Housing in African Cities: A Lens on Urban Governance (GeoJournal Library) 303137407X, 9783031374074

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Urban Perspectives from the Global South

Margot Rubin Sarah Charlton Neil Klug   Editors

Housing in African Cities A Lens on Urban Governance

GeoJournal Library

Urban Perspectives from the Global South Series Editors Christian M. Rogerson, School of Tourism and Hospitality, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park, Gauteng, South Africa Gustav Visser, Geography and Environmental Studies, Stellenbosch University, Matieland, South Africa

The Urban Perspectives from the Global South brings together a wide variety of urban scholars under one series title and is purposefully multi-disciplinary. The publications in this series are theoretically informed and explore different facets of varying sized urban places. This series addresses the broad developmental issues of urbanization in developing world countries and provides a distinctive African focus on the subject. It examines a variety of themes relating to urban development in the Global South including: city economic development, issues of local governance, urban planning, and the impact of multi-ethnic and multicultural formations in urban affairs. The series aims to extend current international urban debates and offer new insights into the development of urban places in the Global South from a number of disciplines including geography, sociology, political science, economics, as well as urban studies. A special focus of the series is the challenges of urbanization and cities in Africa.

Margot Rubin · Sarah Charlton · Neil Klug Editors

Housing in African Cities A Lens on Urban Governance

Editors Margot Rubin School of Geography and Planning Cardiff University Cardiff, UK

Sarah Charlton School of Architecture and Planning University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, South Africa

Neil Klug School of Architecture and Planning University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, South Africa

ISSN 0924-5499 ISSN 2215-0072 (electronic) GeoJournal Library ISSN 2511-2171 ISSN 2511-218X (electronic) Urban Perspectives from the Global South ISBN 978-3-031-37407-4 ISBN 978-3-031-37408-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37408-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

In August 2020, we put out a call inviting abstracts on urban governance as understood through the lens of housing. Our call was expansive: for analytical accounts engaging with the urban governance dynamics and impacts of housing programmes and projects. We understood the notion of housing broadly and were interested in all forms of human settlements, anywhere on the African continent. What we hoped for were empirically-rich accounts, of housing delivery or housing acquisition, housing production, struggle, contestation, achievements or failure, that also told us something about governance in that context. A rich and fascinating set of responses ensued, and we invited a number of authors to develop their outlines into chapter drafts. Although the difficult COVID-19 years meant that some intriguing submissions were subsequently withdrawn, we had a robust collection of drafts around which to structure two online workshops, in March and November 2021. These were wonderful engagements, with authors commenting on each others’ work both as assigned reviewers and in more informal ways. The group benefitted enormously from the diverse perspectives shaped by academia, activism, community support, professional roles and experiences both within and in contestation with government. Some authors have also worked in particular situations, relationships or localities for years, bringing valuable partnerships and depth of interpretation to the discussion. We helped each other tease out aspects of the housing narratives that spoke to issues of governance and strengthened the analyses. We would like to thank our contributors for their enthusiasm to join this process, for their valuable contributions and for their patience during the long haul of finalising the manuscript thereafter. As co-editors, we wish to highlight that Margot Rubin was tireless in instigating, organising and driving all aspects of the project, and it would frankly not have happened without her. Her energy and leadership were particularly impressive given that she and her family moved homes, institutions, continents and hemispheres about halfway through the process. Neil Klug was working on his Ph.D. throughout this time (in addition to his job) yet joined spiritedly in the additional endeavour of this book. Throughout Sarah Charlton contributed intellectual analysis, clear thinking and practical solutions. We have appreciated the support of colleagues at Wits (namely v

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Acknowledgements

the NRF Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning, the Centre for Urbanism and Built Environments Studies (CUBES) and the School of Architecture and Planning), and at the School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University, our intellectual homes where much of our ideas have been nurtured. We particularly thank the set of reviewers who provided invaluable comments to chapter authors: we so much appreciate your collegiality and generosity in contributing to this process. Our appreciation also to Fiona Anciano for her valuable insights on the introductory chapter. We thank Joey Kok for technical editing assistance and Springer for all their support on the publishing journey. Finally, we join the other authors in this book in extending our gratitude to those everywhere who are striving for fairer outcomes in the complex world of housing, including many of those whose narratives are reflected in this book. We hope that elevating the dimension of ‘governance’ in the housing stories makes a contribution to this process.

Contents

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Urban Governance of “Messy” Cities: Housing and the African City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Margot Rubin, Neil Klug, and Sarah Charlton

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Cleaving Open the Space to Advance Spatial Justice: Promoting Inclusionary Housing in Cape Town . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jonty Cogger and Robyn Park-Ross

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The Production of Scale Through Large Private-Led Housing Developments in Windhoek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Guillermo Delgado, Phillip Lühl, and Jennilee Kohima

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Making Land ‘Developable’ for Market-Driven Affordable Housing in Gauteng, South Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Siân Butcher

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Are Social Movements Achieving the Right to Adequate Housing in Lagos, Nigeria? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Oluwafemi Olajide and Taibat Lawanson

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What Lies Inbetween: Self-Built Housing and the Struggle to Remain in Place in Dar es Salaam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Priscila Izar, Tatu Mtwangi Limbumba, and Albert Nyiti

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Beyond Funding Micro Property Entrepreneurs in Urban South Africa: Governance Innovation Through the uMaStandi Programme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Kirsten Harrison

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Becoming ‘Unlawful’: Homeownership, Housing Bureaucracy, and the Production of Precarity in Eastridge, Cape Town . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Geetika Anand, Sophie Oldfield, and Anna Selmeczi

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Contents

Governing Low-Income Housing Delivery in Mangaung . . . . . . . . . . 161 Malefetsane Mokoena, Lochner Marais, Nepo Masithela, and Anita Venter

10 Oversights, Omissions and Ownership Visions: State-funded Walk-up Housing in Johannesburg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 Sarah Charlton, Neil Klug, and Margot Rubin 11 Why Housing Is Not Affordable in Kigali: A Fieldwork Analysis on How Urban Governance Inhibits Housing Affordability in Rwanda’s Capital . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 Charlotte Niedenhoff 12 Stuck in Time: The Halted Lives of Housing Co-ops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Ibrahim Abdou Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235

Editors and Contributors

About the Editors Margot Rubin is a Lecturer in Spatial Planning, School of Geography and Planning, University of Cardiff, and is a Visiting Lecturer at the School of Architecture and Planning, Wits University, Johannesburg, where she was formerly an Associate Professor, at the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning. She is also a Research Associate, with the Gauteng City-Region Observatory, a partnership between the University of Johannesburg, the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Gauteng Provincial Government and organised local government in Gauteng, Johannesburg, South Africa. She is an editor for the journal African Studies and sits on the board for Third World Quarterly Review. Currently, she is engaged in research on urban governance in African cities, issues of housing and elite engagement with space in the Global South. Sarah Charlton is an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her experience in municipal government, the non-profit sector and consultancy included informal settlement upgrading and lowincome housing policy and practice. Her research explores the interfaces between urban infrastructure and people’s practices, state development initiatives and urban governance. Research has included work on urban peripheries and collaborative research in Ethiopia and Mozambique. She has a doctorate from the University of Sheffield and is a Research Associate of the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies. She serves on the boards of African Studies, International Development Planning Review, and the International Journal on Homelessness. Neil Klug is a Senior Lecturer & Planner, School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He has also run an urban planning consultancy since 1999. As a practitioner, he has covered a wide range of projects

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from plan preparations, policy formulation and evaluations, to project implementation and training mainly related to low-income housing. His current research focuses are on urban governance, specifically around low-income housing policy instruments and implementation.

Contributors Ibrahim Abdou Department Cambridge, UK

of

Architecture,

University

of

Cambridge,

Geetika Anand University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa Siân Butcher Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA Sarah Charlton School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa Jonty Cogger Ndifuna Ukwazi, Cape Town, South Africa Guillermo Delgado Institute of Land, Livelihoods and Housing, Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, Namibia University of Science and Technology, Windhoek, Namibia Kirsten Harrison Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO), Johannesburg, South Africa Priscila Izar School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa Neil Klug School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa Jennilee Kohima Department of Architecture, Planning and Construction, Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, Namibia University of Science and Technology, Windhoek, Namibia Taibat Lawanson University of Lagos, Lagos, Nigeria Tatu Mtwangi Limbumba Institute for Human Settlements Studies (IHSS), Ardhi University, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania Phillip Lühl School of the Built Environment, Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, Namibia University of Science and Technology, Windhoek, Namibia Lochner Marais University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa Nepo Masithela Mangaung Municipality, Bloemfontein, South Africa Malefetsane Mokoena University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa

Editors and Contributors

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Charlotte Niedenhoff Initiative Offene Gesellschaft, Berlin, Germany Albert Nyiti Institute for Human Settlements Studies (IHSS), Ardhi University, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania Oluwafemi Olajide Lincoln University, Lincoln, New Zealand Sophie Oldfield Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA Robyn Park-Ross Ndifuna Ukwazi, Cape Town, South Africa Margot Rubin School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, UK Anna Selmeczi University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa Anita Venter University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2

Fig. 4.3

Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.2

Ndifuna Ukwazi and social movement partner, Reclaim the City, attend and make oral representations at the MPT hearing for the Harbour Arch development (24 October 2019), filling the usually empty gallery for public oversight (Credit: Jared Sacks) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Private developments in Cape Town with considerations for inclusionary housing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Map of Windhoek indicating surrounding private housing estates (Source Authors, 2021) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘Affordable’ housing development in the south of Ekurhuleni, Gauteng (photo taken by author, 2018) . . . . . . . . Gauteng’s distribution of residential properties in the three metropolitan municipalities. Blue represents the category called ‘affordable’ (Ballard et al., 2021b) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘Affordable’ housing developments a In Ekurhuleni; b South of Johannesburg; c On the West Rand; d In Johannesburg South (photos taken by author, 2012–2019) . . . . . Township establishment process as shared in interviews (Adapted from Rubin and Harris [2018]) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stalled West Rand affordable housing development (photo taken by author, 2018) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Eviction notice issued by the Lagos state government to Makoko/Iwaya community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dar es Salaam administrative subdivision and highlighted wards. Based on Resiliency Academy Tanzania. Courtesy of Linda Heiss (Source Linda Heiss, based on Resiliency Academy TZ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chamazi neighborhood and study area. Based on Google Earth 2022. Courtesy of Linda Heiss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

