to remove people of colour from the more central urban areas was the township of Langa, which saw large scale removal after the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923. It is the oldest township in Cape Town and was the location of much resistance to apartheid. Its origins go back to the 19th century. During the apartheid era, race-based legislation such as the Group Areas Act and pass laws either forced non-white people out of more central urban areas designated for white people and into government-built townships in the Cape Flats, or made living in the area illegal, forcing many people into informal settlements elsewhere in the Cape Flats. Large housing projects were built here, mostly as part of the Nationalist government's larger effort to force the so-called Coloured communities & other people of Colour (mostly Xhosa) out of the central and western areas of Cape Town, which were designated as white areas under the Group Areas Act. This meant that only whites could reside there permanently, as under the apartheid system black Africans were officially made citizens of native reserves (called "homelands"), therefore having resident worker status, despite often never having been there & having spent their entire lives in the now "designated white" regions. Since many of the mostly Xhosa workers and their families, were designated under apartheid as citizens of assigned native reserves/homelands, many who were out of formal work were obliged to live in the area illegally, further contributing to the growth of informal settlements. In addition to the extant townships of the mid-century, other large townships (such as Mitchell's Plain & Khayelitsha across the road) were created on the flats in the 1970s & 1980s. Both have become among the largest residential areas in Cape Town and some of the largest in the country at large. Large scale rural-urban migration has rapidly increased the population, putting strain on housing with major increases in informal shack settlement, including in areas that were originally created on a planned basis, e.g. Khayelitsha. One of the major priorities of the RDP (Reconstruction & Development Programme) is to build houses. Since the end of apartheid, these communities are no longer legally bound by racial restrictions; but history, language, economics and ethnic politics still contribute to homogeneity of local areas. So, for example, most residents of Mitchell's Plain likely still speak a locally inflected version of Afrikaans, along with English and