risk of being seen to back away from a commitment to a free house for all poor South Africans is incalculable, especially since 2.8 million had been supplied between 1994-2013.28 And so, de facto urban public policy lurches forth in a no-mans land of perpetuating the status quo because doing the opposite – as articulated in your own policy agenda – amounts to political suicide.29
an input into its 20-Year Review process, Johannesburg: Wits University, 2013
Informal Market, Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa (photo: Sydelle Willow Smith for City Desired | ACC).
27 Republic of South Africa [RSA], Breaking New Ground: A
need for a planning paradigm shift’, Third World Planning Review, 1995, 17(4): 407-419. Dewar, D. and Uytenbogaardt, R., South African cities: A
Since the answer is too multi-dimensional and convoluted a story to summarize effectively, a few basic points will have to suffice. In a nutshell, the efforts by democratic government to effect redistribution since 1994 has inadvertently worsened spatial divisions and inequality. The policy priority was to provide 2.3 million households who did not have adequate shelter with a formal house, basic services and a title deed.
manifesto for change, Cape Town: Urban Problems Research Unit, University of Cape Town, 1991 25 Elaborated in: Hindson, D., Mabin, A. and Watson, V., Restructuring the Built Environment. Report to Working Group 5 of the National Housing Forum, Johannesburg: National Housing Forum, 1993 26 Harrison, P., South Africa’s spatial development: The journey from 1994. Report prepared for the Office of the President of South Africa as
Comprehensive Plan for the Development of Sustainable Human Settlements, Pretoria: Department of Housing, 2004 28 Republic of South Africa [RSA], Twenty
The spear point of this policy is the RDP Housing programme that guarantees all households below a predetermined income threshold (3500ZAR/270 euros per month) the right to a “free” public house including the title teed. For the government this entitlement is the programmatic expression of the constitutional commitment to the right to housing. Many progressive movements in the (developing) world would give a limb to achieve such a political commitment. But this seemingly progressive policy has had disastrous impacts on the livelihoods of the working classes and the poor and the overall urban landscape. Since the 100% subsidy covers the (market) cost of land, internal services and the physical top structure, the only way in which the programme could be implemented at scale by private developers was through the purchasing of large tracts of cheap land, typically at the edges of cities and towns. The spatial effect of this is that class and social segregation intensified, the poorest are furthest away from economic opportunities, and the extremely sprawled and low-density urban form associated with apartheid modernism became more entrenched; with disastrous ecological consequences.26 A diagnostic to this effect was articulated in the government’s Breaking New Ground policy framework of 2004, but without it leading to an exit from the free public housing approach.27 The reason is self-evident: The political 20
The effects of this policy are stark in Cape Town. Almost all of the new public housing that has been provided since 1994 are at the opposite end of the economic hubs of the city, adding a massive transport cost onto the budget of working class families. Almost all of the new public housing mirrors the spatial form, mono-functional urban design and absence of public and economic amenities of Apartheid era townships. Thus, all of the challenges associated with sociological processes of ghettoization have not only been deepened in the old townships but have also become embedded in the new townships. As a consequence, high levels of economic redundancy due to spatial marginality are reinforced by low levels of educational attainment due to the poor quality of teaching and school infrastructure in most townships. This further reinforces the negative spiral of social and economic marginalization.
Year Review – South Africa: 1994-2014, Pretoria: The Presidency, 2014 29 This conundrum was vividly reflected in a highly contradictory budget speech delivered by the new Minister of Human Settlements, Lindiwe
The only way in which the social and spatial dynamics of Cape Town can shift is if the city is able to forge a radically different economic trajectory that can lead to job-intensive growth in the direction of a predominantly green economy. The structure, form and spatial dynamics of the city are critical levers to enable such a trajectory, which is why it has been so important to confront the political imperative of spatial transformation. The cruel irony of the South African urban landscape is that the apartheid spatial project left an enormous amount of residual spaces— around highways, rail tracks, green buffer zones, golf courses, military barracks—to reinforce divisions and categorizations. Yet, instead of first optimizing these parcels of infill land, the housing programme and private real estate fashions have been keen on ever more suburbanization, in part due to cost but one should not underestimate the limited power of planners and urban designers to impact on public investment decisions even though all of the right sounding rhetoric is enshrined in law, policies and regulations.
Sisulu on the 23 June 2014 in which she made a commitment to accelerate the selfsame programme over the next five years and simultaneously lamented how unsustainable the programme is
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In Conclusion South African cities are not short on policies and rhetoric that extol the virtues of densification and compaction. What is missing is political leadership equipped with the skills to forge the necessary coalitions and investment to break decisively with the legacies of the past. This can be traced back to a lack of imagination for how things can be done and lived differently. It is for this reason that it is impossible to overstate the symbolic and political importance of the Density Syndicate research by design experiment. Across the three sites of the Density Syndicate,