The Times Editorial: The City of Cape Town has embarked on what could prove to be a difficult path with its plan to change the city's apartheid-era geography.
As the Group Areas Act was enforced in the 1960s, spatial development in Cape Town took on a distinctly racial character. Formerly mixed suburbs, particularly those close to the city centre, became for the most part enclaves of white privilege. Coloured residents were relocated further from town.
As apartheid continued, the explicit racial construction of Cape Town became entrenched. New coloured and African townships, such as Mitchells Plain and Khayelitsha, were created as dumping grounds for the dispossessed races.
This week, Belinda Walker, who oversees spatial planning in the city, launched a spatial development plan that would integrate the citizens of Cape Town.
"What we are saying is that we don't think people who live in shack settlements should live forever out on the edges of the city," she said.
Walker's statement of intent - that Cape Town will be a city for all its residents - is certainly encouraging. But there have been other attempts to integrate the sprawling city.
In 2009, then minister of housing Lindiwe Sisulu raised the ire of Constantia residents with the "Comprehensive Plan for the Development of Integrated Human Settlement" with the intention of building 750 homes for low- and middle-income families.
At the time, the DA dismissed the Constantia plans as nothing but an election tactic. The houses were never built.
This time it is the DA government that wants to integrate the city. It is certainly in its best interests to do so. Many of the claims of racism regularly levelled against Cape Town have to do with the legacy of apartheid and the way in which residents are racially divided.
Overturning decades of racial engineering will require some persuasion, especially of wealthy residents who might have forgotten how they became the owners of the most valuable properties in the city.
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