Cape Town and the sustainable city in the writing of Henrietta Rose-Innes

In narratives that demonstrate the mutual imbrication of urban and ecological imperatives, Henrietta Rose-Innes complements planners’ work that analyses and strives to sustains human and other native and migrating species in Cape Town. Squeezed between cliffs and oceans, urban life here must deal with mountain topography that appears to escape development and with environments that seem to frustrate civic order, particularly the informal settlements on the edges of this cosmopolitan tourist port. Drawing on anti-apartheid tropes of social justice and on post-apartheid challenges to neo-liberal speculation, her fiction and non-fiction writing traces the steps of biped, quadruped and hexapod figures along the borders between habitation and wilderness, urban street and bare earth to capture the beauty and violence of this singular South African city.