Shanty Towns and Townships in South Africa
Copied directly from:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanty_town
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Township_(South_Africa)
http://places.designobserver.com/feature/south-africa-after-apartheid-from-township-to-town/31148/
Shanty town
A shanty town (also called a squatter settlement) is a slum settlement (sometimes illegal or unauthorized) of impoverished people who live in improvised dwellings made from scrap materials: often plywood, corrugated metal and sheets of plastic. Shanty towns, which are usually built on the periphery of cities, often do not have proper sanitation, electricity or telephone services.
Shanty towns are mostly found in developing nations, or partially developed nations with an unequal distribution of wealth. In extreme cases, shanty towns have populations approaching that of a city. As of 2005, one billion people, one-sixth of the world's population, live in shanty towns.[1]
Etymology
Shanty may have derived from the Irish seantigh, pronounced shant-tí, meaning "old house". The synonym shack may also have passed from Gaelic into English from teach, pronounced chaċ, meaning "house". Both words appeared in American English in the 1880s, when Irish migrants were flooding into New York's tenements.
Since construction is informal and unguided by urban planning, there is a near total absence of formal street grids, numbered streets, sewage network, electricity, or telephones. Even if these resources are present, they are likely to be disorganized, old or inferior. Shanty towns also tend to lack basic services present in more formally organized settlements, including policing, medical services and fire fighting. Fires are a particular danger for shanty towns not only for the lack of fire fighting stations and the difficulty fire trucks have traversing the absence of formal street grids,[3] but also because of the high density of buildings and flammability of materials used in construction[4] A sweeping fire on the hills of Shek Kip Mei, Hong Kong, in late 1953 left 53,000 squatter dwellers homeless, prompting the colonial government to institute a resettlement estate system.
Shanty towns have high rates of crime, suicide, drug use and disease. However the observer Georg Gerster has noted (with specific reference to the invasões of Brasilia), "squatter settlements [as opposed to slums], despite their unattractive building materials, may also be places of hope, scenes of a counter-culture, with an encouraging potential for change and a strong upward impetus." (1978)[5] Stewart Brand has also written, more recently, that "squatter cities are Green. They have maximum density—a million people per square mile in Mumbai—and minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi ... Not everything is efficient in the slums, though. In the Brazilian favelas where electricity is stolen and therefore free, Jan Chipchase from Nokia found that people leave their lights on all day. In most slums recycling is literally a way of life." (2010)[6]
Shanty towns are present in a number of countries. The largest shanty town in Asia is the Orangi Township, in Karachi, Pakistan.[7][8][dead link] while the largest in Africa is Khayelitsha in Cape Town, South Africa[citation needed]. While shanty towns are less common in Europe, the growing influx of illegal immigrants have fueled shantytowns in cities commonly used as a point of entry into the EU, including Athens and Patras in Greece.[9]
In francophone countries, shanty towns are referred to as bidonvilles (French for "can town"); such countries include Tunisia, Haiti, and France itself – see bidonvilles in France.
Other countries with shanty towns include India, South Africa (where they are often called squatter camps) or imijondolo, Kenya, the Philippines (often called squatter areas), Venezuela (where they are known as barrios), Brazil (favelas), Argentina (villas miseria), West Indies such as Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago (where they are known as Shanty town), and Peru (where they are known as "young towns"). There are also shanty town population in countries such as Bangladesh[10] and the People's Republic of China.[11][12][13]
First world countries
Although shantytowns are less common in first world countries, there are some cities that suffer from the shanty town condition. In Madrid, Spain, a low-class neighborhood named La Cañada Real (which is considered a shanty town) has no schools, nurseries or health clinics. Some homes have no running water and rubble and trash is everywhere.[14] In Portugal, shanty towns known as "barracas" are made up of immigrants from former Portuguese African colonies and Gypsies from Romania. The settlements are so bad that they can be compared to other shanty towns in third world countries.[15] In the United States, some cities such as Newark and Oakland suffer from high rates of poverty (28% in Newark and 17% in Oakland) and lead to the creation of tent cities. Other settlements in developed countries that are comparable to shanty towns include the Colonias on the border between the United States and Mexico, and bidonvilles in France, which may exist in the peripheries of some cities.
