Inequality is not only reflected in our cities. It is reproduced by them.
The article correctly identifies inequality as Namibia’s unfinished business. From an urban design perspective, however, one further point must be made: economic inequality is not merely visible in geography; it is reinforced by the way we continue to plan, regulate and build our settlements.
Leon Barnard
The article correctly identifies inequality as Namibia’s unfinished business. From an urban design perspective, however, one further point must be made: economic inequality is not merely visible in geography; it is reinforced by the way we continue to plan, regulate and build our settlements.
Apartheid deliberately created the divided city. Residential areas were separated by race, income and function. The majority of people were placed far from employment, education, commerce and public institutions. Roads, railways, industrial areas and undeveloped buffer zones were used as instruments of separation.
Political independence ended the legal basis of that system, but it did not automatically reconstruct the physical city.
In many respects, we have continued building according to the same spatial logic: low-density suburbs for those who can afford them; distant dormitory settlements for those who cannot; isolated housing projects without employment; rigid separation between residential, commercial and industrial activity; and ever-expanding roads to connect places that should never have been placed so far apart.
The result is that poverty is repeatedly pushed to the urban edge.
