Scale of belonging: Gauteng 30 Years After the Repeal of the Group Areas Act
Over the last three decades South Africa’s urban spaces have been alive with transformations in the scale of spatial arrangements, and this has important implications for the ways in which ordinary people identify with one another, understand their place in both society and space, and are able to take up a position in the city that allows them to live their lives.
This Urban Forum special issue arises from a GCRO project,Scale, Belonging and Exclusion, which brought together a group of researchers who met regularly to share literature and develop their research. This collection offers five studies in which scale manifests as a dynamic related to belonging. They allow us to understand how changes to scale come about, who drives them and what implications they have for the lives of ordinary people. They also allow us to explore normative positions taken by actors in these studies about the ‘right’ scale of spatial arrangements. This special issue was published 30 years after the repeal of the Group Areas Act.
Date of publication:
June 2021