Development
While most shanty towns begin as precarious establishments haphazardly thrown together without basic social and civil services, over time many have undergone a significant amount of development. Often the residents themselves are responsible for the major improvements.[16] Community organizations sometimes working alongside NGO's, private companies, and the government, set up connections to the municipal water supply, pave roads, and build local schools.[16] Many of these shanties have become middle class suburbs. One such extreme example is the Los Olivos Neighborhood of Lima, Peru. The Megaplaza shopping mall, one of Lima's largest, along with gated communities, casinos, and even plastic surgery clinics, are just a few of many developments that have transformed what used to be a decrepit shanty.[16] Brazilian favelas have also seen huge improvements in recent years, enough so to attract tourists who flock to catch a glimpse of the colorful lifestyle perched atop Rio de Janeiro's highlands.[17] Development occurs over a long period of time and newer towns still lack basic services. Nevertheless there has been a general trend whereby shanties undergo gradual improvements, rather than relocation to even more distant parts of a metropolis and replacement by gated communities constructed over their ruins.[18] Many shanty towns are starting to implement composting toilets[19] and solar panels[20], also many of the people living in slums may have access to cell phones and even the internet[21].
Townships in South Africa
In South Africa, the term township and location usually refers to the (often underdeveloped) urban living areas that, from the late 19th century until the end of Apartheid, were reserved for non-whites (black Africans, Coloureds and Indians). Townships were usually built on the periphery of towns and cities.[1][2] The term township also has a distinct legal meaning, in South Africa's system of land title, that carries no racial connotations.
 |
| The town of Hankey (foreground), with accompanying township (background) on the edge of the town. |
Apartheid
During the Apartheid Era blacks were evicted from properties that were in areas designated as "white only" and forced to move into segregated townships. Separate townships were established for each of the three designated non-white race groups (blacks, coloureds and Indians). Legislation that enabled the Apartheid government to do this included the Group Areas Act.
Townships for non-whites were also called locations or lokasie in Afrikaans, and are often still referred to by that name in smaller towns. The slang term "Kasie", a popular short version of "Lokasie" is also used sometimes to refer to townships.
Townships sometimes have large informal settlements nearby.
Despite their origins in apartheid South Africa, today the terms township, location and informal settlements are not used pejoratively. However policy makers are, as in the 1950s, once again using the term 'slums' in a highly pejorative way.[3]
Most South African towns and cities will have at least one township associated with them. Today they are often viewed as just one of the many suburbs that an urban area might have. Some old townships have seen rapid development since 1994, with, for instance, wealthy, and middle-income areas growing up in parts of Soweto, Chatsworth, etc.
Post-apartheid
Forced removal from city centres to townships has continued in post-apartheid South Africa. The difference is that under apartheid all black people faced forced removals to townships while now it is only the poor living in shack settlements that face eviction to townships on the peripheries of cities. In Cape Town and Durban this has given rise to mass resistance.[3]
The new townships being built to house people forcibly removed from shack settlements have much smaller houses than those built under apartheid and are often, but not always, even further from city centres than apartheid era townships.[3]
Problems Within the Townships
Within the townships, the communities face many troubling issues. Most often the homes are built on lands that are not owned by the occupier so it is there illegally.[4] Since the houses are not there with the government’s permission they most likely do not have the proper services needed. With out the proper services, such as sewage, electricity, roads, and clean water, life becomes very difficult for them.[5] The many South African townships are run uniquely, but they also face similar problems.
