The struggle for in situ upgrading of informal settlements: Case studies from Gauteng
Marie Huchzermeyer
School of Architecture and Planning
University of the Witwatersrand
Private Bag 3
Wits 2050
Tel: 011-717688
Fax: 011-7177749
Huchzermeyerm@archplan.wits.ac.za
Paper to be presented at the Southern African Housing Foundation Conference & Exhibition,
Cape Sun, 9-11 October 2006
Abstract
Department of Housing released a new Informal Settlement Upgrading Programme in 2004,
which makes in situ upgrading of informal settlements possible with minimal disruption to
residents’ lives. To date, the new programme is not necessarily the municipalities’ choice
when intervening in an informal settlement. This paper presents the case of three informal
settlement communities in Gauteng province, which have struggled for recognition of basic
principles of the informal settlement upgrading programme. Their requests have been met
with great reluctance from local government. Through these cases, the paper seeks point to
some of the critical re-skilling and capacity building areas that are necessary before local
government can role out the informal settlement upgrading programme at scale.
The struggle for in situ upgrading of informal settlements: case studies from Gauteng
Marie Huchzermeyer
Introduction
Informal settlements occupy contested spaces in our cities – physically, legally and in public
discourse. In this paper, I try to make sense of this contestation, highlighting the
inconsistencies between informal settlement reality and perceptions that dominate
intervention. This inconsistency is mirrored in the discrepancy between progressive national
policy and technocratic local government practice in Gauteng Province. At a time when it is
increasingly legitimate to officially label shacks or informally constructed homes as a threat
not only to the value of individual properties but also to cities’ ability as a whole to attract
international investment, is it important to reassess government’s obligation in relation to the
poor and their position in our cities.
Challenging the dominant perceptions of informal settlements, this paper points to the benign
and often positive role that informal land occupation plays in shaping South African cities. It
also highlights the extent to which this form of land occupation is driven by human needs,
rather than the market processes that determine formal urban development patterns. From
this portrayal of informal settlements as the uncommodified, human face of our cities, the
paper points to the stresses and conflicts experienced through the non-implementation of
progressive government policy (in particular Chapter 13 of the Housing Code) in Gauteng. In
particular, local government thinking in two metropolitan municipalities is unpacked in relation
to the refusal to consider in situ upgrading of three informal settlements. This is not intended
as a critique of the officials involved, who are but trying to make sense of contradicting
instructions from somewhere above. Instead, the aim is to illustrate the urgent need for
sensitisation and reskilling in the urban development sector, be it municipal and provincial
officials or those of the implementing agencies who are increasingly tasked with carrying out
housing development (Johannesburg Social Housing Company – Joshco, Thubelisha Homes,
etc.).
The paper tries to highlight not only key areas of capacity-building required by those dealing
with informal settlements on the ground, but also key areas where mayors’ and city
managers’ commitments to global competitiveness (and in Gauteng the Provincial
government’s commitment to a global city region) need to be synchronised with
democratically derived national and local commitments. Here it is relevant to note that in the
conceptualisation of a new Informal Settlement Upgrading Programme, ‘addressing the
problem of mindsets’ was identified as an important prerequisite for Informal Settlement
Support (Huchzermeyer, et al., 2004). Two years later, this paper suggests that without a
significant campaign to change mindsets, informal settlement intervention is not breaking the
new ground intended in the national housing policy refinement in 2004.
The benign role of unplanned land occupation in the segregated city
Our cities are hugely inadequate – shaped by discriminatory and repressive apartheid
planning and further expanded by powerful and far from equitable market processes, driving
apartheid’s planned inequality and exclusion even deeper, and effortlessly overriding attempts
at urban democratisation and integration. While never welcomed, informal land occupation by
the poor has not been entirely ineffectual in shaping the city. If it were not for the struggle of
poor informal occupiers of land, the high income suburb of Houtbay in Cape Town would still
contain no independent black low income residents (other than those renting in ‘servant’s
quarters’). But the overcrowded low income enclave in Houtbay remains an exception, as
post-apartheid town planning and urban management has failed to restructure the city into a
more equitable habitat in which South Africa’s diverse social groupings can coexist and
income disparities gradually close. Where legal battles have led to the acceptance that
informal settlement residents should be given rights to an area they invaded, the subsequent
formal development stamps out any evidence of organic or people-led (‘informal’) processes,
instead duplicating as far as possible the segregated, low density urban planning form and
typology inherited from the apartheid state.
