Brand Aid: shopping well to save the world

ing and unacceptable inequities of this metropolis. Yet rather like ascribing Cape Town’s problems of a previous dispensation to ‘racism,’ I was predisposed to find the term ‘neoliberalism’ too protean, too vague to have much analytical merit. However, in his conclusion, especially in its final nine pages, Samara provides a clear, five-faceted elucidation of what he is prepared to see as a punitive neoliberalism. What was once a colonial city became an apartheid city and then, we had hoped, a liberated city? It didn’t pan out. Instead, the transition from a city underdeveloped by apartheid to one underdeveloped by neoliberalism appears in his opinion to be almost seamless. He makes the most cogent point that after electoral democracy was established in 1994, whichever the political party in power – be it the ex-apartheid, revamped New National Party, or the liberal Democratic Alliance/Party, or the African National Congress – the neoliberal agenda of securitisation remained the same. The central city is polished up, and its fortified boundaries are to be defended against the Cape Flats. The current spatial language of the metropolis, Samara alleges powerfully, is one ‘that rearticulates the apartheid-era geography of inside/safety and outside/danger’ (p. 182). A very good book – but from the author’s description, the metropolitan situation comes across as wretched.