Cast in stone: spatial narratives in the face of democracy
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Apartheid Museum walk through<blockquote dir="ltr" style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
To be free is not merely to cast off ones chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others (Nelson Mandela). </blockquote>
The flowing words greet you when entering the Apartheid Museum: metallic text mounted on a massive concrete slab, a trickle pours into the shallow enclosing moat. The museum, situated at Gold Reef City casino and theme park serves to embody and institutionalise apartheid. It approaches South Africa's history in a postmodern, unsentimental manner (fig.1). 
Upon entering the enclosure "[w]rapped in a fortress-like 10-metre high wall" (Bremner, 2002) through the rusting framed military style gates (fig.2). Be classified as white or non-white by the randomly issued entry card. Walk past the "Slegs Blankes [Whites Only]" benches and seven pillars representing the cornerstones of the Constitution - Democracy, Equality, Diversity, Respect, Freedom, Responsibility, Reconciliation (fig. 3). Walk through the race-relevant door (fig. 4) and stand before a print of the Classification Board (fig. 5). Ascend the ramp with the life-size images of South Africans mounted on mirrors and occasionally catch a glimpse of yourself (fig 6). Gabion walls to your left and orange-brick yards (fig.7) with Koisan rock painting reprints to your right. Reach the plateau, desolate except for the row of rigid water fountains (fig 8), raw steel fencing and stone walls. Look down on Gold Reef City's Anaconda roller-coaster and the back-dropped city horizon. Descend the staircase between the towering walls and caged lights (fig. 9) and step into the interior of the Apartheid Museum. 
In the seemingly empty space photographs are enlarged to span walls. A three story length window is the surface of a few lines of text and the concrete exterior walls and a lone tree the backdrop. Memory boxes contain artefacts of early settlement and immigration. An auditorium screens a movie depicting the beginnings of apartheid. Video footage and photographs of contrasting white and non-white lifestyles, political speeches and propaganda are displayed. 131 nooses hang, the number of political prisoners executed in South Africa (Magid, 2002). A quote by Solomon Mashlanga reads "My blood will nourish the tree which will bear the fruits of freedom". Loops of right wing AWB leader Eugene Terre Blanche falling off his horse and Nelson Mandela's release from prison play on giant screens. A photograph of a first democratic election voting-queue lines a corridor to a ballot box. Enter a brightly-lit space with a depiction of Nelson Mandela sporting a South African rugby jersey and interviews giving testimony of the hardships of living in the new South are televised. 
In the final phase of the museum natural elements begin returning to the landscape. Wood replaces the steel fencing. A rock disrupts the concrete slab flooring. Saplings penetrate the gravel and a tree emancipates from the geometric structures (fig. 10). A tamed bushveld garden - rows of Highveld grass, and gravel leading to grass carpeted stairs from which to "reflect on the unique South African story experienced in the museum" (Apartheid Museum pamphlet) (fig 11). 
Sorkin: ageographic city<blockquote dir="ltr" style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
The frame of reference is ... limited: it is not about Soweto, the South Bronx, or Dhaka. Nor is it directly about Urbino, Paris, or Savannah, those pleasant centres of traditional urbanity. And yet it is (Sorkin, 1992a, p. xv). </blockquote>
The ageographia is a recently emerged kind of (American) city, "a city without a place attached to it" (Sorkin, 1992a, p. xi). Sorkin (1992a) evidences the advancement of the ageographical city in shopping centres inhabited by national-chain department stores and surrounded by crowded parking lots, in an endless sprawl of new suburbs without cities and in the millions of antennas of satellite dishes asserting equal value to all elements of the broadcast day. The 'suburban cities' on the fringes of the metropolis exist for Sorkin (1992a) in a 'non-place urban realm', providing the functions of the city but eradicating the undisciplined formal and social mix of city life. 
For Sorkin (1992a) the growth of the new city is not only physical as it also occupies a vast unseen conceptual space or Cyburbia. Yet the connections that make sense of this city's forms are lacking. That is, in the history of the city, proximity results in order through mapping social relations clearly with a vast information of status and regulation. In the new city these orders have been manipulated and obscured as hierarchies are both reinforced and concealed (Sorkin, 1992a). Value is still a function of location but with communication developments (telephone and modem) the new city is liberated from its centres and edges and replaced by an order directed towards single citizenship and consumption threatening an unimagined sameness (Sorkin, 1992a). 
