of the consequences of rapid urbanisation. In both the developing and developed world, small towns are becoming ghost towns as young people leave for the bigger urban centres. At the same time, the infrastructure of the cities of the Global North is aging, creating many “unremarkable” and derelict urban sites, often described as “non-places,” in European towns and cities. Investigations of these areas are revealing that many neglected and abandoned places are worthy of study for a variety of reasons.15 These include their current use by non-mainstream occupants such as drug addicts, homeless people and teenagers with skateboards, as well as many of them being sites of new, ‘wild,’ urban biodiversity.16 Although “unremarkable places” or “non-places” in the urban landscape17 have not been well studied in South Africa, academic interest in the dynamics of unoccupied urban land and urban “spaces” in South African cities is slowly growing.18 In South Africa, abandoned, ordinary and unspectacular urban places will in all likelihood carry racial meanings linked to the apartheid past of racial exclusion and will not in fact be vacant, but occupied by destitute black persons. Investigating the “unremarkableness” of the tiny South African farming town of Marikana seemed a worthy project, particularly considering the proximity of this ‘ordinary’ town to an ‘extraordinary’ event, the 2012 police shooting of striking mineworkers. The town is also interesting because of its bystander status in the face of the poverty and exploitation in the platinum mining sector. While the small white farming town of Marikana was “unremarkable” for a very long time, the 2012 atrocity should have made it visibly exceptional in some way – but it has failed to do so. As an outsider visiting the town, one has the sense of stepping into a rather ominous ‘movie set’ where subtle cues have been provided to indicate that bad things have happened in the past, that nothing here is pleasant, and that there are hidden elements of violence creating tension. The settlement seems desperate and brash, a dangerous frontier or mining town with dusty, pot-holed streets, formidable mining infrastructure all around and hardscrabble poverty the lot of local people. Heavy mining vehicles carrying loads of ore roll continuously through the town. Walk-on ‘actors’ appear, carrying crates of beer. Smoke billows from an informal street barbeque where ‘hoodlums’ stand around and converse, setting the scene for a drama yet to happen. The town has a raw, masculine aura, attesting to the prominence of male labour in the local mines.
Marikana: A Town in Decline
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