35 36 53 66

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72 74 78 90

110 111

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Fig. 6.3

Fig. 6.4

Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2

Fig. 8.3

Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 9.3

Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 11.1 Fig. 11.2 Fig. 11.3

Fig. 11.4 Fig. 11.5 Fig. 11.6

List of Figures

Modalities of Housing Self Building in Chamazi’s Territory (a–c Swahili, d–f Federation and g–i Jenga Uza) (photo taken by authors) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Federation Housing, Swahilli Housing and Jenga Uza Housing Clusters. Courtesy of Linda Heiss, based on Google Earth 2022 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Location of phase I sites of CTCHC (Source Zweig [2006]) . . . . Home renovations in Eastridge (2001–2018) (Source Interviews with Eastridge residents, 2018 [where no address is included, we added residents’ initials]) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Timeline of CTCHC phase 1 Projects, with particular reference to Eastridge (Source Authors’ analysis of project documents available in the public domain [top], and in the Eastridge residents’ personal archives [bottom]) . . . . . The extent of Mangaung Metropolitan Municipality and its location in the Free State and in South Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Results of the local government elections in Mangaung, 2000–2021 (Source IEC [2021]) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Average amount of the project-linked subsidies used in Mangaung, 1994–2013. Note Some years are missing because there were no subsidy allocations to Mangaung for those years (Source NDHS-HSS [2020]) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An integrated residential development with different typologies (Source CalgroM3 website) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fleurhof state-funded walk-up housing and public space conflicts (Source Sarah Charlton, 2017) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Batsinda II construction site (photo taken by author, 2020) . . . . . Rugarama Park Estate construction site with onlookers. Author’s photo 2020 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Upper left Kigali Masterplan 2020 rendering of new Kimironko market (Kimironko DU Report 2013, as in Moriello et al., 2019, p. 67), upper right Kimironko market today, interior view (author’s photo 2020), lower left Kigali Masterplan 2020 rendering Nybugogo transport hub, city center in the background (Nyarugenge DU Report 2019, as in Moriello et al., 2019, p. 65), lower right Nyabugogo bus station today, unplanned settlement in the background (author’s photo 2020) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Batsinda II construction site (photo taken by author, 2020) . . . . . Planned facade view of Batsinda II. Light Earth Design (2015, p. 114) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rugarama model townhouse (photo taken by author, 2020) . . . .

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116 148

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156 165 166

172 184 193 200 201

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List of Figures

Fig. 11.7 Fig. 12.1

Fig. 12.2

Planned facade view of Rugarama Park Estate. De Zwarte Hond (2019, p. 89) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Timeline of co-op movement and Egyptian political economy since 1952, showing degree of state support of coops, growth of capitalist markets, and “afterlives” of co-op projects (Source Produced by the author) . . . . . . . . . . . . Stuck in time: photo of vacant buildings in Saqr Qureish today (photo taken by author) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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List of Tables

Table 6.1 Table 8.1 Table 9.1 Table 9.2

Chamazi’s self-built housing production models . . . . . . . . . . . . . Changes in monthly instalments in CTCHC Phase 1 projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Number of project-linked subsidised houses in Mangaung: 1994–2020 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Infrastructure access of projects in Mangaung, 1994–2013 . . . . .

117 150 169 171

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Chapter 1

Urban Governance of “Messy” Cities: Housing and the African City Margot Rubin , Neil Klug , and Sarah Charlton

1.1 Urban Governance, Housing and African Cities 1.1.1 Introduction After over 30 years of involvement in housing and housing-related issues in South Africa as well as in Mozambique, Egypt, and Ethiopia as academics, policy consultants, government officials and researchers, we are increasingly aware of housing’s deep connection to multiple spheres of the urban condition. Our projects, policy engagements and interactions with other colleagues across the continent over this period have repeatedly shown us that housing issues reveal much about the cities and contexts in which we were working. Crucially, they give us insights into politics, power, and daily practices in these cities, and thereby a window into their governance processes. In this book we focus on the intersection of governance and the built environment within the field of housing. We offer granular empirical work from African cities and respond to calls to think through and theorise the Global South from the Global South (Pieterse & Simone, 2013). The book continues a trajectory of diverse modes and methods of urban research largely undertaken by African scholars on African cities (Parnell & Pieterse, 2016). Using the scaffold of work by authors such as M. Rubin (B) School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK e-mail: [email protected] N. Klug · S. Charlton School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] S. Charlton e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rubin et al. (eds.), Housing in African Cities, Urban Perspectives from the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37408-1_1

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Myers (2011) we avoid either catastrophising or romanticising African urbanism, seeking to not fetishize these cities (Robinson, 2011) but to understand their intricate and complex dynamics. We see this book as adding to the canon of publications on African urbanism that tries to think from the ground up, using fine-grained analysis and an acceptance of the diversity of urban governance regimes in different cities and countries. The book uses cases from six countries and eight cities across the African continent (Kigali, Lagos, Cairo, Dar es Salaam, Windhoek, Mangaung, Cape Town and Johannesburg), to delve into a wide variety of situations. Selected from submissions received in response to an open call for submissions to this book, these showcase just some of the many forms of housing production in African cities, and the ways in which multiple actors can work in concert or in contestation in their attempts to deliver accommodation. Chapters examine processes of housing production at a range of different scales, from small incremental and fairly individualized actions of households (see Izar et al., this volume) to large scale urban interventions with multiple actors (see Delgado et al.; Mokoena et al.; Charlton et al., this volume). The book includes stories of housing delivery by various government departments, exploring the fractured and diverse processes by which discourses and policies become actions, and how patterns of intervention are linked to specific constellations of actors (Niedenhoff; Charlton et al.; Anand et al.; Mokoena et al., this volume). The book also offers tales of resident-driven initiatives to establish new forms of housing or defend existing territory, sometimes with external institutional support (Abdou; Olajide et al.; Izar et al., this volume). Chapters shows the crucial role of advocacy in nudging innovation or contesting patterns of sedimentation and privilege (Harrison; Cogger et al., this volume). Other tales focus on developer-driven housing and the ways in which particular initiatives gain traction in their contexts (Delgado et al.; Butcher, this volume). There is also insight into how apparently-collective resident efforts become mired in contextual difficulties and can essentially stifle effective housing production (see Abdou, this volume). Across the chapters authors consider the results of these diverse engagements, and what happens to landscapes, cityscapes, relationships and discourses as a consequence of these interactions. The collection demonstrates the ways in which understanding power in relation to governance and housing surfaces how those in power (and processes they use to navigate conflict), influence the spatial transformation and configuration of a city. Through many of the chapters in the volume, we also show the “messiness”, contingence, and sometimes changing nature of the relationships between urban actors, and how quickly circumstances are able to change (Anand et al.; Olajide & Lawanson, this volume). We do not use “messy” in a pejorative sense, this is not a normative term; rather we build on Chalana and Hou’s (2016, p. 5) conceptualisation of “messiness” as a way of seeing that “denotes urban conditions and processes that do not follow institutionalized or culturally prescribed notions of order”. However, we go beyond that to use “messy” as in a number of different ways: as a way of describing the processes of urban transformation where there are entangled, confusing, often hard to follow lines of engagement, collaboration and contestation, that contribute to the way that African cities are built and transformed (Butcher; Izar; Olajide &

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Lawanson; Cogger & Park-Ross; Mokoena et al., this volume). As such we do not use it to “denote” the “other” (Chalana & Hou, 2016) and rather see it as the mainstream way in which many African cities are being built. Where the rules of engagement are often unclear, the state behaves informally in moments and urban actors move through their repertoires of action in order to have their needs met (Delgado et al.; Olajide & Lawanson, this volume). There is also some “messiness” in terms of intention and motivation of the actors, an uncertainty and convolution in thinking that drives policy responses and actions (Niederhoff; Mokoena et al.; Anand et al., this volume). Then there is often “messiness”, complexity and uncertainty in the outcomes of what can be seen as fairly straightforward courses of action with limited numbers of actors (Charlton et al.; Delgado et al.; Anand et al.; Harrison; Abdou, this volume). Unintentionally, difficulties, challenges and “messes” result often from policies, practices and that have not been well- considered or have been poorly translated from other contexts. As such, we use the term to mean, convoluted, complex, intricate and tangled. We argue that the cases demonstrate the complexity and messiness of African urbanism with its myriad actors, huge differentials in access to power and resources, complex motivations and unexpected and unintended outcomes. In this opening chapter we offer a set of reflections on what these examples reveal about broader trends and dynamics in cities across the continent. In narrating and engaging with diverse housing stories the book surfaces the power relations between a variety of urban actors. We gain a view of urban governance enacted through “the relationships and interactions between these actors as well as the conditions and rules that frames those relationships and interactions” (Da Cruz et al., 2019, p. 2). In this way housing stories help tell us how cities are governed, and by whom, providing insights into ‘how things get done’. The chapters offer pragmatic accounts that we suggest will resonate not only in contexts across Africa but also in many cities elsewhere. Clearly cities in Africa cannot easily be dismissed, as they were a few decades ago, as ‘basket cases’ nor are their slums and informalities all there is to them (Davis, 2006; 2013). These cities are complicated; the state is not largely absent, as is sometimes theorised, but is deeply entangled in the lives of residents. Residents are not passively living in post-Colonial apocalypse but are often actively engaged in the making and remaking of their spaces. The private sector is not always a predatory entity but is imbricated in complex ways in relationships with residents and the state. Housing is a useful lens through which we can see the intricacies, fragilities and complexities in the African environment. The cases chosen, provide a number of ways of surfacing these actions at a variety of scales. They consider different actors and interactions, such as in the court, in state invited spaces, in self-determined provisioning and in conflicts between different private sector actors and civil society. These cases show how these relationships configure and shape the cities in which they operate. In many ways, these perspectives are not new: African scholars and people working in the Global South are well familiar with them. What this book does is add depth, insight, granularity and colour from the realm of housing, and it foregrounds the links between housing production and urban governance. It brings these relationships to the surface and highlights their diversity. It is hoped that readers of

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this book come away with a deeper understanding of the complexities and connections, as well as the everydayness of life in these African cities. We also hope the book contributes to the evolving understanding of urban governance (Pierre, 2014). In the following sections we lay out our use and understanding of some of the key terms, and elucidate the ideas and literature that we are building on. We discuss urban governance and as well housing in African cities before exploring the main themes that come out of the book.

