Why it looks like this

Soweto was assembled, not grown: from the 1930s (Orlando was among the first townships) the authorities built ranks of small standard houses — 'matchboxes' — on curving planned streets, far from white Johannesburg, separated by mine dumps and buffer land. Residents were moved there by law, not by choice.

The map still shows the design: repeating house rows, few through-roads to the city, hostels for migrant workers. It is also where the design was defied — the 1976 student uprising began on these streets, and Vilakazi Street later counted two Nobel laureates, Mandela and Tutu, among its residents.