SPATIALISATION OF POST-APARTHEID URBAN INEQUALITIES: A NEW TYPE OF SPATIAL-SOCIAL INEQUALITIES IN SOUTH AFRICAN CITIES.

Abstract

Geographers have always studied urbanisation as a social response to problems of uneven development. Though there is far less consensus of the precise causes social inequalities there is a general recognition that the implementation of neoliberalism as a social, economic and political project has led to further marginalisation of the urban poor and increased spatial inequalities. South African urban landscape has gone through several phases of spatial-social restructuring which have all variously contributed to uneven development and spatial-social marginalisation. Early phases of urban development during the colonial and apartheid period were mainly about implementation of the ideology of spatial and social segregation within the context of free-liberal economy doctrines. Spatial and social differentiation was an official formal programme for urban landscape. The uneasy relationship between the colonial-apartheid ideology of racial spatial segregation and `capitalist free-liberal economy’ find significant convergence in spatialisation of inequalities and left persistent spatial-social legacies of inequalities. The collapse of `formal official apartheid’ ideology in 1994, and the subsequent transformation programme created an opportunity for neoliberalism as a political, social, economic project and dominated all areas of post-apartheid urban transformation. This paper explores how the principles of neoliberalism became embedded in new transformative legislative, regulatory and institutional frameworks and reproduced on post-apartheid urban space. The purpose of this paper is to review the spatialisation of post-apartheid urban inequalities and explores the resurgence of new forms neoliberalised spatial inequalities on South African urban landscape.