Inhabiting the Ruins of the City of Tshwane

Abstract

In the inner city of Tshwane stand the skeletons of four high-rise buildings – the remains of Schubart Park. While there are no more people inside the ruins of these buildings, they contain the stories of the relations between a city and its inhabitants. In 2012 Justice Froneman wrote the judgment that ordered that the inhabitants of Schubart Park should be reinstated in their former homes, after they were evicted by the City of Tshwane in 2011. More than ten years after his judgment, there is (again) a plan to move the former residents back. From a spatial justice perspective and through Ann Stoler's work on ruination, Chris Butler's call for inhabiting the ruins and Ivan Vladislavić's short story We Came to the Monument, I reflect on how court judgments stand between the possible and the impossible. I call for a re-imagination of the ways in which the municipality can relate to the inhabitants of the City and argue that Justice Froneman enables this re-imagination through his judgment in Schubart Park.