The suburban challenge: (De)segregation, opportunity, and community in Akasia, City of Tshwane

Abstract

Residential desegregation and social reform in urban South Africa are of particular interest when considered against the degree of separation and division that previously existed (Lemon, 1991). Urban South Africa under apartheid is a classic example of the long-standing view that spatial segregation leads to social polarisation and eventually results in the exclusion of categories of people from

Residential Desegregation Dynamics in the South African City of Bloemfontein

“…Donaldson and Kotze (2006: 569, 570) also argue that desegregation studies in South Africa mainly endorse five viewpoints. According to the first of these, not much desegregation has occurred (Kotze and Donaldson 1998;Christopher 2001a;Horn and Ngcobo 2003). The authors point out that in the most recent national account of desegregation, Christopher (2005) shows that changes have been placespecific, with the Free State Province being the most segregated, for example, while KwaZulu-Natal continues to be the most desegregated and group-specific, with the black-white index of dissimilarity having remained high, although there has been some evidence of decline.…”

“…As a result, it has mainly been black, coloured and Indian individuals with largely newly acquired capital who have left their previously designated township areas and moved to less crowed, more secure and better-serviced formerly white residential areas (Horn and Ngcobo 2003).…”

Marikana in translation: Print nationalism in South Africa's multilingual press

“…Despite some evidence to suggest that new middle-and upper-class suburbs are more integrated now than they were in the mid-1990s, the majority of urban and township space is still largely racially, and to some extent ethno-linguistically homogenous and in some places, re-segregating because of economic disparities and security pressures. 19 It is therefore difficult to tease out the implications of one division-language-from other social forces like class, race, and location. However, because the influence of print media is largely transmitted through language, and because these processes are observable and iterated through the daily news cycle, they constitute both a reflection and a deepening of the social cleavages associated with language communities.…”

Spatialities of Urban Change: Selected Themes from Bloemfontein at the Beginning of the 21st Century

“…Indeed, only a small body of research has explored former white neighbourhoods specifically (exceptions being Donaldson and Williams, 2004;Ballard, 2004;Kotze and Van der Merwe, 2000;Maharaj and Mpungose, 1994). Moreover, although these investigations are presented as focusing on neighbourhoods, these areas are consistently deployed as spatial units of analysis to explore more specific urban processes such as gentrification, desegregation, crime and gated communities (Visser, 2002;Horn and Ngcobo, 2003;Dirsuweit 2002;Hook and Vrdoljak 2002). On the whole these investigations do not contribute to our conceptual understanding of the term neighbourhood, its place in the development history of the city, or its bearing on how we might understand the evolution of South African cities.…”