Keywords

3.1 Introduction

The geographical landscape in South Africa (physical, social and economic), was profoundly influenced by the policy of apartheid, which constitutes an unparalleled example of state-directed socio-spatial structuring. A central focus of apartheid state policy was to annihilate such communities and to “quarantine them in localities selected by the state where they could be more effectively regimented and controlled” (Bonner & Lodge, 1989, p. 1).

This chapter will analyse the rise and demise of the apartheid city and is divided into four sections.Footnote 1 The first section focuses on compounds and locations, which marked the early phase of colonial segregation, and was often implemented under the guise of health concerns and slum clearance programmes. Municipal officials also viewed locations as a mechanism to control the influx of Africans into cities. The Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 represented the first Union attempt to control, manage and segregate urban Africans. The Group Areas Act (GAA) of 1950 was one of the key instruments used to reinforce the ideology of apartheid and is the theme of the second section. The major impact of group area dislocations was borne by black communities, and well-known examples include District Six in Cape Town and Cato Manor in Durban. The demise of the GAA and the rise of ‘grey’ and free settlement areas are discussed in the third section.

The final section reviews post-apartheid segregation and desegregation trends. There are remarkable continuities between the apartheid and democratic eras in terms of socio-spatial inequalities, and neoliberal policies tend to reinforce race and class segregation, rather than radically challenge the apartheid urban landscape. Although all race-based discriminatory legislation has been scrapped, the legacy of apartheid will be visible in the South African landscape for a long time. Smith (1986, 1992) and Lemon (1991) provide interesting case studies of urban segregation.

3.2 Colonial Segregation—Locations and Compounds

In South Africa colonial and apartheid segregation served first and foremost as sophisticated systems of labour regulation and exploitation (Wolpe, 1972; Legassick, 1974). A key strategy was to dispossess black people of their land and livelihoods. In terms of the Land Act of 1913, the total African population would be restricted to rural reserves which would comprise 13% of the total land area (Platzky & Walker, 1985).

Although a number of factors have been responsible for the inequitable distribution of political power and wealth in South Africa, it has been argued that the dispossession of land had the most immediate impact on black communities. The 1913 Land Act allocated 13% of the land to black people. The economic and social structure of these communities was premised on the distribution of land, typical of most agrarian communities. Therefore, land dispossession was “an act akin to national destruction” (De Klerk, 1991, p. 1).

The primary intention was to force small scale rural farmers into the wage economy and to control the allocation and movement of labour between major economic sectors—agriculture, mining and manufacturing—and especially ensuring that the former two always had a surplus, which will keep wages low. As Rex (1974, p. 4) has argued, the “compound, the Reserve and the urban location [were] the essential institutions of Southern African labour exploitation”.

The compound system was developed by the De Beers Consolidated Mines in 1885, mainly in an attempt to reduce diamond losses from theft, as well as to control and confine the labour force around Kimberley. It was subsequently adopted widely in the Witwatersrand goldmines. Compounds represented a successful effort by mining capital to create self-sufficient labouring communities with restricted access to the outside world. By restricting the workers’ access to town, services provided by African petty bourgeois traders were also effectively eliminated. Compounds and locations should be viewed as urban constructs which developed as historically specific social formations, whose position in relation to the rest of the city was determined by the nature of capitalist production—the need to isolate workers and to segregate them spatially (Padayachee & Haines, 1985). Compounds, hostels and locations served as effective means of control and repression, and stifled political or labour action (Rex, 1974). According to Mabin (1986, p. 5), “compounds as the first formal means of segregation had a profound influence on the timing and emergence of the presently more widely known feature of the apartheid city: the ordered, state-planned township”.

