A Racial City Imagined

This chapter outlines some of the effects that colonial/apartheid laws and spatial planning practices had on the making of Johannesburg. It argues that the lawscape of colonial/apartheid Johannesburg radically shaped a complex interaction between race, space and difference. As this nascent city was taking shape in the late nineteenth century, after the discovery of goldfields in the Witwatersrand region (the Rand), its early foundations were predicated, in the main, on the beginnings of racial capitalism, its reliance on racial segregation and the re/production of radical difference.