ABSTRACT
In South Africa the questions of tenure security and urban access have historically been intricately linked. A policy on native locations and limitations on access to residential rights was firmly established as early as 1910. By the late 1950s and 1960s urban population resettlement was a cornerstone of the apartheid strategy to reduce the size of the urban African population. South Africa has a long history of territorial segregation and tenure insecurity. The implementation of the apartheid vision saw urban inhabitants ‘superfluous’ to white needs resettled in ethnically defined ‘homelands’ (or reserves or bantustans), the development of industries on the borders of bantustans and the denial of urban residential rights. This period saw the introduction of the infamous Group Areas Act and it was from this time that millions of people were evicted from their homes within the urban areas. Freehold settlements such as Sophiatown, Lady Selbourne, Marabastad, District Six and Cato Manor were destroyed to force black residents to move to formal townships on the periphery of the ‘white’ cities and towns. Thousands of black people were evicted from urban areas altogether and removed to bantustans, small areas of mainly rural land set aside for black occupation.