In the colonial era, segregation was often implemented under the guise of health concerns and slum clearance programmes. At the turn of the 19th-century, municipal health officials began to call for segregation of Africans in locations because of the poor sanitation and high disease rates associated with this group (Swanson, 1977). They were supported by white religious leaders who viewed the rapid expansion of squatter settlements around cities as undermining the moral fibre of Africans, as well as that of white people who were ‘living cheek by jowl’ with Africans. The outbreak of bubonic plague in 1902–1903 spurred this coalition of interests to promulgate a series of health legislation to forcefully remove thousands of Africans from urban ghettos into native locations. The influenza epidemic of 1918 and the serious tuberculosis problem led to the proclamation of the Public Health Act of 1919. This Act facilitated central state control over conditions in locations (McCarthy & Smith, 1989). However, slum clearance did not eradicate such settlements but merely transferred the ghettos beyond the limits of the city. Given their limited resources, which was further depleted by higher transport costs, Africans in locations lived under worse conditions than in slums (Packard, 1989).

Municipal officials also viewed locations as a mechanism to control the influx of Africans into cities. At the formation of the Union most black people lived in ‘locations’ outside white towns, which were specifically designated for them by local authorities (Davenport, 1971). The 1920s were characterised by renewed calls for more rigid segregation as the rapidly urbanising population was perceived as a threat to white workers. Segregation was justified on the basis that the natives were ‘primitive’. The fact was that tribalism was disintegrating and Africans were demanding fairness and integration in the urban economy (Welsh, 1975).

The Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 represented the first Union-wide attempt to control, manage and segregate urban Africans which was regulated by the pass laws (Frankel, 1979). The rationale for the legislation was based on the findings of the Stallard Commission, initiated in 1922, which contended that the Native should only enter urban areas “when he is willing to administer to the needs of the white man, and should depart therefrom when he ceases so to administer” (Hellmann, 1961, pp. 121–22). This was a central state response to demands from various white classes (shopkeepers, small traders, property owners, and workers) who had campaigned for rigid segregation, influx control, the termination of property rights for black people, and the prevention of the use of municipal rates being used to provide facilities and services for black people (Kock, 1984). The Urban Areas Act was subsequently amended in 1930, 1937 and 1942 in order to equip the central and local states “with powers to deny to the African any enforceable right to reside, acquire property, carry on independent economic activity, or freely to seek or take up employment in an urban area” (Molteno, 1977, p. 30). The Urban Areas Act constituted the principles for urban segregation which were later revised, consolidated and rigidly enforced by the apartheid regime.

The worldwide outcry against racism and colonialism in the 1930 and 1940s had an influence on South African policies. Also, complaints by the private sector about the cost and inefficiency of the job colour bar, and labour policies which denied black people training, security and satisfactory living conditions, did influence state thinking (Lipton, 1985). Moreover, black workers were successfully organising themselves in unions, and strengthening their bargaining positions. In August 1946 more than 70,000 African mine workers participated in a massive strike (Davies, Kaplan, Morris, & O’Meara, 1976, p. 24). The central state at this time essentially reflected the concerns of manufacturing interests. The problems of urban black people began to receive some attention and three major official commissions (van Eck, Smit and Fagan) were engaged to investigate their plight (Lipton, 1985).

The essence of these reports was that a permanent urban African population was inevitable, and the “job colour bar, pass laws, and migrant labour were criticised as unjust and inefficient, deterring ambition and competition” (Lipton, 1985, p. 21). According to the Native Economic Commission of 1932, in “the interest of the efficiency of urban industries it is better to have a fixed urban Native population to the extent to which such population is necessary than the present casual drifting population” (Maylam, 1990, p. 65). In 1947 the Minister of Native Affairs maintained that “the native must be trained for his work in industry, and to become an efficient industrial worker he must be a permanent industrial worker. On that account he must live near his place of employment” (Lipton, 1985, p. 21). In 1948, the Fagan Commission maintained that while a stable urban labour force should be encouraged, migratory labour should not be terminated. The state was basically responding pragmatically to the needs of mining and secondary industry for a stable labour force (Maylam, 1990).

The ruling United Party Government responded by limiting or reversing discriminatory labour practices. Job discrimination and pass laws were relaxed, trade unions were recognised, and there was an attempt to improve the socio-economic conditions of workers. However, these reforms conflicted with the needs of agricultural capital. The pass laws and influx measures were essential to ensure an abundant labour supply in rural areas, which would keep agricultural labour costs low. The United Party entered the 1948 elections committed to these reforms.

