached.

Furthermore, the ‘sophisticated’ humankind that we are, consider ourselves as separate from nature. This is an attitude that predominantly, sets up a discourse of difference between nature and culture/us. Coupled with our obsession with power, this has made us master in the art of controlling nature for our own ends. It seems apparent that this detachment could be playing a considerable role in leading to the destruction of the environment today. Yet, I believe this sharp Cartesian division between mind and matter can no longer be maintained. We can never speak of nature without speaking of ourselves.

This is no different when it comes to the post apartheid South African space. One held hostage by a lucrative fear industry. The longer I stayed in South Africa the more frustrated and claustrophobic I became by warnings from my peers of ‘no go’ areas and constant reminders of the need to be paranoid. So on a bright sunny day of February 2001, I decided to lose myself while walking the city. I had relinquished my fears and was pleasantly surprised when I was welcomed with a reciprocal openness by the perceived ‘other’ from within ‘those’ perceived ‘no go/dangerous’ areas. It takes commitment to change. Charles Landry in his book The Art of City Making (2006), rightly points out that the structures and incentives around us do not help and denial translates into avoidance activity. It takes behavioural change. Many want to hide from reality. They are wilfully ignorant, their fear often masked behind arrogant overconfidence and power play.

Consequently my frequent straying in the city led to the birth of the citywalk initiative, which explores a state of inbetweeness often looked at but hardly seen.  The intention is that of an exposure of an existing parallel reality and hopefully to create a shift in perspective around the ‘other’ and ourselves.

Walking from the informal settlement/township of Umkhumbane [Cato Manor], via suburbia, along the N3 highway through the heart of the city to the port [from one periphery to another], I got intrigued by, amongst other things, the growth of plants at the meeting points [spaces of in-between] of the primary dividing/controlling elements of the urban framework. In the gap where the boundary wall meets the pavement, where the pavement meet the street, in-between the paving brick and even in the crack of the asphalt of the road. These are the interstitial spaces where human control fails. As a result this is where life/nature prevails.

Here, I make a deliberate allegorical connection with nature and a metaphor drawn from plant life to accentuate the relevance of gaps [isikhala] where time in our disciplined spatial composition gets suspended.

I was equally astonished to notice that like plants growing in the fissure of the city’s infrastructures, an unrecognised community of walkers has been travelling along the N3 a freeway for at least thirteen years, on their way to the city and back to the township everyday. This freeway, besides being a means for vehicular movement, also served as a segregating device during the construction of the apartheid regime. It is a big gap trenched out forming a no-man’s land between two suburbs. It is a much larger scale of state inbetweeness where these walkers, like the plants, appropriate a forgotten space in the practice of their freedom.

This hypothesis brings into mind Walter Benjamin’s (1928) concept of how the ‘the flaneur botanizing the asphalt’. The walker is able to plant and reap experiences from an activity, which has become increasingly unnatural to many dwellers [mainly the rich/middle class], addicted as they are to the intoxication of motor travel.

Michel De Certeau (1984) in his book on the practice of everyday life became an advocate of the stories told by pedestrians in the city. Not verbalised or written in text, but those spatial narratives as people traverse the city in an uncontrolled, irregular fashion. This he argues, provides a counter-foil to the panopticon, the disciplined, rational use of space defined by planners, architects, engineers and owners of capital. Pedestrians bring nature back into the ‘being’ into human beings.