The City Agency

03/06/2026

Today marks 16 years of The City.

What began as an idea has become a vehicle for research, gathering, storytelling, exhibitions, urban projects, archives, conversations, collaborations, travels, and countless encounters with remarkable people.

Over the years, The City has taken many forms, but its purpose has remained remarkably consistent: to pay attention to the places we build and inhabit and honour the people and stories that shape them.

At the heart of our work is a belief that cities should be more just, inclusive, and equitable. Whether through research, curation, documentation, or public engagement, we have sought to better understand the forces that shape our urban environments and to contribute, in our own way, to addressing the inequalities that continue to define them.

We are deeply grateful to everyone who has contributed ideas, commissioned work, collaborated, shared knowledge, opened doors, trusted a process, or simply accompanied the journey.

Sixteen years later, we are still learning, still curious, and still excited about our cities.

Thank you for being part of the story.
The City is a space for all.

25/05/2026

Africa Day | Stimela

For Africa Day, we return to Hugh Masekela’s Stimela the coal train.

A song of breath, metal, memory and mourning.

Stimela carries the sound of men travelling from across Southern and Central Africa to work in the mines of Johannesburg. From Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Lesotho, Botswana, Eswatini and beyond - men were drawn into the machinery of extraction, leaving land, family, language and home behind.

Johannesburg was built through this movement.

Its wealth, infrastructure and modernity did not emerge from nowhere. It was carried by migrant labour. By African bodies moving across borders that were themselves violently drawn. By men who went deep into the earth so that a city could rise above it.

And yet, this history also tells us something else.

Johannesburg has always been cosmopolitan. It has always been made by movement, by arrival, by language, by exchange, by people coming from elsewhere and becoming part of the city’s life.

This is something to treasure, not to police.

In a country and continent shaped by arbitrary borders, colonial extraction and selective gain, we have to ask what it means to keep reproducing exclusion. What does it mean to fear the very movement that built our cities? What does it mean to criminalise the presence of those whose histories are already woven into the making of this place?

Stimela reminds us that migration is not new. African movement is not an interruption of the city. It is one of its foundations.

Let the memory of the great Hugh Masekela return us to something larger than fear: inclusion, integration, dignity and exchange.

We can be more than inherited borders.
We can be more than scarcity.
We can build cities that remember who built them.

31K likes, 2K comments. "Hugh Masekela The Late [Living] Jazz Legend Performs Stimela"

18/05/2026

Reading the City Through A Man of Good Hope

We live in a time when movement and migration are constantly placed under suspicion. Yet people have always moved. For necessity and survival. For trade, curiosity, joy, wonder - and sometimes simply to wander.

During Africa Month, we return to Jonny Steinberg’s “A Man of Good Hope”, a book whose title carries its own historical weight. The Cape of Good Hope was named in relation to passage, promise, conquest and wealth - the belief that this route around the Cape would open a way to Asia.

Centuries later, Assad, a young Somali man, arrives in South Africa carrying another kind of hope: not imperial, not extractive, but human. The hope of safety, dignity, and rebuilding a life. But Assad arrives in a country already deeply fractured by colonial and apartheid spatial planning. He lands in Cape Town, where poverty is pushed to the edge, where displacement is repeated, and where the poor are too often treated as a problem to be hidden rather than people to be housed, protected and included.

Blikkiesdorp, created as a “temporary” relocation camp ahead of the 2010 World Cup, is central to this reading. It was part of a city-making logic that sought to “clean” poverty from view while selling Cape Town as a world-class destination for tourists and investors. But temporary solutions have a way of becoming permanent conditions.

Assad begins to see how different South African communities were shaped differently by apartheid, and how these histories continue to produce fear, resentment, scarcity and uneven access to the city. What is striking is that even a man fleeing war is jarred by the violence he encounters here and yet he is still able to understand something of the historical violence that shaped the local population.

The tragedy is that the anger is not directed at apartheid’s architects, its beneficiaries, or the systems that continue to reproduce inequality. It is too often turned against other poor and vulnerable people.

So we ask: would this violence take the same form if spatial justice had been served? If people had been returned to land, neighbourhoods, opportunity and dignity? If cities were built for residents first?