There are three infrastructures within the townships that are in need of repair, which are the sewerage, water, and electrical. The problems that each of these infrastructures cause for the residents is mainly due to the lack of sanitation, accessibility, and availability. The government does not help out the people that are not actually residents so they are forced to use the resources of the residents, which end up causing more problems for the whole community. Matters are made worse because each of these infrastructures are serviced by different department so the efficiency goes down unless there is substantial co-ordination at all stages of the project planning, budgeting, and implementation cycle.[6]
The only water pump in that area of the township
Top: Reconstruction and Development Programme houses in Soweto. [Photo via Flickr] Bottom: Residents add a personal touch to government-built duplex houses. [Photo by Lisa Findley]
Sewerage
The sewerage system within the townships is very poorly planned and constructed. With the populations continually growing the sewerage was not built for a growing population so it is not able to deal with it causing an overload on the system. The overload then causes problems such as frequent blockages, surcharges, as well as spilling over and causing the roads to flood.[7] Most areas within the townships have a limited number of public toilets that are so over used, abused, and quickly become health hazards for the community. One problem that was not foreseen, when building the houses so close together and so densely packed in one area, is the poor access for maintenance of the sewerage system. Having so many houses in one area and very little room in between each house make it very difficult for someone to be able to go in and fix the pipes. Whether it is a local plumber or a government plumber the job is very difficult to accomplish and when they finally do come around to fixing the pipes it could potentially end up causing more issues such as more flooding, traffic around the area of construction, and a long wait for the resident to go with out water.[7] Some of the areas on the outside of the townships or near riverbanks and tributaries do not have access to facilities because they are not connected to the formal waterborne sewerage system.
Water
The water is a very challenging situation to deal with. With the mass numbers of residents the pressure of the pumps become very low because they it is being used so much at the same time. With low pressure the water becomes difficult to get and sparse amounts are already available to each household. With each section of the townships is normally one pump per section. The water is used for everything from cleaning clothes, cooking, drinking, bathing, and cleaning the house. Having very little water accessible to each section makes it very hard to get enough water for a day per household.[8] One way that this could be improved is to make some improvements to the main water supply and to add more pumps in each region in the township but have it coming from a different water system allowing more water in each area but without dealing with lower pressure.
Electricity
As you drive through the narrow streets in is very hard to miss the overload of electrical wires strung from the trees leading to the only power box in the area. Hundreds of wires come off of the power box because the residents of the area were not given access to the electricity they need so they decided they would take it. This is of course illegal and not to mention very dangerous but every house in the area has a wire coming out of it and every wire is known by their owner in order to fix problems as soon as they arise.[7] Most of the sub-stations are very unsecured to begin with so having so many additional wires coming off of it is very dangerous for the people near by and the kids playing in the area. The government not like that the people using the sub-stations are not actual residents so they refuse to give them electricity but if they were to install more sub-stations then the problem would be solved.[9]
Electricity wires in a township near Cape Town
Tributaries and River Banks
Some of the townships, such as Alexandra and Diepsloot, are built along or by a tributary or river bank. This causes problems with the high density of people, poor access, and services. These areas are extremely dense with only tortuous, narrow access, few communal water points and banks of chemical toilets on the peripheries of the settlements. The settlements are beginning to be built in the old tributaries due to the continuing growth of the townships. With the houses in the dried up tributaries is a potential problem when a large storm comes and the tributary starts to fill up with water again or if there is a backup of sewerage coming into the tributary. The houses built in that area are all in danger of being destroyed by natural occurrences. As the area grew the tributaries were piped and a number of concrete aprons and gullies were constructed over the tributary to which the communal water points drain. The gullies were then chocked with garbage and the tributaries appear to be substantially blocked but this will not hold off the water for very long if a flood came through.[10] Flooding is also an issue in the river bank areas where houses were built. These houses should be relocated but most places are running out of space to expand which is how those houses ended up in the area below the flood lines. Some people think it could be a good thing to live next to s river in order to be able to use the water to do laundry and clean but most of the time the water in that area is so polluted and trashed that it is unsanitary for them to use due to all the local pollutant of nearby factories or plants.
