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From Resources to Power: The State and Spatial Change in Post-apartheid Durban, South Africa

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Abstract

After apartheid, local government in Durban, South Africa, attempted to break down the barriers of the apartheid city through a massive program of public investment, intended to close the economic and infrastructure gaps between race groups. The results of this program varied widely. In core areas, growth coalitions were able to influence state infrastructure development, limiting its transformative impact. In peripheral areas, wide ranging infrastructural needs, coupled with pressure on the state to deliver services quickly, resulted in rushed, substandard construction. In buffer zones, previously undeveloped areas between the core and the periphery that under apartheid had separated race groups, the state was able to construct public housing for poor Africans near both economic activity and white and Indian residential areas, an outcome previously unseen in Durban’s history. I argue that the state’s infrastructural power, varying in different parts of the city relative to the power of other actors in society, explains these results. Geocoded census and municipal infrastructure data from 1996 and 2001, together with qualitative data from key informant interviews and workshops, form the empirical basis of this article.

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Notes

  1. The four terms for “race groups” designated under the Population Registration Act of 1950 were African, Indian (or Asian), Coloured, and white. Despite some controversies, they remain common forms of data collection and self-identification, and will be used in this article.

  2. The index of dissimilarity can be interpreted as the percentage of one group or the other that would need to move to create spatial evenness.

  3. See Marais 2000, Nattrass and Seekings 2001, Seekings and Nattrass 2005, Turok and Watson 2001.

  4. This research is part of a broader comparative project analyzing Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban.

  5. The CBD, once a white area, was by 1996 40% African, 24% Indian, and 28% white.

  6. Evans (1996: 1126) and Tendler (1997) argue that uniform interventions are fundamentally antisynergistic because they cannot be based on local knowledge, local networks, or contextually specific planning.

  7. Logan and Molotch argue that they may not even produce growth, given how much cities fight to compete in the global convention and tourism circuits. Maharaj and Ramballi (1998) suggest that Durban’s investments, oriented toward high end tourism and convention business, have been wasted given the city’s traditionally working class tourists.

  8. The shift inward is a common feature of mobilization in poor communities (Nelson 1979).

  9. The ANC’s top-down party and bureaucratic structure and post-transition political dominance were central to its disconnect from social movements and civil society groups. Even ahead of transition, scholars and activists were concerned about the ANC’s efforts to “colonize” civil society (Friedman 1992).

  10. Fox (1996) suggests that contestation need not be a barrier to synergy; however, it must be combined with engagement, which neither the local nor the national state does well in South Africa.

  11. The collective goal of social transformation in South Africa stems from the anti-apartheid movement, which was indeed formidable.

  12. Conceiving of networks spatially is crucial in Durban, despite some shifts in the literature on networks that suggest space no longer matters (e.g., Wellman 2001), because of the extremes of spatial separation in the city.

  13. Income cutoffs were low enough to exclude all but the very poorest Indians, and all whites.

  14. This was frequently not the case with social services such as schools and clinics, so housing projects were hardly complete communities.

  15. Unlike Johannesburg, Durban does not have a history of informal settlements in the city center, including after transition.

  16. Due to category shifts in the income question between 1996 and 2001, household income is only comparable between the 2 years using relative community rank. New Germany’s rank in 1996 was 31 out of 406 communities, just higher than the median rank for white communities of 35.

  17. Data on individual residents of public housing projects is not collected in Durban.

  18. This is a substantial amount of Indian flight. Because of the movement of Indians into the Open Space between 1996 and 2001, it is reasonable to suggest that the snapshot the census provides is not capturing the start of total flight of Indians out of the Newlands West Residential.

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Acknowledgement

Thanks to the editors of the special issue, as well as Nitsan Chorev, Jennifer Darrah, Patrick Heller, John Logan, Celso Villegas, and peer reviewers for insights and feedback on this article. Thanks also to respondents in Durban who participated in analysis of initial results. My research is supported by a National Science Foundation Human and Social Dynamics grant, number 526486, and by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship.

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    Daniel Schensul

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Schensul, D. From Resources to Power: The State and Spatial Change in Post-apartheid Durban, South Africa. St Comp Int Dev 43, 290–313 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-008-9029-5

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