What exchanges might have been possible? Trade, friendship, family, travel, language, culture - the ordinary and extraordinary possibilities of African movement.

South Africa once represented a promise. It still does. But constitutional values mean little when our cities remain organised through exclusion, distance, insecurity and abandonment.

A city that cannot hold dignity for its residents will struggle to hold dignity for newcomers too.

04/05/2026

Note: This post contains references to human remains.

Before Cape Town became a city of streets and property lines, it was shaped by systems of enslavement. From the 17th century, people were enslaved and brought to the Cape from across the Indian Ocean world. They built the early infrastructure of the colony and became the fabric of Cape society itself - yet their lives and deaths remain largely unacknowledged. Many were buried on the edges of the colonial town, in ground later absorbed into the expanding city.

In 2003, during construction in Green Point, these burial grounds were uncovered. Excavation was halted, briefly. What followed was a negotiation between development, the state, and civil society one in which the demands of development were prioritised over the claims of the dead. Thousands of bodies were exhumed. Calls to preserve the site as a place of memory were dismissed. Construction continued.

This is not an isolated moment. It sits within a longer history of removal: from enslavement, to forced removals under colonialism and apartheid, to the ongoing redevelopment of the city for a global, elite urban imaginary.

Today, at the Prestwich Memorial, the remains of those who made the early city possible are held in an ossuary placed in cardboard boxes. Stacked. Stored. Contained. Keeping these lives in a state of transience, not fully acknowledged, returned, or at rest.

In post-apartheid Cape Town, land is excavated for development with urgency. The result is a city that builds over its past while keeping it at a distance.

Visitors have written:
“Respect is returning them to us, their people.”
“Rethink this memorial.”

If the enslaved were among the founding makers of this city, woven into its social and cultural fabric, what does it mean to keep them here, in boxes?
What would it mean to move beyond containment - to recognition, to restitution, to rest?
What would it mean to uncover this history fully - not only in moments of development, but as part of how we understand the city itself?
And what kind of city do we become if we continue to build without reckoning with what lies beneath?

Photographs by Zahira Asmal.

27/04/2026

Freedom Day. 32 years of democracy.

To reflect on freedom, it is necessary to return to Robben Island - not as a single story of imprisonment, but as a longer history of exile, resistance, and removal.

Long before the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, the island functioned as a place of banishment within a wider imperial network. Figures such as Krotoa were removed from their communities, while Tuan Guru and Tuan Matarah were exiled from Indonesia for resisting Dutch colonial rule. Their presence situates the island within a broader history of global anti-imperial struggle where the Cape was not peripheral, but connected.

By the 19th century, the island held those cast out through illness and stigma. In the 20th century, it became synonymous with political imprisonment. Yet even within this history, forms of isolation were uneven. Robert Sobukwe was held in enforced solitude under a special legal provision, denied even the limited solidarities available to other prisoners.

The consequences of this isolation extended beyond the prison itself. Families were left waiting and relationships mediated through censored letters, restricted visits, and prolonged absence. The labour of endurance was not only carried by those imprisoned, but by those outside. Figures such as Winnie Mandela occupied this space of waiting, negotiation, and political continuity, though their roles are often less fully held in public memory.
Robben Island remains visible from the city. Its outline is familiar.

Yet visibility has never guaranteed understanding. Memory requires work. It is unevenly held, differently valued, and continually reshaped. What is remembered and what is allowed to fade continues to shape the present.

Photographs by Zahira Asmal.

22/04/2026

On Earth Day, conversations about the environment often focus on conservation and sustainability.

In South Africa, these conversations cannot be separated from land.

The Natives Land Act restricted Black South Africans to just 7% of the country’s land, fundamentally restructuring access to resources, livelihoods, and ecological systems. This was not only a social or economic intervention - it was an environmental one.

The Group Areas Act extended this spatial logic into cities, entrenching patterns of exclusion that continue to shape land access today.

Colonial expansion also transformed the Cape’s ecological landscape: indigenous vegetation was cleared, wetlands altered, and species extinct or driven away from environments they once inhabited.

