Geographies of Oppression: Building the Soweto Historical GIS Project

Last year I began a collaborative project with students in the Department of Geography at Middlebury College to build a historical GIS database drawn from a collection of thirty-nine largely unseen maps, architectural plans and drawings discovered at the National Archives in Pretoria, South Africa.  The Soweto Historical GIS Project (SHGIS) seeks to build a multi-layered historical geographic information system database that explores the social, economic and political dimensions of urban development under South African apartheid regimes (1904-1994) in Johannesburg's all-black township of Soweto.  Soweto (an acronym for the South Western Townships), a creation of state power, was developed to house low-wage workers and to segregate black South Africans from white.  No African Studies scholars to date have examined Soweto using historical GIS during the apartheid era.  Much of the previous scholarship using GIS has focused on reconstruction during the post-apartheid era.  The application of geographic methodologies to the study of the anti-apartheid movement reveals the complex spatial dimensions of violence, resistance, and freedom.  The project examines the micro-geography of resistance and the layering of meaning and action between the apartheid state and township residents across its built form.  As the racial and political ideologies of apartheid within these townships are documented - townships that may be characterized as Black labor-machines – an important question is raised: can we map residents' resistance to oppression across space and time using GIS?  Research suggests that modernism – as expressed through urban planning and architectural design – was upended by the ground-up activism of township residents in the struggle against apartheid.  This paper will discuss the early development of the project's integrated spatial history database as it records and analyzes a wider range of spatio-temporal features, both physical and human, of apartheid and oppression.