Apartheid Planning in South Africa: The Case of Port Elizabeth

Abstract

This article seeks to examine the development of statutory racial segregation in the South African city as applied to Port Elizabeth. The partially segregated colonial city was converted between 1950 and 1985 into a set of virtually totally separate areas for the different groups recognized by government planners. The restructuring in physical land use terms, together with the movement of population, profoundly affected the appearance and organization of the city, with serious implications for future planning. has profoundly affected the form and pattern of the urban areas, resulting in the emergence of the Apartheid city (Christopher, 1982; Lemon, 1987). This has been the subject of many studies and projections as rapid Black urbanization undermines the basic concepts of the entire structure (Smit and Booysen, 1981). However, few cities were planned as Apartheid cities from their inception. The majority were founded as colonial cities with a measure of economic segregation which was reflected in racial terms (Christopher, 1983). Within the colonial polity, however, lay the elements of legal segregation inherited from the experience of the colonial power in earlier times. The Apartheid city therefore has its origins deep in the colonial period and the basic decisions of that era profoundly affected the manner in which later bureaucrats enforced twentieth century legislation. The present century, however, has witnessed a major restructuring of South African cities to achieve the maximum possible degree of racial segregation. The colonial programmes were refined and new measures adopted to separate first, the Black indigenous population from the remainder, and later the White population from other groups. This involved not only a major structuring of legal constraints upon the population as to where people may live, work and enjoy recreation, but a major exercise in land use zoning to achieve the aims of the legislators. As David Smith (1982) has stated, Apartheid is 'the most ambitious contemporary exercise in applied geography', whereby political objectives are translated into plans and urban building programmes. Thus, models of the Apartheid city have been proposed by Western (1981), Davies (1981) and these may be applied to all South African cities as legislators' aims have been converted into concrete landscape terms. It is proposed to examine the city of Port Elizabeth in the Cape Province as an example of the transformation of a colonial city into an Apartheid city. It is also an opportunity to assess the degree to which post-1948 planning has achieved its objectives at a time when the whole concept of Apartheid has been called into question not only in political opposition circles, but also within the government itself. Port Elizabeth provides a particularly significant example of replanning a city. It is the major city of the eastern Cape and has experienced a turbulent history in the last few years. An examination of the implementation of residential segregation within the city may assist in the understanding of current events and the problems associated with political change (Simon, 1984). The township of Port Elizabeth was laid out in 1815, although it was only five years later that it was named after the wife of the Acting Governor. Its basic function was to handle and later process the goods and materials passing through the harbour. The settlement grew as a result of the expansion of trade, particularly the development of pastoral activities in the interior of South Africa after the 1840s and later mining in the