Architectures of millennial development: Entrepreneurship and spatial justice at the bottom of the pyramid in Cape Town

In Cape Town, as in other cities of the Global South, the paradigms of millennial development are continuously mobilized in specific material ways. The idea that poverty can be fought with profit is manifest in a series of urban experiments that involve informal entrepreneurs, corporations, real estate developers, local architects, economists, non-governmental organizations and state agencies, in the search for market solutions to economic marginality. To illustrate this argument about the spatial politics of development, this paper charts the architectural, organizational and pedagogical making of Philippi Village, a building complex in one of Cape Town’s poorest neighbourhoods. A former cement factory turned into an entrepreneurial hub, Philippi Village is a material inscription, at the so-called bottom of the pyramid, of the possibility of expanding the frontiers of accumulation. However, while this entrepreneurial village may be a brownfield site for new forms of profit, its architectures also reveal the diverse economic rationalities that emerge from the quest of good entrepreneurship, including the politics of seeking spatial justice amid the urban legacies of apartheid.