The victory of the Nationalists in 1948 brought into power a government that was significantly different from that of the United Party. The Nationalists represented a collection of interest groups who were totally opposed to the pattern of social and economic development which had shaped the South African social formation over the previous two decades. They rejected the findings of the Smit and Fagan commissions that a permanent African population was inevitable and essential for economic progress. Rather, they emphasised the Stallardist doctrine of the 1920s.

3.3 Apartheid Segregation—Group Areas Act

The ascent to power of the National Party (NP) in 1948 with its apartheid policy set the tone for the race legislation which followed. The Population Registration Act (1950) South African were classified into four groups—Africans, Whites, Coloureds and Indians. The NP was particularly obsessed with the policy of racial segregation of the different groups in all spheres—social, economic and political. The different aspects of segregation which were espoused were finally embodied in the Group Areas Act (GAA) of 1950, which has been regarded as one of the most controversial statutes in South African history and embodied the essence of apartheid at an urban scale. It served as a powerful tool for state intervention in controlling the use, occupation, and ownership of land and buildings on a racial basis, and emphasised separate residential areas, educational services, and other amenities for the different race groups (Maharaj, 1997).

The application of the GAA was ruthlessly rigid and inflexible. It prevented those reasonable adjustments and concessions which were integral for harmony in a heterogeneous society. The Act was characterised by a perverse contempt for human feelings and reflected pathological racial prejudices of white people. It assumed that the white people would feel protected when the other groups were secluded away in their ghettoes and segregated territories. However, it was impervious to the fact that a new sense of insecurity and futility would be imposed upon millions of black, Indian, coloured people (Maharaj, 1997).

Between 1950 and 1991 more than 1 million hectares of urban space was rezoned on a racial basis (Christopher, 1997). The fragmented distribution of land and opportunity that resulted from forced removals left Black South Africans being cramped into remote locations at the periphery of the city.

There were some interesting differences between Cape Town and Durban with regard to the implementation of the GAA. Prior to 1948, Cape Town was one of South Africa’s most integrated cities—“37% of the residential area of the city in 1936 was mixed” (Western, 1996, p. 36). However, Western (1996) points out that segregation measures in Cape Town were not enforced as rigidly as that introduced against Indian people by the Durban City Council (DCC). The Cape Town City Council did not co-operate with the Group Areas Board because “instituting group areas would cause great hardship” (Western, 1996, p. 121). The Government imposed its version of race-space zoning on the city which basically entrenched the interests of white people.

In contrast, the DCC regarded the Group Areas Act as a lifeline by which Durban could be preserved as a ‘European’ city. The DCC almost matched the NP in their defence of the Group Area Act, arguing that it provided opportunities for black people to develop on a parallel basis to Europeans, as well as offering them new economic opportunities. The Durban City Council, as the representative of the white minority of the city, historically played a significant role in the development and promulgation of Group Areas legislation, actively advocating for the expropriation of the Indian community (Naicker, 1956).

The foundations of the race zoning plans of the DCC were determined by the Technical Sub-Committee (TSC). The TSC elaborated quite significantly on the criteria for the demarcation of group areas, (a crucial matter on which the Act was curiously silent) which were subsequently adopted through the country. According to the TSC, the juxtaposition of races could produce conflict, as one group may unwittingly offend another. Consequently, residential neighbourhoods should not only be clearly racially defined, but spill over into another group area, or casual crossings of borders, must be reduced. The TSC believed that one race group should not traverse the group area of another in the journey to work, and as far as possible natural, physical boundaries (like rivers, railways) should separate groups. The TSC’s work was regarded as pioneering and it influenced the race zoning plans of many cities in the country (Maharaj, 1997). Demonstrating the spatial implementation of these group area principles, Davies (1981) developed his widely cited model of the classic apartheid city (Fig. 3.1).

