Who owns the roads? Privatising public space in South African cities through neighbourhood enclosures

Abstract

In the past five years, the numbers of enclosed neighbourhoods have dramatically increased in South Africa. These are existing neighbourhoods that are closed off-through gates and booms across the roads. Many of these neighbourhoods are fenced or walled off as well, with a limited number of controlled entrances/exits, manned by security guards in some cases. The roads within these neighbourhoods were previously, or still is public property and in most cases, the local council is still responsible for public services to the community within the enclosed neighbourhoods. In this way, public urban space is privatised, whether formally or informally. This paper will explore the distribution of enclosed neighbourhoods in South Africa on a national scale and within two metropolitan municipalities, namely the Cities of Johannesburg and Tshwane. It will then proceed to highlight the nature and impact of these neighbourhoods on the privatisation of public space. It will also draw on a wide basis of empirical data obtained through a national survey and in-depth case studies. Finally the paper will conclude with examples of lessons learnt from South Africa and how these may relate to international experience and future research on gated communities.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.