1.1.2 African Cities and Governance Africa is a vast and highly diverse continent with some 54 states and multiple cities. Although highly varied it has some strong commonalities with respect to governance and urban challenges. These include a legacy of colonialism, which largely shaped the state boundaries on the continent as well as the architecture of the governance structures. Along with rapid urbanisation and growing inequality (Smit, 2018), other common challenges are often understood to include “state fragility, poverty, climate change, conflict, poor leadership, underemployment, low capacity and low productivity” (Cubitt, 2014, p. 1). However these are broad generalisations, and there is considerable diversity across the continent. Thus, also at the level of cities any attempts at commenting on “African cities” as a collective are made with caution and in full acknowledgment of the limits of this. While we note trends and patterns that seem to be common, we fully endorse the idea of their expression being highly differentiated according to different sites, politics and histories. According to Förster and Ammann (2018), narratives on governance in Africa have broadly fallen into two dominant bi-polar camps, the first almost romanticising African cities and the other reflecting Afro-pessimism. The latter is often based on normative narratives underpinned by developed countries’ notions of governance. A contrasting view draws attention to “the economic rationality of much activity in African cities”, their “cultural creativity” and their potential to nurture “the seed of a new Africa that can overcome present dilemmas” (Freund, 2007, p. 142). In recent years studies and statistics show a mixed picture in the trajectory of development: despite recent improvements in several areas of health, areas of rapid development in some large cities as well as a general improvement in shelter quality across the continent, the challenges still far outweigh the improvements (Cubitt, 2014). In this book we focus on governance from the perspective of housing. ‘Governance’ has been referred to as ubiquitous as the term is now so pervasive, appearing in multiple disciplines from development studies and geography to political science and sociology (Bevir, 2011). There are a number of different conceptualizations of governance (see Obeng-Odoom, 2017; Smit, 2018; UNDP, 1997; World Bank, 1989). Bevir (2011, p. 1) posits that the term governance denotes both theories and practices as well as “the dilemmas to which they give rise”. As a verb, the notion of

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governance draws attention to the processes and mechanisms by which organisations and individuals achieve particular ends. Crucial to this sense is that the endeavours are exercised around collaborative efforts, common goals or shared objectives (Ansell & Torfing, 2016; Fox & Goodfellow, 2016). Whilst multiple actors and forms of resources are required, the pathway and intended results is a negotiated one, and to an extent at least, parties are working towards the same purpose (Ansell & Torfing, 2016). From this perspective governance can be understood as “the complex process through which a plurality of actors with diverging interests interacts in order to formulate, promote and achieve common objectives by means of mobilising, exchanging and deploying a range of ideas, rules and resources” (Torfing et al., 2012, p. 14). In urban governance, this perspective focuses on the quest for shared outcomes through city administration that does not necessarily include the state (Peters & Pierre, 2012). In many African contexts, states and local governments simply do not have the resources to deliver on economic development, public services, welfare and infrastructure modernisation and therefore need to establish alliances with actors more resourceful in financial and organisational terms than themselves (Anciano & Piper, 2018; Pierre, 2014). As such, many African municipalities are dependent upon other partners for technical expertise, resources and access to markets, as well as, “emergent forms of informality” (Anciano & Piper, 2018, p. 14) often resulting in policy outcomes at the local level that are determined by outside stakeholders (Rhodes 1996 cited in Cubitt, 2014). A plurality of stakeholders involved in the governing of urban space can also be referred to as multi-level or network governance, or even hybrid governance (Anciano & Piper, 2022). Literature on African governance considers the ways that urban actors offer services in situations of state fragility (ibid.). This can be through an expansion of advocacy groups and third-party organisations delivering state services, or through new practices and institutional designs such as public– private partnerships and collective governance. This complex set of stakeholders govern in networks. In a more radical interpretation of the idea of hybrid governance an ineffective state is bypassed: “‘hybrid governance’ has moved from the idea of partnership to govern with the state, to a partnership to govern despite the state” (Anciano & Piper, 2022, p. 301). In certain contexts, aspects of cities are being formed and configured, maintained and moderated in the state’s absence. In cities on the African continent, it has for some time been recognised that analytical attention must broaden beyond the state, to appreciate the ‘complex webs of power’ that shape urban governance (Lindell, 2008, p. 1880). Even in contexts of relative strength, competence and power of government authorities, multiple other actors such as the formal private sector and poorer and middle-class people are influencing urban outcomes (Albrecht & Moe, 2015; Harrison & Todes, 2015). These efforts may be disconnected from or not aligned with the purported endeavours of the state. In contexts of weak local governments, practices frequently develop that are “localised and dispersed…beyond the purview of the state” (Lindell, 2008, p. 1882). In some cases therefore the notion of concerted action around common purpose is much more fractured or elusive: goals may be highly contested or divergent, and processes abrasive, discordant and conflict-ridden (ibid.). Thus when used analytically, the notion of ‘governance’ can be used more broadly to surface the diverse forms

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of authority, power, institutions and individuals that are actually shaping urban areas, their spaces, usage, and functioning – here, the notion of governance is ‘a heuristic tool’ (Ballard, 2017). In this book we deploy the term governance broadly. We use it analytically, concerned with the relationships between actors, their interactions and the exercise of power involved. In many of the cases discussed the state is present in different ways and to different degrees. In some instances it is a key actor in some aspect of the production of housing, thus the state is significant in “the mechanisms through which citizens and groups articulate their interests, exercise their legal rights, meet their obligations and mediate their differences” (UNDP, 1997, p. 3). As similarly articulated by Olajide and Lawanson (this volume) this idea of governance refers to “complex ways through which groups and individuals engage with each other to make and operationalize decisions” (Smit, 2018, p. 55). However in some of the engagements we discuss, the state is an adversary, a reluctant actor or an absent one, key stakeholders may not have been invited to the deliberations, and participants have little voice or influence. Here the chapters draw on a concept of governance as a broad field that helps articulate relationships, forms of influence, distribution of power and mechanisms through which claims are staked. Given these understandings, governance is inherently political, yet Collard et al. (2021, p. 55) note that these aspects are underexplored (with some notable exceptions, Piper & Anciano, 2015) in significant dimensions of the urban sphere, including in the realm of housing: while there is substantial scholarship on land administration, decentralised governance, planning and housing, the majority of this remains technical and managerial in approach, with a relatively small literature explicitly examining their political dimensions.

The high levels of urbanisation, the limitations in infrastructure provision by the state and the varying strength of formal and informal authority in urban areas, means that there are a vast array of practices and power relations in many African cities. Some of these reinforce previous forms of sovereignty whilst others are configuring newer relationships. What is clear is the high levels of complexity and the rapid degrees of fluidity and flux that categorise urban governance in these cities. Power, wealth and questions of legitimacy construct different circuits of engagement for different parts of the population (Anciano & Piper, 2018). Chatterjee (2004) differentiated between political and civil society: political society is inhabited by the middle classes who are legitimate rights-bearing citizens and as such are the legitimate users of the formal institutions of the state. However, civil society is the domain of poor urban dwellers who operate in situations of illegality or extra-legality and are thus not allowed to make the same type of claims on the state. As a consequence, they have to find others to ways to leverage the state in order to have their voices heard, and find ways to access those in power to have their needs met. As such, they rely quite extensively on relationships with those in power i.e. politicians, or local ‘big men’ to pursue their own interests (Harriss, 2011). In fact,’big men’ politics and the practices of patronage, clientalism and patrimonialism have been a keyway of understanding governance in African states at a variety of scales (Croese, 2017;

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Daloz, 2003; Hyden, 2006), focusing on situations where those in control of or with access to resources provide these in exchange for support and allegiance. This effectively means that “clients have their welfare needs met directly, and that big men enjoy the authority and legitimacy necessary to maintain power” (McCauley, 2013, p. 4). Studies have examined these relationships with politicians and bureaucrats, but also with more informal institutions such as churches (ibid.), transport mafias (Albert, 2007) and social movements (Bénit-Gbaffou, 2012), for example. Others have also nuanced the relationship, demonstrating that there can be mutual benefits to arrangements (Driscoll, 2020). Interestingly, few scholars have looked at the connections between patronage, urban governance and party politics, which would seem an important omission (Bénit-Gbaffou et al., 2013), though see for example Anciano (2018). Oldfield and Greyling (2015) in some ways nuance the duality that is often struck between civil/political society or patronage politics and formal channels, by demonstrating that in urban contexts such as those in South Africa, poorer people often move between registers of legitimacy and conformity. They may patiently wait for the state to deliver goods or services, applying through state programmes, but at the same time subverting legalities in order to access shelter. Formal and informal practices of engagement between urban residents and various institutions is entangled and does not necessarily fit neatly into one category or another, and urban actors are often in a state of flux moving between relationships in order to get their needs met. The themes touched on so far describe some of the configurations of collaboration that exist in African cities, but there are a host of other collaborative interventions in cities that have often unintentionally had divisive consequences for urban residents. The push towards “world class cities” has been a key driver in constructing both coalitions between actors, especially international private developers, financiers and local state agencies, as well as contestations with poorer residents (Myers, 2015). As Robinson put it, “the processes involved in making world cities are usually not very progressive processes and are often at odds with promoting cities that are good to live in” (2006, p. 113). The forced removals of informal dwellings, informal businesses as well as homeless residents and anyone or anything else that does not comfortably fall into the aesthetic frame of the World Class city (Ghertner, 2015) often results in these moved from sight and where possible to the peripheries of cities (Huchzermeyer, 2011). The drive for world class cityness is often coupled with two other features: public–private partnerships (PPPs) with local and international investors and property companies, and internationally financed urban development. Cities across Africa have been the controversial ‘beneficiaries’ of international financing for megaprojects. These have included large scale housing projects (Croese, 2021) as well as a wide variety of infrastructure such as bridges but these initiatives, including China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), have been critiqued as “debt trap diplomacy” (Brautigam, 2020) and the construction of useless infrastructure that benefits local elites but few others in African cities. These plans also imbricate local governments in international geo-politics and commitments that do not necessarily have any local benefits.

