Spatialisation of new modes of power relations in post-apartheid urban landscape

Abstract

This presentation analyses spatial reconstruction of post-apartheid urban landscape through a combination of public sector driven legislative and policy instrumentspn one hand and private sector driven processes. The emerging spatial arrangements of new power relations is an expression of urban class struggles in the context of neoliberal economic social framework of post-apartheid urban landscape. The empirical evidence suggests that the post-apartheid spatial urban landscape reflects not only resilience of apartheid spatial-social imprint but a spatial reconfiguration of power relations. This happends in the context of declining significance of racial divisions and increasing urban social stratefication albeit along racial lines. In neoliberalised post-apartheid urban space, social class struggles have become more prominent and ideological raced spatial division has declined in significant. Although the public sector plays an important role as a developer, neoliberalisation of the state has substantially compromised its ability to reduce social and economic inequalities. Economic and financial forces operating at different geographical scales have become dominat factors in a property driven urban development environment. However Post-apartheid urban patterns reflects that these spatial rearrangements involve much more than just production of space, as they sustain and support novel ways of asserting new urban social identities. Empirical research revelas that these spatial processes are complex and fraught with ambivalence. This research is based on the view that neoliberalism, democratization, globalization, urbal inequalities and social class struggles, integration, desegregation are key instruments to understanding post-aparthied urban landscape.