Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
you'll worry about them, you know. We've got a sliding door to the back garden
and there's a gate that anyone can get through and I just keep saying “keep the
door shut!” and my wife's like “yeah but it's not dangerous,” and I say “it just
takes once. It just takes once, that's all, then it's very, very unpleasant.…”
As we talked, it was clear that Neil is not happy with the confined nature of his life in
South Africa. He recognizes his privileges, but the ways in which these are achieved sit
uneasily with him. He worries that he is being changed personally by the raced repres-
entations of space in the city, and the ways these play out in spatial practice at a range
of scales. This not only affects his relationship with the geography of the city, but also
he can see how it affects the embodied, microspatial interactions of everyday life:
It turns you into a racial thing … for example: service. This is another reason I
want to go to the UK, we're so spoilt in this country, you know, just snap your
fingers and you've got a beer on the table, and I see the worse side of it as well.
I've seen a bloke come in, he'll sit down and he won't say his please, thank you
andhe'llcomplainthathisglassisslightlywarmandthen“canyoutakemybeer
back” and “don't you bother us.” I mean that's not me, that's not my lifestyle.
Albeit in contrasting ways, Stephen and Neil both demonstrate in their constant ref-
erences to the UK how the grounded locales of everyday life are continuously produced
by a range of social, economic, cultural, and embodied processes that draw on both the
local and the global (Lefebvre 1994; Massey 1994; Cresswell 2004). Thus as they both
position themselves within the Jo'burg discourse, this plays out differently for each of
them. Stephen's sense of belonging to/longing for both South Africa and the UK is pro-
duced through stereotypical constructions of what it means to be white/male/middle-
class/British. He has no desire to return to Britain, however, enjoying its imaginative
reach but fearing a substantial material impact on the privileged lifestyle he so enjoys
in South Africa. But of course he can if, at any time, he finds he wants to; and this may
explainwhy,inspiteofthepoliticalchangeshehaswitnessedinthepastthirtyyears,he
remains “soutpiel” and largely untouched by these, and untroubled by the social costs
involved in the production of his everyday life.
In contrast, Neil's occupation of spatial privilege is more complex. Whilst he feels
trapped and confined, and lives in fear for himself and his family, he is troubled by the
continued racial divisions which mark life in the city and his engagement with it. At the
same time he is rendered immobile by his fears, and these prevent him from taking up
alternative positions within South Africa. For Neil, escaping back to what he sees are
the privileges of the UK is the only answer; and for him these are primarily a life which
