Abstracts

66 As a result of the Group Areas Act, by 1961, most areas in Cape Town were racially zoned, and black South Africans faced deliberate exclusion from much of the locale (Cook, 1991, pp. 29–32). A massive reorganization of the city in the 1950s left colored people (who made up 54% of the population) with only 27% of land allocations. These long-standing disparities helped frame the current ways in which housing segregation is manifested in Cape Town. The organization of urban areas is entangled with a violent history of eviction and spatial displacement. One of the most salient examples within the context of Cape Town was District Six, a diverse, bustling neighborhood. In 1966, the neighborhood was declared a white zone and renamed Zonnebloem. The colored people of this neighborhood were scattered, displaced, and forced further toward the outskirts of the city on underdeveloped land. Due to the loss of their homes, many became dependent on local housing authorities for accommodations (Cook, 1991, pp. 32–33). It is estimated that more than 60,000 people were forcibly evicted from District Six by 1981 and moved to an area over 20 kilometers away, known as the Cape Flats. Their homes were bulldozed to make room for new, exclusively white, housing developments (District Six Museum). Although Cape Town and Johannesburg bear some similarities in the adopted policies and practices of segregation, some elements distinguish the two metropolitan regions. For example, the land on which Johannesburg lies is rich in gold and other minerals, the mining of which contributed to the structure of the city and surrounding townships (Parnell & Crankshaw, 2013, p. 129). But similar to Cape Town, racial segregation in Johannesburg is profoundly ingrained in its residential landscape. Dating back to the earliest land allocations, provisions were in place for exclusively separate locations for black Africans. The Gold Law of 1885 excluded black people from owning and residing on land allocated for mining. Additionally, since the 1960s, housing developments, both public and private, ensured the entrenchment of racial residential segregation in Johannesburg (Parnell & Crankshaw, 2013, p. 137). Toward the end of apartheid, barriers into cities, such as pass laws that forced nonwhites to obtain legal permission before entering white areas, began to dissolve (Levenson, 2014, p. 14). Black South Africans were finally permitted to move freely as racialized urban influx control mechanisms diminished (Moolla et al., 2011, p. 318). This relaxation, coupled with the lack of development and industrialization of rural regions, consequently resulted in rapid nonwhitemovement into cities (Huchzermeyer, 2001, p. 580). Additionally, the state practice of mass eviction had ceased by the 1980s, which allowed black residents with no other affordable housing option the ability to establish informal settlements on the peripheries of cities (Levenson, 2014, p. 15). Unfortunately, in 1994, there was only one house available for every 43 black citizens, a huge gap compared to one house for every 3.5 white individuals (Ile & Maklva, 2013, p. 111). During the 1980s, the creation of informal settlements and worsening housing backlogs had aggravated the residential problem, such that by the end of apartheid, this was so entangled a crisis that the African National Congress (ANC) had to address it directly (Moolla et al., 2011, p. 319). As a first step under President Nelson Mandela, the ANC established a protective and expansive Bill of Rights in the new Constitution, which includes the right to housing and the right to due process with regard to court-ordered eviction. Government Intervention and Policy after Apartheid In 1994, the new ANC government inherited the complex issue of housing and its entanglement with systematic racial discrimination, which deeply impacted not only spatial separation of groups of people but also access to infrastructure and resources. In an effort to improve the long-standing racial inequities, including housing, the ANC government enacted the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), described as “seek[ing] to mobilize all our people and our country’s resources toward the final eradication of the results of apartheid and the building of a democratic, non-racial and non-