The ageographic thesis is based on the new city that is understood as a dystopic Disneyland (Lees, 1997). Disneyland or rather the theme park has its roots in practical utopianism (an optimistic vision of a perfectible future). America became a blank canvas for this ideal in the late 1800's, intentional communities, for example the Shakers, Quakers and Mormons who may not have reformed the physical life of the city but who provided an atmosphere of renovation and reform. In terms of urbanism, according to Sorkin (1992b), the contrast between practical utopianism and the increasing degraded conditions of the industrial city precipitated proposals that took a physical form of which the 'City Beautiful' movement was the first model to occur. City Beautiful prescribed baroque symmetries and an abundance of parks and greenery. City Beautiful anticipated the formula for the theme park with its "fascination with sumptuousness, visible order and parks - with the monumental, 'public' aspect of the city" (Sorkin, 1992b, p. 211). 
Baudrillard: notes on simulation 
One of the defining principles of the ageographia is its working in the realm of simulations (Sorkin, 1992a). The concept of simulation will thus be further elaborated on before applying it to the ageographia. Baudrillard (1983) differentiates between simulation and representation. Representation for Baudrillard (1983) is founded on the principle that the sign and the real are equivalent, even if this equivalence is utopian. Simulation begins at this principle of utopian equivalence or "the radical negation of the sign as value" (Baudrillard, 1983, p. 11). Representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation. Simulation embraces representation as a simulacrum. The image thus undergoes four successive phases in the transition of signs that dissimulate (to feign not to have what one has) something to those that simulate (to feign to have what one has not or to dissimulate that there is nothing). According to Baudrillard (1983) dissimulation leaves the reality principle intact as the difference between true and false is clear although masked. In simulation truth, falsity and the difference between real and imaginary are threatened as the simulator produces true images (Baudrillard, 1983). 
In the first phase the image "is the reflection of a basic reality" (Baudrillard, 1983, p. 11) and thus a good appearance. Ideology belongs to this phase in that there is a dissimulation of truth and secrecy. Next, the image "masks and perverts a basic reality" (Baudrillard, 1983, p. 11), translated as an evil appearance. This inaugurates the age of simulacra as the separation of true from false becomes impossible. In the third phase the image "marks the absence of a basic reality" (Baudrillard, 1983, p. 11), playing at being an appearance. Nostalgia comes to dominate thinking along with a "proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality" (Baudrillard, 1983, p. 12). Lastly, the image "bears no relation to any reality" (Baudrillard, 1983, p. 11) and is thus not in the order of appearance but of simulation. According to Baudrillard (1983) there is panic-stricken production of the real resulting in the hyperreal - models of the real without origin or reality. Representation has replaced reference and representationism is now the most real. Baudrillard (1983) uses the example of the map in which the territory today no longer precedes or survives the map, but rather the map precedes and engenders the territory. 
The orders of the simulacra are based on Baudrillard's (1993) proposed tripartite account of value. This consists of "a natural stage (use-value), a commodity stage (exchange-value), and a structural stage (sign-value)" (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 5). The first order simulacrum is based on the natural law of value and supposes a detectable alteration between semblance and reality. The second order of simulacrum, is based on the commercial law of value that absorbs appearances, liquidates the real and the logic of the operational system becomes immediate. The third order of simulacrum is based on the structural law of value. It is a stage of serial reproduction in which only affiliation to the model makes sense (Baudrillard, 1993). For Baudrillard (1993) there is a fourth stage of value, the fractal, where there is no point of reference but rather a radiation of value in all directions. There is an indifference in which objects become undefined simulacra of each other. Each "value shines for a moment in the heavens of simulation, then disappears into the void" (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 5). 
Apartheid Museum as ageographia
Sorkin (1992a) outlines three principles by which to identify the ageographia. It is useful to consider the Apartheid Museum in light of these criteria. The museum serves as one example of the ageographia, although it stands for many other private-public fragments of the city. It serves as a place from which to launch further considerations of public space, democracy and the place of the individual subject within this new city. 