The tone of government’s current campaign against informal land development and informal
house construction by the poor suggests that it is dealing with a sinister, undesirable,
pathological and criminal process. Terminology otherwise applied to life-threatening
epidemics and violent crime is officially used: ‘eradication’ (Patitza, 2005, quoting the Minister
of Housing) and ‘zero tolerance’ (City of Johannesburg, 2002:89; Spadework Consortium,
2000, cited in Huchzermeyer, 2004a). This aligns with the continued fixation with orderly and
segregated development in South African cities (see Huchzermeyer, 2003b). Informal
settlement ‘eradication’ is often justified with reference to the normatively inappropriate ‘Cities
Without Slums’ campaign of the Cities Alliance, a joint programme of UN-Habitat and the
World Bank, also incorporated into the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) (UN-Habitat,
2003) – MDG Target 7 is increasingly referred to internationally as the ‘Cities without Slums’
target (see Tabaijuka, 2005:5). This international campaign has glaring inconsistencies – its
official target of ‘significantly improving the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020’
(UN, 2000:5), if reached, which is unlikely (UN-Habitat, 2005), would affect only 10% of the
world’s growing slum population of the year 2000, and would not achieve cities without slums
(Bazogly, 2005). Several country governments, South Africa included, interpret the MDG to
mean eradication of slums, rather than merely the improvement of the lives of those living in
them. While perhaps well intentioned by governments, the eradication process is feared by
slum residents and often results in worsened life conditions.
The Cities without Slums campaign would not be used as a reference by South African
decision-makers if it did not resonate with the dominant internal political and bureaucratic
thinking. The interpretation that the task to host 2010 requires elimination of informal
structures in order to welcome international spectators is shaping approaches in high offices
of provincial and local government. This thinking is distant from contemporary policy in Brazil,
a country to which the South African government, business and academia looks for southsouth comparison, inspiration and partnership. In response to market-driven fragmentation of
its cities, Brazil has embraced informal land occupation as a process that yields desirable
results in terms of land utilisation and land distribution. In 1988, an amendment to the
Brazilian Constitution introduced an innovative legal provision that transfers ownership rights
to informal occupants of private land after a period of peaceful and uncontested occupation of
five years (Fernandes and Rolnik, 1998). Thus, unlike South Africa, de facto use of the land in
Brazilian cities has influence in the planning process. Though far from ideal, Brazilian cities
are visibly shaped by informal processes driven by the poor, as much as they are by the
market. Time and again, Brazilian urban scholars are surprised by the harsh control
maintained over the South African urban environment, particularly Johannesburg, many years
after apartheid (Maricato, Fernandes, Souza, Rolnik, personal communication). They question
the widespread unwillingness by local and provincial government to recognise informality as a
process that can positively shape urban space.
Informal land occupation as innocent human needs-led development
Unlike the illegal, exploitative and extremely profitable informal landlordism and corrupt land
allocation practices that shape informal settlements or ‘slums’ in Kenya (Mwangi, 1997),
informal land occupation in South Africa takes a relatively benign and uncommodified form.
Shacklordism, or the informal supply of rooms to rent, while re-emerging since its eradication
by the civic movement in the early 1990s (see Cross, 1994, cited in Huchzermeyer, 2004b), is
as yet not dominant in South African informal settlements. By and large, ‘informal settlements’
represent not only ‘basic needs’ (limitations of Maslow’s 1943 concept of a ‘hierarchy of
needs’ are widely accepted – even by the business management fields that have made most
use of the concept – see Business Knowledge Centre, 2002) but universal human needs:
community, individual and cultural expression, shelter and home-making, access to a
livelihood and access to schooling. Therefore, in contrast to formally planned and established
neighbourhoods which express a wide range of market interests, ‘informal’ settlements in
South Africa’s cities portray primarily a human face (though to varying extent articulated by
the market, i.e. not entirely independent of it – see Ward and Macoloo, 1992).
