Tariq Toffa, Johannesburg Community Manager
In South Africa, the government’s response to the characteristically peri-urban poverty of informal settlement (between 1.7 million and 2.5 million households) has occurred within the paradigm of individual title (subsidised housing), the conventional route for informal settlement upgrading in the country. Despite well-intentioned policies, however, this ownership model is far removed from lived realities; where many households are condemned to either waiting patiently for state-subsidised housing or to land occupation, while others cannot access the state subsidy, such as foreign nationals and the poor-but-not-poor-enough-to-qualify. In the longer term, the model could even be said to lock poor people into marginal locations.
Reflecting global trends over the last decade, however, a more flexible approach is also emerging, as represented by the Urban LandMark (Urban Land Markets Programme Southern Africa) programme, which advocates for opening up more officially recognised channels of land supply as a primary means for improving the pro-poor access to and functioning of urban land markets, and the benefits that flow from it. Based in Pretoria, the programme was set up in 2006 with funding from the UK’s Department for International Development (UKaid), and is now hosted at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in South Africa.
While an emphasis on individual ownership rights represents one approach to tenure; a second approach emphasises the administrative and legal mechanisms to tenure security as a first step towards official recognition. The Urban LandMark model, in seeking to realistically provide increasing levels of security during the period between informal settlement of an area and the delivery of ownership (through the housing subsidy), incorporates elements of both views. This incremental approach is probably the most distinctive feature of the model.
A second and integral aspect of this approach is context specificity. By recognising existing local practices in land management (how land is accessed, held, traded, etc.), more appropriate responses that enhance community agency are built. Co-funded by the Cities Alliance Catalytic Fund with UKaid, Urban LandMark researched little-understood, local practices in six poorer urban areas in Southern Africa in order to provide guidance on incrementally securing different routes to tenure in informal settlement upgrading (or “regularisation”). In Johannesburg, from 2009 the City worked closely with Urban LandMark in the City’s Regularisation programme. Tenure security was provided to informal settlements through legalising the land use, allowing them to be upgraded in situ in an incremental way until they can be formally developed. This legal innovation entailed an amendment to the zoning scheme, and resulted in some 23 settlements being declared as transitional areas in 2009.
A third important — though not emphasised — aspect of the incremental approach is the potential role accorded to space; for recognising local practices also means engaging the socio-spatial relationships that underpin them. Since municipal registers of informal settlement occupants have already been found to play a role in the land market, by linking it to the actual spaces through which practice occurs (e.g. layout plans), they may become an important hybrid resource for tenure security, and economic and social functions.
Although the delivery of ownership will likely remain a national objective for some time, given the magnitude of informal settlements, alternative approaches remain crucial. However, land use and allocation in Southern Africa remains a highly political issue. It remains to be seen how perceptions of interim-focused models will fare in the long term, against the evidence of past provisions and current expectations of formal housing.
Fig. 1: Different routes to greater tenure security. Fig. 2: Street and shack numbering: one mechanism for incrementally securing tenure. Both photos by Urban LandMark.