Fig. 3.1
figure 1

The apartheid city model (Davies, 1981)

Full size image

The Group Areas Act resulted in the destruction of racially integrated areas like Sophiatown in Johannesburg (Lodge, 1983); Cato Manor in Durban (Maharaj, 1994); and District Six in Cape Town (Hart, 1988; Western, 1996). The destruction of District Six had a “pervasive spatial meaning for the Coloured people of the Cape” (Western, 1996, p. 149), and the relocation of coloured people from Mowbray. The magazine Sunday Life (15 June 1997, p. 11) described the removal process as follows:

Sixty thousand people, including families who had never known another home, were forced out—sometimes physically carried from their houses and loaded onto trucks along with their modest belongings. They were then carted away to places like Bonteheuwel, Manenberg and Hanover Park, while their original neighbourhoods died a little with each removal. The social dysfunctions that resulted from the forced removals also gave rise to the moral stillbirth of the Cape Flats. Nurtured by neglect, the area, perching on Cape Town’s doorstep, is awash in crime and poverty.

In 1958 the Mayville Indian Ratepayers’ Association (MIRA) made an emotional appeal to the DCC and the government, emphasising the attachment of people to place and community:

People form deep and lasting attachments to the places in which they live and such attachments are rooted in emotional association with homes, temples, churches, mosques, schools, burial places and with neighbours—years of friendship, the passing on of homes from generation to generation. Such are worthwhile values which cannot be set aside lightly. Is it fair to ask people, now advanced in years, to break up old associations and homes, businesses, etc. and to start afresh (Memorandum from the Mayville Indian Ratepayers’ Association submitted to the Durban City Council, May 30, 1958).

As a result of the Group Areas Act, settled integrated communities like Cato Manor were destroyed, with Indian people being relocated to areas like Chatsworth and Phoenix, and Africans to Kwa Mashu and Umlazi. African and Indian communities unsuccessfully resisted relocation. A major problem was the lack of organised protest action and resistance (Edwards, 1989; Maharaj, 1994).

The main reason for the failure of resistance to relocation was the repressive state apparatus. The weak apartheid state of 1948 was very much in control by the early 1960s. Another reason for the failure of resistance was that residents realised that resettlement was inevitable, and therefore joining the queue for new housing as soon as possible was in their interest. Furthermore, for Africans allocation to a municipal house in townships like Kwa Mashu and Umlazi would give them rights to live in the urban area and end their feelings of insecurity (Maasdorp & Ellison, 1975).

Also, in the Indian community segregation affected the different classes in disparate ways. Segregation laws seriously affected those Indian people who could afford to buy land in white areas. It reduced opportunities for investment and commercial expansion for the wealthy, and there was also a possibility of financial losses. The less affluent of the elites faced the possibility of moving into working-class neighbourhoods. It did not have any immediate effect on the majority of working-class Indian people who could not afford to move out of the Indian ghettos. Segregation represented a double-edged sword for the underclasses—with increasing rents and slum clearance some would become homeless, while others could possibly be housed in municipal housing schemes (Freund, 1995; Johnson, 1973; Swan, 1987).

However, the goal of complete urban segregation eluded the apartheid state. Despite the use of a daunting array of legislative measures, relics of earlier integrated areas survived annihilation (Christopher, 1990). A good example would be the Warwick Avenue Triangle (WAT) in Durban which had developed as an integrated neighbourhood since the early 1900s. The rise of racial politics since the 1930s curbed the organic development of a thriving, integrated community. Although white people were initially in the majority, by the end of the 1980s the WAT reflected the ethnic vibrancy of the ‘rainbow nation’. However, neither the central nor the local state recognised or supported the non-racial character of the area, and attempts were made to use slum clearance laws, the Group Areas Act and urban redevelopment plans to destroy the area (Maharaj, 1999).

