Opening the Black Box of Urban Development: Public Controversies at the Amazon Megaproject in Cape Town

This paper focuses on efforts by indigenous Khoi activists to oppose a mega-development in the middle of the Two Rivers Urban Park (TRUP) at the Riverlands site (formerly known as the River Club) in Observatory, Cape Town. In the paper, we argue that, even though the mega-development ultimately went ahead, intense contestation surrounding Khoi cultural heritage contributed towards opening up the ‘black box’ of urban development in Cape Town, as well as pressuring the developers to accommodate some demands of indigenous activists and environmentalists. We also examine why and on what terms it was even possible for a small group of indigenous activists to temporarily halt a mega-development driven by powerful actors, including Amazon, the City of Cape Town, and private developers. What the anti-development activists achieved was to refuse to allow the alliance of developers and local and provincial governments to continue operating under the radar. Drawing inspiration from Bruno Latour’s notion of the black box, we show how these activists were able to temporarily interrupt the construction process and create the conditions for opening up to public and legal scrutiny the opaque character of urban development processes. In Latour’s original discussion of the concept, opening the black box referred to prising open the collective construction of technoscientific facts by following their controversies. In an analogous manner, closely following the ‘River Club controversy’ in the media and the courts ultimately allowed us to get a sense of its making, contestation, and unfolding as a ‘development in action’. While Latour’s concept of the black box only provides one entry point for analyzing the hidden relationships and opaque processes that inform capitalist mega-developments, we are particularly interested in how this concept can be used productively in studying the ways in which urban development operates in a city such as Cape Town.