Small town geographies rethinking South African urban imageries

Abstract

South African small-town settlements are an integral part of our urban and rural landscape; providing important trading and service centres for the surrounding communities. Although widely researched under a variety of banners, the ‘small town’ remains an elusive construct that is seemingly caught in the midst of the rural and urban debate, resulting in a crisis of identity and terminology for small towns. Whist many have attempted to remedy the situation, the innate plurality and ambiguity of these not-urban and not-rural spaces has yielded no intellectual nor pragmatic consensus as to how they should be defined. Traditionally, small towns are understood in terms of a broader urban hierarchy. However, traditional positive-functional approaches are proving to be less and less effective in capturing the heterogeneous complexity of small towns. The consequence is very much a slowing of the progression of knowledge within the field to continue to ‘move with the times’ and remain a competitive discipline. The aim of this research was to challenge the way small towns are understood, investigated, constructed and represented within the field of human and urban geography. In principal it is to initiate a conversation on the potential of imploring different methods and how this could act as a catalyst for a more nuanced and dynamic understanding of small towns. This document makes reference to two films, which can be found at: https://youtu.be/CKMJX6cmgms and https://youtu.be/gYGwLLkx3k4