![]() So we used satellite images and we also used a buildings dataset that shows buildings in the whole country. It doesn’t necessarily say that there are people, or whether there is development in that space. Datasets from the government define neighborhoods in a certain way according to ‘designated land use’. We pulled together different existing datasets. Thinking about the size of South Africa, it’s quite huge. This is where our work stems from, because townships don’t seem to exist in official datasets anymore. Townships and suburbs have been merged together in one class. Or this is what we wanted to investigate: Is this really happening? But then when we tried to research this, we couldn’t find datasets that demarcate townships over time. But even after apartheid ended, it looks like resources are still in the same pattern. During apartheid, townships were underfunded compared to suburbs. When apartheid ended, anyone could live where they wanted, but systemically it was still hard for you to move. They were occupied by non-Europeans: Indians, black people, colored people. However, during apartheid they forced people to regroup, and only specific racial groups would live in certain townships. When I did my masters degree, I had a chance to research something I care about, and that’s the first thing that came to mind.īefore apartheid, townships were just working class neighborhoods. Your hospitals, your schools, and other public resources were overcrowded - which was not really the case for suburbs. The houses there were all uniformly sized regardless of the number of people living in them. I grew up with six siblings in a township called Lebowakgomo in the Limpopo province, in the northern part of South Africa.
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