Mapping Spatial In/Difference

This chapter provides a historical narrative of the intersection between law, specifically planning legislation, spatial planning practices and racial hierarchisation in the making of South Africa’s colonial/apartheid cities. Drawing from the philosophical/analytic framework of lawscape detailed in Chapter one, it demonstrates that the colonial/apartheid project was predicated, and hinged, on a complex body of legislation and spatial planning practices that produced geographies of gross sociospatial and economic inequalities. From the mid-seventeenth century onwards, the formulation and subsequent implementation of various pieces of legislation resulted in the ‘compartmentalisation’ of space130 primarily on racial lines, leading to the production of racially segregated and spatially fractured South African cities.