A 'desire line' is an informal path rather than an official route, an intersection that reveals notions of space, memory and identity in the post-apartheid city, contested spaces of power and privilege, identity and difference; palimpsests of historical experience; lived spaces in the everyday performance of urban life. Lines of desire cut across the formal grid, challenging the search for order, engaging in a tussle for recognition and difference, and risking disappointment and destruction as the stamp of authority is reasserted. Cape Town began as a grid imposed on the troubling disorder of the colonised landscape. lts orthogonal grid grew to include houses and gardens, Castle, Church and Slave House, and a Garden of walkways and planted beds, ‘rich in fruits and flowers', enclosed by 'a wall a rood high and a moat half a rood wide' and defined by rules for its use and maintenance. Visitors drew a comparison between this geometric regularity and the wild and untamed nature of Devil's Peak behind, 'a land that seems the most sterile and horrible in the world’.