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‘Velddrift’: the making of a South African company town

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2001

Lance van Sittert
Affiliation:
Dept of History, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7700, South Africa

Abstract

Recent reviews of South African urban history have highlighted its neglect of rural urbanization and the role of the state and capital in urban development. Natural resource frontiers offer a uniquely unobstructed view of rural urbanization under the aegis of capital and the state. The process has been well documented for South Africa's mineral revolution, but other resource frontiers have been completely ignored. The latter developed in the long shadow cast by mining and the urban metropoles, with their centripetal pull on labour and the state, making the company town an archetypal urban form on the rural periphery.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2001 Cambridge University Press

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