This study investigated the forms, meanings, and contours of contemporary urban culture, space, and identity in the South African port city and municipality of eThekwini/Durban. The production and representation of urban culture, identity and space were examined regarding media representations of the city and lived experiences of purposively selected participants, cultural actors, and practitioners who live and work in the city. Utilising the circuit of culture model, critical discourse analysis of local newspapers, and the participatory photovoice method, this qualitative study examined how the city exists as an object of ongoing and active practices of “city-making”, negotiation, regulation, exchange, consumption, representation, and cultural production. Whereas the racially ordered space of apartheid “group areas” and “dormitory towns” was as openly enforced as it was resisted before 1994, it has now been replaced by democratised and seemingly non-racialised space. However, the coming of democracy has only intensified and sharpened the struggles over the meaning of urban space and belonging and identity. Indeed, the contest over urban space has intensified after 1994, but in ways that call for further and deeper study and analysis. This study has sought to contribute to this discourse of reimagining struggles over urban space and its meanings. The study finds that urban space emerges, more and more, as the product of the constant but uneven tension between the ordering and the dis-ordering of space. The outcome is neither purely ordered space (i.e., urban planning) nor dis-ordered space but a constantly negotiated and renegotiated spatial order whose final form is always emerging and is far from being definitive, conclusive, or decided. Crisis and contradiction are constant. In the study, the layered and contested “construction” of the city emerges as a fundamental theme in the study. The study found that, whereas eThekwini aspires to be a “global city” and flourishing hub of economic development, investment, and tourism, particularly since the hosting of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, as well as a source of livelihood and “equal” opportunities for all its residents, the alienating and schizophrenic reality of the persistence of inequality, poverty, and exclusion, fed by the fraught histories of colonialism and apartheid, produce and reproduce a continuously contested and fragmented city. The urban culture, spaces and aspirations of eThekwini exist in non-stop (if productive) tension.