CITIES & URBAN PLANNING Let us in
events of the past year have left many South Africans uncertain about the nation’s future. Phrases such as “police massacre”, “credit rating agency downgrade” and “failed state” have slipped back into the SA lexicon for the first time since the end of apartheid.
This has left many people questioning how we got here in just 18 years — how the country’s kaleidoscopic future has been demoted to an overambitious dream.
One abstract concept may hold the answers. Space. More specifically, the spaces that we live in.
Beyond the centimetres between two paintings on a wall, an engine capacity, the size of an en-suite bathroom or an expansive field, space is central to the fractious nature of SA society and remains at the core of our social and economic divides.
Apartheid’s most pervasive, most obvious and often most subliminal impact on our society today is spatial. While apartheid legislated division, it essentially built itself on a firm foundation of segregation laid by successive colonial and capitalist processes. Towns and cities were planned on racial and socioeconomic grounds, mine workers were housed near the mines, factory workers near the factories and the wealthy far away on large plots, removed from the rough and tumble city.
Central to the apartheid plan was an anti-urban strategy — a diverse, dense, messy city similar to the likes of New York and London would have been obsessive apartheid’s worst planning nightmare.
Separating races into different, dislocated neighbourhoods, combined with the coring out of what little urban life we as South Africans had in the 1990s, has resulted in largely disconnected, suburban communities burdened with a culture of exclusion, mistrust and otherness.
This dislocation remains visible in a city such as Johannesburg through its sprawling urban appendages. In Jo’burg the likes of Lenasia, Soweto, Orange Farm and the post-apartheid Diepsloot remain largely peripheral to