Featured
How do we, as a society, in a free, democratic dispensation, address the enduring legacy of spatial apartheid
On July 2, 2026, the Constitutional Court of South Africa issued a “landmark decision”, a decision that should be read by every housing, anti-eviction, labor activist as well as every city planner and elected official in Cape Town, across South Africa, around the world, dominated as the world is by the brutality and complexity, by the logic and practice of expulsions, of global cities on a planet of slums. The decision begins, “At its core, this case raises a fundamental constitutional question: how do we, as a society, in a free, democratic dispensation, address the enduring legacy of spatial apartheid? The submissions in these matters have highlighted the crucial distinction between merely distributing resources and ensuring that those resources are distributed in a manner that actively dismantles historical inequalities shaped by race and class along geographical lines. A city’s architecture tells the story of its soul.”
A city’s architecture tells the story of its soul.
Where do you live? What is your city’s architecture? How has that soul baring, soul bearing architecture changed in the last ten, twenty, thirty years? In the past half century or so, when the world economy spawned both a planet of slums and a planet of global cities marked by mcmansionsa and, even more, formally and informally gated communities? A city’s architecture tells the story of its soul.
The judgment continues: “In Cape Town, as in most, if not all, South African cities, that story remains one of division – where the echoes of apartheid’s spatial planning continue to reverberate through its streets and suburbs. Every morning, thousands of Cape Town’s workers board buses, taxis and trains in the pre-dawn darkness, travelling for hours from the city’s periphery to its centre. Their daily journey is not just a commute – it is a living testament to the enduring legacy of spatial injustice that this case glaringly exposes before this Court. The main question in this matter is whether the State, as custodian of public land, has a legal obligation to address spatial divisions within Cape Town, or whether, through its actions, it is perpetuating divisions without breaching any legal duty.”
While many tumble from bed into their home-based workspaces and others commute perhaps a half hour to an hour or so to work, around the world it is considered normal that those who work the most hours and are paid the least spend the most time, inordinate amounts of time, getting to work and returning home. The impact of those treks is, at best, deeply corrosive, for both individual and community. And, of course, the impacts of these dire conditions are worsened by gender. This is urban design, and the feeling in too many places has been, “Yes, it’s `unfortunate’, but really, what can we do?” The Constitutional Court answered, as did activists and organizers, from movements such as Ndifuna Ukwazi and Reclaim the City who have been organizing and mobilizing on this particular case since 2016. A wild patience took them to this decision.
The decision goes on to explain the concept of social housing: “Pervasive spatial inequality could only be combatted by housing schemes seeking to ensure that access to areas of opportunity is more evenly distributed across the population so as to cure the deep geographical divides. This includes subsidising people’s occupation in areas they were previously excluded from, thereby fostering integration and improving the prospects of occupants. Government could bring this about by acquiring, developing, converting or upgrading buildings for integrated housing schemes. By placing segments of the population closer to economic opportunities and social services, social housing is exactly such a scheme. It strives to ensure that well-located, affordable and quality rental homes are made available to segments of the public in locations that enable them to benefit from greater proximity to economic opportunities and to health and educational facilities and social amenities. The importance of social housing, therefore, cannot be understated.”
The importance of social housing cannot be understated.
From there, the decision enters into the details of the case, which I won’t go into here. The decision is here; summary responses are here and here. They’re all fascinating. The key is that the Constitution assures the right to adequate and dignified housing, and that means, among other things, housing that supports a dignified life, dignified in and of itself, dignified in the context of the general society. It’s not enough to build a house “somewhere”. The location matters … as a matter of law.
Further, pipeline plans and projects that [a] did not emerge from any consultation with the disenfranchised communities, [b] continue to stick social housing in the far peripheries of the city, and [c] generally don’t materialize anyway are “not in compliance”. Translate: mean less than the paper they’re written on. The City of Cape Town was told to get serious about providing real, affordable, dignified housing in “amenity-rich” neighborhoods, to provide detailed plans which will be monitored by the court, and to rethink its approach to housing and, perhaps even more, to those in need of decent housing.
The final point is that the right to decent, dignified and adequate housing is and must be a codified, Constitutional right. If it’s not … make it so.
A city’s architecture tells the story of its soul. What’s in yours?
(by Dan Moshenberg)
(Photo Credit: Matthew Hirsch / GroundUp)
Why don’t you go back …
Stories change and yet remain the same, sometimes over time, sometimes in translation, sometimes just because, just because they’re haunting. Here’s an example, perhaps. In the 1950s, Baltimore, where my family lived, was deeply, though by that point largely “informally”, segregated. It was called “neighborhood charm”: White neighborhoods, Black neighborhoods. White neighborhoods were either Jewish […]
States of abandonment: In evictions, who abandons whom?
“Zones of abandonment … accelerate the death of the unwanted. In this bureaucratically and relationally sanctioned register of social death, the human, the mental and the chemical are complicit: their entanglement expresses a common sense that authorized the lives of some while disallowing the lives of others.” João Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of […]
Fortress Football: Empire, Anti-Blackness and the Capture of the Beautiful Game
The 2026 FIFA World Cup will unfold during a period of intensifying U.S. militarism, imperial consolidation and border securitisation. Rather than standing outside these realities, the tournament risks functioning as spectacle for empire — projecting “global unity” while systems of extraction, anti-Blackness and unequal mobility deepen globally. Yet football mega-events have perhaps never been politically […]
From 1976 to 2026, neither peace nor ceasefire have ever been keywords. So what?
“The blues remembers everything the country forgot” Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson, “Bicentennial Blues” What does it mean to forget the meaning of peace? Of ceasefire? Or, what does it mean to never have known? In 1976, the year of the United States Bicentennial, the Welsh activist scholar Raymond Williams published Keywords: A Vocabulary of […]
With “seclusion rooms” in schools, the war on children with disabilities continues
This week, NPR reported rampant abuse of Native American children in schools in a district in upstate New York: “Native kids with disabilities were held in wooden boxes. Sweeping reforms are coming”. The story is deeply disturbing. Schools built wooden boxes, “timeout” spaces”, and confined children with disabilities, children in majority Mohawk districts, into […]
Empty words that empty us: ceasefire
because your side of the cease-fire was holding since more than a year before they said so what June Jordan, “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon” Today, The New York Times (finally) thankfully revealed the truth we already know and have known: “Russia-Ukraine War Shows Cease-Fires Have Lost Meaning Under Trump”. For the past […]
On which seashore of endless worlds do children meet?
On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water is boisterous. On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances. They build their houses with sand, and they play with empty shells. With withered leaves they weave their boats and smilingly […]
On record-breaking: When you care enough to send the very best …
“Whoever’s homeless now, will build no shelter; who lives alone will live indefinitely so” Rainer Maria Rilke, “Day in Autumn” Today, it is reported that homelessness in Western New York state hit “a record high”. The current level is “the highest recorded since data collection began in 2005, and 24% up from just last […]
The racist `normal’ of deed theft: near death, near-death, or nearly dead
Sustaining today’s waves of spectacular violence is a web of everyday violence, the violence of the normal. This week’s example of that is deed theft. In Brooklyn last Wednesday four people were arrested at a protest against deed theft “after gathering outside a brownstone in support of a woman who is fighting attempts to evict […]
I do know this can’t happen to anyone else, ever again: is this the end of childhood?
Five years ago, the United Kingdom public was “shocked” to learn the story of child Q, a 15-year-old Black girl in Hackney. Child Q was at school. She was “suspected” of having cannabis. The police were called. The police strip-searched the child. The child was menstruating. Of course, the police found no contraband: “A council […]