| dc.description.abstract | Progressive spatial segregation of Whites from other ethnic races in South Africa started
in 1886. Apartheid rulers evicted three and a half million Blacks, Coloureds and Indians
from white urban and residential areas between 1904 and 1994. Apartheid planners
used natural, mining, industrial, and infrastructural buffer zones to spatially enforce
segregation. They based their apartheid spatial governance on separation and control
and not on urban development. Today remnants of apartheid remain deeply embedded
in the urban framework, where large buffer zones continue to enforce segregation and
disrupt economic growth.
Victims of apartheid legislation believed the eradication of apartheid in 1994 meant
the right to live in the city and the end of forced evictions. Since then the post-Apartheid
government has conducted 2 million evictions, reminiscent of the 3.5 million evictions
during the apartheid years. In an attempt to make Johannesburg a `world class city`,
the municipality forcefully removed the poor from the city, and relocated them to rural
locations where their livelihoods are severely challenged. To many, a new ``apartheid`
has been born; one that segregates the rich and the poor.
The government has released several strategies to provide land for the poor near the
city, but the high cost of land in urban areas has disrupted implementation.
The thesis proposes a three-fold strategic design intervention to provide land for the
poor near the city and dissolve the apartheid-designed buffer zone between Soweto
and Johannesburg. The site, a landmark from the apartheid spatial legacy and part of
the Witwatersrand gold mining belt, separates Soweto, home to four million Blacks,
from the city of Johannesburg. About one and a half million people commute to the
city each day passing by the 14 km stretch of this toxic mining land.
The thesis proposes three urban design strategies to transform the site into a
community, which the local people would build: Remediation strategies to address
the toxic mining landscape, infrastructural strategies to provide basic services and
economic strategies to promote economic growth. These strategies operate in a codependent
structure. Co-op centres implement these strategies, transfering strategy
technologies to the local community. | en |
