Since 1994, millions of people have set up shacks on the peripheries of townships and cities across the country. They didn’t expect to get such a huge influx of new residents into the cities. ![]() Hence the stubbornness of spatial segregation.Īfter the collapse of apartheid, Mandela and his new team vowed to provide housing, water, electricity and other amenities to the previously disadvantaged. ![]() Whites make up the majority of the elite or top 5% of the population. Poverty levels are highest among black people. The World Bank said in May 2018 that South Africa remains the most economically unequal country in the world. Johannesburg is a microcosm of South Africa. There is a reason for this glacial pace of change. Even with the explosive rise of the black middle class in the mid-2000s, the presence of black people in formerly white suburbs across Johannesburg remains low. In my neighbourhood of Parkview, a tree-lined middle-class suburb in the jacaranda tree shadow of the “ Randlords’” mansions in Westcliff, mine remains one of woefully few black families. The Maboneng development zone in Johannesburg in 2013. Spatial apartheid would be done away with thanks to creative and determined urban planning. Hopes for a new South Africa and a new Johannesburg – integrated, non-racial and free of the divisions of the past – were high. Mandela and his party, the ANC, were installed in office. Separate and unequal black and white rich and poor. For 46 years from the formal introduction of apartheid in 1948 until its demise in 1994, this was the architecture of apartheid Johannesburg. ![]() It mutated into a frontier town and grew in a colonial fashion – blacks and whites remained largely separate, with the white mine-owners building mansions that sprawled into rich northern suburbs while black people were pushed to the south into townships.Īpartheid formalised the loose colonial arrangement in the 1940s, creating a black labour reserve named Soweto (from South Western Townships) and banishing black people from the city while forcing them to carry a dompas (permit) at all times to show cause to be there. People queue to cast their votes at a polling station in Soweto in April 1994, in South Africa’s first all-race elections. This week Guardian Cities explores the incredible changes taking place, the challenges faced and the projects that bring hope.Īfrica correspondent Jason Burke reports from the Flats, where violence and death are endemic just miles from Cape Town's spectacular beaches and trendy cafes.Īuthor Niq Mhlongo pens a love letter to the "other Soweto", one that visitors to gentrified Vilakazi Street never see. We hear from Port Elizabeth, where one architect is using recycled materials to transform his city, and Durban, where a surf school is changing the lives of vulnerable children. We explore the deadly underground world of zama zama gold miners operating illegally under the city of Johannesburg, visit the Afrikaner-only town of Orania and publish an extraordinary photo essay by Magnum nominee Lindokuhle Sobekwa, who documents life in a formerly white-dominated area where his mother once worked as a domestic helper. Twenty-five years after the fall of the brutal apartheid regime, South Africa's cities remain hugely divided, both economically and racially.
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