Living in Apartheid's shadow

Abstract

The laws specifying separate group areas and planned residential segregation have been abolished and non-racial social and living environments are espoused as state planning objectives. Yet an examination of current residential planning in the area between the Witwatersrand and the Vaal Triangle points to the fact that recently developed African areas like Orange Farm, Wildebeesfontein, Evaton West and Rietfontein appear to conform with the racial land zoning policies developed in the period when Dr Verwoerd was Minister of Native Affairs (Mabin and Royston 1991: 27). The more things appear to change, the more they seem to remain the same: a recent prospectus on reconstructing South African cities concludes that a recurring theme in the emergence of new planning regimes in the history of modern South Africa has been the persistence of older social and physical forms (Mabin and Smith 1992: 30). In the context of enormous and traumatic social and political change new, progressive urban planning ideas, which have as their starting point integration of the cities and empowerment of the citizenry, have taken root. Will the current idealism and popular democratic vision of reconstruction be eclipsed, as Mabin and Smit (1992: 30) put it, by ‘the accession to power of new regimes which have perverted the idealism and vision of reconstruction to less attractive ends’?