Settlements driven by human need have proliferated over the past 12 years. The ‘human
face’ of our cities, far from representing an ‘epidemic’, is strained or contorted by deepening
inequality. Unlike formal property owners, the residents of these settlements play no active
part in the socio-economic processes that deepen inequality: They are excluded from the
formal process of land subdivision and land-use control and from the distorted land market it
underpins and which is so much adorned and guarded by all who play their economic cards in
this lucrative game (myself included). Our political economy requires us to believe that playing
these cards is a universal human need. Those who do not or cannot participate are not to be
tolerated, their human needs-led settlements will be ‘eradicated’ over the next 8 years. If
carried through without a significant budgetary and bureaucratic reform to ensure massive
land urban release and subsidised housing delivery, these people will be displaced into the
hands of exploitative landlords inadequately subdividing derelict buildings while shacks, even
in the backyards of formal township housing, become strictly prohibited.
As much as the unplanned settlements must be recognised as a benign expression of human
need, community organisation in South African ‘informal’ settlements must also be recognised
as a primarily human endeavour. While there is evidence that community leaders are
corruptible and occasionally enrich themselves, the situation is far from that in the famous
favelas of Rio de Janeiro. South African informal settlements are not controlled by violent
drug-dealing gangs (see Souza, 2005). They are organised by voluntary, largely apolitical civil
society organisations that seek to make a positive contribution to urban development – the
Landless People’s Movement, the Federation of the Urban Poor, civic organisations, Abahlali
in Durban (Huchzermeyer, 2004b; Kahn and Pieterse, 2006; Pithouse, 2006). Far from
promoting informal settlements, they seek recognition of the existing situation and a solution
that best responds to the residents’ needs. This is interpreted by local governments as a
disruption to planned or orderly development (as in the case of Protea South in the City of
Johannesburg, discussed in more detail below). These community organisations seldom pose
a party political challenge. While occasionally withholding their vote in an attempt to draw
attention to non-delivery of housing in acceptable locations, they refrain from openly critiquing
the political economy which to a large part is to blame for the conditions that these
organisations represent. The few supporting NGOs that serve such organisations are largely
bound by the rules of donor funding – they consciously refrain from open critique, instead
seeking partnerships with the state. The community-based organisations establish
themselves in existing informal settlements (as do the drug lords in Brazil – Souza, 2005), but
seldom lead new land invasions. The invasion process in South Africa is as yet poorly
understood. The history of many informal settlements points to gradual word-of-mouth
processes that arise directly out of a desperate need for accommodation (Huchzermeyer,
2003c; 2004b; 2006a).
While there has been evidence of political party involvement in land invasions
(Huchzermeyer, 2003c), land invaders seldom set out to confront or to make political
statements. They seek out land where resistance is likely to be least, and they avoid media
attention. Informal settlements insert themselves on unused land – former buffer strips,
undeveloped land between formal township developments, on the edges of new townships,
on land allocated for public or commercial facilities that show no signs of ever being
developed for its official purpose, and on unutilised and unprotected ‘natural’ land (often not
immediately suitable for development). As officially recognised in Brazil, the informal
occupation process improves the effectiveness of land utilisation, increases urban densities
and decreases segregation, while challenging urban planners to move beyond modernist
ideals of technical expertise-driven urban development (Bolaffi, 1992, cited in Huchzermeyer,
2004b). If, instead of attempts at eradication, the Brazilian legal provision of transfer of
ownership after 5 years of peaceful occupation were applied to private as well as publicly
owned land in South Africa, there would be effective pressure to revise inappropriate spatial
standards (which supply underutilised invadeable land), to align sectoral capital budgets so as
to ensure that land allocated for public facilities does not lie unutilised, and to ensure that
environmentally sensitive areas are appropriately utilised and protected. At the same time, a
large number of informal settlements would have to be given permanent rights to the
occupied land and be upgraded in situ. Coupled with a quota system or affirmative action for
affordable housing in suburban areas (see Huchzermeyer, 2003a; Smit and Purchase, 2006),
the state could start taming the dragon that was bred and raised by the apartheid state and
fattened by weakly reformed postapartheid urban planning: the urban property market.
