Originally published in 1990, Urbanization in Post-Apartheid South Africa examines the democratic future of South Africa in the context of policy options and constraints. The book looks at the issue of South Africa’s future including access to land and housing, marked regional differences in well-being, large peri-urban settlements arising around all major towns, and racial inequalities in access to farming land. The book will be of interest to students of urbanization, geography, economics and planning and African studies.
This book explains how apartheid changed South Africa's cities, how people responded to regain some control over urban life, and how the forces of urbanization held back under apartheid will affect the post-apartheid era.
This book provides an analysis of South African urban change over the past three decades. It draws on a seminal text, Homes Apart, and revisits conclusions drawn in that collection that marked the final phases of urban apartheid. It highlights changes in demography, social as well as economic structure and their differential spatial expression across a range of urban sites in South Africa. The evidence presented in this book points to a very complex set of narratives in urban South Africa and one that cannot be reduced to a singular statement so the conclusions of the various investigations are in many ways open. As urban apartheid represented one clear outcome, its post-apartheid urban legacies varies greatly from city to city. As such this book is a great resource to students and academics focused on urban change in South African cities since the demise of apartheid, and scholars of urban policy-making in South Africa and Southern urbanists generally.
Although Africa has experienced rapid urbanization in recent decades, we know little about the process of urbanization across the continent. The paper exploits a natural experiment, the abolition of South African pass laws, to explore how exogenous population shocks affect the spatial distribution of economic activity. Under apartheid, black South Africans were severely restricted in their choice of location and many were forced to live in homelands. Following the abolition of apartheid they were free to migrate. Given a migration cost in distance, a town nearer to the homelands will receive a larger inflow of people than a more distant town following the removal of mobility restrictions. Drawing upon this exogenous variation, the authors study the effect of migration on urbanization in South Africa. While they find that on average there is no endogenous adjustment of population location to a positive population shock, there is heterogeneity in these results. Cities that start off larger do grow endogenously in the wake of a migration shock, while rural areas that start off small do not respond in the same way. This heterogeneity indicates that population shocks lead to an increase in urban relative to rural populations. Overall, the evidence suggests that exogenous migration shocks can foster urbanization in the medium run.
Urban governance as a term captures the complex interaction between stakeholders or groupings which influence urban development. In South Africa, this complexity emerged with the transition from apartheid more than two decades ago. Today, governance influences priorities in a wide range of urban domains, from public transport to policing; from engagements at the neighbourhood level to city-wide strategies. In different configurations, urban governance shapes inner city districts and gated estates on the urban periphery. The contributors to this volume cover urban governance in contemporary South Africa across three spheres, the state, the community and the private sector, through a variety of lenses. Spatial concerns are central to many of the analyses and case studies, in which the authors highlight different modes that influence the steering of South Africa's largest cities. The range of insights provided by the authors illuminates post-apartheid tensions and urban dynamics in a way that will be of value to scholars, practitioners, decision-makers, politicians and activists alike. This is the most important work yet on cities in post-apartheid South Africa. It does not reduce them to technical problems and their residents to recipients of "service delivery". Rather, it sees cities as what they are - political spaces in which some fight for inclusion while others work to exclude them. Its chapters produce detailed accounts of the alliances and conflicts which are generated daily in our cities - they are essential reading for an understanding of urban South Africa today.
Well written and with an extensive bibliography and maps of the urban areas, the volume is an essential source for understanding South Africa's urban future as well as for documenting the legacy of apartheid on South African urbanization. --Choice... an illuminating look at one of the twentieth century's most ignominious failures in social engineering. --Journal of Interdisciplinary HistoryThis book examines the legacy of apartheid in nine of South Africa's major cities (including Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Johannesburg, and Pretoria), the factors that have influenced their distinctive development, and the possible direction and patterns of urban change in a post-apartheid society.
South Africa's urban population is set to double by the year 2010. This critical analysis of apartheid's legacy to the cities proposes a number of strategies that might prevent the transition to a multiracial society from ending in disaster.
Democracy and Delivery: Urban Policy in South Africa tells the story of urban policy and its formulation in South Africa. As such, it provides an important resource for present and future urban policy processes. In a series of essays written by leading academics and practitioners, Democracy and Delivery documents and assesses the formulation, evolution and implementation of urban policy in South Africa during the first ten years of democracy. The contributors describe the creation of democratic local governments from the time of the 1976 Soweto uprising and the intense township struggles of the 1980s, the formulation of 'developmental' planning and financial frameworks, and the delivery of housing and services by the new democratic order. They examine the policy formulation processes and what underlay these, debate the role of research and the influence of international development agencies, and assess successes and failures in policy implementation. Looking to the future, the contributors make suggestions based on experience with implementation and changing political priorities. Academics, students, policy-makers and government officials, as well as an informed public, will find this book an enlightening read.