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Further on the multiple themes impacting housing and governance in African cities is that they also sit at the nexus between communal and indigenous power structures and land ownership, “modernist” leanings of local and provincial authorities, and the rapid and often informal expansions onto traditional-authority areas (Sawyer, 2014). These processes construct intersections between older land and governance structures and newer forms of power and control and construct complex sets of relationships that sometimes map onto local politics (Gough & Yankson, 2000). In some cases, this means that pre-existing authority is reinforced as traditional leaders are able to capitalise on new forms of speculation and collaboration with other actors, largely based on control and commodification of land (Aryeetey et al., 2007; Owusu, 2008; Yeboah, 2008). However, in other situations, the extrusion into the hinterland means the sever disruption of pre-existing sovereignty and the reconfiguration of new types of authority and control by other actors (Omedo et al., 2014; Smit, 2018). Meth et al. (2021, p. 996) in their conceptualisation of the logics evident in the urban periphery also identify speculative development as a key process that is able to change urban power relations, as investments generate power for institutions (such as developer conglomerates or partnerships) and often cement power for particular governance structures (municipalities or national government, for example).

Studies of governance mechanisms and practices in African cities come from multiple perspectives. For example some draw on the lens of a particular sector or activity, such retail trade in the markets of Maputo (Lindell, 2008) or transport providers in Nigeria, Uganda or Rwanda (Agbiboa, 2018; Goodfellow, 2015). There are studies of governance in particular cities (see for example Olver, 2017, 2021), or of the role of particular actors such as traditional authorities in urban areas (see cases in Marrengane et al., 2021). The fiscal and financial dimensions of urban governance have received considerable attention (Cirolia, 2020), as well as infrastructure delivery and infrastructure citizenship (Lemanski, 2020). Other studies have explored governance in relation to housing issues, often in the terrain of informal settlements and the logics that pervade in these spaces (see for example Anciano & Piper, 2022). Yet there is still much to explore on governance from the perspective of housing. Overall, an examination of the governance literature reveals a multitude of governance concepts exhibiting individual and overlapping features described above (Bevir, 2009, 2011). Rather than trying to map out a comprehensive framework of all the combinations of features to governance, the focus on the book as noted above is on providing grounded case studies on the production of housing that individually and collectively illuminate aspects of urban governance. The purpose of focussing on urban governance is to draw attention to how some African cities are being made and re-made; who the actors are, what resources they are able to leverage and how relationships are built. Understanding these factors is key to understanding how and why African cities look and operate the way that they do, to the extent that these are shaped through residential practices. This is important for both theory-building as well as policy and intervention.

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1.1.3 Housing in African Cities Within this broader governance context, this book explores how cities are being built and transformed on the African continent through the lens of housing and the governance processes underpinning its production. Housing is the most visible and extensive built form within a city, and includes all sectors: private, state and corporate. Housing issues are central to six of the nine commonalities typical of African cities identified by Parnell and Pieterse (2014). These include rapid urbanisation resulting in housing and service backlogs; circular migration between urban and rural areas, impacting on housing needs; development of large peri-urban residential areas due to land affordability issues; and informality of housing reflecting unclear legal situations,1 affordability constraints, and income inequalities. Some countries demonstrate elements of government performance with respect to lowincome housing delivery, and people’s access to citizenship through acquisition of land and shelter. But fundamentally, in African cities as well as elsewhere, many people earn too little to adequately and decently house themselves (Potts, 2020). A range of poor living conditions prevail, along with pockets of middle income and elite accommodation. There are some notable trends in housing studies in African cities: a key one has been the concern with informality and informal settlements. Almost every aspect associated with informal settlements and slums have received attention: including health, quality of life, access to water and sanitation, governance, evictions and upgrading, to name just a few. For this volume some of the most interesting work has considered how states in Africa have responded to informality. For example evictions, and generally violent evictions, have often characterised state responses (Mohindra & Schrecker, 2013) in African cities, often motivated by the modernising impulse of World Class cities noted earlier. These are frequently justified according to Ocheje (2007) in the public interest and in defence of building ‘better’ housing for poorer households. More recently, due to the combined efforts of international organisations and grassroot movements, there has been a push back against evictions and a drive for in situ upgrading or more humane approaches to resettlement, often under the banner of the Right to the City (Fieuw, 2011; Huchzermeyer, 2014). Both evictions and the contemporary right to the city movements have been key in surfacing attitudes of the state as well as power structures and collaborations between different interests in the city. These have also highlighted the discrepancies and discord within the state as judiciaries, the executive and other state actors confront each other over the question of residents’ rights and state’s responsibilities (Huchzermeyer, 2016; Rubin, 2013). In other instances, relocations from informal settlements may not fall within the frame of violent evictions but also reveal much about state-citizen relations, rights, the power to shape destinies and the multi-faceted outcomes of such processes (see examples in Beier et al., 2021; Meth et al., 2022; Schramm, 2017).

1

Meaning housing that does not adhere to regulations and perceived legal tenure frameworks.

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Although informal settlement development can be seen as an important “mode” of urbanisation (Roy, 2005), it is not the only process by which housing is developed in African cities. The state is still firmly imbricated in housing provision in many contexts (Lemanski et al., 2017), often coupled with relocation and rehousing processes. An example would be the housing and human settlement programme of the South African state (Charlton, 2009; Tissington, 2010), which has been hailed as both a grand achievement in some quarters and an enormous failure in others. Relationships between citizens and state as mediated through this housing are diverse and complex (see for example Charlton, 2018; Meth & Charlton, 2017; Rubin, 2018). In Ethiopia, a similarly ambitious programme of condominium developments is significantly re-shaping parts of Addis Ababa and households’ financial and other links to government (Huang et al., forthcoming). Buire (2014, 2018) and Croese (2017) explore housing delivery in Luanda, Angola, including ways that the new Chinese funded housing on the periphery has constructed new identities and relationships with the state (Buire, 2017). Pitcher (2017) explores contexts in Nairobi, Kenya and Luanda, and demonstrates the interactions between private sector developers and financiers, the state and residents. Goodfellow (2017) unpacks similar dynamics but shows that the drive to higher end housing is privately financed by groups who see property as a safe and lucrative investment. However, the impact on cities like Addis Ababa and Kigali, are “landscapes of unused and underused high-end properties” (ibid., p. 786). Others have also investigated this relationship between the private and public sectors, with Gillespie (2020, p. 600) arguing that what is being seen in Accra and other African cities is a “‘real estate frontier’ characterized by the incremental and contested commodification of state land to enable the growth of the real estate sector in the city”. However, large scale international finance is not the only formulation of housing construction and investment, and a form of Bayat’s (1997) quiet encroachment is evident as households incrementally build and add on to cities on their own. Often unable to afford formal loans or unwilling to borrow from institutions, as well as often being unable to access higher-end building developments, households take to building their own units over time (Bangdome-Dery et al., 2014). Located across the city and often transecting formal, informal and communal land transactions, households build using savings or funds from diasporic remittances send back home by kin working elsewhere (Melly, 2010). This is not just amongst poorer residents, as wealthier and more middle-class African urban residents are also buying plots, largely on the periphery, and developing new suburbs, in effect producing large swathes of the African city (Andersen et al., 2015; Mercer, 2020). These activities may intersect with state processes in various ways, echoing Caldeira’s (2017) notion of autoconstruction. Another stark trend being observed on the peripheries of cities of the Global South, including in urban Africa, is what Sawyer et al. (2021) refers to as “bypass urbanism”. This refers to “huge affluent and exclusive urban zones” being built outside of existing cities through “conglomerations of large-scale real estate megaprojects, new centralities and newly constructed urban infrastructure in certain sectors of the urban periphery” (2021, p. 676). What is evident is that the urban

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peripheries are seeing both the expansion of informal settlements and new types of elite developments, enclaved and fortified spaces for the wealthy and middle class (Mabin et al., 2013). Golf estates, so-called “eco-states” that are walled off and largely secede from the cities, construct a form of urban “splintering” (Graham & Marvin, 2022). At the same time, in some contexts peripheral residential settlements that emerged under earlier political regimes (such as colonialism or apartheid), also persist, and may reflect new forms of investment and consolidation despite their distance or apparent dislocation from urban centres (Meth et al., 2023). Peripheral parts of African cities are thus reflecting a variety of complex and dynamic processes connected to housing and living spaces. Further out, beyond existing urban centres, new cities based on fantasies brought from elsewhere are planned or emerging (Watson, 2014). This trend towards the construction of new cities has found significant purchase in many African cities: for example Tatu City and Konza Techno City outside Nairobi (ibid.), Lanseria outside of Johannesburg; New Administrative Capital outside of Cairo; to name but a few. These new cities promise to be everything that their predecessors are not: safe, clean, smart, well-organised and a step into the future (Côté-Roy & Moser, 2019). These cities are master planned by architectural offices in the Global North and intentionally mimic aesthetics from “modern” cities like Dubai and Singapore (Watson, 2014). Although few have actually been built yet, preliminary plans have been met with criticisms from communities that have been evicted in preparation for their construction as well as urbanists who point to the social and political exclusion that will result and the state disinvestment from sites in poorer areas. It also introduces the idea of urban citizenship2 and the rights of city residents and how that is made precarious or dismantled by these projects. Our book picks up on a number of these forms and trajectories of housing production, foregrounding a diverse range of situations across different classes and income groups. Thus, the chapters by Abdou and Delgado et al. provide insights into housing production for middle income groups in Cairo and Windhoek respectively, and Butcher focuses on speculative development for lower-middle incomes in Johannesburg. Focusing on state-funded housing, Niedenhoff argues that the Rwandan Affordable Housing Program is in effect for wealthier families than its name implies, and Mokoena et al. discuss distorted aspects of the state-funded housing programme in Mangaung, South Africa. Charlton et al.’s chapter from Johannesburg and Anand et al.’s from Cape Town highlight perverse consequences for recipient households of different approaches to low-income housing taken by the state. Africa cities are often ‘rapidly urbanising’ without concomitant job-creating economic growth, with the result of many people living outside of formal employment (Jenkins et al., 2007). This is a contributing factor to individual and collective household efforts to house themselves or supply housing to others, reflected in Izar et al.’s 2

We use the term citizen in the broad sense rather than the legal sense, to mean the array of acts and practices that urban residents undertake to demonstrate and claim their rights, in every day acts (Lemanski, 2019). There is an extensive and fascinating literature on the topic but this is outside the purview of this book.