Signs of stress: Conflict and contradiction in the implementation process
The increase beyond 190 informal settlements in the City of Joburg jurisdiction over the past
decade (COHRE, 2005, citing City of Johannesburg, 2004) has largely occurred without
drawing public attention. Increasingly, however, city officials are tasked with implementing
‘zero tolerance’ – preventing the construction of new shacks within existing as well as newly
forming informal settlements – and with ‘eradication’ – ensuring no informal settlements exist
by 2014 (City of Joburg officials, personal communication). This task is carried out in a largely
unparticipatory, top-down fashion that takes little cognizance of the diverse survival strategies
of informal settlement residents. The stress caused by the prospect of loosing a precarious
livelihood and social network has resulted in growing despair and outrage by informal
settlement residents, and increasingly in organised, legal and non-violent protest action
(Pithouse, 2006).
Housing policy at national level underwent a revision after the first ten years of democracy
(Department of Housing, 2004a). The continued ‘peripheralisation’ and segregation of low
income settlements (Mabin, 1995; Sihlongonyane and Karam, 2003; Huchzermeyer,
2003a;d), low density sprawl and deepened urban poverty were concerns that policy revision
sought to address, as was the absence of a dedicated policy instrument for informal
settlement upgrading. The revised ‘housing programme’ or policy, which includes as Chapter
13 of the Housing Code an ‘Informal Settlement Upgrading Programme’ (Department of
Housing, 2004b) was appropriately termed ‘Breaking New Ground’. While practitioners and
analysts have found the new Housing Programme to be largely in continuity with previous
policy (Charlton and Kihato, 2006), the Informal Settlement Upgrading Programme explicitly
calls for a ‘paradigm shift’ (Department of Housing, 2004b, cited in Huchzermeyer, 2006b)
and indeed puts forward a radically different approach to dealing with informal settlements.
Government subsidies under this programme are neither calculated as a standardised
amount per household, nor to be drawn down on the basis of individual households’ housing
subsidy eligibility. Instead, grant funding for land, infrastructure and community facilities is
applied to the community as a whole (with the exception of a separate subsidy for improving
top-structures or houses), therefore inclusive of those previously not qualifying for subsidies
under the national housing subsidy programme. The programme requires an investigation by
the municipality into the feasibility of in situ upgrading and assumes that relocation is
necessary in some cases, but only as a last resort. Its principles and funding apply to the in
situ development as well as the development of the relocation site. It makes available funding
for immediate provision of basic services, for community empowerment and participation in
decision-making, for the provision of basic community facilities (not just infrastructure and
housing), and for assistance in relocation where this is required. It an attempt to ensure that
the benefits of upgrading are not reaped by the market, it encourages alternatives to
individual freehold tenure (Department of Housing, 2004b). The opportunities and constraints
of the programme are discussed in detail in Huchzermeyer (2006b).
The Informal Settlement Upgrading Programme responds to concerns of housing rights
violations raised in a number of court cases since 2000 (the year of Grootboom, the landmark
housing rights case in the Constitutional court), and is welcomed by human rights
organisations (see COHRE, 2005). The programme was launched through a pilot project in
each of the nine provinces. In the Eastern Cape Province, the Duncan Village pilot project
(Buffalo City Municiplaity, East London) has been completed and the municipality is moving to
scale on implementing the Informal Settlement Upgrading Programme (Sam, personal
communication). However, cities such as Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni (the former East Rand),
and Ethekwini (Durban), while professing to upgrade informal settlements in situ, do not apply
the principles and funding mechanisms of the Informal Settlement Upgrading Programme.
Instead, they deal with informal settlements in the conventional project-linked subsidy
approach (based on subsidy eligibility of individual households), resulting in relocation or at
best disruptive ‘shack-shifting’ or roll-over upgrading, mostly with the displacement of nonqualifiers of the housing subsidy. Thus city officials consciously or unwittingly act as servants
of orderly development, global competitiveness and the market, rather than as implementers
of the transformative aspects of the Constitution (de Vos, 2001) and of progressive policy and
legislation that has been developed to ensure realisation of Constitutional rights.
The City of Joburg has a track record of poor performance in court, having lost many housing
rights/eviction cases brought against it to date (COHRE, 2005). However, of the over 190
informal settlements in the city, only a small proportion of communities affected by plans for
orderly development have legal representation. On the larger map of the city, these cases
have very little impact. Therefore, despite damning declarations by judges on the
municipality’s violation of the Constitutional right to housing, the City of Joburg can still
demonstrate to its desired investment partners in global agencies and corporations that its
commitment lies squarely with ensuring global competitiveness. Its discourse, which requires
the eradication of what appears to be the greatest threat to the property market – shacks –, is
more powerful than constitutional obligations.
