Abstract
Apartheid was a regime of socio-spatial relegation: racialised populations were banished to South Africa’s urban peripheries and rural hinterlands. In the post-apartheid period, the ruling ANC framed its democratisation project as remedial, a corrective to centuries of dispossession. This entailed government providing the physical infrastructure required for black South Africans to return to cities, not as precarious squatters on the urban fringe, but as residents with an equal right to the city. Yet, more than a quarter century later, little progress has been made in any substantive sense. While South Africa has delivered more free, formal housing units than any other modern democracy, it has consistently failed to coordinate this programme with employment, transportation, and food security initiatives. This has left residents with homes to be sure, but typically delivered to locations where residents already live, rendering the geography of apartheid permanent. This chapter also accounts for the substandard quality of the units delivered; the slow pace of delivery; and the fact that the housing backlog continues to grow despite the ongoing provision of homes. It concludes with an analysis of the exclusionary effects of the government’s equation of housing delivery with democratisation tout court.
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Notes
- 1.
These figures come from the Department of Human Settlements, thanks to Steve Topham, at the time the Technical Team Leader for the National Upgrading Support Program (NUSP).
- 2.
The NHF was the multi-stakeholder body in charge of devising new housing policies during the transition. Patrick Bond characterizes the NHF’s dominant bloc as advocating a “warmed-over neoliberalism”, blaming them for limiting post-apartheid housing delivery to individually owned sites rather than public rental stock.
- 3.
To this day, most South Africans continue to refer to state-delivered homes as “RDP houses”, despite the closure of the RDP office within 2 years. After a major housing policy shift in 2006 called Breaking New Ground (BNG), the Department of Human Settlements began officially referring to government-provisioned homes as “BNG houses”, but the term never caught on. All of my contacts on the Cape Flats continued to refer to these structures as “RDP houses” – more than 20 years after the demise of the RDP itself!
- 4.
Apartheid era waiting lists were typically consolidated into unified municipal lists. As the Cape Town municipality expanded to incorporate previously independent jurisdictions, these previously autonomous municipalities’ waiting lists were amalgamated with Cape Town’s to create a master “demand database” for the newly expanded municipality (interview with Brian Shelton, September 2013). So even those on apartheid-era lists were incorporated into the post-apartheid system.
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Levenson, Z. (2021). Post-apartheid Housing Delivery as a (Failed) Project of Remediation. In: Home, R. (eds) Land Issues for Urban Governance in Sub-Saharan Africa. Local and Urban Governance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52504-0_12
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