![]() It effectively captured the power of government officials, professionals and the apartheid 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. We can trace in this map, for example, echoes of garden cities and the postwar British planning system. Rather they emerged through the exports and impositions of planning expertise through European colonialism and post-second world war modernist reconstruction. 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. ![]() 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. Posing as if unaware of the photographer, their engagement with the plan is gestural, rather than technical, during a conversation. 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. In situ interactions with maps and technical drawings are common practice in urbanisation. ![]() ![]() The plan is a careful scale drawing, draughted at a size that could easily be rolled up and rolled out on location. From 1960 to 1983 a further 3.5 million non-white South Africans would also be displaced and forced into segregated neighbourhoods. This resulted in the forced removal of around 60,000 people over a period of five years from February 1955. In Johannesburg, the Natives Resettlement Act, Act No 19 (1954) and central government pressure resulted in an acceleration of the city council’s earlier piecemeal ‘slum clearances’, facilitating the removal of Africans from Johannesburg’s western areas, such as Sophiatown, to new gridded suburbs south-west of the city, such as Soweto, shown on the map. ![]()
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