Translated at the level of a mayoral priority relocation project Lehae (meaning ‘home’ in
Sotho) in Region G of Johannesburg (to the South of Soweto and Lenasia), the possession of
corrugated iron sheets is strictly prohibited (City of Joburg officials, personal communication).
Preventing the use of corrugated iron or so-called ‘zincs’ for backyard letting or informal trade
stalls means cutting off a lifeline. Whereas these ideals of urban orderliness have been
unimplementable in most new developments, City of Joburg officials are proud to show that
the Mayoral project with a mixture of differently coloured houses (each colour intended for
relocatees of a particular informal settlement) is ‘free of zincs’ even a few months after the
first occupation. Faced with the prospect of being moved to a sterile and socially
controlled/engineered, colour-coded environment, devoid of livelihood opportunities, does
resistance to relocation come as a surprise? Even less so, when communities are made
aware that an Informal Settlement Upgrading Programme exists but is not being
implemented.
The non-implementation of the Informal Settlement Upgrading Programme: Cases from
Gauteng
Over the past three years, four informal settlement communities have had legal
representation by the public interest law department of Webber Wentzel Bowen: Harry Gwala
in Ekurhuleni, and Eikenhof, Thembelihle and Protea South in Region G of the City of Joburg
(WWB, 2005). My insight into their struggle for in situ upgrading stems from my voluntary
collaboration with WWB’s lawyer, particularly on the cases of Harry Gwala, Thembelihle and
Protea South (legal representation of Eikenhof resulted in an improved relocation deal to
Lehae, to which the community has agreed – WWB, 2005). Our experience in these cases
has been that city officials (both from City of Joburg and Ekurhuleni Metro) have dug their
heels into the dictates of orderly development. They have used every imaginable reason to
justify relocation of the informal settlements through the project-linked subsidy, rather than
apply (or even consider application of) the Informal Settlement Upgrading Programme. Unlike
Ekurhuleni Metro, the City of Joburg has also consistently withheld information from the
communities, regarding development plans (WWB, 2004-2006a,b).
The three settlement communities have peacefully occupied the land for over a decade, and
from this base are able to access schools, livelihoods and public transport – Thembelihle is
embedded in a relatively suburban area of Lenasia with good schools and close to the
Lenasia CBD; Protea South provides direct access to good schools, to a railway station and
industrial areas; and Harry Gwala is adjacent to the established Wattville township with
schools, while also in walking distance from the domestic and industrial job market in
surrounding suburbs and industrial areas. All three settlements provide access to natural
amenities – the Leeupan water body in the case of Harry Gwala, a river and areas for urban
agriculture in Protea South, and vegetable gardens as well as Lenasia’s parks in the case of
Thembelihle. In all three cases, the relocation sites present disadvantages in terms of access
to schooling, to livelihoods and the job market, to public transport and to recreational
amenities. A large proportion of their residents fear, and therefore resist, relocation due to its
threat to livelihood, schooling and community networks, and not least their home. Since 2001,
they are organised through the Landless People’s Movement, which seeks a solution to these
fears (Mnisi, personal communication). Through the legal representation, the community
organisations became aware of the national Department of Housing’s new Informal
Settlement Upgrading Programme and agree with its principles and approaches – immediate
provision of basic services, inclusion of all residents, minimal disruption to livelihoods,
community empowerment, community participation in decision-making, development of
community facilities, alternative forms of tenure, etc. (Department of Housing, 2004b). They
would like the feasibility of in situ upgrading to be investigated rigorously (as called for by the
programme), and if relocation is found to be necessary for some or all of the residents ‘as a
last resort’ (as termed in the programme), they would like the same principles and
approaches to be applied to the relocation (as required by the programme).
While detailed case studies of these settlements would provide deeper insight into the
contradictions of local government intervention, I will focus here only on the arguments put
forward by local authorities for relocation. These arguments are indicative of the dominant
understanding and interpretation of informal settlements, and reveal important aspects of
reskilling or mindset change that need to be addressed in order for the Informal Settlement
Upgrading Programme to be rolled out. Informal settlement relocation has been motivated on
two separate fronts. One relates to the characteristics of the occupied land, the other to the
perceived requirements for occupation of newly developed areas.
