The Architecture of Belonging

On writing the city's invisible people into the spaces that were never built for them.

What does it mean to belong to a place that was not designed with you in mind?

That question has followed me for most of my life — as a woman, as a wheelchair user, as a person of Khoi San and European descent navigating cities that were built for a very specific kind of body, a very specific kind of person. It is the question at the heart of my twelve-part series, The Architecture of Belonging, currently being published in The Big Issue South Africa.

The series sits at the intersection of urban design, identity, human dignity, and access. Each instalment asks something different of the reader — and of the city. What does Cape Town look like to someone who cannot enter its most celebrated spaces? Who gets to feel at home in a destination marketed to the world as one of the most beautiful on Earth? And what responsibility do we carry — as planners, as tourism professionals, as citizens — to answer that question with something more than a ramp bolted on as an afterthought?

This is not academic writing. It is lived. It is personal. And it is published in a magazine that, by its very existence, asks you to pay attention to the people most cities choose to ignore.

The Big Issue SA is sold exclusively by homeless and vulnerable vendors across South Africa. When you purchase a copy, 50% of that sale goes directly into the hands of the person who handed it to you. That is not charity — it is dignity, transacted face to face.

To every tourist who visits Cape Town and passes one of these vendors on a corner in the city bowl, at the waterfront, outside a café in Sea Point: stop. Buy a copy. Read the stories inside.

You will not find them in a glossy hotel brochure. You will find people — real, complex, remarkable people — and ideas that will stay with you long after you've returned home.

The Architecture of Belonging is one of them.

I hope it finds you.

xxx

→ Find your nearest Big Issue vendor at bigissue.org.za