Abstract:
This article examines the relation between the University of Pretoria and the City of
Tshwane, outlining seven different kinds of relation as they have taken shape historically.
The first type relation between the University and the City presented here, establishes
correspondences in public architecture at the height of apartheid modernity, between
structures marking and shaping political convergences. The second type of relation is
premised on the walling in and fencing off of the University from the City; the Metro
musings exhibition inaugurating the ‘Capital Cities’ project looks across the divides thus
cemented, from within the confines of the University. The third type of relation is that
of ‘Community Engagement’ culminating in the annual Mandela Day activities, impelled
by ideas on the Developmental State featuring in the National Development Plan. In the
fourth type of relation, corporate models of municipal governance find common cause with
the corporate management styles of the University, expressed in corporate partnerships
combining a ‘University of Excellence’ with ‘the African City of Excellence’. The strategies
envisaged for social intervention emerging from this ‘partnership’ form a sixth type of
relation between the University and the City. In the process of pitting property and law
against poverty and lawlessness, new civic challenges are emerging for transformative
constitutionalism and for the University. In both arenas, this article concludes, what is
at stake is a seventh type of relation between the University and the City – outside of the
‘legal’-‘illegal’ distinction. For the University, in particular, this would entail a productive
idea of ‘dissensus’.
Description:
Panel on ‘Contestation and
Dissensus’ (14 August 2014)
of the ‘Feast of the Clowns’,
University of Pretoria, 11–16
August 2014: ‘The clown,
the university, the city: (un)
shackling liaisons’.
