The New Apartheid – Housing and the Implications of Fear in South

Africa

Ayana Rockett

December 2011

Fear perpetuates social divisions that were inherent in Apartheid. The

fear of crime being used as a justification for a predominantly

racist fear of difference

Apartheid“Apartness”

• Apartheid was a system of racial segregation enforced by the National Party governments of South Africa between 1948 and 1994.

• Non white south Africans were curtailed and Afrikaner minority rule was maintained.

• Non white political representation was abolished in 1970 and black people were robbed of their citizenship and legally became citizens of tribally based, self governing “bantustans”

• Pillars of Grand Apartheid:

- Population Registration Act (1950)

- Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (1953)

- Black Homeland Citizenship Act (1970)

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Bantustans

“Architecture of Fear”

• The fall of Apartheid began in 1990 after a series of negotiations by government and nationalist groups.

• The end of Apartheid, democratization and majority rule were optimistically anticipated to bring and end to violence.

• Urban panic focusing on criminal activity**

“Architecture of Fear”

Fear has always influenced Urban Planning

• Baron Haussman – boulevards fragmenting revolutionary threat of underclass

• Le Corbusier – eliminated streets, replacing them with artificially “pure” environments

• Oscar Newman/Jane Jacobs – defensible space, natural surveillance

“Architecture of Fear”

State led efforts to mitigate fear have been usurped by private, individual citizen responses

Cape Town

Ruthless spacial polarization

Third largest city

Most common are violent personal crimes, property crimes

Khayelitsha – fastest growing shantytown in South Africa

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CrimeThreat of victimization affects behavior

• Crime is not uniform. Socio-spacial legacy of apartheid concentrates crime in black areas.

• 80% of white victimizations occurs outside of neighborhood boundaries

• Aggravated by skewed distribution of personal and institutional resources

Fear

Media increases anxiety

Citizen Responses to CrimeFortification is common among the poor and the

rich

• Black: dogs, window grills, high fences.

• Coloureds: burgular alarms

• Wealthy: Excessive- blocked themselves - high walls

- closed streets - security guards

- electric fences - CCTV

Consequences of Fortification

- Rejects efforts to address socio-spacial issues activity corridors

- Increases crime

- Decreases public responsibility for public space

- Promotes inequality, fear and segregation

- Limits social mixing, increasing distrust between groups

- Prevents “freedom of movement”

- Promotes “fear of crime” rhetoric

- Encourages poverty by exclusion and concentrating the poor small spaces with limited resources and political leverage

Discussion

Whites have long used the “fear of crime” as a euphemism for a fear of blacks.

• Whites blame crime on the new black governments inability to rule. Black see it as unfinished democracy.

• More “acceptable” discourses revolve around decreased property value, environmental degradation and increased taxes all conceal a racist fear of the “other”.

• The concept of “fear” creates conditions that mirror the Apartheid city in that it justifies exclusion, uses spacialmechanisms to displace social problems, and dominance of social and symbolic exclusionism.

Solution• Government planning needs to encourage

diversity

• It needs to address citizen needs

• It needs to enforce the negative public consequences of unchecked public action.

• Combat the symbols of exclusionism