Re/Constituting the Urban

Having established the role played by law and spatial planning in the imagining and realisation of the colonial/apartheid project of establishing a racially segregated South Africa, this chapter seeks to outline some of the efforts by the post-apartheid state to promote spatial justice and thus reconstitute the lawscape. From the late 1980s onwards, various legal scholars and policymakers began to deliberate on the potentially new role that was to be played by law and planning in the remaking of a ‘new’ South African society founded on democratic values and principles. Interestingly, in imagining a new society, the very same instruments that had contributed to making the colonial/apartheid lawscape - that is, law and planning - were viewed as having the potential to undo the injustices of the past. As Edwin Cameron observed, post-1994 South Africa had emerged from ‘oppression by law’, and yet it found itself seeking ‘liberation through law’.359 So, these two instruments of societal engineering were to be the antidote to the very sociospatial, economic and political challenges they initially created.