Negotiating contested spaces and places: Narratives of social suffering and resistance in racialized Cape Town communities

This study employs a schizocartographic approach to explore community narratives of space, memory, and violence in Kraaifontein, Cape Town. Through participants' accounts, ordinary places—gardens, shops, blocks, sports grounds, and streets—emerge as ambivalent geographies where trauma, resilience, and belonging intersect. Sites such as the green boxes (street utility containers) and Long Street (a main road in the township) carry memories of killings and erasures, while the garden created at the entrance of the residential block is remembered as a cultivated counter-space of healing, care, and safety. Sports grounds oscillate between vitality and danger, and residential blocks reveal community strategies of negotiation and survival. A postcolonial lens highlights how these racialized and marginalized spaces mirror the nonlinear continuum between well-being and distress, where rhizomes of dispossession and structural violence intersect with those of resilience and resistance. The findings highlight how ordinary urban locations become ambivalent places where care, danger, memory, exclusion, and survival coexist. These place-based dynamics are discussed as contextually grounded insights with implications for future research on spatialized experiences of distress and well-being.