Cape Flats

Laura Pannack's project explores the tumultuous public lives of young people in the gang-governed Cape Flats area of Cape Town, South Africa, where their daily commute carries the risk of death.

Following an application by the PHA Campaign, the Western Cape High Court stopped a development in the PHA because of unanswered questions about its impact on water provision and recharge of the Cape Flats Aquifer.

This area, just 20km outside central Cape Town on the Cape Flats, has been whittled down from over 3,000 hectares in the mid-1960s to under 2,000 hectares today.

We thumbed away from the waterfront and the verdant enclaves that hug the iconic Table Mountain, and over to the sprawling Cape Flats, all dusty brown.

I was nine years old, taking part in an anti-apartheid protest in our neighbourhood on the Cape Flats, an area designated as "non-white" under the segregationist Group Areas Act.