Paths of nostalgia and desire through heritage destinations at the Cape of Good Hope

'Desire lines' - the theme of this volume - traverse the spaces between that which is projected and planned, and that which is circumstantial and accidental. This space, heterotopia in Foucault's concept of the instable zone of creativity, both builds on the organised project of modernity, and subverts it. Desire and nostalgia are interleaved, resulting in contradictions and uncertainties. In this chapter, we explore the nature of some of these spaces through contemporary entertainment complexes - shopping malls and casinos - the architectural children of a new democracy re-inserted in the global consumer economy. Entertainment complexes embody the contrasts between wealth and poverty and frequently evoke heritage in their pitch for the attention of the consumer. Our argument is that these spectacular inventions are both manifestations of the global entertainment industry- interpreted with a local patina - and also opportunities for new, popular, public spaces. They are amalgams of nostalgia and desire - shaped, and shaping, aspects of city living. As physical spaces, they are true 'desire lines'. The unintended consequence, then, of such 'desire lines' may be their contribution to the formation of identity in South Africa. As the old racialised divisions of apartheid are reassembled as socio-economic classes, those who have the resources to participate as consumers will become the familiars of these retail environments - of what George Ritzer has called 'cathedrals of consumption'. This point can be amplified by looking again at GrandWest. It is easy to dismiss the designers' hubris that theirs is a 'recreation of historic Cape Town'. Less obvious, perhaps, is their unintended construction of a new set of referents for an imagined past, a bizarre, concentrated mélange of romanticised Cape Malay and white suburban villa baroque, with a bit of colonial militarism thrown in. In its design, GrandWest is classic kitsch: 'a saturation of materiality, a saturation which takes place to such a degree that materiality is ironic, split into contrasting voices: past and present, mass production and individual subject, oblivion and reification'. This points to a new agenda for heritage studies in South Africa. Rather than limiting work to the past, with the risk of becoming locked in an academic form of 'restorative nostalgia', or remaining with critiques of the appropriation of heritage in the service of consumerism, heritage practitioners perhaps need to engage with urban designers, with planners and with the architects of the new 'cathedrals of consumption' which will - inevitably - be destination magnets in the cities of the future.