Cape Town has bucked the general trend towards controlling access to streets, a controversial anticrime mechanism now common in other cities.

However, there has been a tendency to underplay the effect of violence on urban dynamics a leading consideration in the debate about closed suburbs raging in Johannesburg where the municipality has declared most privately installed booms illegal and ordered their removal.

"SA cities in transition, post-1994, have not paid adequate attention to the impact of urban violence. Violence and residents' attempts to deal with it now have major economic and political implications, especially at a local government level," says research director of the French Institute of SA, Philippe Guillaume.

The French Institute, which conducted a forum in Johannesburg last week covering security, urban dynamics and privatisation of space in sub-Saharan cities, addressed by institute representatives from SA, Kenya, Nigeria, Namibia and Mozambique and its associate research institutions, is promoting African networking to establish levels of urban violence and strategies of protection in sub-Saharan cities.

In 1995, a year after the first democratic elections, the number of private security firms in Johannesburg increased fourfold an indication of fear and lack of faith in state and local security mechanisms. From 1997, "gated" communities in the city became another mechanism to secure homes and protect assets from damage and declining values, Guillaume says.

Residents were creating enclaves and taking charge of security as well as protecting the value of their property investments, but now the realities of this privatisation of space have to be addressed or the uncertainty will affect urban development, Gillaume says.

The policy of various levels of governance in post-1994 SA was to try to unravel the apartheid- driven segmenting of the country, primarily on the basis of race.

Now, with constitutional guarantees of freedom of movement and association, methods to combat crime are driving people back to segmentation that is based on fear.

Evolving urbanisation in Cape Town, as free space areas are being restricted to meet the demands of its role as a safe tourist destination, reflects new dynamics at play to meet future residential and tourism needs, says University of Paris research geographer Marianne Morange.

Beyond Table Mountain and Robben Island, Cape Town is attractive for its Cape Dutch architecture and the idyllic surrounds of its wine farms. Tourism dictates that this be maintained, but higher-density homes have to be built to meet demand, and these developments cannot always afford to imitate facades in keeping with those of the area.

"The authorities, tourism partners and developers are going to have to find a way to compromise to provide homes," Morange says.

Delphine Dabrowski- Sangodeyi, researcher for the Institut Francais d'Urbanisme, says segmentation has had a disastrous effect on the social interaction of residents in Brazilian cities, where violence has also driven people behind walls and gates.

"Gated communities have totally debased the free interaction of the varied local, European, African and Indian communities of Brazil in some cities. Traditional social life, which was a vital component of a very free and easy social fabric, has been stunted," she says.

Outlining the potentially disastrous effects of privatised control of space on traditional governing structures, University of Nairobi consultant Sam O Owuor says the municipality of Kenya's capital was without work unless residents took the lead.

To facilitate services and security, residents financed infrastructure maintenance to the point where streetlights are now "adopted" to keep them shining in an effort to help make neighbourhoods safe. Residents provide the material and the municipality does the repairs.

The political changes in Kenya late last year revealed the level to which records of legal title to land in the city have been undermined by unchecked control and documentation of tenure.

Today much of Nairobi's land falls into a grey area of ownership, which is undermining the stability of its property sector.

Business Day