A City Still Divided by Spatial Apartheid

By Mphuthumi Ntabeni

Of all the Cape Town City mayors I have lived under, I have a soft spot for Geordin Hill-Lewis. That is why I was so deeply disappointed when, in a recent interview he claimed that the talk of spatial apartheid in Cape Town is nothing more than “propaganda language that is no longer rooted in reality” with The Daily Maverick’s 13 October 2025 article, “No Place for Old Locals.”

That single statement reveals an alarming detachment from the lived reality of most Capetonians. Claims about rhetoric cannot be adjudicated by assertion alone; they must be tested against what people actually experience in different parts of this city. Once we do that, once we look at where infrastructure exists, where it breaks down, who commutes how far, and where sewage or service crises repeatedly occur, the picture that emerges is not one of a single, post-racial metropolis. It is a city still structured by inherited inequality, where privilege and poverty remain separated by the same fault lines that defined apartheid’s urban design.

The lived landscape of the Cape Flats, its infrastructure gaps, daily precarity, and social fragmentation, testifies to the enduring nature of spatial apartheid in Cape Town. Researchers and the City’s own auditors continue to document stark disparities in access to water, sanitation, and electricity across informal settlements in the Cape Flats — Khayelitsha, Gugulethu, Philippi, Nyanga, Lavender Hill, Hanover Park, and beyond. Studies of water governance and infrastructure show that historical exclusion and current political economy combine to produce enduring gaps in reliable service.

Many settlements still rely on communal or edge-located toilets, temporary chemical or bucket systems, and ad-hoc water provision. These arrangements make sanitation and public health crises far more likely than in the formal suburbs. Independent investigations have linked recurring sewage spills and bacterial contamination on beaches to failures in wastewater treatment, and to runoff from informal settlements where drainage is poor. These are not abstract injustices; they are tangible, measurable realities. Parents cannot rely on safe toilets near their homes. Residents walk long distances or queue for water. Communities live with crime and health risks compounded by concentrated poverty.

This is not rhetorical invention — it is the enduring architecture of spatial apartheid. Mobility remains one of the clearest markers of inequality. Journalistic analyses of Cape Town’s traffic jams along the N2 or Mew Way illustrate that the majority of commuters trapped in the morning crawl are Black residents travelling from far-flung townships into affluent employment nodes.

The average working-class Capetonian spends hours each day in transit. That distance translates directly into reduced earnings of people spending almost a third of their earnings on daily transportation. It causes family strains and limited access to socioeconomic opportunity. Spatial apartheid was always about geography and control, about how the poor were placed at the edge of the economy. It continues in subtler but no less brutal ways today. To call that “propaganda” is to insult those who still live the daily consequences of apartheid’s geography.

Service delivery remains profoundly two-tiered in the City of Cape Town (CoCT). In the Cape Flats and townships, residents contend with erratic water supply, uncollected refuse, broken streetlights, and unsafe streets. Meanwhile, along the Atlantic Seaboard, in the CBD, and in suburbs like Claremont and Constantia, a seamless coordination of public and private investment produces rapid response, spotless streets, and functioning infrastructure.

City Improvement Districts (CIDs) such as those in Camps Bay or Sea Point operate private security, cleaning teams, and maintenance hotlines. These areas benefit from stable utilities and attract the tourism and commercial revenue that perpetuate their privilege. The outcome is a city that offers two qualitatively different experiences of citizenship, one buffered by capital, the other abandoned to decay.

The CoCT municipal budget under Hill-Lewis often boast of being “pro-poor,” but on-the-ground delivery tells a different story. When housing developments continue to be built on the city’s periphery, far from jobs, schools, and transport hubs, they reproduce exclusion, not inclusion. The form of provision may change, but the pattern of inequality remains.

Nowhere is this contradiction more visible than in the city’s property market, a theme captured powerfully in The Daily Maverick’s 13 October 2025 article, “No Place for Old Locals.” The piece records how Hill-Lewis defends a “vision” for Cape Town in which skyrocketing prices, disappearing communities, and relentless construction are described as “the costs of success.”

But success for whom? When long-standing residents of Sea Point, Woodstock, and Observatory are priced out of their own neighbourhoods by the gentrification wealthy or foreign buyers with the blessings of the CoCT then there is no other way of describing that the social fabric of Cape Town is being hollowed from within. The very people who gave these suburbs their character (teachers, nurses, artisans, retirees) are being displaced to cheaper, more remote areas.

Local economies suffer when corner stores, hair salons, churches, and small landlords disappear. Communities that once sustained mutual care networks of babysitting, food market exchange, informal credit are replaced by empty Airbnbs and speculative investment flats that light up only during the tourist season, then we have a serious of not only gentrification but wiping out the local identity of our city.

This “success” may look good on a property ledger, but it is devastating for community continuity, social cohesion, and the moral ecology of a city. A city that loses its locals loses its soul. And yet, when challenged on these patterns, the mayor dismisses the very term, spatial apartheid, that offers language to describe what is happening.

When a mayor calls spatial apartheid “propaganda language,” he is not merely debating semantics. He is reframing the city’s structural inequality as a matter of perception rather than evidence. That rhetorical sleight-of-hand has policy consequences of shifting the focus from rectifying deep systemic inequities to defending the optics of progress.

The phrase spatial apartheid is not a relic of the past, it is a living diagnostic tool. It names a set of spatially patterned injustices that demand spatial solutions. It demands that we serious consider infill housing near transport hubs, inclusionary zoning, limits on speculative foreign ownership, and deliberate investment in public infrastructure for historically excluded areas. To declare the descriptor obsolete is to risk foreclosing the very vocabulary required to correct entrenched disadvantage.

If Hill-Lewis’s point is that “propaganda” should not replace policy, that is fair enough. But to claim that spatial apartheid is no longer “rooted in reality” is empirically false. Spatially patterned deprivation in Cape Town is measurable, documentable, and daily lived. It manifests in the toilets of Khayelitsha, in the clogged N2, in the ghost apartments of Sea Point that are occupied for only two months a year when we have a dire need for convenient human habitation, and in the luxury of Clifton lawns kept green while the Flats dry out.

To call all this “propaganda” is not leadership but evasion and a refusal to look the city’s injustices squarely in the eye. And it betrays not only the poor but also the idea of Cape Town as a place of belonging for all who call it home.