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discussion from Dar es Salaam and Harrison’s focus on mechanisms to support household’s backyard rental accommodation. Often however user-initiated efforts by poor residents are contentious or are overridden by authorities. Olajide and Lawanson’s chapter on Lagos recounts efforts to retain a fragile hold on prime land by impoverished residents, whilst Park-Ross and Cogger discuss the skilled use of formal planning mechanisms by an advocacy group championing spatial transformation in Cape Town. With this brief overview of some of the prominent housing trends in African cities and how chapters link with these, we now turn to the substantive themes that have emerged across the chapters.

1.1.4 Themes Covered in This Book Overall, we aim to give a nuanced reading of the ‘messy actuality’ of urban governance (Wafer & Oldfield, 2015) as reflected in housing. The cases in this book look at government, social movements, the private sector and ordinary people in their quest to design, develop and deliver housing for themselves and others. As we have noted housing offers a lens through which we are able to unpack and untangle power relations and see the spatial consequences of actions. The material product of housing is a very tangible manifestation of power, compromise and conflict on the landscape. It also highlights the point that “[t]he right [and the fight] to adequate housing is central to urban struggles” and to understanding the nature of urban struggles (Olajide & Lawanson, this volume). Seeing how and why people struggle tells us about their daily lives, the politics they face and the ways that they have found agency to address them, or have been thwarted from doing so. The authors in this book explore these tensions, threads and dynamics, as well as some of the stresses and strains manifesting within government housing activities.

State Interfaces and Differentiated Citizenship Within cities, there are numerous moments of connection and engagement, a key one is the interface between the state and its citizenry (Heller et al., 2015). Wafer and Oldfield (2015) describe housing as “a site of encounter with the state”. This interface surfaces power-relations and provides insights into precisely how government and non-government actors interact, what is leveraged and what is exchanged tactically in order for the different parties to get what they need. The question of interface is key in trying to understand what happens along the border between the state and very local actors, their engagements, and contestations over access to land, housing, basic services and upgrading programmes. It also surfaces the moments when the state is absent, how residents in informal settlements and other forms of housing step into the breach to govern and to self-provide for their own needs. This interface also

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reveals the policy instruments utilised by the state, which in some cases uncovers underlying intention of the state (Lascoumes & Galès, 2007; Le Gàles, 2010). As such, the book examines the relationship of a variety of urban actors with the state at all levels from local to provincial and national. However, the state is not a monolithic institution but rather a fragmented and highly complex set of organisms (Bénit-Gbaffou, 2018; Bénit-Gbaffou, forthcoming), and so chapters in the book also examine moments of conflict within the state, including between different spheres and departments, policies and programmes (see Mokoena et al., this volume). These housing contestations also surface the way that the state perceives urban residents and the form of differentiated citizenship that is in evidence. Niedenhoff (this volume) shows the “gap” that exists between the intentions and aspirations of the Rwandan state and the desires and needs of urban citizens in the city of Kigali. She argues that despite the recognition by the state that the affordable housing policy is not effective, there is a strong pull for officials to “render technical” (Murray Li, 2007) the solution, making deviation difficult and perpetuating a strong top-down approach. Delgado et al. (this volume) also highlight the ‘strength’ of the state in Windhoek, Namibia, enacting top-town decisions that are driven by state-private sector collaboration but do not address the needs of the majority. However, unlike the Rwandan and Namibian cases, Lagos residents have fought against their lack of recognition by the state (Olajide & Lawanson, this volume). The Lagos case provides a clear example of how social movements construct ‘bottom up’ protestations against the state and the various strategies and tactics that they use in order to ‘fight’ their corner. However, explicit contestation is not the only form of protest, and Izar et al. (this volume) point to both the inter-locking networks that make housing delivery possible as well as the atomised or quiet encroachments of the individuals who incrementally and individually transform their spaces outside of the net of the state or private developers and largely just get on with it. The authors show how a particular self-build modality related to speculation of land and housing markets has become pervasive in a peripheral neighbourhood of Dar es Salaam, as it best maps to a state policy regime committed to formalisation and legalisation of private housing markets. This is in contrast to an existing housing modality that is also self-build, but that facilitates an incremental, slow process by residents themselves or in association with small scale builders through informal arrangements. The chapter shows that there are many ways to subvert and transgress against a state and that the relationship need not be one of outright antagonism in order for residents to exercise their right to the city. Harrison’s focus (this volume) on the UMastandi programme of a private sector housing funding agency notes what happens when the state is incapacitated or unable to fill a specific role and how the private sector in one form or another steps in. However, the agency’s efforts to innovate and help with compliance of small scale landlords to regulations and by-laws and provide innovative small-scale housing finance solutions are stifled by the seeming inability of the local state to adapt its governance practices and support these projects, despite purportedly endorsing the objectives of small scale entrepreneurship and regulatory compliance. Although the residents may benefit from such private-sector intervention in the short-term,

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Harrison demonstrates that over the longer period, it may weaken local government and help to drive a wedge between the state and its citizens as the local authority fails to take on functions needed to support and bolster low-income housing options. Charlton et al. (this volume) also note interactions between state, private sector actors and residents and expose what happens when there is a lack of consideration of one of the actors (residents). The chapter argues for a more meaningful engagement between the three in order to produce better quality, more functional housing that works for all parties involved. A close reading of housing and housing related processes offers the “gradations, texture and contradictions” of the terrain that shape state interventions in housing delivery (Charlton, 2018, p. 102) and provides further insight into the production of differentiated citizenship (Bhan, 2016; Anand et al., this volume). Housing can tell us about urban citizenship, how it is experienced, how it is made manifest, its strengths and limitations. Olajide and Lawanson (this volume) demonstrate how poorer residents in Lagos enact their citizenship and the different tactics that they use to try and ensure that their bundle of rights is made into concrete realities. On the other hand Anand et al. (this volume) demonstrate how an understanding of citizenship can be effectively ‘removed’ through the construction of precarity. The removal of certainty and security of tenure in effect demotes residents’ sense of their own rights and citizenship. Through a litany of bureaucratic errors resulting in inadequate contracts, legal notices, payment disputes and court cases, the recipients of state housing projects in Cape Town were made even more insecure. What several of these cases point to is the power and capacity of citizens and residents to enact their own visions on the urban landscape and their moments of connection and disconnection with the state in its many levels. The chapters highlight how exertion of power is enacted, the actions and practices of governance, whether they are straightforward or underhanded attempts at making profit, fulfilling a vision or attaining social and spatial justice. Cases also demonstrates the highly differentiated nature of citizenship within urban settings. Private actors can and sometimes do act in collaboration with the state and sometimes in contestation with the state. What these cases tell us is that these interactions between actors have a more temporal dimension, in which actors come together and act in concert in moments but these very same urban actors can equally and under different circumstances be in strict opposition to each other. Relationships between urban actors are context dependent, relative and contingent. These situations may exist in some way in most cities, however, African cities demonstrate these facets in often stark and exaggerated ways. The high rates of urbanisation and the robust conflicts and contestations over land and between actors (Kennedy, 2015) is amplified where the state is often weak, authoritarian or removed from the daily lives of residents, creating new pathways in which residents construct their citizenship (Förster & Ammann, 2018). There are also daily realities that persist in many of these cities “where rapid urban (re)development predisposes the poor to constant threats of forced eviction” (Olajide & Lawanson, this volume), and where evictions are processes which tells us about the politics and the limitations of urban citizenship. It is also often where “… urban development approaches by the state and

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the lived realities of the urban poor intersect in damaging ways” (ibid., this volume). These African cities also have complex relationships with their pasts, complex histories and post-colonial rules. Cases in this book demonstrate the power or lack thereof of certain citizens and groups, as we see in Lagos, as well as the authority that different communities have (such as in Dar es Salaam), to be able to shift what happens within cities themselves, or the limits to this.

Housing Contestation Understanding and interpreting conflict is key to seeing how cities are built, why certain projects succeed or fail and gives insights into the power of different actors to enact their visions. In Butcher’s discussion of the production of new neighbourhoods in edge localities in Johannesburg (this volume) she draws attention to “frictions within this development process: between equity and efficiency in new land use management policy; between the state and developers over timing; and within the state itself over managing its contracts”. She exposes the state and private sector interface in the land development process in the South African context, showing how established developers dominate and their large, peripheral housing estates mitigate against spatial transformation. The chapter shows the distorting effects of historical continuities, ‘business-as-usual’ approaches and entrenched forms of power. Similarly, Anand et al. (this volume), demonstrate the moments of conflict between residents and the state as well as within the state itself, and how the courts become a key site for intervention and mediation (an issue that also comes up quite clearly in Cairo in the chapter by Abdou). Olajide and Lawanson (this volume) report on a situation of different actors playing off each other. Abdou (this volume) also shows how contestation becomes a tactic for those in power. In Cairo, people in powerful positions who do not want to resolve the question of housing co-operatives, tie matters up in court or in extended sets of meetings and discussions, giving the appearance of fair contestation but in reality ensuring that no progress is made and that the matters remain unresolved. Niedenhoff’s work in Kigali (this volume), Delgado et al. (this volume), Charlton et al. (this volume) and Olajide and Lawanson (this volume) demonstrate how much of the crafting of housing policy is based on the imaginaries of a small elite. These actors’ discourse, visions, normative beliefs about the city and who should reside where (or if at all) then come up against other residents who don’t quite fit the mould, usually as they can’t afford to. Contestation is thus not necessarily just about economic interests related to new building projects but is also propelled by individuals and institutions’ beliefs about cities, their function and the role of housing in these spaces. Olajide and Lawanson (this volume) also point to social movements and following Miraftab (2004) and others, the use of invited and invented spaces where interest groups use spaces curated by the state as well as street protests. However, in the Lagos case study they describe, the state does not give the NGO and poor community representatives the legitimacy and recognition to be considered legitimate or

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valid actors in the development process. Across the chapters in the book, sites of contestation and their resolution are thus manifold: the streets, the courts, tribunals, offices and even the space of people’s home (Anand et al., this volume). However, not all these spaces are equally open for contestation and Cogger and Park-Ross (this volume) describe the municipal planning tribunals in Cape Town as “a highly technocratic, untransformed and largely inaccessible space that, intentionally or not, undermines public participation”. The use of these sites by legal experts, in ways that have not been intended, demonstrates the adaptive and innovative ways that urban actors are able to subvert spaces and processes for their own ends of greater social justice. However, as seen in Niedenhoff (this volume) and Cogger and ParkRoss (this volume) despite sustained acknowledgement of the contestation and the differing views, these are still not always sufficient to ensure the rights of poorer and more marginalised people. Abdou (this volume) also shows how contestation is maliciously sought-after as an end in itself, to delay a process or to tie it up so that there is no forward progress. This contrasts against a simple conflict with actors pitted against each other, in which different parties are actively fighting to ensure their best interests are met. However, given the relative power of some groups like the state this contestation can take the form of violence, coercive practices and brutality rather than the slow processes of courts or disempowerment. These chapters show the agonistic value of conflict and how it produces much of the city and its features. Conflict between actors could be seen as the most fundamental of city-building actions, forcing compromise, which may also explain the often strange and slightly mutated architectural and planning decisions that are made by both the state and the citizens engaged in their own construction.

