Soweto hardly needs an introduction. An iconic township, it's name reverberates through South African political history and is known internationally. The City of Johannesburg's report Remaking of Soweto provides a quantitative description that can serve as a prologue to this chapter:

It is impossible to unravel the complex entanglement of society, politics, economics and environment that is continually shaping the production and reproduction of space across Soweto in this chapter. We do, however, provide a synoptic overview of spatial processes post-1994, and we locate this account within a tradition of writing on Soweto that goes back to the 1960s.

In common with earlier writers, we focus on the differentiated nature of Soweto's social and spatial landscape – Soweto cannot be spoken of in generic or generalised terms. We also try to provide a balanced and analytical perspective on more recent transformations in Soweto. The Remaking of Soweto is a glowing account of Soweto's makeover that celebrates Amos Masondo's ten-year stint as executive mayor of the City of Johannesburg. The report points to the transformation of Soweto as one of the considerable achievements of his administration. We do not dispute this claim but we do argue that there are diverse narratives and that the so-called ‘renaissance of Soweto’ is more partial and ambiguous than the report suggests.

In 1979 Phillip Frankel wrote that ‘Soweto displays many of the finer features of urban pathology in its endless rows of uniform 47 square metre houses, its unlighted, treeless and unpaved streets and in its rudimentary recreational outlets’ (1979: 50). It would be profoundly misleading to describe Soweto in similar terms today. There is no doubt that Soweto has experienced dramatic transformation. But, we must ask how equitable this change has been, and who in Soweto has benefited and who has not.