Apartheid in South Africa, which lasted 46 years, involved a legally enforced and systematic oppression of black people as well as racial segregation. It divided the people, it divided the country's resources and landmass. The system is long gone, but inequality remains.
Some of these barriers are intangible. But in parts of South Africa, the line dividing the people is literal. Years after apartheid ended, the infrastructure and architecture of some cities still bears the tell-tale signs, with starkly different living spaces and conditions for different groups of people.
Photographer Johnny Miller captures this inequality in Cape Town through photographs taken using a drone, to show what he has described as the "architecture of apartheid."
In this video, which is a part a project by Miller called Unequal Scenes, we can see how a wetland divides Cape Town's Masiphumele and Lake Michelle areas.
On his project website, Miller said that Masiphumelele houses about 38,000 people, many in tin shacks, and there is a high prevalence of HIV and tuberculosis. Lake Michelle, on the other side of the wetland, is considered prime real estate.
Apartheid ended in 1994, but, as Miller said, “many of these barriers, and the inequalities they have engendered, still exist.”
This divide in living spaces isn't all that alien to India. In Mumbai, a city that's known for sheltering people from across the country, the sight of skyscrapers flanked by slum clusters is fairly common.
A 2009 human development report described it as the least homogeneous city in the country.
“The contrasts in living standards are of a magnitude not seen anywhere else in the country,” the report, by All-India Institute of Local Self-Government and the United Nations Development Programme, said. “Two distinct cities exist within one.”
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