Review

This volume, the fourth title in the Ashgate Studies in Architecture series, is a substantial achievement due to Nicholas Coetzer’s thorough scholarship drawing on archives and other primary sources to support a historical study of architecture, housing, and urban planning in Cape Town, South Africa, from the late nineteenth century to 1948, when apartheid officially began. Coetzer argues that the project of legal exclusion known as apartheid began fifty years before it was enforced through legislation. The book is admirable for its highly articulate portrayal of the social, political, and cultural contexts that, through architecture and the ordering of urban and suburban spaces, “were actively constructing Cape Town and South Africa into a territory...