Johannesburg's gated communities echo apartheid-era segregation in South Africa — Quartz:
"In order to gain access to an unremarkable suburban road, South Africans have become accustomed to parting with their most personal details. At barriers erected across public roads, people who want to cross into this protected zone fill in their name, surname, cellphone, identity and car registration numbers, and then the exact time of their entry.
The law says they don’t have to when driving on a public road, but most people don’t give a second thought to handing over data in exchange for a sense of personal security in a city like Johannesburg with a reputation for high contact crimes, like murder and robbery.
This payoff, however, has created pockets of development—ranging from middle class suburbia to opulence—walled off from South Africa’s socio-economic reality. It has not only exacerbated inequality by making those beyond the wall invisible, gated communities show how short South Africans’ memory is about restricting the movement of the disenfranchised."
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Gated private communities are 15% of the real estate market in Gauteng, which is the area around Johannesburg and Pretoria. Half the gated communities in South Africa are in Gauteng. Obviously South Africa has a long and loathsome history of racial oppression by the white minority, and now that legal Apartheid is in the past, new forms of segregation have become prevalent.
2 comments:
And how is Johannesburg really that different from what we have here in the US, where gated communities, condominiums or co-ops with 24-hour doormen and concierge, and the like physically separate and insulate themselves from the more ordinary residents of their cities?
Tie this into your previous post about school district segregation, and the fact that social engineering by way of “gerrymandering” school district boundaries (it was called “bussing 50 years ago) has failed miserably. Besides the fact that people simply migrate to new neighborhoods, you have the fact that more parents are opting for private school and even home schooling.
To some extent, planners have not figured out that you cannot stop people from gravitating toward neighbors who share common lifestyle preferences and values. And that includes growing minority groups as well, as it always has, throughout our country’s history. Think Chinatown. Little Italy. Harlem. Greenwich Village.
The problem is that certain groups tend to have social and economic advantage over other groups.
How does privatization of community development mitigate these effects? It doesn’t. In fact, it exacerbates social divisions. Many planned communities are conceived, designed, and marketed to specific market niches, based upon socioeconmic characteristics.
And I maintain that the choice of restrictive covenants and architectural standards are deliberately chosen to attract the “right” type of owners to fit in with the overall theme or community plan.
Just another product copied from the United States. The Fair Housing Act does not eliminate discrimination - it's been embedded through disenfranchising homeowners from having individual choice and vote. The entire subdivision of housing is designed with little or limited input from homeowners. After "purchase" the homeowner will have to have "architectural committee" approval of anything they do. It's similar to red-lining or the types of "dress code" bars adopted to refuse entry by non-whites.
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