Reformatting Boundaries and Belonging in Johannesburg's South
In 1991, the Abolition of Racially Based Land Measures Act repealed South Africa’s notorious Group Areas Act and related measures. 30 years since the end of legislated segregation, this paper introduces a part of Johannesburg straddling an apartheid buffer zone between Soweto and Johannesburg South that has changed substantially: in urban form, demographics, and relations to other parts of the city. This has been through incremental, mundane shifts, instigated in the main by various private actors in relation to a growing multi-racial middle class and end of the city’s mining economy. What can we learn from this accretive, fragmented set of suburban developments about how things have changed and how they’ve stayed the same; what old boundaries and forms of belonging have been replaced by new ones, and which have endured?
Contact Professor Sean Kennedy for more information: seankenn@illinois.edu