The WAT could not be cleared immediately because of a shortage of alternative accommodation. As alternate accommodation became available in townships to the north and south of Durban in the 1970s, eviction notices were served on residents in the WAT. However, by the early 1980s, a large non-racial community still lived in the WAT. The political reforms of the 1980s (Tricameral Parliament) meant that relocation could not take place as ruthlessly as was the experience of Sophiatown, District Six and Cato Manor in the 1960 and 1970s (Maharaj, 1999). While the government tried to ‘reform apartheid’ in the 1980s, the national and international opposition to white minority rule escalated and culminated in the unbanning of the liberation movements in February 1990 (Price, 1991).

Despite the apartheid regime’s attempts to curb urbanisation through separate development and influx control policies, cities continued to grow. Poverty and lack of socio-economic opportunities led to the migration of large numbers of rural black people to the cities. The nature of the apartheid planning discourse resulted in urban areas being characterised by open spaces, with under-utilised infrastructure and services. Such spaces were exploited by the marginalised to gain a foothold in locations close to opportunities in the urban areas. Lack of housing led to an increasing number of informal settlements on vacant land close to cities and suburbs. By the late 1970s, the state was forced to acknowledge that influx control had failed, and to concede the reality of a permanent black presence. However, the end product was “urban permanence without reincorporation into the primary local government system and the white cities” (Swilling, Cobbett, & Hunter, 1991, p. 175).

Since the 1980s many black people began to move into white residential zones, which blurred race-space divisions and led to the formation of ‘grey areas’.

3.4 ‘Grey’ and Free Settlement Areas

Although the GAA was repealed in 1991, de jure white residential exclusivity was being contravened since the mid-l980s as large numbers of black people began to move into designated white group areas in most major urban centres in South Africa. Rigid race-space divisions were blurred with the development of grey areas (Elder, 1990; Hart, 1989; Pickard-Cambridge, 1988; Rule, 1988).

Well-known grey areas include Hillbrow and Mayfair in Johannesburg, Woodstock in Cape Town, and Albert Park in Durban. These areas were viewed as “symbols of a new urban future… Despite major constraints on their effective operation, and despite official neglect, integrated areas have emerged as relatively hopeful harbingers of a new society” (Urban Foundation, 1990, p. 15).

A combination of factors contributed to the erosion of residential segregation:

  1. i.

    With the process of suburbanisation, white people were moving from the inner cities to the suburbs, even before the influx of black people into the area.

  2. ii.

    There was a surplus of accommodation for white people, and landlords were forced to accept black tenants, who were experiencing a tremendous shortage of housing. Hence, landlords and black tenants were responding to market forces. The GAA created an artificial shortage of land and housing for black people.

  3. iii.

    With improvements in socio-economic status, black people were seeking a better quality of life, away from dormitory, strife-torn townships.

  4. iv.

    The apartheid government’s increasing reluctance to enforce the GAA because of the adverse international publicity.

  5. v.

    White individuals were acting as nominees for black people who wanted to let or buy property in white group areas (Maharaj & Mpungose, 1994; Pickard-Cambridge, 1988; Urban Foundation, 1990).

The government response to ‘grey’ areas was to introduce the Free Settlement Areas Act (FSAA) of 1989. In terms of this legislation, a few areas open to all groups will be established, while the GAA will be enforced more strictly in other areas. However, the government was merely responding to a de facto situation (Saff, 1990). There were great expectations that apartheid race-space patterns would be eliminated in the democratic era.

3.5 Post-or-Neo-Apartheid City?

The contemporary South African city is reflective of a discourse of apartheid urban planning characterised by racially fragmented and discontinuous land use and settlement patterns, haphazard, dysfunctional and inefficient spatial ordering, land use mismatches, low level population density and the concentration of the poor in relatively high-density areas on the peripheries and the rich in the core intermediate urban areas (Hindson, Mabin, & Watson, 1992).

An attempt to introduce a new urban planning discourse started with the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). The RDP emerged as the key strategy to address the social and economic inequalities of apartheid and the facilitation of the transition to a non-racial democracy. The Urban Development Strategy (UDS), released in October 1995, had a specific goal to integrate the segregated city by concentrating on rebuilding the townships, creating employment opportunities, providing housing and urban amenities, reducing commuting distances, and “facilitating better use of underutilised or vacant land” (Ministry of the Office of the President, 1995, No. 16679, 1995, p. 10).