Backyard Shacks
Backyard shacks are additional units on a plot of land that is rented out by the land owner as a significant income to the main householder. A plot of land designed for a house big enough for one family has turned into a plot of land that holds on average six families instead of one.[11] These structures are indeed illegal by the government and built without compliance with planning and building code norms and have made servicing and maintenance very difficult for the whole community. Having the excess amount of people on one plot of land has created inevitable strains on the infrastructure and services causing capacity and blockage problems. The government refuses to make the backyard shacks legal but it would unethical to make that large a number of people move so a compromise is needed in order to satisfy both parties. In the township called Diepsloot near Johannesburg a study was done in 2001 and it shows that 24% of the residents lived in brick structures, 43% were in shack areas, and 27% were in backyard shacks.[7]
Education
Changes have been attempted within the last few years to make the education system better but one of the biggest problems facing African youths is the lack of education.[12] The education system in South Africa is set up differently than the rest of the world. School life spans 13 years or grades, from grade 0, other wise known as grade R or “reception year”, through to grade 12 or “matic”. All South Africans have the right to a basic education but most of the kids in the poor areas end up dropping out around 9th grade.[13] The Bill of Rights of the country’s Constitution states that they have the obligation, through reasonable measures, to progressively make education available and accessible. Then in the South African Schools Act of 1996 education became compulsory for all South Africans from the age of seven to age 15, or the completion of 9th grade. .[14] In order to target the education of the poorest of the poor the government created two notable programs. One is the fee-free schools, institutions that receive all their required funding from the state and so do not have to charge school fees. These schools were carefully identified in the country’s most poverty-stricken areas, and will made up 40% of all school in 2007. .[15] The other is the National Schools Nutrition Program, which feeds about 7 million schoolchildren every day. The government is targeting improvements in the infrastructure for poorer school including libraries, laboratory, and sports fields as well as improvements in math and science scores. Other strategies include learner transport, crime campaigns to address violence, sexual abuse and gangsterism, the “Drop-all-and-read” campaign that focuses on basic literacy and numeracy skills.[16] After the implementation of these programs the national budget has increased as well as the matric pass rate and total number of students. .[17] Even with all these increases and positive transformations they have not been accompanied by a better distribution of education. This skewed distribution is mainly attributable to higher and more rapid drop out rates among the poor, rather than to a lack of initial access to schooling.[16] The formerly white Model-C schools uniformly produce better results and their governing bodies are able to raise substantial private funds used to get resources that are then unreachable by the rural and township schools which survive on the commitment of their teachers. .[16]
Gangs and Violence
Kids as early as age 12 or 13 will begin the initiation into a local gang. Kids that begin that young have a role model that is a gang, which is the reason for their own induction. Some see violence and gangs as a way of life and a culture. So if their role model is seen doing something wrong they do not see it as a crime but idolized. Without a conviction of the wrongdoers the kids sense of mortality becomes distorted. Some blame the apartheid for leaving a bitter legacy of poverty, inequality, and the nobility of violence. The weapon of choice for most is a gun and with easy accessibility anyone is able to get one. It is estimated that out of the 14 million guns in circulation, in South Africa, only four million are registered and licensed to legal gun owners.[18]
Largest townships
Largest townships in South Africa at the time of the 2001 census:
|
Township
|
Population
|
Neighbouring city/town
|
|
858,644
|
||
|
398,650
|
Cape Town (former Coloured township)
|
|
|
388,687
|
||
|
349,866
|
||
|
348,693
|
||
|
329,002
|
Cape Town
|
|
|
311,223
|
||
|
256,117
|
Pretoria
|
|
|
255,826
|
||
|
222,045
|
||
|
217,076
|
||
|
192,914
|
Pretoria
|
|
|
175,913
|
Durban
|
|
|
175,822
|
Bloemfontein
|
|
|
175,789
|
||
|
166,968
|
Johannesburg
|
|
|
163,877
|
Johannesburg
|
|
|
153,098
|
Durban
|
|
|
150,277
|
|
Township
|
Population
|
Neighbouring city/town
|
|
148,206
|
||
|
144,289
|
||
|
143,157
|
||
|
138,354
|
||
|
131,390
|
||
|
124,435
|
Benoni
|
|
|
117,319
|
Port Elizabeth
|
|
|
116,798
|
||
|
114,579
|
Durban
|
|
|
112,516
|
||
|
104,977
|
||
|
104,096
|
Johannesburg
|
|
|
100,940
|
|
Township
|
Population
|
Neighbouring city/town
|
|
99,720
|
||
|
99,517
|
||
|
95,676
|
Pretoria
|
|
|
91,751
|
||
|
87,585
|
||
|
85,106
|
Alberton
|
|
|
82,509
|
||
|
80,277
|
Cape Town
|
|
|
80,265
|
Newcastle
|
|
|
79,573
|
||
|
79,115
|
Pietermaritzburg
|
|
|
73,931
|
Newcastle
|
|
|
71,960
|
||
|
71,290
|
||
|
71,279
|
Pretoria
|
Legal meaning
The legal meaning of the term "township" in South Africa differs from the popular usage, and has a precise legal meaning[19][20] without any racial connotations. The term is used in land titles and townships are subdivided into erfs (stands).[21] "Township" can also mean a designated area or district. For instance "Industrial Township" has been used in reference to an industrial area, e.g. "Westmead Industrial Township", in Pinetown, South Africa.
