Oh I Love the Vibe': Alternative Township Geographies in Cape Town

Townships were creating during apartheid as part of a policy of racial separation and disenfranchisement of Black South Africans. Over 20 years since the end of apartheid, they remain in the urban landscape as a reminder of the continued racialized disparity in the country as they continue to be the economic margins of the city. Despite this, for many people who reside in townships, they are not simply ‘margins’ but social centers. This manuscript explores townships as social margins through a social formation, a way of being in the world, an aesthetic form, that residents use to describe this social value: what they refer to as vibes. Taking vibes as a guiding analytic, this manuscript argues that vibes are a complex web of social aesthetics, embodied ways of being in the world, and emerge as a kind of social legibility. Vibes are therefore an aspect of daily life that residents ascribe value to, complicating current understandings of townships as simply and solely marginal and violent, places. Alongside challenges of living in places crafted through various forms of structural violence, people’s lives are not simply defined by these experiences. Townships are also experienced through vibes, which shape people’s experiences of living in townships, and thus shape township geographies.