Ideological landscapes 
The new city or ageographia occupies a distinctive material and ideological landscape maintained in a realm of simulations (Sorkin, 1992a). Sorkin's (in Lees, 1997) ageographia allows a sceptical synopsis of the image-driven postmodern culture. 
Traditional urban arrangements in the ageographia are replaced by the space of the single human subject or monadic consumer (Halley, cited in Soja, 1995). The authenticity of the simulation depends on the faded knowledge of an absent genuine. This point is well illustrated by the use of reproductions of petty apartheid signage, for example the 'Europeans only' benches (O'Toole, 2002). According to Mail & Guardian columnist, Matshikiza (in O'Toole, 2002) "[w]e all remember how those signs looked - even if it is only from photographs reproduced from Drum magazine and documentary films like Last Grave at Dimbaza. Here however signs are brand new and have been unfaithfully reproduced in rather more attractive type fonts than the apartheid state could be bothered with". Kathryn Smith, curatorial consultant explains that due to a shortage of artefacts the museum relied on photographs when constructing their replicas (O'Toole, 2002). O'Toole (2002) goes on to argue that authenticity brings one no closer to the truth of apartheid. This short exchange echoes two of Baudrillard's (1983) assertions. Firstly, we can categorise the bench as a simulation in which truth, falsity and the difference between real and imaginary are dissolved. Secondly, there is a movement to the fourth phase of the image (here the bench), or the hyperreal. That is, instead of referencing the real or original, other representation become the source of reference (movies, magazines and photographs). The representations seem more real to us than experienced apartheid. 
Buildings relying on images drawn from history for their authority are a powerful example of how a past is appropriated for an exigent present. Sorkin's (1992a) understanding could thus be interpreted as referring to the use of the image in architecture - and the way that image becomes form. Urban design is preoccupied with reproduction and creating urbane disguises, and for Sorkin (1992a) the happy face of familiar architecture of deception, spectacle and coercion distances itself from the most fundamental realities. Sorkin (1992a) describes this design as almost purely semiotic, simulated and invested in the theme-park building. It is based on imageability rather than on the needs and traditions of its inhabitants (Sorkin, 1992a) who become essentially alienated by their submission to the routines of another's imagining (Sorkin, 1992b). Distinguishing between monument and tourist attraction becomes difficult in a global tourist economy (Bunn, 2000). 
This disjunction from the familiar is created when engulfed by the strange postmodern architecture of the museum, or as Bremner (2002) explains, "The Apartheid Museum is a very good building. Unused as we are in this country to very good buildings, its poetry evokes a strong sense of being somewhere else", or in Bauer's (2002) words, "[i]t signals both the emergence of a new South African architecture, as well as a new South African way of thinking about our past". Marin (1984) (in reference to Disneyland) illustrates how a new reality is mediated by a perfectly mastered narrator-visitor vocabulary. The function of the narrative is that it is: (i) phatic - allowing stories to be narrated; (ii) referential - through it reality becomes a fantasy and an image of reality; and (iii) integrative - "a condition by which the space takes on meaning for the viewer and a condition by which the space can be narrated by the visitor (the actor)" (Marin, 1984, p. 247). Applied to the seven unmarked pillars, (i) they allow the story of apartheid and the cornerstones of the Constitution to be narrated; (ii) passing through them we move from democratic South Africa into a represented apartheid space; and (iii) the visitor become part of that space for their time there - an actor. By placing the 'outside' inside so to speak, an evocative power is gained as the 'outside' is seized by the trappings of the scene (Marin, 1984). Reality thus plays an intricate part in ones understanding of a vision and comes to dominate it. The freedom of individual narrative is constrained by the codes and representation of a history contained in a system of representations (Marin, 1984). 