Collaborations, Navigation and Negotiations The chapters in this book identify through their housing stories who the main actors are in the narratives of governance and their relationships to each other. Butcher (this volume) notes the role of private sector developers and the state but also demonstrate that these are long-standing relationships and go beyond the growth machine or urban regime theory. She offers a deeper genealogy of relationships in which the state is not completely in cahoots with the private sector, and the private sector is not all powerful but rather that there is a set of cross-cutting formal and informal relationships that may shift over time. There is also a degree of informality in the state, which surfaces some of the negotiations that take place. Niedenhoff (this volume) focuses on the government and argues that “While much of the visions and narratives are shaped by a strong central Rwandan state, the role of individual government officials in planning and executing said visions should not be underestimated”. Street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky, 2010) can still have the power and the authority to make projects work or to halt them in their tracks, tying up projects for years. Further, relationships between state officials, private sector actors and other stakeholders operate over long periods of time and straddle the worlds of both routine,

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bureaucratic forms and personal and sometimes intimate relationships to negotiate deals and to make things happen. Often it is a combination of both types of links that allows for changes to be made on the landscape. Developers also become attached to certain geographical sites or specific housing typologies, due to familiarity with those areas, particular land or other interests, or connections with specific sets of state officials, and tend to develop and re-develop the same forms of housing over and over again, becoming what Butcher calls “quite territorial”. This means that groups can control certain spaces or housing typologies within cities over long spans of time. Citizen-led/private sector-led organisations can be powerful. Social movements according to Olajide and Lawanson (this volume, drawing on Domaradzka, 2018) “can enable the collective actions of deprived and marginalized communities in claiming the right to the city”. These movements have become important platforms for collective action against projects and practices that promote forced eviction, spatial displacement and economic marginalisation (Olajide & Lawanson, this volume). It is through these actions of contestation against the state and state action that the most dispossessed of urban residents are in some way able to lay claim to forms of justice. However some of the major NGOs representing the poor in the Lagos study have disputes around the strategies to adopt in engaging the state, and the chapter shows the consequences that ensue when cooperation is not achieved between multiple actors in the governance process. Not only the nature of the relationships between the various actors but also the instances and spaces of encounter help to construct the landscape of cities. The capacity of specific groups to navigate the labyrinthine corridors of power mean that some actors are better able to get their visions realised on the cityscape than others. Butcher (this volume), Olajide and Lawanson (this volume) and Cogger and Park-Ross (this volume) discuss groups that have relationships or networks with those in power or who have access to expertise that allows for the skilful navigation of bureaucracies. In the case of private sector developers, these may be inhouse planning and legal departments. Cogger and Park-Ross (this volume) as well as Anand et (this volume) demonstrate how legal expertise and knowledge of the law and the rules governing bureaucracies allow for strong interventions for ordinary people and successful engagement with spaces of contestation such as Tribunals and courts. These examples are strongly contrasted against the residents of co-ops in Cairo whose cases have been tied up in courts or met with little legal success (Abdou, this volume). Abdou describes how a cooperative governance model for delivering low-cost housing is caught between two conflicting temporalities- speedy financial markets versus slow collective governance. Using the concept of ‘time as infrastructure’ the author shows the value of a temporal lens in diagnosing and assessing conflicts within housing governance. The book thus demonstrates that there are significant sites of encounter between actors, courts, tribunals, and other invited spaces of engagement, and it highlights the value of progressive legal frameworks and processes in some contexts (such as South Africa) that committed organisations use to advocate against powerful interests. However it also shows that to successfully navigate these opportunities

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takes expertise and the ability to discern the rules, and that in some contexts processes of navigation become deadlocked. There are, however, other roles for “experts” and Harrison (this volume) shows how a financier “plays an intermediary and negotiator role between the microdevelopers it finances and local government departments”, and so the relationships between actors can be mediated by third parties. It is these mediators that facilitate the production of different kinds of spaces—in this example, the household rental sector—and Harrison demonstrates that without this assistance there would be slow and limited support from a sluggish local authority. Niedenhoff also points out that experts play key roles in Kigali’s affordable housing sector noting that they “navigate the complex and often contradictory landscape of putting the Affordable Housing Program into action” (this volume). Izar et al. (this volume) note that the building of cities in the Global South is not just about moments of engagement and navigation between the state and citizens but also includes strings of encounters between numerous non-state urban actors. As a mode of production, self-building in Tanzania also facilitates an incremental, decades-long process that involves residents themselves, either individually, in association with small builders, or through local organizations, building and financing their houses and neighbourhoods, through and within predominantly informal arrangements and territories. However, navigation is not just a technical process and brings with it politics as well as clear implications for the built environment. Butcher (this volume) draws on Blomley (2017) and others in discussing “reactive departments” in a local authority, who respond to developer proposals but whose activities must be recognised as highly significant and influential in conferring property rights. Urban actors in the realm of housing collaborate, contest and negotiate with each other, sometimes to promote or defend their interests and sometimes to curtail or amputate the interests of others. The consequences are manifold: they mean the transformation of urban spaces, the development of some projects, the hollowing out of others and having the effect that some that never come to full fruition. An example of the latter are the co-operative housing in Cairo which Abdou (this volume) describes as resulting “[I]n incomplete vacant structures which physically exist in space and gradually deteriorate, but their productive lifecycles never begin”. Significant parts of cities are literally built by which modes or combination of modes are most successful, and cities also reflect the failures or absences in the residential sphere, though these gaps and missing aspects may go unacknowledged by the propertied and the powerful. Much of the urban change in residential accommodation is due to a series of compromises and concessions between parties. However, the engagements have implications beyond individual developments: while built environments can literally create distance they can have other consequences. As Delgado et al. (this volume) put it in relation to the residential complexes of Windhoek which are unaffordable to most households: “[t]hese estates are not only physically separated from the urban fabric; but…they increase the ‘distance’ between residents and local government and warp the scale of neighbourhood and city”. Thus negotiations

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and navigations also have consequences beyond the material and implications for politics and state-citizen relationships.

1.1.5 Conclusion Work on urban governance in African cities has examined the multiple configurations of urban actors, their collaborations and conflicts. This book adds to and nuances this view and demonstrates that by looking at housing in cities in Africa, the subtle, constantly shifting terrain of engagement, disengagement, and encounter spatially transforms cities. In short, understanding power relations in the urban housing sectors sheds light on how cities are spatially affected. As demonstrated in some of the contributions the actors, within predominantly networked and multi-level governance frameworks (Bevir, 2009), rarely operate in simply one mode of engagement or set of relationships. There is constant slippage between and betwixt different modes, depending on what is needed, how the acts are motivated and what seems to be the most potentially successful mode at a given moment. That is not to say that certain forms of housing production are not dominated by specific groups of actors at specific points in time, such as Butcher’ example (this volume) in Gauteng where “a small cohort of local developers dominates the production of greenfield affordable housing”, or the example of the prevalence of local homeowners and networks in Dar es Salaam. However when delving more deeply the manner in which domination is achieved it is often far more complex, and can involve multiple actors across a range of scales. Engagements between actors can also be more personal and intimate than is usually considered, with actors knowing and working with or against each other over many years. This is often not a case of faceless bureaucracies working in anonymous institutions but rather long-standing relationships (both negative and positive) between stakeholders. This also means that individuals both in and outside of bureaucracies can and do have some influence over what happens. Key figures in the cases from Cairo, Cape Town and Kigali were able to push specific outcomes and to sway the direction that decisions were taken. Whilst it is true that powerful actors still often hold sway and are able to get their way either through violent coercion or through the ability to navigate the reams of bureaucracy, those with less voice and less power are often still able to influence or moderate decisions. Through protests, the use of invited spaces, and even the courts, the more powerful are forced to hear (if not always listen) to those that are contesting their plans and ideas. Very often the courts are resorted to as a site of adjudication between actors, but their record of being able to resolve conflicts and to have their judgments acted upon is uneven at best. Examples show some contexts seeing success and the rights of the poor protected (Anand et al., this volume) whilst in others, there is little that courts can do and they end up as something of a toothless lion (Abdou; Olajide & Lawanson, this volume). It is also important to note that time makes a difference, as Abdou (this volume) points out with the mismatch in cycles between actors having the effect of throttling

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the housing co-operatives of Cairo. Political context, which authorities are in power and how their thinking is driven matters too, as played out in the world class aesthetic of Kigali or Lagos. Historical legacies (in terms of process) still dictate contemporary processes and thus outcomes, so that what has come before can be startlingly evident in the contemporary city, in the ways that actors engage, in the laws and rules that are appealed to and applied, in the very layout of the urban form. In the Cairo case study Abdou (this volume) notes that co-operatives are “surviving remnants of a long-gone socialist regime” that are still subject to an “obsolete paternalistic bureaucracy”. Motivation and discourse matter: on the one hand, many actors’ behaviour is driven by self-interest or self-protection but there are many other motivations too. Niedenhoff (this volume) identifies the world class aesthetic shaping housing interventions and Olajide and Lawanson contend that the need for Lagos to look a specific way drives the actions of the local government. In Windhoek Delgado et al. (this volume) demonstrate that there is a powerful motivation to provide a specific kind of housing, middle income complexes, that compels the actions of the various stakeholders. State aspirations or priorities are also often far removed from the needs of the poor and the marginalized, even though stated goals may be to improve their environments. Governance is not just constituted by people’s interactions but also by the artefacts and documents that they handle and exchange and the rules and laws that they enforce. In their study of a long contestation by residents against the possibility of eviction from their apartments Anand et al. privilege also “the bills, the contracts, the legal letters, the shifting terrain of policy,” and how these “are constitutive of bureaucratic rules, ideologies, knowledge, practices, subjectivities, objectives, outcomes, even the organizations themselves” (Hull [2012, 251] in Anand et al., this volume). As Cogger and Park-Ross (this volume) state, “urban land governance cannot avoid the inherent ideologies and power dynamics between various interest groups”. Housing embodies contestations between different ideological positions: ideas of what the city could or should be; how exclusion or inclusion is to be maintained. Questioning whether housing should be governed by market logic, the right to the city or some other rationale is at its most fundamental a disagreement on who should control the resources and how. Thus, we would argue that housing is an inherently political project and an exercise and expression of power, power relations and dynamics, and that housing is not just a demonstration of politics but is politics in built form. Through understanding what one sees on the ground one can begin to comprehend the power relations that exist, flourish or diminish within cities of the Global South. This has been recognised in analysis of some housing situations particularly around informal settlement and land acquisition, but our case studies show how illuminating a broad view across multiple housing types in African cities can be. Unpacking and untangling the relationships that exist, the reasons why projects are located in their specific positions and undertaken by the set of specific actors reveals the nature of who has and who does not have power within an urban or even regional environment. Agendas and interests play a key role in who is included and excluded from projects and who has ‘voice’ and ability to present their interests. Housing also offers insights into the architecture of the governance mechanisms, and instruments through and by which different actors reveal and access their needs.

