What question did this study set out to answer?

To examine how the values nurtured in urban townships during apartheid influenced suburban living and citizenship in South Africa.

May 25, 2026Open Access

Displaced urbanism: city shack life and the citizenship of the suburban house in the rural Transkei

Key Points

To examine how the values nurtured in urban townships during apartheid influenced suburban living and citizenship in South Africa.
Literature review of Healy-Clancy and Hickel's book Ekhaya: The Politics of Home in KwaZulu-Natal
Analysis of socio-spatial developments in urban townships
Exploration of kinship and gender relations post-resettlement.
Urban townships originally designed by apartheid significantly shaped attitudes towards suburbia and individualism.
Forced removal disrupted traditional kinship structures and altered gender relations in urban communities.
The township experience has created a longing for private life, influencing contemporary housing patterns.

Abstract

In their book Ekhaya: The Politics of Home in KwaZulu-Natal, Healy-Clancy and Hickel (2014) argue that the values that informed the democratic revolution in South Africa were to a large extent incubated and nurtured in the sociospatial complex of the urban township a social form that was designed by the apartheid state to control Africans but ended up cultivating an appetite for private life, suburbia and individualism. Hickel (2014) argues that the forced removal and resettlement of tens of thousands of families in planned townships designed to accommodate nuclear families fundamentally transformed the structure of kinship and gender relations in urban communities across the country.

Displaced urbanism: city shack life and the citizenship of the suburban house in the rural Transkei

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Abstract

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