This paper deploys several propositions from Amin and Thrift's recent theoretical work to map emerging geographies of the postapartheid city. Using Cape Town as a case study, the focus is on urban planning and informal sector retailing. After a discussion of the informal food sector, three parameters of urban space that are often apprehended separately are held together: an imagined geography of planning for the efficient and postapartheid city (‘dreams’); a material geography of marketplaces for the developmental transformation of informal retailing (‘bricks’); and a socioeconomic geography of what local officials call “pre-entrepreneurs” (‘bodies’). The author argues that these three geographical features of the postapartheid city are of an emerging and mutually dependent piece; that is to say, they are cocreating each other across scales and domains of reality. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the broader implications for understanding the prospects of the postapartheid city.
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