Urban Bantu housing: a detailed study and re-appraisal of the position in South Africa

This report is an applied report, intended to reappraise the housing position in our urban Bantu townships in South Africa. The whole design of the study has been strongly influenced by the needs and requirements of the architects who will work on the problem of evaluating existing housing designs and who will be responsible for the preparation of new dwelling designs if this report suggests that this is required. It is a quantitative study based on analysis of over 1000 pages of computer tables derived from over 300 000 items of information.Through observation we were left with a series of individual cameos which illustrated particular types of social processes as well as overall impressions.

This document from the archive, along with various others from the 1960s and 1970s, was stamped ‘confidential’. After some debate, staff of the Development and Population Studies programmes (University of KwaZulu-Natal) have taken the decision to digitise and make them available for the following reasons. Firstly it is normal practise to release once-confidential documents into the public domain after a long period of time. Secondly, the documents marked confidential are not raw research material but rather finished research reports.