“The typical ‘face of poverty’ in South Africa is no longer that of a rural woman engaged in subsistence agricultural production. Poverty today also refers to the large number of unemployed
men who wait daily in vain on street corners for a casual job, women suffering from among the highest rates of HIV/Aids
infection in the world, large numbers of children living in areas with among the highest crime and murder rates in the world, and poor black communities which continue to be excluded from the economic riches of our country. We can no longer
ignore the problem of urban poverty.
A large part of Cape Town’s less affluent population live on the Cape Flats, which was relatively unpopulated until the
1960s. Since then, two waves of settlement took place: the period after the 1960s saw the forceful resettlement of so-called
‘Coloured’ people through apartheid socio-spatial engineering, and in the 1980s a then illegal process of large-scale African migration from the impoverished areas of the Eastern Cape began.”
