Constructing communities will take more than new housing

Fifteen years after the dawn of democracy in South Africa, says Mark Swilling, urban apartheid is getting worse, not better.

Everyone in South Africa has heard of Joe Slovo – the African National Congress (ANC) elder who regularly wore red socks and a warm smile; the white Jewish communist whose struggles against apartheid cost the life of his activist wife, killed in a letter bomb attack...

But today, when you hear his name, most people think of a low-cost housing development for black migrants on the Cape Town airport road. It heralded a new approach to dealing with a growing problem of urban sprawl, dominated by tin shacks and informal settlements.

When the ANC came to power in 1994, Joe Slovo was the first post-apartheid Minister of Housing. He poured his efforts into providing solid houses for millions of shack dwellers. But the ANC’s initial approach was flawed. It wanted to give the urban poor a stake in the property market, but instead of providing a subsidy to the inhabitants, it gave it to the developers.

Under the Reconstruction and Development Plan (RDP), developers bought up the cheapest land on the outskirts of urban centres, to put up row upon row of cheek-by-jowl matchbox homes. So while many got a solid roof over their heads and a house to their name, they were still tucked away on the margins, forced to spend an exorbitant portion of their meagre incomes on commuting. Mismanagement and outright corruption were rife, and so it’s no surprise that, in the words of local resident Alona Mkansi: “Half the RDP houses were falling apart before you [could] even move in”.

In response, the Government launched Building New Ground (BNG), designed to bring the poor closer to urban centres in more attractive high-density settings, creating a space where new community life could develop and flourish. The Joe Slovo project was its flagship: turning a desperately squalid squatter camp – inhabited mostly by recent rural migrants – into a model of sustainable urban planning. At least, that was the theory.

Orchestrating human acceptance and development is seldom simple, and so instead of receiving good press, the Slovo scheme began to dominate the headlines for all the wrong reasons. There was insufficient consultation with the 20,000 shack dwellers who already lived on the site, many of whom were excluded from the new development. They took their case all the way to the Constitutional Court amid a wave of damaging publicity – and lost.

Now the Zuma administration is making a fresh start, putting ANC commander-turned-business magnate Tokyo Sexwale at the head of a new Department of Human Settlements. He is charged with creating ‘sustainable integrated human settlements’. That means building communities, rather than just a collection of houses, however well subsidised – and green communities at that. There’s a presumption in favour of energy efficient design, renewable power and the re-use and recycling of solid and liquid wastes. At the technical level, 60% energy savings can be achieved simply be ensuring that these southern hemisphere houses are oriented northward towards the equator, have roof overhangs, decent insulation and solar water heaters. These are not new ideas for the housing department, but, with a few exceptions, implementation has been slow.

If Sexwale is to deliver all this, he will have his work cut out. Two-thirds of the population is urbanised; and up to 30% live in shacks on the outskirts of cities, towns and villages, many without basic electricity, water or sanitation. With massive housing backlogs and increasing civil unrest, he is under pressure to deliver – and deliver now. In order to clear land for community development close to cities, existing shack settlements have had to be moved and, as the Joe Slovo project shows, this has not been without controversy.

Meanwhile, the building of ‘integrated human settlements’ implies an acceptance from wealthy suburbs that low-cost housing will be built in their areas. Given South Africa’s highly stratified boundaries of race and class, this cannot be taken as read.

It remains to be seen whether the Zuma Government will learn from past mistakes.

All eyes are now on Tokyo Sexwale and his new department – looking to see whether he will be as effective in solving the housing crisis as he was, as a businessman, in creating new wealth.

Mark Swilling is Academic Director of the Sustainability Institute at Stellenbosch University, and a leading government advisor on urban planning.

Additional research by Patrick Burnett. Additional material by Monica Graaff.

11 December 2009

Mark Swilling