Abstract |
The south east and cape flats regions of Cape Town is home to abundant supplies of cheap and available unskilled labour. With the awareness that Cape Town may be slowly following the developmental path of Johannesburg and many other cities of the world, as decentralization, suburbanization, and the overall processes of economic 'tertiarisation' and urban transformation encompass the entire structure and culture of the city, we wonder about how the cities unskilled workforces are faring. Development has focused on the north of the city while the south east has been bypassed, causing residents to have to travel far out to find jobs and work. There is a clear spatial mismatch between places of work and places of residence for the workers of the South east, and overcoming this disconnection is challenged further by an inefficient and expensive public transport service, upon which they are fully dependent. By way of the interviews with businesses from various industrial areas in Cape Town, this thesis shows that many owners and management do not place much importance on where their workers, in particular unskilled and semi-skilled manual workers live and how they travel. |