Understanding the objective of post apartheid urban mixing (2020)

As many analyses of South African cities have argued, the inequities of apartheid directly were manifest in and are caused by, the morphology of the apartheid city. The apartheid city was characterized by separation of ‘races’, prioritised investment in white areas, under-investment in black areas, and the burdens of accessing economic and other opportunities in the city being placed disproportionately on poorer people (Davies 1981). It follows, for many policy makers, that the endurance of the apartheid urban form in the post-apartheid period obstructs the achievement of greater social justice.

Aside from the inherited legacy which retains much of the social and physical shape of the apartheid city in townships and suburbs, post-apartheid processes have extended the kinds of spatial patterns that were characteristic of the past. Gated communities for example have created new middle class residential spaces on the periphery of former white suburbs. Meanwhile low cost housing has occurred on peripheral land in a way that extends township-like space.

There have of course been important changes to the apartheid urban form. Cities have both densified and spread. The transformation of inner city residential spaces such as Hillbrow and Yeoville have been wholesale. Informal residential spaces have inserted themselves into available areas against the intentions of planners. Meanwhile some former white middle class residential areas have deracialised as a black middle class as diffused into them.

There have been proactive policies too. The creation of single tax bases across large municipalities allows for the possibility of cross subsidization much more than would be possible in balkanized local government forms typical of apartheid, or as occur in many cities in the US today for instance. Some policies do attempt to adjust the shape of settlement. Some municipalities have relaxed minimum property size regulations to enable densification. One of the motivations behind Johannesburg's 'Corridors of Freedom’ project was to break up old urban patterns ‘re-stitching the city to create a new future’.

The motivations for this kind of policy intervention are to enable residents to live closer to work, school and so on and to be able to move around the city more easily. They also invoke environmental sustainability. There are also more redemptive overtones, such as the intention to have ‘Rich and poor, black and white living side by side’ (Joburg, No date).

Research in this project resulted in two academic book chapters listed below.

Outputs

Ballard, R. and Hamann, C. (2021). ‘Income Inequality and Socio-Economic Segregation in the City of Johannesburg’. in van Ham, M. Tammaru, T., Ubarevičienė, R., and Janssen, H. (eds). Urban Socio-Economic Segregation and Income Inequality. Springer. pp 91-109. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-64569-4_5

Richard Ballard, Christian Hamann and Thembani Mkhize (2021). ‘Johannesburg: Repetitions and Disruptions of Spatial Patterns’. In Lemon, A., Donaldson, R. and Visser, G. (eds) South African urban change three decades after apartheid: Homes Still Apart? Cham, Switzerland: Springer, pp 91 – 109. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-73073-4_3

Hamann, C. and Ballard, R. (2017) Dimensions of diversity in Gauteng. GCRO Map of the Month, September 2017.

Video

Ballard, R and Hamann, C. are interviewed by Ubarevičienė, R., (2021) 'Building Inclusive Cities, Tackling urban inequality and segregation. This educational video is part of the course Building Inclusive Cities, available for free via http://www.online-learning.tudelft.nl​ ©️ TU Delft. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s01Ke_jqxA0

Last updated: 5 November 2020