The “Bigger Picture”: How the 2010 FIFA World Cup and the 2014 World Design Capital Events Conditioned Cape Town’s Urban Transformation

This paper explores how the 2010 fifa world cup and the 2014 world design capital events feed into the disjunctive experience of time in cape town. It demonstrates, via a timeline, how a set of contemporary global discourses around soccer and design comes to rest in this very particular local context, as well as the effects that these discourses have. I argue that these discourses transform cape town into a global city oriented towards the future. I also argue, though, that they contribute to a state of amnesia. I address how this amnesia reinforces the imprint of colonial modernity on the landscape of the cape, with its associated historical and contemporary violence, and its effect on cultural production, identities and agency.