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From 1950 onwards, under the apartheid regime's Group Areas Act, hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes across South Africa's cities. While the removals from some areas, notably District Six in Cape Town, are well documented and memorialised, many others have largely been erased from public memory. In a context of burgeoning research into issues of spatial justice in Southern cities, this paper puts forward the argument that the concepts and practice of memory and memorialising in urban spaces deserve more attention. Specifically, we suggest that the relationships between space and memory, shaped by collective, public acts of remembering and forgetting, can expand our understanding of what constitutes spatial justice in our cities. Reflecting on a research project conducted in Lower Claremont, a racially mixed, middle‐class suburb in Cape Town that was declared White in 1969 and subsequently dubbed Harfield Village, we explore some of the ways in which remembering and forgetting take place on the urban scale, and their implications for imagining just cities. We ask, too, what possibilities exist for active remembering in this place and in similarly ordinary city spaces. Analysing oral histories from former residents and interviews with current occupants of the neighbourhood, we open up some of the complications in surfacing forgotten stories and creating landscapes of memory. In the final section of the paper we reflect on an art installation that formed part of the research project, and suggest some possibilities for active memory work in our urban spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops infrastructural citizenship as an analytical framework that bridges geography's sub‐disciplinary silos. While urban geography promotes infrastructure as a core lens for understanding the city, recognising that political struggles are mediated through infrastructure, discourses of citizenship are rarely employed. Similarly, while political and development geography promote citizenship as vital in understanding socio‐political life, often framed by citizen‐led action to secure basic rights and services, critical debates on urban infrastructure are typically overlooked. Consequently, despite the growth in studies recognising the politicised nature of urban infrastructure and the centrality of citizenship to urban life, the multiple ways that citizenship and infrastructure relate in diverse urban settings has received limited critical attention. This paper demonstrates how urban dwellers' relationship to public infrastructure in the domestic spaces of the home and settlement, and the temporal scale of the everyday, offers a representation of broader political identities and perceptions, framed through the language of citizenship. In South Africa, despite 25 years of significant post‐apartheid public investment in housing and services, frustration at poor service delivery and beneficiary (mis)use of public infrastructure remains dominant. While citizens adapt and consume public infrastructure in ways deemed "illegal" and "uncivil" by the state, citizens view these actions as a legitimate form of "citizenship‐in‐action" in the context of rapid urbanisation and poverty, and are frustrated by perceptions of state neglect. Using the analytical framework of infrastructural citizenship, the paper reveals how this state–society disjuncture represents a citizenship mismatch that is embodied in infrastructure, rather than a material product of state disinterest or citizen destruction per se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In South Africa, young men are generally considered to generate many of the risks associated with informal settlement life, yet their own vulnerability in these environments is seldom considered. Seeking insights into male susceptibility in these impoverished urban spaces is methodologically challenging. How does one encourage poor marginalised young men to speak with candour about their insecurities and challenges? The research methods used, while facilitating openness, should also build their confidence as they reflect on the challenges of everyday life. This paper describes the methodological journey undertaken in a study of young Black men living in informal settlements in Cape Town, South Africa, revealing how they perceive their vulnerability in these environments. It demonstrates how a suite of methods gradually developed through trial and error, with the young men themselves assisting in the adaptation of tools, ranging from interviews using adapted participatory methods to non‐prescriptive diary‐writing. Together they delivered deep and penetrating insights into the lives of the young men, and the nature of their vulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]