Johannesburg - How, why and where many of us live was determined by the Group Areas Act, which was passed in 1950.
July 7, 2020, marks 70 years since the Act was passed, and we still find ourselves experiencing the legacy of this oppressive legislation.
Take a look at your neighbourhood – are most of your neighbours a part of your race group? Do you only have one or two roads that allow you to enter and exit the area? Do you have any rivers, large green spaces or highways that separate your neighbourhood from the next?
If you answered "yes" to the questions above, then you are living in a space that is marked by the remnants of the Group Areas Act.
The Group Areas Act was a spatial planning tool used during the oppressive apartheid regime to restrict people to designated residential areas for exclusive use by certain race groups. These areas were to be known as “group areas”.
The Act was a cornerstone of the apartheid regime, as it reinforced the idea of separating people into racial groups. The Group Areas Act was not only a tool to restrict the movement of black people, but also to ensure prime properties in the well-developed areas, closest to the CBDs, were allocated to or reserved for the white minority.
The black majority was relegated to overcrowded townships at the outskirts of the urban fringe, with a significant number forcibly restricted to “homelands”, referred to as Bantustans.
The areas reserved for black, Indian and coloured communities lacked basic services such as street lighting, tarred roads, electricity, adequate sanitation and running water.
Most of these areas, including the African homelands, usually had one transport network so as to monitor the people’s movement.
Apartheid-regime urban planners separated the group areas using barriers such as highways, railways, rivers, mountains and buffers such as green spaces and other “undesirable” land uses, such as cemeteries.
What is clear is the continued predominant separation of the racial groups.
It is also important to note that the central business districts have diversified and there is now more than one in most areas. But generally, the white population lives closer to these CBDs than any other racial group.
While many, largely African, people are within the CBD itself, this trend has resulted in white people leaving the city centre and surrounds for estates and the countryside.
The Group Areas Act was officially repealed on June 30, 1991 by the Abolition of Racially Based Land Measures Act.
Given that over two decades have passed since the repealing of the Group Areas Act, why is there still such
inequality among the living conditions of the races? After working in the planning sector for 11 years, I have witnessed the following:
* Spatial planning is not led by urban planners, but by other professionals in the built environment who are responsible for the barriers.
* Roads, service infrastructure and conservation areas are determined in silos before allowing proper land-use planning. For example, poorly located transport networks still dissect areas, rendering most urban spaces inefficient and unworkable.
* Green spaces continue to act as buffers, which leads to a lack of integration - sometimes deliberately.
* Planners lack adequate training as the curriculum for such studies fails to deal with planning issues at the coalface - work-integrated learning is rarely part of the curriculum.
* There is a lack of political will to undertake meaningful measures that would see spatial transformation or integration. This is largely because economic separation has now replaced racial separation, with the political elite preferring the former. Gated communities and golf estates are one of the most prevalent examples. South Africa is meant to be a development state - implying that the state plays an active role in guiding economic development to meet the needs of its citizens.
If we change how and where people live and work, the rest follows.
So how do we change this?
* We need to teach our youth the legacy of oppressive legislation such as the Group Areas Act, so we can incite passion about spatial planning issues and have new perspectives enter our field.
* Planners need to take the lead in land-use planning, and they need to influence the spatial transformation agenda.
* The current curriculum for planning students and candidate planners needs to change – there needs to be an emphasis on practical land-use planning as part of their training.
* State departments and their agencies responsible for the planning profession (such as the SA Council for Planners) need to play a more interventionist role in guiding spatial transformation.
Given our atrocious history, every person in South Africa deserves dignity. We can do this through ensuring quality service delivery to all, which can be achieved through spatial transformation.
* Siphelelisiwe Sithole-Ngobese is a registered professional town planner and
founding director of the member-based Women in Planning SA.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of IOL.