Imagined Homes: Speculative Futurecraft-work in South Africa’s Margins

This paper explores the concept of “home” in Cape Town’s Cape Flats through the lens of displacement, creativity, and everyday resistance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, community storytelling, and theoretical frameworks of stickiness (Ahmed), fabulation (Deleuze), and sincerity (Jackson), it examines how residents engage in what is termed speculative futurecraft-work—the imaginative construction of futures amid historical loss and material precarity. Through vignettes of inherited keys, colourful walls, and communal repair rituals, the paper shows how homes are continuously made, remembered, and desired. These practices challenge the imposed geographies of apartheid-era spatial planning and affirm the right to shape one’s environment and identity. Rather than romanticising survival, the analysis highlights both the constraints and radical possibilities of home-making at the margins. Ultimately, the work reveals how memory, care, and creativity transform marginalised spaces into dynamic landscapes of belonging, rooted in the sincerity of lived experience and the audacity of imagined futures.