Gated Communities in Südafrika - Untersuchungen im Großraum Johannesburg

Abstract

In the course of a broad liberalisation and globalization of the South African society, the transformation of the apartheid-city to the post-apartheid-city has contributed to an increase in crime or just to a feeling of insecurity among the people. Urban blight has changed a lot of the inner cities into no-go-areas for blacks and whites. In order to protect oneself against the outside world, living areas have been created in the suburbs since the end of the 80s (the phase of the abolition of apartheid laws) whose uniqueness and exclusiveness are defined by the amount of safety measures. They are called gated walled communities or security villages, as the case may be, and their population structure combines social and racial segregation. The statistical basis for this derives from our own empirical investigations which have been realised as a complete survey in two housing areas in northern Johannesburg in 1999. South African families' traditional wish for big building plots and a home of their own is replaced by wishing to live in townhouses, cluster housing and sectional title flats with a shared use of swimming pools or tennis courts.