Nothing is immune to simulation and so we witness the emergence of a simulated naturalism. In Sorkin's (1992b) work on the theme park an alien, sublime view of nature is offered. The natural has been approached either as the 'wild' in the romantic ode, or as that needing to submit for example, the garden ideal. Both these views of nature rely on a pastoral idea that the renaturalisation of the denatured city would have a restorative effect on humanity. At the plateaux of the museum we gaze across "an artificially constructed mound of earth planted with indigenous Highveld grass" under which the exhibition spaces are buried (Bremner, 2002). "Here the visitor is presented with views of Egoli, City of Gold, to which the original migrants travelled, with a topograph orientating the visitor with the places from which they came" (Apartheid Museum pamphlet). The nostalgia prevalent in Baudrillard's (1983) simulacrum is thus facilitated. Our second encounter with the natural, after exiting the exhibition space, serves as a medium from which to reflect on apartheid. By extension, the natural provides a space form which to consider the role of apartheid in the construction of our own identities - on the kind of subject that the museum in that brief time constructs us as. 
The unrelenting slabs of concrete, walls of brick and cages of stone construct a Panopticon, the visitor submitting to the status of a surveilled subject. Simultaneously the emptiness and vastness of the space leaves the impression of a deserted prison, an abandoned apartheid. We thus witness what Sorkin (1992a) describes as semiotic design. Rather than illustrating the narrative within architecture reminiscent of that used during the hay-day of apartheid or in a site commensurate with apartheid, an alien design in a removed location is utilised. This brings us to Sorkin's (1992a) second principle of the ageographia, placelessness. 
Placelessness 
The Apartheid Museum's location is a result of its function. That is, in order for Gold Reef City Casino to keep its gaming licence the government required the casino to complete a social development project (Swarns, 2001). The idea was, according to business tycoon Solly Krok (in Bauer, 2001), "to add another tourist attraction to help us get the licence", an add-on attraction to Gold Reef City's theme park. South Africa's first apartheid museum thus shares its space with Gold Reef City theme park and casino, also the site of an abandoned gold mine (SABC, 2001). 
"[F]lanked by screaming roller coasters, a big wheel and the brass springboks of the Golf Reef Casino" (Bremner, 2002) the inappropriateness of the site seems nonetheless unproblematic insofar as the theory of the ageographia is concerned. Yet, as Sorkin (1992a) explains, the ageographia is characterised by a diffusion of stable relations to local physical and cultural geography, the loosening of ties to a specific place. An ageographic place can be inserted into any space. Anomaly is replaced with a universal particular, resulting in the 'departicularisation' of space. Telecommunications, highways and airport connections remain the links enabling these dispersed developments as a mode of urbanism. "To get to the museum, take the Booysens off ramp from the N1 and allow the signs to lead your way". Only on entering the ageographia does a benign mobility, indigenous to leisure, and signified by the pedestrian pathways predominate. Now you can watch yourself catching up to photographed-mounted-on mirror-people walking away (refer to fig 6). The dislocation of the theme park is essential in magnifying the relationship between transportation and geography and illuminating its relation to society (Sorkin, 1992b). That is, the Apartheid Museum forms one of the fragments of the city, appealing only to those who can afford to be there (Bremner, 2002). "This is the Johannesburg of tomorrow. A city of [among other things] simulated history and unwelcome poor" (Bremner, 2002). 
With reference to the design, one of the project's architects, Kroese (in Bauer, 2002) explains "[t]here are features in the building which you can relate to certain places like prisons or hostels, but the brief was not - could not - be to evoke specific places. One of the things I like about this building is that it doesn't really look as if it was designed by anyone. It bears no one's trademark or stamp, but rather looks as if it emerged. And perhaps therein lies its sense of place". Meaning again becomes a function of narrative, here the story that the architecture tells. 
Gottdiener (1995) describes this phenomenon as the production and consumption of spatial forms and symbolic conceptions. The former refers to the production of meaning through the built environment, where the sender may be an individual or group with or without an intention to communicate a particular message (Gottdiener, 1995). Consumption refers to the reading of space or the built environment "where the addressee is an individual or collective synchronic or diachronic subject either known or unknown to the sender" (Lagopoulos in Gottdiener, 1995, p. 101). At the Apartheid Museum the ideology of apartheid, a part of South African history is narrated through the images the design represents - it is concretised in a spatial form. The visitor consumes this narrative, is subjected to the apartheid ideology (for example, forced to enter through separate entrances). 