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In addition, the book recognizes that housing becomes the very site of politics as self-provisioning becomes an act of political insurgence against the state and as a way of claiming a seat at the table of governance and the right to stay and be a part of the city (Von Schnitzler, 2013, p. 271). It is often through the battle for housing and other infrastructure that political sensibilities are developed (Smith, forthcoming). The book demonstrates that if we are to engage with the every-day actualities of city-building, city-making and spatial change, in African cities, then we must be willing to engage with the messy actuality of their every day lives. As with other calls from the perspective of Southern urbanism, the book tries to build on the canon of existing theory and empirical work about African urbanism. It acknowledges the high numbers of actors in the housing terrain of African cities, the multiple forms and intensity of contestation, the use of aggression by states as well as some more well-meaning but often misguided interventions, and the self-provisioning that many urban residents are forced to undertake in order to survive and thrive in these environments. The book takes seriously the idea that, as revealed through the lens of housing, urban governance in African cities is “messy”, contingent and in a state of constantly unfolding as the terrains, actors and alliances shift. Through looking at housing, the book usefully unveils the variety of power relations that exist in African cities and demonstrate how they impact on citizenship and ‘spatiality’ over time.

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Myers, G. (2015). A world-class city-region? Envisioning the Nairobi of 2030. American Behavioral Scientist, 59(3), 328–346. Obeng-Odoom, F. (2017). Urban governance in Africa today: Reframing, experiences, and lessons. Growth and Change, 48(1), 4–21. Ocheje, P. D. (2007). “In the public interest”: Forced evictions, land rights and human development in Africa. Journal of African Law, 51(2), 173–214. Oldfield, S., & Greyling, S. (2015). Waiting for the state: A politics of housing in South Africa. Environment and Planning A, 47(5), 1100–1112. Olver, C. (2017). Houses, security and comfort. In How to steal a city: The battle for Nelson Mandela Bay: An inside account (Chapter 8). Jonathan Ball. Olver, C. (2021). Power, institutions and rents in two South African cities. Area Development and Policy, 6(3), 250–270. Omedo, M., Ogutu, M., Awiti, A., Musuva, R., Muchiri, G., Montgomery, S. P., Secor, W. E., & Mwinzi, P. (2014). The effect of a health communication campaign on compliance with mass drug administration for schistosomiasis control in Western Kenya—The SCORE project. American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 91(5), 982–988. https://doi.org/10.4269/ajtmh. 14-0136 Owusu, G. (2008). Indigenes’ and migrants’ access to land in peri-urban areas of Accra, Ghana. International Development Planning Review, 30(2). Parnell, S., & Pieterse, E. (Eds.). (2014). Africa’s urban revolution. UCT Press. Parnell, S., & Pieterse, E. (2016). Translational global praxis: Rethinking methods and modes of African urban research. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40(1), 236–246. Peters, B. G., & Pierre, J. (2012). Urban governance. In P. John, K. Mossberger, & S. Clarke (Eds.), The oxford handbook of urban politics. Oxford University Press. Pierre, J. (2014). Can urban regimes travel in time and space? Urban regime theory, urban governance theory, and comparative urban politics. Urban Affairs Review, 50(6), 864–889. Pieterse, E. A., & Simone, A. M. (2013). Rogue urbanism: Emergent African cities. Jacana Media. Piper, L., & Anciano, F. (2015). Party over outsiders, centre over branch: How ANC dominance works at the community level in South Africa. Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, 87(1), 72–94. Pitcher, M. A. (2017). Varieties of residential capitalism in Africa: Urban housing provision in Luanda and Nairobi. African Affairs, 116(464), 365–390. Potts, D. (2020). Broken cities: Inside the global housing crisis. Bloomsbury Publishing. Robinson, J. (2006). Ordinary cities: Between modernity and development. Routledge. Robinson, J. (2011). Cities in a world of cities: The comparative gesture. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35(1), 1–23. Roy, A. (2005). Urban informality: Toward an epistemology of planning. Journal of the American Planning Association, 71(2), 147–158. Rubin, M. (2013). Exclusion and exceptionalism: The site of the courts in urban governance. Geocarrefour, 88(3), 207–216. Rubin, M. (2018). At the borderlands of informal practices of the state: Negotiability, porosity and exceptionality. The Journal of Development Studies, 54(12), 2227–2242. Sawyer, L. (2014). Piecemeal urbanisation at the peripheries of Lagos. African Studies, 73(2), 271–289. Sawyer, L., Schmid, C., Streule, M., & Kallenberger, P. (2021). Bypass urbanism: Re-ordering center-periphery relations in Kolkata, Lagos and Mexico City. Environment and Planning a: Economy and Space, 53(4), 675–703. Schramm, S. (2017). People’s room for manoeuvre in a fragmented city: State housing in Kibera, Nairobi. Transformation: Critical perspectives on Southern Africa, 93(1), 116–141. Smit, W. (2018). Urban governance in Africa: An overview. In C. Ammann, & T. Förster, (Eds.), African cities and the development conundrum (pp. 55–77). International Development Policy Series, Graduate Institute Publications, Brill-Nijhoff.

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Tissington, K. (2010). A review of housing policy and development in South Africa since 1994. Studies in Poverty and Inequality Institute (SPII). Socio Economic Rights Institute. Typescript. Torfing, J., Peters, B. G., Pierre, J., & Sørensen, E. (2012). Interactive governance: Advancing the paradigm. Oxford University Press on Demand. UNDP. (1997). Governance for sustainable human development—A UNDP policy document. United Nations Development Programme. http://mirror.undp.org/magnet/policy/. Accessed 1 June 2009. Von Schnitzler, A. (2013). Traveling technologies: Infrastructure, ethical regimes, and the materiality of politics in South Africa. Cultural Anthropology, 28(4), 670–693. Wafer, A., & Oldfield, S. (2015). Contesting the participatory sphere: Encountering the state in Johannesburg and Cape Town. In Bénit-Gbaffou, C (Ed.). Popular politics in South African cities: Unpacking community participation (pp. 232–247). HSRC Press. Watson, V. (2014). African urban fantasies: Dreams or nightmares? Environment and Urbanization, 26(1), 215–231. World Bank. (1989). Sub-Saharan Africa: From crisis to sustainable development. World Bank. Yeboah, I. E. (2008, December). Ethnic emancipation and urban land claims: Disenfranchisement of the Ga of Accra, Ghana. Geographical Research, 46(4), 435–445.

Margot Rubin is a Lecturer in Spatial Planning, School of Geography and Planning, University of Cardiff and is a visiting lecturer at the School of Architecture and Planning, Wits University, Johannesburg, where she was formerly an Associate Professor, South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning. She is also a Research Associate -Gauteng CityRegion Observatory, a partnership between the University of Johannesburg, the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Gauteng Provincial Government and organised local government in Gauteng, Johannesburg, South Africa. She is an editor for the journal African Studies and sits on the board for Third World Quarterly Review. Currently, she is engaged in research on urban governance in African cities, issues of housing and elite engagement with space in the Global South. Neil Klug is a Senior Lecturer and Planner, School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He has also run an urban planning consultancy since 1999. As a practitioner he has covered a wide range of projects from plan preparations, policy formulation and evaluations, to project implementation and training mainly related to low-income housing. His current research focuses are on urban governance, specifically around low-income housing policy instruments and implementation. Sarah Charlton is an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her experience in municipal government, the non-profit sector and consultancy included informal settlement upgrading and low-income housing policy and practice. Her research explores the interfaces between urban infrastructure and people’s practices, state development initiatives and urban governance. Research has included work on urban peripheries and collaborative research in Ethiopia and Mozambique. She has a doctorate from the University of Sheffield and is a Research Associate of the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies. She serves on the boards of African Studies, International Development Planning Review, and the International Journal on Homelessness.

Chapter 2

Cleaving Open the Space to Advance Spatial Justice: Promoting Inclusionary Housing in Cape Town Jonty Cogger and Robyn Park-Ross

Prologue Walking into the City of Cape Town’s (“City’s”) Municipal Planning Tribunal (“MPT”) North-Western Panel hearing room at the Goodwood Civic Centre is like walking into a time capsule from 1960. It is a red-carpeted room, with full walled wooden panels, a u-shaped wooden table surrounding an elevated podium. Behind the podium is a South African flag (replacing the old apartheid flag) followed by a string of portraits of current and old political leaders, starting with Helen Zille and a successive row of white male mayors who came before her.1 This line-up of the political leaders of the city is deeply revealing of whose interests continue to be represented in Cape Town since South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1994. Beneath the portraits sit five MPT members drawn from the planning profession, one technical advisor and one Chairperson, both from the City. The public gallery of four or five rows of chairs behind the u-shaped table are routinely empty while the MPT incrementally, site by site, decides the future of the city.

1 A list of Cape Town mayors in the pre-democracy-era can be ascertained at https://en-academic. com/dic.nsf/enwiki/5227671.