Often a township (in the legal sense) is established, and then adjoining townships, with the same name as the original township, and with a numbered "Extension" suffix are later established. For example the Johannesburg suburb of Bryanston has an extension called Bryanston Extension 3 [1].
Relationship with "suburb"
In traditionally or historically white areas, the term "suburb" is used for legally-defined residential townships in everyday conversation.
A suburb's boundaries are often regarded as being the same as the (legal) township boundaries, along with its numbered extensions, and it usually shares its name with the township (with some notable exceptions, such as the Johannesburg suburb known as Rivonia, which is actually the township of Edenburg and its extensions).
Occasionally formerly independent towns, such as Sandton (which itself consists of numerous suburbs), are referred to as "suburbs" [2].
South Africa: From Township to Town
For many, particularly outside of South Africa, the name Soweto evokes an image by Sam Nzima made during the 1976 Soweto Uprising. In that iconic photograph, 18-year-old Mbuyisa Mahkubo carries Hector Pieterson, a 13-year-old boy who was fatally wounded when police fired on students protesting the official lowering of academic standards in South Africa’s black schools. The image of the dying boy spread around the world, and today the uprising is widely seen as a turning point in the struggle against the nationalist government. “Soweto” became the symbol of the profound social, cultural, economic and physical divisions of apartheid.
But such a “black and white” reading belies the complex spatial history of townships in South Africa. Soweto itself is not a unitary place but an abbreviation for South Western Townships, a collection of over 25 townships bordering Johannesburg’s mining belt to the south, which range from middle-class enclaves to informal settlements (sometimes known as shantytowns).
Until the early 1990s, when South Africa became an inclusive democracy, nonwhite workers were forced to live outside cities in residential areas known as townships. The systematic segregation dates back to the colonial era: in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the British colonial government resettled racial groups under the pretense of responding to disease epidemics in overcrowded neighborhoods. The area now known as Soweto was settled by blacks and other nonwhites who were relocated after an outbreak of bubonic plague in central Johannesburg. Early separation was formalized and reinforced by colonial laws such as the Natives’ Land Act of 1913, which reserved nearly 90 percent of the land in South Africa for a tiny minority white population. In the following decades, during which South Africa became an independent republic, a series of pass and influx laws comprehensively restricted the rights of the nonwhite population. During the Apartheid Era, from 1948 to 1994, the ruling Nationalist Party, dominated by white Afrikaaners, passed miscegenation laws, institutionalized legal segregation, formalized racial categories and restrictions on movement, and embedded apartheid physically in the landscape. Cities were designated “for whites only,” and townships became, in effect, the mechanism for housing the nonwhite labor force. Such policies accelerated the growth of separate townships across the country at all scales — from cities like Cape Town and Johannesburg to the smallest villages.
Top: Township located on a barren tract outside Johannesburg. Bottom: Private minibuses known as black taxis, which provided transport in the townships under apartheid and continue to thrive today. [Photos by Liz Ogbu]
Apartheid is often construed as a largely political construct, but architecture and planning were critical to implementing apartheid policies. Design practices became cultural extensions of state power, and some professional designers validated the power of the white minority through the design of monumental structures such as the Union Buildings and Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, and through the planning of new townships mandated under laws such as the Group Areas Act (1950), which specified where racial groups were allowed to live in urban areas. Vibrant multiracial settlements were cleared and razed, their residents separated by race and relocated into distant townships. In District Six near downtown Cape Town, for instance, 60,000 residents were forcibly removed between 1968 and 1982; Cape Technikon, a white-only university, was built on a portion of the land, while the rest sat vacant for decades and is only now being developed for post-apartheid housing and community facilities.