Relocation reasons relating to land are twofold – physical characteristic of the land and
designated land use. The former applied in all three settlements. Land may be deemed
unsuitable for low income housing due to its geomorphology – steep slopes, high water table,
situation below flood-line, instability due to dolomitic soil, refuse deposits or undermining.
However, the argument that land is unsuitable for upgrading is largely founded on the low
levels of funding available for low income housing (as per the project-linked capital subsidy).
Such land usually can be developed, but at a varying cost, due to required engineering
interventions. Over a decade of stringent cost constraints on low income housing through the
standardised project-linked subsidy allocated on the basis of individual household
qualification, of which the land and engineering component was capped to a minimal amount
(see Huchzermeyer, 2003d) has led officials to rule out the possibility of rehabilitating or
improving land for development. In response to this problem, access to additional funds for
land rehabilitation has been made possible since 2004 through the Informal Settlement
Upgrading Programme, which does not standardise the subsidy per household and explicitly
sets no limit on the subsidy amount for land purchase and land rehabilitation that can be
applied for (Department of Housing, 2004b).
For Thembelihle and Protea South, dolomite is put forward as the reason for relocation (High
Court of South Africa, 2003; Joshco, 2006). For Harry Gwala, unsuitability for upgrading is
argued through a combination of shallow undermining, an industrial dump, the fact that part of
the occupied and lies below the sewer mains, and the existence of various servitudes
(Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality, 2004-2005). The legal representative questioned these
grounds for relocation through consultation with relevant experts and authorities (WWB, 20042006b). For Thembelihle, the expert finding was that large parts that are low risk dolomite are
indeed upgradable in situ, provided the necessary water precautionary measures are taken
(SRK Consulting Engineers and Scientists, 2004), and costs for this can be covered by the
Informal Settlement Upgrading Programme. While the municipality has finally undertaken, on
this basis, to investigate feasibility of in situ upgrading (City of Johannesburg, 2005), official
pronouncements still are that the entire Thembelihle community will relocate to houses of a
particular colour in Lehae (City of Joburg officials, personal communication). The project
linked capital subsidy registration and application is therefore proceeding, with a clear
message to the community, despite an official undertaking to the contrary, that the decision to
relocate is final.
For Protea South a very fraught official process led the municipality to undertake
Geotechnical investigations only in mid 2006, long after various announcements about the
development had been made, plans drawn up and indeed a decant camp constructed near
the settlement. From 2003, a official City of Joburg bill board graces the entrance into Protea
South, stating that 3 200 sites would be developed at Protea South. This meant that half of
the 6400 households would have to be moved. In April 2005 the Gauteng MEC (Member of
Executive Committee) for Housing made an official announcement at Protea South that all
none of the residents would be moved, as all could be housed in the area (WWB, 20042006a; Mnisi, personal communication, 27.3.06). A subsequent announcement again was
that half the residents would be moved to Lehae, some 10km to the south (Mnisi, personal
communication, 27.3.06). In May 2006, Johannesburg Housing Company (Joshco), the
implementing agents for City of Joburg, stated that only 1600 new sites could be developed in
Protea South, with the implication that 4 800 households would have to be moved (Joshco,
personal communication, 16.5.06). In June 2006, an announcement was made that instead of
relocation of Lehae, Protea South residents would be moved to Doornkop, some 8km to the
north west (Mnisi, personal communication, 4.6.06). More recently, an announcement was
made that due to the prevalence of dolomite, only 329 households could remain at Protea
South, (Mnisi, personal communication, 13.9.06) meaning that the remaining 6000 plus
households will be relocated, all of this without any attempt to implement principles and
measures of the Informal Settlement Upgrading Programme, including immediate provision of
basic infrastructure, empowerment, and participation of the residents in the decision making
(WWB, 2004-2006a).
For Harry Gwala, relocation on the grounds of undermining was refuted by the legal
representation through a consultation with the relevant Ministry (WWBb, 2004-2006).
Considering the Informal Settlement Upgrading Programme, the servitudes were found to be
suitable for urban agriculture or sports fields, which could be demarcated through a
participatory layout planning process that would involve some internal relocation and
densification of parts of the settlement. The argument that parts of the settlement lie lower
than the sewer mains, thus requiring expenditure in the form of a sewerage pump, was also
found to be irrelevant, given that the funding regime of the Informal Settlement Upgrading
Programme is tailored precisely to such situations (WWBb, 2004-2006).
