South Africa continues to be a deeply unequal society with markedly different standards of living across population groups (or race) and spatially. The current evidence base concerning inequality in South Africa is relatively small, and says little about the changing geographies of inequalities, the associated impacts which are felt on the ground as individuals' 'lived experience' of inequality, and consequences for the urban social fabric of the country. In this project quantitative and qualitative methods were combined to examine the interplay between urban spatial transformation and social attitudes towards inequality, attachment to place, and social inclusion.

The three-year research programme had four parts: (i) Mapping the changing geographies of inequality across South Africa between 1996 and 2011. Measures of spatial evenness and clustering were generated to characterise the spatial context of areas. (ii) Focus groups were undertaken in Cape Town to explore the factors and processes that shape people's experiences of inequality, and whether people's experiences of inequality affect their attachment to place and sense of social inclusion. (iii) Surveying people's experiences of inequality and their attitudes to inequality. A new module of inequality-related questions was included in the 2017 round of the nationally representative South African Social Attitudes Survey (SASAS). (iv) Testing whether people's attitudes to inequality are associated with their experiences of inequality using new/refined dependent and independent variables in multilevel regression models. The quantitative spatial measures developed in (i) were linked to the SASAS data to develop a more nuanced analytical appreciation of how inequality impacts on residents' lives and their attitudes about inequality and redress.