The use of townships as a racial construct was reinforced by theoretical movements within architecture and planning. Le Corbusier’s concept of temporary workforce housing, presented in the 1922 utopian proposal Ville Contemporaine, inspired the white South African vision of the positive yet controlled movement of a black population as temporary labor; and the influence of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities can be seen in township plans, which often included neatly drawn boulevards and neighborhoods laid out in lovely curving grids. In the 1950s a group of architects at the prestigious University of Witswatersrand in Johannesburg proposed to solve the “native housing problem” by designing a series of matchbox houses whose sterile forms became ubiquitous across the sprawling township landscapes. [1] Residents have since modified these homogenous spaces, personalizing the houses with incremental upgrades, cultivated gardens, the inventive use of scavenged materials and lively paint schemes.
Under apartheid, the townships were highly controlled bedroom communities, often located at some distance from the “white city.” [2] While in a few cases, like Alexandra, older townships were close to white enclaves and separated only by walls and fences, in most places a vast zone of uninhabited land separated the townships from the city. Getting to work often involved a long and expensive commute to a job that could be three hours away. Transport was limited to state-owned buses and trains, and the scarcity of commercial development forced many township residents to shop in faraway white-owned centers, or in licensed white-owned or Indian-owned shops dispersed around the townships. Leisure activities were also strictly regulated: the only legal beer halls were in government buildings, and dirt lots served as soccer fields. Schools were poorly maintained barrack-like structures with barred windows and secondhand desks. There were no cultural facilities, though churches did provide places of community and belonging.
Residents make their own public space in New Brighton. Behind the informal shacks in the foreground are newly built houses, and behind them are two-story barrack buildings from the apartheid era. [Photo by Lisa Findley]
Nor was there any “public space.” While there was a great deal of unoccupied land in most townships, it had no civic, social or cultural role. It truly was a “no-man’s land,” with no owner, no rules, no maintenance. Footpaths to transit connections often crossed these weed-infested fields, but they were dangerous and strewn with trash. What little civic interaction occurred in the townships during apartheid happened in people’s yards, in churches or in the marketplace.
And yet, even in this strictly controlled environment, informal spaces and activities emerged and flourished — sometimes as a matter of survival, other times as a political act. Private minibuses, more commonly known as “black taxis,” filled the service gap between the need for urban transport and the capacity of the state system. (Post-apartheid, they've been legalized and are still the backbone of the transportation system for most townships.) Illegal bars, or shebeens, were run out of matchbox houses, providing a much-needed social (and, often, political) venue. Spaza shops, also run out of homes, served as small-scale convenience stores integrated into the township landscape. And the inadequate supply of official housing was supplemented by informal settlements located either on the periphery of the sprawling townships or integrated within their boundaries as shacks on subdivided lots — solutions that today remain an integral part of the landscape. These acts of responsive urbanism underscored the substandard living conditions for nonwhite peoples; sometimes they also gave the townships a physical and cultural vitality absent from the more sanitized city centers.
Racially motivated land tenure policies were officially repealed in 1994, following the democratic election that brought the African National Congress party to power, but there persists a class barrier that follows the old racial lines. In 2007, according to a report by the Johannesburg-based consultancy FutureFact, 55 percent of black adults lived in townships, and more than 40 percent of these were members of the working class. [3] As white-only areas have opened to other races, the biggest post-apartheid population shift has been the movement of black middle-class residents from townships to formerly all-white suburbs, enabled in part by growth in the black middle-class. [4] And yet the FutureFact report found that 81 percent of township residents planned to continue living there. Many stay for the strong communities and fledgling economic opportunities the townships provide; others cannot afford to leave.
Market near Baragwanath Hospital, Soweto, in 2007, prior to the construction of an improved bus and taxi facility. [Photo by Robert Cutts]
To understand why these demographic trends are significant, look at Soweto. It occupies only 10 percent of the land of metropolitan Johannesburg but contains 40 percent of its population. [5] Even as economic growth remains unpredictable, the people of the Soweto townships are pushing to transform these marginalized settlements into important hubs of commerce, political power and diverse social agendas. In fact, in some places, the townships are actually beginning to resemble towns. Entrepreneurial residents engage in a variety of businesses, run out of homes or hastily constructed shacks and shipping containers, or in newly constructed commercial centers. And global consumer culture is making an appearance in places like the huge air-conditioned Jubalani Mall, where Soweto residents can buy almost anything available in South Africa — from the latest fashions to fast food — from franchises of national and international chains. Another enormous commercial complex, Maponya Mall, envisions itself as an all-inclusive entertainment center, with special cultural exhibitions and activities designed to attract tourists.
