In other cases, such as that of Botshabelo, the explicit separation from Bloemfontein has remained. There are instances where the buffer zones between spatial enclosures have become blurred boundaries, and so, for instance, Soweto can be seen as a part of Johannesburg’s agglomeration, with some form of economic integration. It was then that the term ‘township’, that originally merely indicated ‘an area of land divided into erven ’ became synonymous with a racially defined settlement.Īll of the above makes it difficult to systematically address today’s situation. This led to a process of forced relocation of large tracts of population, and ethnic cleansing of urban centres. After 1950 and the promulgation of the Group Areas Act, during the years of the so-called ‘high apartheid’, the Department of Community Development was established by the government to ‘provide and assist in the proper settlement and housing of all population groups, and local authorities were assigned the task to demarcate specific areas for the different ethnic groups’. The oldest existing township is New Brighton in Port Elizabeth, built in 1902, however the majority were built almost half a century later. A recent series of drone pictures by Johnny Miller, aptly titled ‘Unequal Scenes’, makes the contrast eloquently visible. The result has been that injustice and discrimination have become an integral part of South Africa’s topography. Quite the opposite, they were created as a physical support to a precise plan of social engineering, drafted and implemented by the government and its institutions, not only to assert the supremacy of the white population, a numeric minority, but to firmly entrench it. The second is that the origin and the development of townships was not a spontaneous or informal phenomenon.
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