Although the City of Cape Town seems now to have a social housing plan in place, we should all be unsettled by the continued issue of spatial apartheid and seek to support the eradication of this apartheid legacy that continues to divide us today.

I've been on a bit of a documentary binge lately, and one that hit quite close to home was Mother City, which was recently screened at the Encounters SA International Documentary Film Festival in Cape Town. The documentary was spearheaded by civil society movements Reclaim the City and Ndifuna Ukwazi - and it spotlights Cape Town's housing crisis.

The City of Cape Town has for years been battling a housing issue. At the heart of this is the struggle to eradicate the continuing scourge of spatial apartheid, which is exacerbated by the City's gentrification development projects. I think it is necessary to examine the concept of spatial apartheid, as I fear that the term is bandied about without people pausing to understand its meaning. It also seems to me that many of us are far too comfortable with its continued existence.

The concept exists as part of apartheid - our former heinous system of governance where people were divided according to race and resource allocation, such as land and residential living. White people were allocated prime real estate and black, coloured and Indian people were relocated to less desirable areas, which were also far from their places of work. Sadly,...