Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
KHAYELITSHA (BEFORE AND AFTER APARTHEID)
New York, 2001— Once Ikonos had begun selling imagery commercially, I purchased
a 1-meter-resolution image of Khayelitsha in Cape Town in order to explore the
latent possibility of a comparison between the Corona (before) and Ikonos (after)
imagery, such that one could see the changes in one place across two moments in
time. Most places in Cape Town had changed over the years—a lot had happened,
needless to say, in South Africa between 1968 and 2000—but none as significantly
as the area around the highway that was photographed under construction by the
Corona satellite in 1968.
In those thirty-two years, a city had emerged along that highway. Khayelitsha,
which takes up about 43 square kilometers (16.6 square miles) of those sandy flats,
was laid out in the early 1980s as a “new home” (its Xhosa name) for so-called
“nonwhite” residents of the Cape Peninsula then living in what were defined as
illegal shantytowns and squatter camps around the white city. Khayelitsha is a
direct expression of the spatial politics of apartheid. It had grown considerably: by
the time the Ikonos satellite passed overhead, it had around 400,000 inhabitants.
That is roughly the number of people in Orleans Parish, but with an average of
around ten thousand people per square kilometer (just over one-third of a square
mile), mostly in single-story buildings, shacks, and shanties, it is significantly
more dense. 31 Khayelitsha was first settled—“informally” in a sense, but one could
also say by force—when residents of the Crossroads settlement, located alongside
the Cape Town International Airport, were removed there in 1983 with a promise to
legalize their residency status. More fled to Khayelitsha in 1986 when Crossroads
erupted in violence. The city grew exponentially over the next few years. It was a
planned town (or “township,” in apartheid terminology), but its formality effec -
tively meant formalized squatting in planned areas known as “sites and services”
areas, rows of single, double, or quadruple plots with shared outdoor faucets and
toilets.
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