The death of liberation hero and icon Nelson Mandela has spurred on remarkable public reactions. He has been eulogized in countless major and not so major news outlets, hotels in Johannesburg booked out immediately upon the announcement of his passing in anticipation of the official memorial service, a hundred and fifty sites in South Africa have been quickly designated as public memorials areas, and many, many informal memorial sites have sprung up in myriad locales. The global outpouring of grief for this ‘giant of history’, as Barack Obama has called him, is simply extraordinary. Amidst the sadness, of course, there has been a deluge of commentary on Mandela’s legacy. Along with commemoration, there has been much critical reflection on the contradictions, exclusions, and disappointments of the post-apartheid era that he, among many others, shepherded into being and indelibly impacted. As Slavoj Zizek asserts in a commentary for the Mail and Guardian, “if we want to remain faithful to Mandela’s legacy, we should…forget about celebratory crocodile tears and focus on the unfulfilled promises his leadership gave rise to.” The boos that met current South African President Jacob Zuma when he took the stage at Mandela’s memorial exemplify this statement’s potency.
In this moment of critical reflection, we have selected 13 articles from the archives of the Environment and Planning journals to form this virtual theme issue. The articles were published between 1989 and 2013, and they cover a wide range of economic, environmental, urban, political, cultural and social issues. These works by geographers and other social sciences and humanities scholars defy easy summary, but taken together they demonstrate the power of incorporating a spatial analysis into understandings of post-apartheid challenges.
[Note: Antipode has also compiled a list of some of its relevant articles on South Africa here (requires subscription to access)]
Sue Parnell, 1989, Shaping a racially divided society: state housing policy in South Africa, 1920 – 50 Environment and Planning C 7(3): 261 – 272
Jonathan Crush, 1994, Scripting the compound: power and space in the South African mining industry Environment and Planning D 12(3): 301 – 324
A J Christopher, 1996, Regional patterns in South Africa’s postapartheid election in 1994 Environment and Planning C 14(1): 55 – 69
Jenny Robinson, 1998, Spaces of democracy: remapping the apartheid city Environment and Planning D 16(5): 533 – 548
James D Sidaway, 1998, The (geo)politics of regional integration: the example of the Southern African Development Community? Environment and Planning D 16(5): 549 – 576
Simon Lewis, 2001, “This Land South Africa”: rewriting time and space in postapartheid poetry and property Environment and Planning A 33(12): 2095 – 2108
Clive Barnett, Dianne Scott, 2007, Spaces of opposition: activism and deliberation in post-apartheid environmental politics Environment and Planning A 39(11): 2612 – 2631
Cheryl McEwan, 2008, A very modern ghost: postcolonialism and the politics of enchantment Environment and Planning D 26(1): 29 – 46
Jennifer Robinson, 2008, Developing ordinary cities: city visioning processes in Durban and Johannesburg Environment and Planning A 40(1): 74 – 87
Brian King, 2009, Commercializing conservation in South Africa Environment and Planning A 41(2): 407 – 424
Charlotte Lemanski, Sophie Oldfield, 2009, The parallel claims of gated communities and land invasions in a Southern city: polarised state responses Environment and Planning A 41(3): 634 – 648
Mark Hunter, 2010, Racial desegregation and schooling in South Africa: contested geographies of class formation Environment and Planning A 42(11): 2640 – 2657
Mary Lawhon, 2013, Dumping ground or country-in-transition? Discourses of e-waste in South Africa Environment and Planning C 31(4): 700 – 715