Across the country, new and rehabilitated museums, monuments and leisure accommodations have transformed the townships into cultural destinations. Attractions like the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum in the Orlando West township (Soweto), Mahatma Gandhi’s printing press and home in the Inanda township (Durban), and the Red Location Museum in New Brighton township (Port Elizabeth) appeal to both South African and foreign tourists. Township tours, restaurants and homestays are also big business. Johannesburg tour companies like Imbizo offer shebeen crawls.
It is difficult to assess the value of all this commercial activity, but one clear benefit is increased employment in a country where the unemployment rate among blacks is nearly 29 percent [6] and where most jobs, until recently, were far from home. Township residents who work in local businesses, museums and malls do not have to spend hours and rands commuting; and locally owned businesses keep money in the township, where it spurs prosperity. The townships finally have access to commercial momentum. But still, even with the significant shifts of the past 15 years, residents in places like Soweto make 74 percent of their retail purchases outside the township; and of those who are employed, 70 percent work outside. [7]
The recent record of public space is equally mixed. Many early post-apartheid projects were small plazas built in prominent locations, like the entry plaza at the main road into the Philippi township near Cape Town. These well-intentioned civic gestures were quick and inexpensive, and they signaled the intention of the African National Congress Party to invest in the transformation of the townships. The small spaces served multiple roles — as weekly markets, informal car washes and shoeshine corners — but with no historical tradition of public space in South Africa, they were rarely used for civic gatherings of any sort. Moreover, the post-apartheid government, after funding construction of plazas, usually failed to plan for maintenance and improvement. Most early projects are now derelict, and the trees that were planted with such hope for the future have been chopped down for cooking fuel.
Top: Entry plaza, Philippi township, near Cape Town. Next: Car wash that took over a section of the unused Philippi plaza, taking advantage of a water tap. Middle left: The vast plaza entry at Walter Sisulu Square, Kliptown, Soweto, nearly empty on a sunny weekend. Middle right: A more successful part of Sisulu Square, at its commercial edge. Bottom: Furniture store, one of the formal commercial enterprises that have opened in the former no-man’s land near Sisulu Square. [Photos by Lisa Findley]
The past decade has seen more ambitious public space projects. In 2002, the government, in cooperation with quasi-governmental development groups, launched a design competition for a public space scaled to the vastness of Soweto but rooted in one of its vibrant communities, Kliptown. The winner, Johannesburg-based architect Pierre Swanepoel and his practice, StudioMAS, created a vast public square featuring, at its edges, a hotel and conference center, a large open-air market, food vendors and office space, as well as community meeting space and other needs. The focal point is a memorial celebrating the Freedom Charter, an anti-apartheid document signed and dedicated at a mass rally held on that spot in 1955. Named after the great anti-apartheid activist and close friend of Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu Square is slowly settling into the community, as residents figure out how to use the huge space for trade and tourism.
The government has also used infrastructure projects to correct the apartheid legacy of inadequate transportation, housing and services in the townships. Since 1994, infrastructure has been developed through initiatives like the Reconstruction and Development Programme, a national blueprint for improving government services and basic living conditions for the poorest citizens, who number at least 17 million. [8] By 2009, programs such as the RDP had facilitated the construction of over 2.3 million homes [9] and provided electrification and clean-water access to millions more. [10] Yet, with 50 percent of the population living below the poverty line, implementation has not kept pace with need. [11]
South Africa has also seen large-scale infrastructural investment in connection with the 2010 World Cup. In anticipation of millions of soccer-loving tourists, the government spent over $5 billion to upgrade stadiums, airports, trains and roads. [12] Soweto in particular has been changed by the landmark Soccer City Stadium, designed by Boogertaman + Partners, on its outskirts, and the new bus rapid transit line, by Ikemeleng and Osmond Lange, from Dobsonville township to central Johannesburg. While both have been touted by the government and media, public opinion has been mixed. Informal minibus taxi drivers fear that the BRT system will undercut their livelihood. Activists and NGOs have complained that the government shifted money away from poverty alleviation projects to high profile showpieces that would, they argued, provide little benefit to the country as a whole.
