Abstract:
Emulation of the West’s privatization of urban spaces, and securitization and policing, through city
settlement planning has uniformly reinvented spatial social segregation in most democratizing
developing countries. Reverence of the gated-community model in democratic urban settlement
planning has paradoxical sustained social segregation. Understandably, democratization of South
Africa entailed the application of urban settlement planning as a democratic instrument of social
integration. This article argues that gated-community urban settlement planning creates physical
enclosures that transfer public spaces to private ownership, thereby perpetuating apartheid social
exclusion legacies. South Africa’s modern urban settlement planning epitomizes gated-communities,
security villages and enclosed neighbourhoods phenomena, which sustain spatial differentiation of
lifestyle, prestige, socio-economic status and security. Given apartheid city legacies, securitization of
urban settlement planning reflexively maintains social exclusions through a democratic strategy. The
article posits that the adoption of the gated-community model in urban settlement planning in a
democratic South Africa has privatized public spaces and created secluded settlements with
fragmented delivery of public services such as security, policing, emergency services (fire trucks and
ambulances) and a host of other municipal services (waste removal, water and electricity meter
readings). In practice, this privatization creates controlled, restricted and prohibitive access to public
spaces and amenities. The article concludes that the nuance application of gated-community principles
in urban settlement planning perpetuates social exclusion through the same old market ethos and
economics of space. To this extent, the spatially and socially fragmentary modern urban spatial
planning is inappropriate for South Africa’s former apartheid cities.
