The architects of apartheid

Officials examine Johannesburg Native Townships plan. Apartheid Museum Photograph: ApartheidMuseum

It is the mid-1950s. The precise location is not clear. Five officials aboard a van are looking intently at a hand-drawn map titled Native Townships, signed off by Johannesburgs city engineer. Presumably they are visiting the area the map depicts, southwest of Johannesburg, planned for the imminent resettlement of tens of thousands of non-white residents from the citys western areas.

The intention and effect of maps such as this was to assert control over space as part of the process of achieving racial apartheid. Such plans, and the records of their use, were instruments that helped to realise and maintain the National Partys Group Areas Act (1950) legislation, which segregated populations racialised as black, Indian and coloured into residential areas away from those allocated to the white population.

In Johannesburg, the Natives Resettlement Act, Act No 19 (1954) and central government pressure resulted in an acceleration of the city councils earlier piecemeal slum clearances, facilitating the removal of Africans from Johannesburgs western areas, such as Sophiatown, to new gridded suburbs south-west of the city, such as Soweto, shown on the map. This resulted in the forced removal of around 60,000 people over a period of five years from February 1955. From 1960 to 1983 a further 3.5 million non-white South Africans would also be displaced and forced into segregated neighbourhoods.

The plan is a careful scale drawing, draughted at a size that could easily be rolled up and rolled out on location. In situ interactions with maps and technical drawings are common practice in urbanisation. In the staged publicity photograph, these middle-aged white men performed their expertise through their visual and physical interaction with the plan they loom over, as they point at, hold and master it. Posing as if unaware of the photographer, their engagement with the plan is gestural, rather than technical, during a conversation. The fact that the men are in a van reinforces their separation from and liberty to move around the territory they are discussing; and emphasises the mobility of the image, a tool within the drastic reconfiguration of the social character of the city.

The professional identities, image-making practices, forms of image and visual languages used within this process were not new or specific to South Africa, even if they were operating in new institutional contexts. Rather they emerged through the exports and impositions of planning expertise through European colonialism and post-second world war modernist reconstruction. We can trace in this map, for example, echoes of garden cities and the postwar British planning system.

The documentary photograph illuminates how maps operated both as practical and rhetorical tools in imagining and imposing the scientific spatial segregation of peoples according to racial constructs. It effectively captured the power of government officials, professionals and the apartheid system. Unintentionally, as an historical artefact, it now serves to communicate this troubled past and the violence city plans can enact.

Ben Campkin is the author of Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture (IB Tauris, 2013), director of UCLs Urban Laboratory, senior lecturer in the Bartlett School of Architecture and co-editor of Urban Pamphleteer.

Mariana Mogilevich is a historian of architecture and urbanism and Mellon Fellow in architecture, urbanism and the humanities at Princeton University.

Rebecca Ross is a graphic and interaction designer and urban historian, senior lecturer at Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design and co-editor of Urban Pamphleteer.

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The architects of apartheid