Marge has faced immense hardship and trauma throughout her life. She was abused as a child and raped by a family member, and was left on the street pregnant and alone as a young woman. Marge struggles to navigate bureaucratic systems to access support and feels like a failure when she cannot overcome the hurdles. She has a long history of unstable relationships and turns to alcohol to cope with the pain of loss and deepen depression. Her outbursts of violence while intoxicated target those she sees as perpetuating her situation, like law enforcement officers. Despite the difficulties in her life, Marge is a fighter and uses bravado, sweet talk, and alcohol to face daily harassment and advocate for herself on the

1. social geographies and street
life dualities
walking the line between dispossession and resilience, structure and agency

2. life histories and daily moments: embodying dual
tensions of structural imposition and agency
A
Marge faces a seemingly impossible situation; she is a woman who has been
failed at nearly all levels of her life. As a child she had experiences of abuse
from her elders and was raped multiple times by a family member. Marge
remembers her family wanting nothing to do with her and her allegations and
soon left her desolate and on the street after she fell pregnant at a young age
and gave birth.
Marge explained that the manner to access health services or information over
her children is often confusing to her, well conveyed information on how to
access follow up support hardly ever provided. Because of these bureaucratic
structures, Marge feels as if she is a failure whenever she is in need to access
state support but steps back from doing so because of the hurdles involved.
Marge has attached herself to various partners over the years, adopting their
behaviour and norms, and entering into their groups. According to her friends
her exaggerated antisocial behaviour and dependency on alcohol is
reinforced when her partners leave her or pass away, deepening her reliance
on alcohol and her depression that is masked with outbursts of bravado and
‘dutch courage’.
Marge often struggles to express how dire her situation feels to her, with alcohol
induced violent outbursts becoming her only form of release. As her reliance on
alcohol deepens with every significant negative moment, her outbursts against
friends, passer-by’s and CCID guards only intensify; targeting in her depressed
and drunken state as responsible for perpetuating her position. The seemingly
impossibility of this situation is not lost to Marge; she can only convey the
complexity of her life through rare, private moments of uncontrollable sobbing
when she is sober early in the morning.
B
Marge’s life is punctuated by daily moments of resilience and
perseverance. A natural born fighter, Marge proudly declares she “don’t
take mos kak from no one”. Despite her vulnerable position as a woman
street person, Marge has shaped herself to counter this assumption and
become a woman to be reckoned with; shaped by her many rough and
traumatic experiences on the street. She employs generous amounts of
bravado to verbally beat down any person who oversteps their
boundaries with her. She is well aware of the effect her loud, abrasive
vocal demonstrations has on people, employing it liberally to get her way
in most situations.
She can however also employ sweet talk in the right situations to get a bit
extra ‘klein geld’ from passing office workers or her favourite policeman
who parks nearby. Marge is well aware of the areas of the east city that
are most patrolled by the CCID; these artificial. geographies play no part
in her keeping her daily routine and going about her business. With the
threat of being harassed by CCID officers ever present, the need for a
liberal swig of alcohol gets her up in the morning It numbs the countless
emotional traumas, lowers her inhibitions and gives her the courage to
attempt to put the officers in their place; an action very few men in the
area would be courageous enough to mimic. Having a morning drink
becomes a tool for Marge to prepare for the day and give her courage to
deal with harassment to come.

3. Mapping these narrative
moments:
street people’s senses of
place and space
narrative points and common place
hotspots
perceived likelihood of risk of displacement
or harassment by CCID safety and security
“They like us to think they’re the boss, but they’re stupid. They’re not
as clever as me. But at the end of the day I have no option. They put
pressure on me, I’m a good man, but then I’ll have no choice. The
CCID is forcing us to survive. That’s instinctive, like an animal. To be
human is to be rational; to live. And we do live! This is our lives. We
live here. We don’t survive, we live. But they’ll make us survive and
become criminals; I’ll break into cars, like this one right here. I don’t
want to go back to jail, but I’ll do what I must if I have to survive.”

4. These forms of support only serve to
entrench structural marginalisation for
entrenched street people groups
through failing to provide essential
outreach services at the foundation
and early secondary levels.
Foundation level
No-strings-attached services
Trust building
Basic outreach services
Development of PIEs
Very high support need, specifically
catered care outreach services
Current organisational
care and support
structure for street
homeless in Cape Town
Ideal organisational care
and support structure for
street homeless in Cape
Town
Second level, stage 1:
Continued support essential
Still vulnerable to fall back to the
foundation
Still relatively high outreach support
needs
??
Second level, stage 2:
Introducing reconnections
Long-term shelter options
Lower support needs, more general
services required
Tertiary level:
Reconnections and housing
Social work counselling to reconnect
with broken families if possible

5. thinking forward
connection making at two levels:
social-cultural
• Forms of mapping (visual and written word
narratives) beyond artificially designated
boundaries
• See place making differences between groups
BUT also overlaps and nexus points of shared place
making
• Informing place making activations, fostering
empathy
organisational
• Attempting to make the first steps to rebalance
the organisational care and support structure
• Finding relatively disparate groups doing good
work at the foundation level, fostering connection
making between them
• Towards fostering context sensitive, first step care
outreach places