Yeoville is an exemplary area for the study of extreme transformation, as one of the oldest previously white suburbs that has been almost completely reoccupied by a black African and multicultural populace – official census records show that 89.7 per cent of the registered population was classified as white in 1980, as opposed to 96 per cent of the population in Yeoville Bellevue being recorded as black in 2011, a doubling of the total number of black people in the area since 1991 (Statistics South Africa 1980, 1991, 2011).

South African cities built and expanded under the apartheid administration housed ‘the most racially defined society in the world, in which “whites” and “blacks”1 were segregated by laws controlling every aspect of their lives’ (Suzman 1993: 1), including movement and accommodation in cities. Black Africans were – in principle – excluded from urban areas as a permanent place of residence other than through passbook permits and – mostly domestic – employment.

More than 20 years into democracy, how does this very specific spatial environment and physical fabric deal with rapid social change in urban areas that were built under different circumstances for different people in different times? What can be learnt from studying this that might be of relevance to the regulation of existing space usage and the design of new spaces at a residential and urban neighbourhood level?

In this chapter we introduce the term ‘urban compounding’, applying it to this neighbourhood of Johannesburg, a metropolitan African city with distinct rural characteristics. ‘Urban compounding’ refers to current models of habitable urban space, including rentable rooms (in houses, apartments, backyards and hostels), often subdivided or shared in existing or adapted structures. The term deliberately evokes both a rural African family compound with its social and physical structures, and the financial term of compound interest which is understood as the sum of both the accrued interest and the original principal amount gathering interest. The concept of urban compounding intentionally collides the social, physical and financial contexts and displaces them (from rural to urban). This provides a framework for the adaptive spaces and people evident in an African inner-city environment in the process of de- and regeneration.