Panoptic fantasies
In the ageographia there exists an obsession with security and rising levels of manipulation and surveillance over its citizenry along with a proliferation of new modes of segregation. These policing technologies take the form of domestic versions of the electronic battlefield (Sorkin, 1992a). Davis (1992), another dystopic theorist who uses Los Angeles as a case study describes lifestyles characterised by an obsession with physical security. According to Davis (1992) the architectural policing of social boundaries or the militarisation of city life has emerged as a master narrative in the built environment. 
In Sorkin's romanticised view of the historical city, the city's role as an integrator of communities has ceased in favour of selective development, urban segregation, enforced distinction (Sorkin, 1992a) and residential and commercial security (Davis, 1992). This is the fulfilling of Nixon's 1969 National Commission's dire predictions that "we live in 'fortress cities' brutally divided between 'fortified cells' of affluent society and 'places of terror' where the police battle the criminalised poor" (Nixon in Davis, 1992, p. 224). According to Sorkin (1992a. p. xv) "as spatiality ebbs, so does intimacy". At the Apartheid Museum there are two forms of surveillance and segregation: (i) that resulting in the fragmentation of the city and the surveillance; and (ii) that of the segregation of apartheid, the suffering to which the building is a memorial. Yet this is an artificial and contrived sense of segregation. The location, guards, closed circuit cameras (depicted in fig. 2 and fig. 4) and entrance fees are testament to the first. It is thus a private space to which entry is inaccessible to many, where admission could be selective. With regard to the second scenario the surveillance and policing of apartheid are experienced from the moment ones gaze meets the uninviting walls in which the museum is wrapped. We live it when walking through those steel gates, being classified as white or non-white, feeling dwarfed to insignificance by the towering uncompromising structure. Are these two 'panopticons' separate or did apartheid pave the way to our fragmented city? Yet the artificiality of this 'second surveillance' - a simulation - must not be overlooked. It is there for effect. 
The end of democracy 

The gloom evident in Sorkin's (1992a, 1992b) work on the ageographia is that of the disappearance of the public space of the city and its replacement by the controlled space dominated by private enterprise and consumer capitalism (remembering that the Apartheid Museum is a private commercial venture (Madlala, 2001)). Ageographic space for Sorkin is antithetical to democracy. Sorkin (1997) holds that public space is the guarantee of democracy. Democracy requires people to occupy positions. "To conduct democracy's negotiations, we must speak from a position of identity, we must be located. Deliberative democracy requires us to be reliably "in the open" to fully participate" (Sorkin, 1997, p 10). The ageographia sanctions no agency from which to protest alienation. There is no choice but to submit to the narrative of the museum. Privately owned spaces function as civic squares but do not assume their responsibilities (Bremner, 2002). 
Another of Sorkin's (1997) preconditions for democracy is that spaces should offer convenient and accidental encounters. "Democracy's logic is to create a society which is perpetually unstable, always becoming, always open the change" (Sorkin, 1997, p. 13). Yet in the ageographia there are instead multiple publics which "presupposes and fixes a given distribution of identities in a radically dynamic society" (Rose in Sorkin, 1997, p. 14), a practice Sorkin (1997, p. 14) deems "clearly exclusionary". That is, there are different spaces for different publics. Soweto is viewed as the heart of black South African urban life (Morris, 1999) and Sandton the new central business district for the moneyed elite. 
Criticisms and renewal

The ageographia may reflect the disappearance of public space, yet it is not that clear-cut. It may rather be emblematic of the emergence of a new kind of space, as Soja (2000) understands public (and private) space as being restructured rather than destroyed. The concepts are not as distinct as they appear and a change in the public sphere does not simply result in an undemocratic transfer to the private domain and thus a loss of civic freedom. Soja (2000) criticises the homoginising of the public realm and the privatisation process. He understands this kind of thinking as protecting public and private space from critical examination of how each is affected by other process of differentiation and change. As Soja (2000) explains, 
From the ancient agora and forum of the Athenian polis to the present-day postmetropolis, public space has been divergently romanticised and mythologized in Western urban theory and practice to such an extent that it is difficult to see that it is a fully lived space, subject to being shaped - and reshaped - not only by class conflicts but also by gender, race, ethnicity, and other relations of differential social and spatial power (p. 320). 