Top: New BRT station and roadway in Soweto. [Photo by Darren Alexander] Bottom: Baragwanath (Bara) Taxi Rank, Soweto, a multimodal transit center designed by Ludwig Hansen. [Photo by Urban Solutions]
Some of the more successful infrastructure investments have been smaller-scale projects like multi-modal transit stations. Designed as mediating points between formal and informal activity, hybrid public transport and shopping centers such as the Baragwanath Taxi and Bus Facility, in Soweto, provide for transport, trade and social interaction. Designed by Urban Solutions and opened in 2008, opposite the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital (one of the largest hospitals in Sub-Saharan Africa), the facility serves over 42,000 people daily, attracting more than 1,000 informal traders. [13] The design incorporates trading stalls and a pedestrian bridge to facilitate movement between transit lines, the hospital, trading areas and the street.
But despite such activity, post-apartheid officials have not been nearly as aggressive as earlier governments were in using planning and architecture to achieve their goals. The physical gaps between the former white city and the former black townships remain all too evident, and the spatial inequities of apartheid endure. While the government has built more than a million new housing units, a majority are on marginal lands at the edges of townships, exacerbating the challenge of access to jobs, transportation, education and commercial goods. Instead of using its robust housing program to heal the spatial wound between cities and townships and develop mixed-use neighborhoods on the in-between belts of land, the government encourages and maintains discrete industrial facilities, factories, workshops and the occasional shopping complex. The townships still lack the commercial diversity, both dense and distributed, that characterize thriving urban centers. What was once a racial divide has now become a class divide — although, of course, the two are linked in South Africa by racism and limits on education and social mobility.
It is also disturbing that the new government-built houses are often indistinguishable from the bare-bones houses of the apartheid era. These basic residential units — usually consisting of a wet core with a room or two — are understood to be starter homes. Residents can, over time and as funds allow, add rooms and floors, or even a small building in the back to rent out. And in the townships, here and there, you can find three-story houses built out to the lot lines, next to a neighbor still living in the basic house with maybe an added-on metal shed. But though they're often painted with a brighter palette, many of the new houses are even smaller than those built during apartheid, and located on smaller lots. The ruling ANC party has apparently decided that replicating the old housing strategy of building bedroom communities is an effective way to make homes, neighborhoods and towns.
Top: Reconstruction and Development Programme houses in Soweto. [Photo via Flickr] Bottom: Residents add a personal touch to government-built duplex houses. [Photo by Lisa Findley]
Such government sanctioned strategies have provoked increasing frustration among the impoverished black South Africans. Persistent factors such as low residential density, high unemployment, family breakdown due to AIDS deaths, and inadequate policing in township neighborhoods have contributed to a pervasive culture of poverty and violence. The rape incidence in South Africa is among the world’s highest, carjacking and burglary are common, and recently there has been an increase in xenophobic attacks toward immigrants from other African countries. After the first significant attack in the Alexandra township, in spring 2008, violence quickly spread to other provinces. Although the unrest was eventually quelled, outbreaks still occur occasionally. Foreigners have become a convenient target for some members of the black working class, with tensions exacerbated by high unemployment, particularly among the young and semiskilled, and by dissatisfaction with the slow rate of progress nearly two decades after Mandela became the nation's first post-apartheid president.
South Africans who were elated at the end of apartheid, and at the promise of townships becoming towns, now battle to remain hopeful. For many it can seem like a surreal and conflicted world. The media report that the country is prospering, but day-to-day experience often says otherwise. South Africa’s townships continue to be sites of struggle and resilience, as they have been throughout their history. They constitute a distinct urban typology that must be addressed by practitioners, policymakers and scholars if we are to transform the spatial legacy of apartheid into a landscape that better reflects the multiracial aspirations of the nation. As townships evolve, residents are confronting the spatial legacy of the past, negotiating the socioeconomic and political challenges and opportunities of the present and slowly building a vision for the future.