These are not parallel histories - they are the same history.

Today, land ownership remains deeply unequal.
National land audits show that approximately 72% of farms and agricultural holdings are owned by white South Africans, while Black South Africans own around 4%, with coloured and Indian ownership making up the remainder.
Despite decades of reform, only a fraction of land redistribution targets have been met.
But land is not only a resource to be managed or extracted.

It is memory.
It is ancestry.
It is relationship - between people, and between people and the environment.

Not all land needs to be productive to have value.
Not all land needs to be cultivated to matter.

Land can hold, restore, and simply be.

To be separated from land is not only to lose access -
it is to be distanced from memory, from ecology, from possibility.

And yet, much of this remains difficult to see.

The histories embedded in land.
The ecologies that have been erased.
The relationships that persist, even when obscured.

Perhaps Earth Day asks something more of us:
To look again.
To attend to what is present, and what has been made invisible.
To recognise the interwoven ecologies - social, historical, environmental - that shape this place.
And to imagine forms of care that restore not only land, but our relationship to it.

15/04/2026

Exhibition Media Coverage: Ceylon Today

We are excited to share media coverage of "There Was Something Here Before", presented in Colombo as part of See - a project by The City.

Described as an exhibition that invites audiences to “unsee and unlearn,” the work challenges the polished, postcard framing of the contemporary city - revealing it instead as a layered palimpsest shaped by tension, contestation, and erasure.

Through a multi-sensory approach - inviting visitors to look, listen, touch, and engage - the exhibition positions the audience as part of the excavation, tracing entangled histories of colonialism, slavery, displacement, and migration across Cape Town, Colombo, and beyond.

At The City, we are committed to creating platforms that surface obscured histories and foster deeper, cross-cultural dialogue through research, curation, and design.
Grateful for the thoughtful reflection and engagement.

"There Was Something Here Before" was commissioned by Ambassador Bonnie Horbach, curated by Zahira Asmal, and supported by the Embassy of the Netherlands in Sri Lanka.

Link to the article in the comments.

14/11/2025

A Dutch Fiscal’s Murder by Professor Nira Wickramasinghe

In an essay titled, “A Dutch Fiscal’s Murder’” published in the “I See You” digital book, Professor Nira Wickramasinghe interrogates the identity of enslaved people in the colonial era.

She writes, “During VOC rule, the term “black” (zwart) was equally used in Cape Colony for all manumitted slaves, exiles, and convicts who could be from Asian as well as African origin. For this reason free blacks or manumitted slaves described as “of Ceylon” in Cape records are virtually impossible to identify by ethnicity or birthplace because they generally have only one name, together with the “origin tag.” African, Malagasy, Indian, or Indonesian were all considered “Zwarten” at the Cape.”

See more here: https://iseeyou.capetown/post/a-dutch-fiscals-murder/
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Nira Wickramasinghe is Chair and Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at Leiden University. Some of her recent books include “Slave in a Palanquin. Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka” (Columbia University Press, 2020), which was awarded the 2021 John F Richards Prize in South Asian History by the American Historical Association, and more recently “Monsoon Asia. A Reader on South and Southeast Asia” (2023), co-edited with David Henley.

For more essays and articles published in the “I See You” digital book edited by Zahira Asmal, please visit the link in our bio.

16/10/2025

"There Was Something Here Before" exhibition & programme by Zahira Asmal in Colombo, Sri Lanka

08/10/2025

We were deeply humbled by the invitation to curate an exhibition and public programme encompassing years of research on history, memory and spatial inequality in Cape Town.

In 2023, research on slavery led The City director, Zahira Asmal, to Sri Lanka, where she searched for traces of the Cape ancestors that she had learned about in archives, books, and sites of memory, and that shaped the identity of their descendants. “What traces of the Cape ancestors remain? Who and what did they leave behind? What stories are being told about them in the places from which they were taken?” These are the questions that fired the making of this exhibition and public programme.

Here is a selection of images from a successful opening night.

"There Was Something Here Before" was created by Zahira Asmal and produced by The City, with support from the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Sri Lanka.

For more information visit the See website, link in the comments.