BUILDING A BETTER CITY A ‘world class African City’ begins and ends with history and geography. SHAUN SMILLIE
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egregation began the process of the dislocation of Johannesburg. This was formalised and enforced by apartheid legislation in 1948, and followed by the demolition of places like Sophiatown. By the 1950s, Soweto absorbed those forcibly removed people who had once enjoyed the benefits of living close to jobs and services, but who were now over 20km from the City. “You had concentric circles made up of skin colour – Indians are allowed to live closer, then coloureds, then blacks. All locked
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into townships and barred off from the City,” says Professor David Everatt, the former Head of the Wits School of Governance. “And apartheid engineers ensured that highways, industrial plants and the like further emphasised the boundary between ‘white’ city spaces and black townships.” Nearly three decades on, apartheid is history, but it still scars the urban landscape and looms large in the psyche of South Africa’s largest city. Its legacy is seen everywhere and is felt in the pockets of the poor.
