Social geographer John Western analyzes the urban spatial planning of the 1950 Group Areas Act that achieved, in the built environment of Cape Town, the racial separatism of apartheid. His new prologue for the paperback edition assesses the changes to be expected from the new government and the obstacles to significant change.

"Straightforward, unapologetic, clearheaded, and morally alert, yet unsentimental. When the reader has finished this book he/she will know how South Africa's outcasts live."-Robert Coles