Rethinking urban South Africa

Abstract

Our reflection on past treatment of urban segregation begins with the assertion that the implicit acceptance of ‘race’ as a legitimate and primary category of inquiry has impoverished the understanding of residential segregation in the South African city. The first section of the paper illustrates the prevalence of racially defined empirical urban studies and tries to explain why this categorisation remains unchallenged. In the second section of the paper we demonstrate that where efforts are made to explain the emergence of a racialised urban structure, inappropriate or inadequate points of reference are involved. Particular attention is given to the use of the race/class debate, feminist perspectives on urban policy, the literature on white supremacy and the city, and in the work on ‘race’. The final section of the paper suggests an alternative approach to exploring urban segregation. Specifically, we pose the questions: what were urban administrators in the early part of the twentieth century to do and why did they do things the way that they did? This provides a platform for our discussion of the emergence of local government in the 1910s and 1920s which we use to emphasise concerns with urban growth, urban design and urban management. This is followed by a more detailed examination of the influences of modernist planners in the shaping of the ‘racially’ segregated city.