Act No. 41 of 1950 empowered the government to proclaim any urban area for the exclusive ownership and occupation of a single racial group, and to declare existing residents of other groups illegal occupiers subject to removal. It commenced in 1951 in the Cape, Transvaal and Natal and in 1952 in the Orange Free State, and was reinforced by the Group Areas Development Act of 1955, which created a board to expropriate and resell affected property. Proclamations were drawn as planning instruments, with buffer strips, railway lines and highways used to separate group areas, and displaced populations were rehoused in peripheral township estates. By 1983 the Act and its successors had uprooted more than 600,000 people; it was repealed in 1991.
The Group Areas Act was the instrument that converted apartheid ideology into physical urban form, making racial zoning the master logic of South African town planning for four decades. It produced the characteristic apartheid city of a white core, buffer land and distant high-density townships, a structure of long commutes and spatial inequality that post-apartheid planning has still not undone.
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