Development of Johannesburg's Black residential sector predominantly took place to the south of the CBD. The initial reasons for this do not appear to have been the outcome of deliberate policy decisions so much as a series of historical and geographical coincidences. Certainly areas south of the Braamfontein ridge have always been considered to be colder, more windy, and hence less desirable for residential purposes than land to its north. This was aggravated by the growth of a mining industrial belt and the ensuing dust pollution it generated. Soweto's present location, however, is the result of the plague scare of 1904. This allowed the authorities to resettle the bulk of Johannesburg's Black community to the Klipspruit health camp where water and sewage facilities were readily available. Circumstances dictated that these were located south of the town, but they could just as easily have been to its north. The subsequent development of an industrial and mining belt along the Reef also made it sensible to erect any new worker housing south of this line.

Faced with this set of self-reinforcing elements, it is probable that Johannesburg's early town planners and subsequent apartheid bureaucrats found their decisions easy to make. Given the segregationist mind-set of most people at that time, it would not have concerned them over-much that the town's southern areas were remote and not as comfortable as their northern counterparts. In this way the planners continued to pile one disadvantage upon the next until they created a physical and material gulf between the affluent northern suburbs and the indigent south, a gap that has persisted. Read individually the negative factors mean little, taken as a whole they create a damning indictment of White Johannesburg. The first Black township was built on the structurally unsound soil of a rubbish dump, Klipspruit was the site of a sewage works, with all its attendant smells and Soweto is remote from town and was poorly served by transport. Little housing was provided until 1951, the south is cold, windy and subject to twisters, temperature inversions, violent thundershowers and hail storms and the area is heavily undermined and prone to wall-cracking earth tremors. Land in some parts is given to heaving clay and is therefore expensive to build upon. This list is long and by no means complete.

There is no doubt that then, as now, economics have played a major role in the planning process. The initial purchase price for land in Soweto, for example, was R16 per acre, a figure considered to be low even by standards of that time. Until recently Soweto was still regarded as a "temporary" dormitory town and families who were resettled there in the 1950s were generally not in an economic position to acquire homes or land outright. Thus their housing was 100% subsidised and had to be economical out of necessity. The questions of social justice, and of a moral partnership between White capital and Black labour had yet to impinge upon Johannesburg's civic consciousness.