A decade of Post-Apartheid: Is the City in South Africa being Remade?

This paper argues that in many ways the South African city continues to reflect the apartheid spatial and socio-economic order. Most black South Africans, especially that section of the population that was categorized African during the apartheid era (about four in five South Africans), remain marginalized, while white South Africans, although increasingly differentiated, continue to dominate spatially and economically. There has certainly been progress in the areas of governance and infrastructural development, but this progress has been tempered by the strong affiliation of the post-apartheid government to a neo-liberal economic policy, low economic growth, pervasive poverty, high levels of unemployment, and the crisis engendered by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The article concludes that the possibility of the creation of a socially just city as defined by David Harvey (2003) is negligible