Smit, following Manuel Castells), the urban accumulation of capital (Patrick Bond, following David Harvey), administrative and spatial power (Jennifer Robinson, following Michel Foucault), or urban efficiency (the Urban Foundation, following the World Bank). Debates have raged between social scientists and policy advocates since the 1980s about whether to view townships through the lens of collective consumption (as do Jeffrey J. Townships originated from South Africa ’s unique economic requirement for inexpensive migratory labor, and they were managed using brutal policing systems as well as British municipal administrative traditions.

Of the townships, which together host more than half the population, only Alexandra is relatively well located, and hour-long commutes from the distant townships to work are common. The area constitutes a vast peri-urban expanse with more than 10 million residents in Gauteng Province. These stretch more than 30 miles (50 kilometers) east –west and north –south, and they fuse into other townships near Pretoria and the Vaal River. Others include Bosmont (largely colored), Daveyton, Diepsloot, Duduza, El Dorado Park (colored), Etwatwa, Evaton, Ivory Park, Kagiso, Katlehong, KwaThema, Lenasia (Indian), Orange Farm, Tembisa, Thokoza, Tsakane, Vosloorus, and Wattville. In the area surrounding Johannesburg, South Africa ’s largest metropolis (founded with the discovery of gold in 1886), the best-known townships are Soweto (an acronym for “South Western Townships ”) and Alexandra. These laws existed until the early 1990s, and since then there has been only gradual desegregation of formerly white, colored, and Indian areas.

Even within black townships, ethnic groups were often segregated into separate areas for Zulus, Xhosas, Sothos, and others. The townships were racially discriminatory in that “black ” African, “colored ” (mixed-race), and “Indian ” people were ordered by the Land Act of 1913 and the Group Areas Act of 1950 to live separately. Possibly the most famous townships are in South Africa and were a creation of the apartheid system and its predecessor regimes of white rule.Īpartheid was formally instituted as state policy in 1948, but dating from the white settlers ’ permanent landing at what is now Cape Town in 1652, racial segregation was formal practice. A township is the land formally allocated to hosting the site of a town the word township legally refers to both residential and industrial sites.

Definiton of townships south africa