However, the replacement of the RDP by the neoliberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) macro-economic policy in 1996 resulted in the retreat of the state as cities adopted public-private partnerships in the financing, managing and delivery of basic services and attempted to compete internationally to attract investments.

According to Harrison (1993, p. 49) the new paradigm which formed the foundation for the urban reconstruction of South African cities could be defined as the “non-racial competitive approach”. The influence of the World Bank is evident in the GEAR strategy and some have described it as a “home-grown structural adjustment programme” (Lehulere, 1997, p. 73). This marked the entrepreneurial turn in major cities like Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban. The focus was on promoting economic growth by attracting international investments and becoming globally competitive, and poor peripheral Black settlements were neglected.

As a result, in the post-apartheid era, racial segregation has been perpetuated, if not been replaced, by economic segregation, which in many ways, reinforces uneven development and the racial and socio-spatial disparities and fragmentations of the apartheid era (Ballard & Jones, 2011; Bremner, 2000; Christopher, 2001; Durrheim & Dixon, 2010; Lemanski, 2007). Hence, as Seekings (2008) observed, class reigns supreme in limiting the mobility of black people, which is intensified by poor education, low-level positions in the work environment and lack of access to loans. This trend continues as many white people and other middle-income race groups move into gated communities, largely viewed as a response to the high level of violent crime in South Africa rate (Ballard, 2004; Coquetry-Vidrovitch, 2014). There has also been some gentrification in some inner city zones (Visser & Kotze, 2008).

However, as Schensul and Heller (2011) have argued, the segregated zones have become more permeable with the upward socio-economic mobility of the black elite who move geographically out of townships into adjacent middle-class suburbs. In some cases, there is also a preference to remain in ethnic neighbourhood enclaves. Also, state investment in township infrastructure and improved transport connections have integrated peripheral zones with urban economic nodes, but “but low-income spatial entrenchment persisted” (Pieterse & Owens, 2018, p. 8). Hence, “structural market forces” have been “significantly mediated” (Schensul & Heller, 2011, p. 28). This led to calls for a more nuanced analysis of neoliberal strategies in South African cities, which “appear more as an assemblage of pragmatic and opportunistic policies than the implementation of a coherent long-term strategy” (Didier, Morange, & Peyroux, 2013, p. 5).

Three distinct processes with regard to the changing racial structures of contemporary South African cities were identified in the mid-1990s, which persist in the contemporary era:

  1. i.

    The desegregation of the inner city and the limited desegregation of the inner white suburban areas. It should be noted that this type of desegregation of white suburban areas is primarily due to class and wealth instead of race.

  2. ii.

    The expansion of the former black townships on land adjacent to the former white suburbs and the expansion of informal settlements on the urban fringes of former white suburbs.

  3. iii.

    The spontaneous growth of informal settlements adjacent to more affluent areas (Crankshaw, 2008; Saff, 1994, 1996).

During apartheid, vacant land, known as buffer zones, separated white suburbs from black townships. In the 1980s, the black townships had experienced an increase in backyard shack dwellings, which expanded on the buffer zones land on the peripheries of white suburbs. The scrapping of the Group Areas Act, violence and crime in the townships, and rising unemployment precipitated the movement of people to vacant land in the inner city, and open land occupations and invasions replaced clandestine squatting (Hindson, Byerley, & Morris, 1994, p. 333).

While these processes spatially changed the racial impress of the apartheid, it had limited social effect on the new black residents, as they were excluded from access to virtually all facilities and social institutions within the neighbouring white suburbs (Saff, 1994). Although there was a major investment in infrastructure, poverty remained a major challenge, and there were remarkable continuities between the apartheid and democratic eras in terms of socio-spatial inequalities (Clarno, 2013; Chapman, 2015).

