The Archaeology of Suburban Desire: A Documentation Project Begins

Where Ordinary Streets Hide Tropical Dreams

When you live somewhere long enough, things start to look normal.

Palm trees, for instance.

After moving back to Cape Town’s northern suburbs, I kept noticing how many palms there were. They stood alone on quiet streets, ringed by paving stones, rising above houses and vibracrete walls. At first, they seemed perfectly ordinary, part of the suburban backdrop.

But the more I looked, the stranger they felt. Why palms, in this place? Who decided these streets needed a touch of the tropics?

That’s how this project began. It grew from the realisation that the landscapes we call normal often aren’t normal at all, once you stop to look properly.

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Inherited Exotica

Inherited Exotica: The Archaeology of Suburban Desire is a photographic series exploring how palm trees became silent markers of suburban dreaming.

I’m not interested in palms as plants, but as cultural artefacts. They’re clues. Fossils of desire.

Over the next few months, I’ll be documenting palm trees across Cape Town’s northern suburbs. My approach is methodical and neutral, drawing from the New Topographics tradition. I’m not hunting for dramatic images. I’m building an archive that shows how ordinary streets have been transformed by thousands of small, personal choices.

This Substack will be my working journal, a place to share photographs, research, and thoughts as the project unfolds.

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Palms as Clues

Cape Town’s palms didn’t appear by accident. Their history runs back to colonial gardens of the 1800s, when people like Ralph Arderne brought exotic trees from around the world to create personal Edens.

That impulse didn’t vanish. It moved into the suburbs. Homeowners planted palms to bring a bit of paradise home, to escape, or simply to add a flourish of glamour to ordinary streets.

Individually, these trees fade into the background. Together, they form a manufactured landscape, an exotic overlay so normal we barely notice it.

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A Systematic Survey

Here’s how I’m working:

• Walk or drive through neighbourhoods

• Find palms, big or small

• Photograph them on my mobile phone, the same device many residents use to share their own suburban visions

• Keep a neutral style: colour images, straight-on framing, everyday light

This is the same kind of detached observation used by the New Topographics photographers in the 1970s. The aim isn’t judgement, but clarity.

Each palm becomes a marker, a timestamp, evidence of the moment someone decided their street needed something extraordinary.

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The Questions I’m Asking

This project explores:

• What do palm trees reveal about suburban aspirations?

• How do repeated, individual choices reshape “natural” landscapes?

• What hidden traces of paradise-seeking lie in these streets?

• How does suburbia become everyday escapism?

I’m not here to deliver final answers. Instead, I’m mapping the terrain, one palm at a time.

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What You’ll Find Here

In the weeks ahead, I’ll be sharing:

• New photos from my survey work

• Research into Cape Town’s history of exotic planting

• Reflections on suburbia, desire, and landscape

• Notes and discoveries from the field

Think of this as both archive and excavation.

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Why Substack?

I wanted a space that sits somewhere between an academic paper and a gallery wall. A place to share ideas and images in progress. Somewhere that artists, historians, and anyone curious about the hidden life of suburban streets might come along for the ride.

This isn’t only a photography project. It’s an archaeological dig into how the ordinary hides the extraordinary.

Thanks for joining me at the start.

Next week, I’ll write about why palm trees, out of all possible trees, became the chosen symbols of suburban paradise.

Until then, keep your eyes open. Even the most ordinary places hold secrets, if you’re willing to look twice.