“What you earn is how you move“

We sit in a corporate board room with a large screen, a wooden table, and six comfortable chairs. Offered coffee and pastries, we wait eagerly for our interview partner, an entrepreneur who has made it his mission to disrupt Cape Town’s transportation and mobility landscape. One of the first things he tells us is: “What you earn is how you move.” In many ways, this statement captures the gist of what we were about to explore for the next two and a half weeks: a city of two tales, a city of incredible wealth and immense poverty, a city of striking inequalities.

A few days earlier, Ingo, Daniel, and I arrived in Cape Town. The mission was clear: validate research findings from a previous trip in November 2023 and build connections with Cape Town’s urban planning scene to prepare a potential third funding phase. Our research revolves around location-based technologies or “locative media.” Locative media are mobile apps that access the geolocation features of smartphones to locate their users in physical space and display web content tailored to their current location. Comparing Berlin, Tokyo, and Cape Town, we are interested in how locative media shape the constitution and experience of urban space. In Cape Town, we conducted qualitative interviews with three stakeholders: queer dating app users, Pokémon Go players, and urban planning experts.

At first glance, it seemed like these groups of people have nothing to do with each other. We learned about the enormous challenges queer individuals face when living their sexual identities in a widely heteronormative society. We gained a better understanding of how virtual and physical gaming realities overlap and produce novel hybrid spaces. For example, one Pokémon Go player told us that they can nominate “PokéStops” – locations for collecting items such as Poké balls, and thus tailor urban space according to their gaming preferences. We also delved into the power-laden intricacies related to the various modes of transport Cape Town has to offer, including the city’s bus rapid transit “MyCiti,” the informal minibus taxis, contracted bus services such as Golden Arrow, private operators like Uber, and Western Cape’s “Metrorail.”

It quickly became clear however, that these different empirical phenomena are all intimately tied to structural inequality generally, and to the post-Apartheid regime more specifically. Queer dating takes place in the white-dominated, liberal places close to the waterfront as opposed to the Cape Flats, where the poor and marginalized live. In addition to that, it is significantly impacted by the cost of transport. If one cannot afford the Uber ride, the date will have to be postponed. Similarly, playing Pokémon Go is a spatial practice that is limited to the West of Cape Town and dominated by white, male, middle class individuals. Finally, urban transport is heavily shaped by the powerful minibus industry, itself a function of racial segregation, which to this day dictates how one moves from point A to point B.

Overwhelmed by this realization, I couldn’t help but wonder: How can we possibly do justice to the multiplicity and simultaneity of these phenomena? How can we grasp the complexities of post-Apartheid Cape Town? If anything, it became clear that urban transport provides a highly intriguing lens to study how inequality plays out across our (seemingly) different case studies. It offers a unique prism into the intimate relationships between formality and informality, Western and African imaginaries of the urban, and radical and incremental notions of urban spatial change.

Back in Berlin, I am left with a feeling of gratitude for the interviewees who entrusted us with their stories about Cape Town. I feel a deep sense of humility and responsibility to provide as accurate an account as possible of what we have observed. Above all, my thoughts consistently return to the tech entrepreneur who told us, “what you earn is how you move.” Reflecting on our time in Cape Town, I would add, “what you earn is how you move, how you date and how you play.”

Author Biography: Nicolas Zehner is a postdoctoral researcher at the CRC 1265 “Re-Figuration of Spaces” at TU Berlin, as well as associated researcher at Weizenbaum Institute. Nicolas holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Edinburgh. His research investigates the co-constitutive relationship between science, technology, and urban development.