Land invasions in South Africa, for example, have largely taken place on property adjacent to existing townships, on the periphery of urban areas. The urban poor began moving towards the city-core areas, mainly on land surrounding Indian and coloured suburbs. Hence, invasions “tend to reinforce the broad apartheid geography of the cities rather than fundamentally challenge it” (Mabin, 1992, pp. 21–22). Bremner (2000, p. 87) has similarly argued that since 1994, urban policies have “reinforced rather than confronted apartheid geography”.

Another urban reality in the post-apartheid era is the decline of the inner city and the flight of capital from the CBDs. Inner-city problems in South Africa are perceived to be “both a creation of apartheid and a phenomenon of the post-apartheid era” (Olufemi, 1998, p. 228). The high crime rates in the inner city areas played a significant role in the decline of the CBDs. The inner city areas of Johannesburg were most severely affected, followed by Durban and Cape Town. Financial institutions were reluctant to grant loans in inner city areas because of the risk, overcrowding, and the inadequate maintenance of buildings (Wilhelm-Solomon, 2016, 2017).

One of the causes of the decline of inner-city areas was the international trend favouring suburban shopping malls and decentralised offices (e.g. Gateway in Durban; and Sandton in Johannesburg). As big businesses have increasingly decentralised from the CBDs they have been replaced by emerging black-owned small enterprises (Rogerson & Rogerson, 1997). Changing economic and social conditions resulted in an escalation in survival activities like informal trading. Basically, “capital disinvestment has created a space for those excluded from formal economic activity to gain a foothold in the urban system” (Bremner, 2000, p. 11).

There were concerns about falling property values and decline in standards in terms of maintenance and services in the CBD. This became apparent since the late 1980s when black people began to move into predominantly white inner-city areas. It was the ‘slumlords’ who were largely responsible for the lowering of standards because of their reluctance to invest in the maintenance and upkeep of premises largely occupied by black people (Maharaj & Mpungose, 1994). The cycle of falling property values and drop in standards was exacerbated by the tendency of banks to redline inner-city areas. While the policy of redlining protected the short-term interests of financial institutions, it was likely to adversely affect all parties in the long term.

Thus the fact that an individual cannot raise a bond to buy living accommodation they can afford in the area of their choice not only affects that individual but the person trying to sell the property and all those who already own property in the redlined area. This includes the financial institutions themselves whose existing bonds are placed at risk by the lowering of prices that the redlining precipitates (Crankshaw & White, 1992, pp. 13–14).

Decades of institutionalised segregation in South Africa will not be eliminated overnight. Segregation has been deeply entrenched in the social fabric and is further reinforced by the socio-economic differences between black people and white people. Also, the spatial inscription of class is becoming an increasingly conspicuous feature of South African urban space.

3.6 Conclusion

The present South African city form is a hybrid product of the colonial and formal apartheid eras which ordained urban spaces as the domain of the white race. The establishment of mechanisms of spatial and social segregation, which were actively developed over the past two centuries, assisted in the exploitation and servility of black people. By virtue of its control over political, economic and social mechanisms the dominant white group determined the distribution of power and privilege among subordinates. Africans were denied access to, and participation in, all political structures, and hence had little or no influence on decision-making, especially with regard to the allocation of resources. Compounds and locations were developed as effective instruments of labour control and exploitation.

In terms of legislation, this chapter highlighted the role of the Urban Areas Act of 1923 in the colonial era, and the Group Areas Act (1950) in the apartheid era. As the democratic initiatives of the 1990s gained momentum various strategies were pursued to reverse the effects of racial planning.

The apartheid system has had long-lasting impacts on South African cities and this paper illustrated that the various neoliberal policy reforms since 1994 have reinforced racial residential segregation in South Africa. The impacts of forced removals and socio-spatial racial fragmentation persist in the contemporary South African urban landscape.

Class segregation has replaced race segregation in most South African cities. However the majority of black people are still at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. The greater portion of South African urban dwellers continues to reside in apartheid legacy townships twenty-five years into the democratic era.