The potential of tranformation constitutionalism to free people from apartheid spatial planning

Abstract

The purpose, of this mini dissertation is to understand South Africa as a country in a spatial crisis that leads to the entrapment of the black body in a social, political, economic and legally depressed state. The crisis describes and is as a result of the multiple upheavals and ruptures that have shaped the post-colonial, particularly African, landscape, and experiences of its people. Particular to the post-colonial landscape is that these ruptures are largely defined by the history of extraction, exclusion and violence by the white elite against the black poor. The nature of the crisis is that it continues to support and re-enact the same colonial oppressive outcomes, ensuring the black poor continue to exist in a state of marginalisation. The spaces in the crisis also work to physically push out and keep marginalised black people in informal spaces away from economic activity. But additionally, the intangible elements of space mean that black people carry the consequences and definitions of these spaces with them which define how they are interpellated, ensuring that in and out of the physical space they are viewed as sub-human. In this dissertation I am particularly interested in how transformative constitutionalism can proactively facilitate spatial justice for the historically and presently marginalised in ameliorating the effects of the crisis. Spatial justice, in my understanding would mean the removal of the abyssal line and simultaneity between those interpellated as human and sub-human.