ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the planning process that produced what we see in Sharpeville today. The township was built as an intentionally segregated dormitory within the racialised space of Vereeniging in apartheid South Africa. Sharpeville was considered a model township due to its low construction and maintenance costs and its attention to control over its residents. The township was designed with minimum services and in physical isolation from the town of Vereeniging, surrounded by buffer zones and cut off from the surrounding national highways. Internally, it was zoned into separate ethnic areas with a police station established in the centre of the township for ease of surveillance. This design has remained unchanged to the present and continues to affect the lives of Sharpeville’s residents.
