Surviving in Overcome Heights: living in and alongside crisis in Cape Town

Abstract

What can surviving in Overcome Heights teach us about the concept of crisis? In the multiethnicinformal settlement in Cape Town, residents faced multiple and continuously unfoldingemergencies during our ethnographic, participatory fieldwork in 2018 and 2019. By taking aninductive approach to crisis, we explore the layered nature of crisis and foreground a sensitivitytowards how differently positioned actors have distinct modes of being the protagonists of,confronting or engaging with crisis. By examining how intersecting inequalities on themargins of the city place people sometimes within and sometimes alongside crisis, we sketchout three different scales and temporalities of crisis: individual, communal and crisis as largescalehistorical structures. Understanding survival in Overcome Heights as lives lived in andalongside crisis means resisting neat theorical definitions of crisis. Rather, we suggest that itmay be an analytical heuristic to pose new questions as to how phenomena that may politically,institutionally and temporally be considered as separate intersect, compounding their negativeeffects, and how actors within these intersections are positioned differently along spatial linesand the temporal rhythms of urban life.