Class and household restructuring in metropolitan Durban

Abstract

This paper uses case studies of communities in Durban Functional Region to examine the general and intertwined processes of social differentiation and decompression unleashed by the disintegration of apartheid reform, the endemic violence in the 1980s and 1990s, and the transition to a non-racial democratic society.

It is argued that under apartheid the black residential townships compressed together a variety of social classes and groupings, as well as compressing a large number of people (extended family members, younger married sons and daughters, relatives, kinsmen, tenants) into those households which had the legal right to be in and have access to houses in the urban areas.

The relaxation of controls as well as violence ad the general turbulence or the period resulted in a process of splitting and fragmentation of households and families and their re-constitution both spatially and socially within new and distinct residential areas on the peripheries of the old townships and the rise of large squatter settlements on the peripheries of the cities.

The paper begins with a brief overview of the inherited spatial structure of the city and the impact of violence and crime in the breakdown of the racial urban form. It then examines the dynamics of movement and resettlement over a number of historical phases, followed by an attempt to quantify the size, growth and spatial distribution of population. The final two sections examine the processes of social differentiation and decompression in the urban population and in the metropolitan core areas.