It thus seems appropriate to approach the ageographia as one possible theoretical understanding though which to approach spatiality. Spaces that are approached as ageographia allow us to reflect on some of the narratives of our city and place in it. They allow us to look toward one of many utopian 'solutions'. Sorkin (1993) does just this when defining Place as: <blockquote dir="ltr" style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
a publicly perceptible and spatially distinct portion of the City that exhibits special cohesion. There is no restriction on the source of its coherence: tectonic, geographic, historical, functional, etc. A Place must be publicly accessible, either physically or visually. Only those aspects of the Place which are thus accessible shall be considered to be encompassed by that place (p. 62).</blockquote>
In this utopian text Sorkin (1993) outlines a kind of utopia that attempts to imagine a new city via a building code as a prescription for an urban fantasy. Sorkin (1993) warns that in a fragmented culture architecture should resist such oversimplified approaches in addition to those that 'aestheticise' present confusions.
Returning to the museum
The Apartheid Museum is an achievement, concretising, materialising the ideology of apartheid, submitting us to a system that we are too willing to forget. Demanding we be the surveilled subject, it successfully echoes the voice of apartheid by making no pretences of choice.
The political values of the Apartheid Museum seem undercut by its features. The consumer- capital reasons for its construction - its siting alongside a casino. That it is separate from the city and thus antagonistic to a democratic end. That it simulates, rather than represents history, separates it from history and meaning. That it is comparable to a theme park. All these reasons seem to undercut the Apartheid Museum's political functioning as a kind of monument. 
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References 

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Baudrillard, J. (1993). The transparency of evil: Essays on extreme phenomenon. London: Verso. 
Bauer, C. (2001, December, 2). Speaking for itself and for all of us. The Sunday Times, Insight. 
Bremner, L. (2002, March, 17). Theme park city. The Sunday Times, Lifestyle features. 
Bunn, D. (2000). Whited sepulchres: On the reluctance of monuments. In H. Judin & I. Vladislavic (Eds.). blanc_architecture, apartheid and after. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers. 
Davis, M. (1992). City of quartz: Excavating the future in Los Angeles. New York: Vintage. 
Gottdiener, (1995). Postmodern semiotics: Material culture and the forms of postmodern life. Oxford: Blackwell. 
Lees, L. (1997). Ageographia, heterotopia, and Vancouver's new public library. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 15, 321-347. 
Magid, S. (2002, March, 7). The Apartheid Museum - a fascinating newcomer. Saturday Star. 
Marin, L. (1984). Utopics: Spatial play. New Jersey: The Macmillan Press. 
Madlala, N. (2001, December, 16). Honour demands that veterans of the liberation struggle get their own monuments. The Sunday Times, Insight. 
Morris, A. (1999). 
O'Toole, S. (2002, March). The structure of memory: Johannesburg's Apartheid Museum. Artthrob Reviews. www.artthrob.co.za/02mar/reviews/ 
SABC. (2001, October, 31). South Africa wrestles with past in apartheid museum. SABC news. 
Soja, E. W. (1995). Heteropologies: A remembrance of other spaces in the citadel-LA. In S. Watson & K. Gibson (Eds.). Postmodern cities and spaces. Oxford: Blackwell. 
Soja. E. W. (2000). Postmetropolis: Critical studies of cities and regions. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. 
Sorkin, M. (1992a). Introduction. In M. Sorkin, (Ed.). Variations on a theme park: The new American city and the end of public space. New York: Hill & Wang. 
Sorkin, M. (1992b). See you in Disneyland. In M. Sorkin, (Ed.). Variations on a theme park: The new American city and the end of public space. New York: Hill & Wang. 
Sorkin, M. (1993). Local code. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. 
Sorkin, M. (1997). Traffic in democracy. University of Michigan: University Lithoprinters. 
Swars, R. L. (2001, December, 10). South African museum recreates apartheid. New York Times.

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