Ideas about density are tied in a complex knot. Once untangled, it reveals the fault lines along which geographical determinism has constructed spatial narratives that ignore the fluid, temporal, and intensely politicized spatiality experienced on the ground. More recent post-structural and post-colonial debates are attempting to make sense of environments exhibiting such complexity and intensity. Revealing a thickness in the urban field where forces of power, control, and subversion reconfigure territories in a manner that makes past density models seemingly obsolete.

Informal settlements on the fringes of post-apartheid South African cities have become the waiting rooms of a promised land. In most cases these communities are now rendered legal and stand in contrast to an emerging other defined as those extralegal communities existing underneath the surface of the visible urban fabric. Including illegal immigrants, criminal networks, and gated communities privileged by past and current bureaucratic malfunction.  Lines drawn along racial differences are morphing into new territories with fluid border conditions being defined by claims to ownership, the formation of identity, and a sense of urgency in reconfiguring territories in the new South Africa. Producing opportunity and tension, fear and desire, and a surprising capacity to negotiate these conflicting desires along variable trajectories. Exploring such trajectories upstream reveals a variable viscosity – metaphorically akin to scattering theory as used in the field of astrophysics when defining probability patterns of reconfiguration.