Integrating Poor Populations in South African Cities - Agence ...

2. Current Challenges
Photos 3 and 4.
Hilbrow, Johannesburg
Photo credit: Fanny Hervé.
The large cities have elaborated strategies to prevent the dilapidation of their
city centres, notably after the merger of various municipal councils. This worked
particularly well in Cape Town. In Johannesburg, several public and semi-public bodies
have succeeded one another since 1991, carrying a determination to rehabilitate the
city centre. However, because of the size of the CBD and the magnitude of the
phenomenon, and even though they are being reconverted, the various districts in the
city centre are still seen as dangerous and many buildings still contain squatters.
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2.2.2. Accentuated Fragmentation: A Perpetuation of Apartheid?
One of the government’s objectives starting in 1994 was to re-build post-apartheid
cities to destroy the territorial traces of apartheid. However, as Fabrice Folio shows in
his article “Villes post-apartheid au Kwazulu-Natal : une déclinaison du modèle de
Davies” (post-apartheid cities in Kwazulu-Natal: a version of the Davies model), the
general shape of cities and the distribution of populations have not evolved as desired
(Graph 7).
According to many authors, the house grant policy has even reproduced urban
landscapes similar to those under apartheid (Harrison et al., 2003). Indeed, the
municipalities chose to build RDP houses on land that was inexpensive and therefore
Integrating Poor Populations in South African Cities © AFD 2009