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

Public Policies on Housing and Urban Integration in South Africa
return of recipient households to squatter camps or backyard shacks became frequent,
and the illegal resale of homes (subsidized houses cannot legally be sold for five years)
proliferated to the point that the Minister of Housing announced in her 2008 budget
speech the start of an audit of occupants’ real status. She also proposed recovering
houses by evicting illegal occupants and excluding the owners — a position that was
fought by activist associations that denounced a return to the methods of apartheid,
with some of them, such as Soweto’s Anti-Privatisation Forum, violently questioning the
government’s economic and social policy.
On every scale, from the settlement to the urban macro structure, the fetishism for
private property ultimately worked against urban integration and desegregation. We can
understand the political value assigned to the status of home owner that had been
denied to black city-dwellers. It is more difficult, however, to understand why the
government granted such exclusivity to private property when poverty over-determines
the housing issue. Becoming a home owner, whether for free or not, in an emerging
country such as South Africa is meaningless unless this accession is accompanied by
an improvement in monetary incomes. Town-planning-based treatment of poverty is
necessary, of course, but it is not sufficient as housing is not an isolated factor
disconnected from social issues. In 2006, there were nearly six million city-dwellers under
the poverty line in the twenty-one functional urban areas, approximately one-third of
their total population, and the average unemployment rate was estimated to be 25%
and nearly 27% in the nine metros (between 35% and 40% in Buffalo City and Nelson
Mandela). And these figures are only averages (in Cape Town, the unemployment rate
reached 40% among black workers and 60% in some townships).
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Among other things, in the context of neo-liberal globalization, any national or local
attempt at urban integration runs up against strong general trends that work against
its objectives. Cities are affected by the rise of flexible accumulation, the transformation
of the labour market, the increasing precariousness of salaried jobs, and the growing
informality of activities. In addition, solidarities within cities are chosen rather than
organic: the residential enclosures and confinements associated with safety practices
that isolate “from the top” (gated communities) combine with the isolation of the poorest
“at the bottom” (trapped communities). Yet, sectoral service policies, despite their
advances in terms of physical and economic solidarity (networks, technical facilities, tariff
measures) have not offset the effects of division.
© AFD 2009 Integrating Poor Populations in South African Cities