Secondly, the unutilised land may be suitable for development, but assigned for a nonresidential land-use. In the same period as the legal representation of the three settlements,
and at a time when the Venezuelan government is taking steps to expropriate land from two
golf clubs in Caracas to make space for low income housing (Guardian, 2006), the
Mshenguville informal settlement in Soweto made way for the township’s first golf-course
(City of Joburg officials, 2006). The Eikenhof informal settlement (also represented by WWB
in resisting to a former relocation site that was further away – WWB, 2005) made way for a
cemetery.
The relocation of Harry Gwala, Thembelihle and Protea South was being argued for by the
municipality on various fronts. Possibly the least defensible grounds, even if the Informal
Settlement Upgrading Programme did not exist, related to the need to occupy newly
established relocation sites. For Harry Gwala, it was argued that the threshold for a School
needed to be created in the Chief Albert Luthuli relocation site 13 km to the north east. The
relocation of the Harry Gwala informal settlement to Chief Albert Luthuli, it was argued, would
ensure sufficient people for the municipality to apply to the Department of Education for the
construction of the School on the designate (unutilised) site (Ekurhuleni Metropolitan
Municipality, 2004-2005, letter dated 15 December 2004). For Thembelihle, the earlier (and
successfully disputed) planned relocation to Vlakfontein was argued on grounds that the sites
there happened to be ready for occupation (High Court of South Africa, 2003). In the separate
case of Mandelaville informal settlement, with less successful legal representation, ‘urgent’
relocation to Sol Plaatjie was justified (among other reasons) on the basis that there was ‘a
high risk of “land invasion” on the relocation site’ (Wilson, forthcoming: page number
unconfirmed, citing High Court of South Africa, 2001). All of these indicate the planners’ and
officials’ treatment of informal settlement communities as figures on a chessboard, to be
moved around in order to solve problems (caused by poorly conceived orderly planning)
elsewhere. The idea colour-coding houses at the relocation side according to settlement
origin, as in the case of the Lehae relocation site for the Mshenguville, Eikenhof, Thembelihle
and Dlamini Camp informal settlements (City of Joburg officials, personal communication), is
indicative of chess-board treatment not only of entire communities but of individual
households. For an alarmed class of largely formerly disadvantaged Housing and
Development Planning master students at Wits University, who participated in the fieldtrip to
Lehae, this resonated with apartheid social engineering (class discussions, University of the
Witwatersrand, 2006).
Conclusion: Implications in terms of capacity building within government
The tension between the market and constitutional rights of poor households has been
evident in South African cities over the past 12 years. Whose role is it to mediate this tension
and to moderate the pervasive demands of the market? The struggle against the exclusionary
dictates of the market and for constitutional rights is fought, consciously or not, by informal
settlement communities themselves, in very few cases with legal support that provides
reference to constitutional obligations and progressive policies of the state, and mostly
ignored, dismissed and or labelled disruptive by local government. Increasingly, the few
socially oriented not-for-profit organisations remaining in the sector of urban land and
housing, encouraged by their donors, seek partnerships with governments and the private
sector, thus compromising the extent to which they are willing give voice to the informal
settlement struggle for space in the city. The lack of power of informal settlement communities
in this battle for a space in the city is evidenced by numerous evictions and relocations and
the minimal impact of informal land occupation on the formal structure of the post apartheid
city.
Local government officials on the ground face the difficult task of weighing off human-needs
driven demands of informal settlement communities with those of the discourse of global
competitiveness, which is increasingly legitimised by South Africa’s task of hosting the 2010
Soccer World Cup. The decision to free the city of shacks by 2014, if not 2010 in order to
welcome the international soccer spectators, as ludicrous as it might sound, is a real
instruction to local government officials, who refer to this dictate from above, rather than to the
Constitutional rights of those affected. If government has any intention to roll out its new
Informal Settlement Upgrading Programme, officials have to be sensitised to the obligations
placed upon them by the Constitution, and understand the demands of global
competitiveness as subordinate to these obligations. This sensitisation has to be informed by
a deeper understanding of the spatial legacy of the apartheid city, of orderly development and
of the market. It also calls for a deeper reform of urban planning beyond orderly development,
so as to provide the tools to give South African cities a human face that is not contorted by
repression and exclusion.
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