Urban legacy of apartheid captured in stunning aerial shots

AMAZING aerial photographs have captured the urban legacy of South Africa’s stark apartheid regime.

ONE TIME WEB USE ONLY FOR NEWS.COM.AU story - MANDATORY CREDIT: Johnny Miller/Millefoto/Rex Shutterstock. Editorial use only. Only for use in context of 'Unequal Scenes' photo project. Please link to website if possible: www.unequalscenes.com. Strictly no stock, books, advertising or merchandising without photographer's permission Mandatory Credit: Photo by Johnny Miller/Millefoto/REX/Shutterstock (5733931j) Papwa Sewgolum Golf Course is located along the lush green slopes of the Umgeni River in Durban. A sprawling informal settlement exists just metres from the tee for the 6 hole. A low-slung concrete fence separates the tin shacks from the carefully manicured fairways Unequal Scenes: Segregation of urban spaces in South Africa - 2016 FULL COPY: http://www.rexfeatures.com/nanolink/sgkr A photographer has captured a stark view of the urban economic segregation in South Africa. Johnny Miller has used drone technology to take an aerial view of the divide in standards of living between the poor and the wealthy. His work highlights how the manicured suburbs of the middle classes sit only several hundred metres away from the ramshackle shanty towns of the poorest members of society. An example include a God's-eye view of the picturesque suburbs looking out onto the glistening waters of Lake Michelle, 20km from Cape Town?s city centre. Separated by wetlands, a guard house and an electrified fence, the 38,000 inhabitants of the neighbouring tin shacks of Masiphumelele are a world away.

A PHOTOGRAPHER has captured the stark contrast between how the rich and poor live in South Africa — side by side, but clearly separate.

Each incredible image in Johnny Miller’s collection Unequal Scenes was shot using a drone and highlight the buffer used to separate communities in city planning. Miller, an American who moved to Cape Town five years ago, said he was studying anthropology and became fascinated by how city planning was used to reinforce the country’s strict apartheid regime. While apartheid officially ended in South Africa in 1994, clear distinctions between shanty towns and wealthy settlements remain evident throughout the country. Images from Kya Sands in Johannesburg and Papwa Sewgolum Golf Course and Umgeni River in Durban are included in Miller’s collection. “Looking straight down from a height of several hundred meters, incredible scenes of inequality emerge,” Miller said. Photo gallery He added some communities were “expressly designed with separation in mind, and some have grown more or less organically”. “Roads, rivers, ‘buffer zones’ of empty land, and other barriers were constructed and modified to keep people separate,” he said. “Twenty-two years after the end of apartheid, many of these barriers, and the inequalities they have engendered, still exist. “Oftentimes, communities of extreme wealth and privilege will exist just meters from squalid conditions and shack dwellings.” Miller used maps and census data to identify areas with big differences in demographics and Google Earth to plan his drone’s flight paths. Once in the air, the drone had only 12 minutes of battery life to capture the images. Here are some of Miller’s incredible results.