This chapter has taken shape at the intersection of several lines of research inquiry relating to the urban-rural interface in KwaZulu-Natal after the end of apartheid. In this very violent province, space is a resource being contested with edged weapons, and providing for rural and urban development is an increasingly grave priority as the national and provincial governments struggle for political control. At a level of abstraction, in many ways the political struggle in KwaZulu-Natal represents the struggle of the ideation of urbanism against the ideation of ruralism. It is based on a competing economics, and rooted in population flows and resource flows.

Some of the questions which have developed around population flows relate to changes which have been observed worldwide, and to what is being widely seen as a coming victory of gravity flows over circular migration (van Hear 1994; cf. Mabin 1989), leading to a more settled and permanent urban and urban-fringe population throughout most of the developing world. Other questions approach demographic shifts at a level where economics meets ideas and ways of thinking. Some of the points at issue involve the settlement process and its requirements: how do people take root, and what do they need to put their roots down? What do people have to have to survive in new environments?

These questions emerge against a background of rural marginalisation. Much of the theory of rural-urban relations has concerned whether or not cities are parasitic on the countryside (Lipton 1977; Rondinelli et al 1989; Simon 1989c). For South Africa's black rural areas, the situation has gone far past that: the rural communities, mostly excluded from production but once the main suppliers of labour to the urban economy, are again being excluded and marginalised as unemployment has risen and the settledtownship populations have taken up most of the jobs available.