Integrating Poor Populations in South African Cities - Agence ...

Public Policies on Housing and Urban Integration in South Africa
Urban Challenges
After apartheid was legally abolished, the urban challenges that needed to be
overcome were considerable. One first had to deal with inequalities of all types, but one
also and above all had to deal with the extreme diversity of inherited situations. Far from
simply a high-level segregation system, apartheid differed from other colonial segregation
systems in its objectives and its constant violence against individuals and groups,
defined by political engineering that established micro classifications that aimed to
create multiple “racial” sub-groups that were placed in a hierarchy and given different
rights, for instance access to land. The effects of this engineering still influence identitybased
behaviours and concepts of one’s “rights to this or that”.
This excessive identity-based fragmentation is in part linked to the extreme
complexity of legacies in terms of the macro urban structure, rights to land, and
administrative and fiscal practices. The racial urbanism made systematic in the
1950s itself varied over time and space. The apartheid city model was an ideal to
attain, often neared in small cities much more than in large ones. Among other
things, the time frames of urban policies were more or less aligned with those of the
regime itself. Until the end of the 1950s, attempts to attain the model predominated
(racial zoning, construction of the townships). With the “great apartheid” of the
1960s, the construction of townships ceased, and massive deportations to
bantustans with the aim of excluding blacks from the city increased. To mobilize the
labour force indispensable to white capitalism, hostels for temporary “single” migrants
were built and new urbanized areas were created — simple bedroom communities
located on the edges of declared white zones, near pools of salaried jobs or growth
points and near the capital cities necessary for the administration of the bantustans.
The stinging political and economic failure of the bantustans, the impossibility of fully
controlling migrations, and the acceleration of migration to cities in the 1980s forced
the regime to open (urban leases were authorized for blacks in 1982, the public
housing stock was partially privatized in 1983, and property rights were extended
to all in 1986) and accommodate migrants in improved frameworks. At the same
time, illegal settlements (squatter camps) proliferated in the gaps between inhabited
areas, on their fringes, and within townships (backyard shacks), and the boycott of
rents and service payments in the townships, a political weapon that made them
ungovernable, spread.
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© AFD 2009 Integrating Poor Populations in South African Cities