This chapter has been adapted into a full Ndifuna Ukwazi publication which can be found at: https://nu.org.za/regulating-the-private-sector/ (Ndifuna Ukwazi, 2022). J. Cogger · R. Park-Ross (B) Ndifuna Ukwazi, Cape Town, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rubin et al. (eds.), Housing in African Cities, Urban Perspectives from the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37408-1_2

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2.1 Introduction Twenty-eight years after the end of apartheid, Cape Town remains one of the most unequal cities in the world, and reflects persistent race and class segregation.2 The prospects of living in a well-located area with good access to jobs, schools, healthcare facilities, public infrastructure and safe communities are slim in Cape Town. While 76% of Cape Town’s population earn below ZAR 22,000 per month, only 34% of all formal homes cater to households in this income range (City of Cape Town, 2022, p. 19; CAHF, 2022). There is clearly a significant mismatch between how much most families earn and how much homes cost. This disconnect means that many families simply cannot afford a formal home—illustrated by the City’s prediction that 53% of homes (334,242 in total) built between 2020 and 2040 will be informal (City of Cape Town, 2022, p. 35). Racial and economic integration has not progressed sufficiently, despite being repeatedly promoted by the government as a key spatial planning and transformation priority and obligation. Instead, the slow pace of (mainly poorly located) state-assisted housing delivery and a deeply exclusionary yet largely unregulated formal property market have in many ways entrenched the spatial legacy of apartheid. It is in this context that this chapter looks at the advocacy efforts of civil society organisation Ndifuna Ukwazi (“NU”)3 over the last 5 years to compel the City to use inclusionary housing as one tool to disrupt this spatial injustice. Used throughout the world,4 inclusionary housing aims to leverage urban real estate market potential to foster economic and racial integration and produce more affordable homes in well-located areas (Jacobus, 2019, p. 1). Even though (at the time of writing), inclusionary housing is not currently in operation in Cape Town, NU has leveraged public participation for the approval of new private developments to campaign for inclusionary housing as a means to force the City to fulfil its obligations to advance spatial justice. The campaign has experienced success in that 16 private developments have included either serious considerations for, or concrete contributions to inclusionary housing and the City has agreed to develop a formal policy. This chapter reflects on some of the ideological tensions and power dynamics navigated in NU’s campaign for inclusionary housing, revealing diametrically opposed interests clashing in the land use application process. It uses the MPT decisionmaking space as a proxy for the lack of meaningfully participatory decision-making spaces in the governance system. This lack is a key contributing factor that limits the 2

By the City’s own estimates, with 359,277 people on the City’s housing waiting list as of January 2022, it is estimated that it will take over 70 years to eradicate Cape Town’s current housing backlog. 3 Ndifuna Ukwazi (NU), a non-profit activist organisation and law centre that combines research, community organising and litigation in campaigns to advance urban land justice in Cape Town. See www.nu.org.za for more information. Further details of the objection strategy and the inclusionary housing contributions will be provided in a publication entitled Ndifuna Ukwazi ‘Regulating the Private Sector: Case Studies of Inclusionary Housing Developments in Cape Town’ (2022). 4 Inclusionary housing is in place in cities in the USA, Western Europe and parts of the Global South, including Malaysia, India, Brazil and Columbia.

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transformative agenda of the Constitutional and statutory framework. These reflections make the case for a thicker form of participation in decision-making around development (particularly in relation to those who need land and housing the most), greater transformation of decision-making bodies and highlights the importance of sustained justice-oriented civil society pressure for redress. In the next section we provide an overview of inclusionary housing including the constitutional, statutory, and policy basis for inclusionary housing in South Africa. Thereafter in Sect. 2.3, we explain the objection strategy that NU uses to compel private developers and municipal decision-makers to include inclusionary housing in new private developments. In the final section, we reflect on the confluence of political and private interests involved in inclusionary housing as a microcosm of wider vested interests involved in urban land governance.

2.2 Inclusionary Housing: A Tool for Spatial Transformation 2.2.1 Origins and Objectives With roots in the civil rights movement, the notion of inclusionary housing (also called inclusionary zoning) emerged in the United States of America (“USA”) in the 1970s and has since spread to parts of Europe and the Global South, including Malaysia, India, Brazil and Columbia (Calavita & Mallach, 2010). Inclusionary housing policies aim to ensure that low-income households are not excluded from living in well-located and affluent areas, close to jobs, good schools, health care and other amenities (Ibid.). These policies, including the definition of low-income, vary widely across contexts and depend largely on the aims of the policy. For instance, in the USA these homes are predominantly targeted at households earning below 50% and 80% of the average income of the area where the housing is located, known as area median income (“AMI”) (Wang & Balachandran, 2021, p. 5). Even within South Africa the terms related to low-income and affordable housing have various understandings and meanings depending on how they are being leveraged and by who. We consider inclusionary housing as one form of affordable housing, of which there are a range of options. For the purposes of this chapter, we refer to the homes produced through an inclusionary housing approach as affordable housing in order to use the City’s only language. We define affordable housing as per the City’s own current definition that affordable homes are targeted at households earning between ZAR 3,500–ZAR 18,000 per month (USD 228–USD 1173) (City of Cape Town, 2018).5 Practically, inclusionary housing makes use of the land use (planning) approvals process to require private developers to provide a contribution to affordable housing 5

As per exchange rate on 01.03.2022.

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in the form of either affordable homes within the proposed development (on-site), on land close to the proposed development (off-site) or as a financial contribution to a ring-fenced fund (fees-in-lieu).6 As a market-related mechanism, inclusionary housing is dependent on new developments being built in order for a fair and feasible portion of the development to be set-aside for residents that would not otherwise be able to afford to live there. Therefore, this mechanism only works in ‘hot’ property markets (Jacobus, 2019, p. 3). Well-drafted policies should be based on the viability of developers to financially absorb the ‘additional cost’, making use of a range of incentives, including density bonuses, fast tracking of applications and tax credit, to off-set these costs and ensure that development proceeds (Hickey et al., 2014, p. 1). While not a silver bullet, inclusionary housing is one in a range of housing delivery tools that can be used by a local municipality to deliver affordable housing in a way that tackles, rather than entrenches spatial disparities.

2.2.2 Constitutional and Statutory Basis for Inclusionary Housing The legal basis for advocating for inclusionary housing relies on strong aspirational spatial planning obligations set out in the Constitution and national legislation—the Republic of South Africa 2013 Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act (“SPLUMA”) (Act 16 of 2013 [Republic of South Africa 2013]). A key motivation of the adoption of the Constitution in the post-apartheid era is to “[h]eal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights” (Preamble to the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa [1996]). Section 25(5) and 26(2) of the Bill of Rights create the state’s obligation to advance access to land on an equitable basis and the right to adequate housing respectively.7 Read together, these rights create an obligation for the state to actively redress spatial apartheid.8 It also disrupts a common misconception of private property ownership as an individual entitlement resistant to state intervention towards a conception where property owners welcome a social responsibility towards broader public interest objectives like spatial transformation (See Singer, 2000, p. 3; Underkuffler, 2003, pp. 45–46; Badenhorst et al., 2006, pp. 45, 51 and 65). Flowing from the Constitution, a new planning regime came into full force in South Africa in 2015. SPLUMA was established as national legislation, which aims to advance spatial transformation. It articulates the obligations of the state to advance 6

For more information on the application of on-site, off-site and fees in lieu see Thaden and Wang (2017); Calavita and Mallach (2010, pp. 34–40). 7 Section 25(5) and 26(2) of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. 8 Adonisi and Others v Minister for Transport and Public Works Western Cape and Others; Minister of Human Settlements and Others v Premier of the Western Cape Province and Others (7908/2017; 12327/2017) [2020] ZAWCHC 87.

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and support the development of spatially just cities, which are reinforced at the Provincial level in the Western Cape Land Use and Planning Act (“LUPA”) (Western Cape Provincial Government [2014] Act 3 of 2014). SPLUMA and LUPA set out progressive development principles, which apply to spatial planning, development and land use management at all levels of government, including at local level when municipalities consider any land use application.9 The principle of spatial justice in SPLUMA requires that, “spatial planning mechanisms, including land use schemes, must incorporate provisions that enable redress in access to land by disadvantaged communities and persons.”10 Importantly, land use schemes must “include provisions to promote the inclusion of affordable housing in residential land development.”11 LUPA reinforces this and requires that “past spatial and other development imbalances should be redressed through improved access to and utilisation of land.”12 The practical significance of the integrated spatial planning system established by SPLUMA and LUPA is that all land use and development decisions be spatially just, spatially sustainable and spatially efficient. The provision of affordable housing in well-located areas is therefore essential to SPLUMA’s underlying vision for spatially just cities. These principles illustrate that unfettered private residential development in well-located areas that do not have regard to the imbalances of past racial and class exclusion are detrimental to the vision of people-centred, integrated and sustainable human settlements. The City of Cape Town Spatial Development Framework (“MSDF”) reinforces these objectives and outlines a commitment to: promote a greater mix of various types of affordable housing in as many neighbourhoods as possible; adopt a spatial fair-share approach to the identification of land and/or housing opportunities for subsidised and gap housing; and increase low-income earners’ access to affordable housing that is located close to the city’s economic opportunities (City of Cape Town, 2018). Despite these lofty constitutional and statutory objectives, there is clearly a gap in implementation, with multiple private developments approved by the City that clearly maintain an unequal pattern of spatial development. Part of the problem is the City’s Municipal Planning By-law (‘the By-law’) is silent on practical ways to fulfil spatial transformation objectives. Despite the By-law’s silence on how to advance spatial transformation, in 2020 the City did agree that it already has the powers within the existing By-law to impose inclusionary housing contributions (The Trustees for the time being of the Ndifuna Ukwazi Trust v City of Cape Town [Case No.: 15767/2019]). This agreement was made in an out of court settlement of a review application that NU brought against a private development in the pursuit of legal clarity on these powers and in order to compel the City to implement an inclusionary housing policy.

9

Section 6 of SPLUMA. Section 7(a)(iii) of SPLUMA. 11 Section 24(1)(d) of SPLUMA. 12 Section 59(1)(a) of LUPA. 10

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Overall the gap between the high-level transformative framework and practical implementation effectively means that developers escape their obligation to comply with the principle of spatial justice and the associated policy commitments. Such non-compliance is not taken seriously by decision makers, who are duty bound to narrowly follow the By-law as the only decision-making instrument. NU’s objection strategy has aimed to challenge this context, which essentially entrenches spatial inequalities.

2.2.3 Inclusionary Housing in South Africa Since South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1994, the need for inclusive and sustainable cities has been a clear imperative. While the strength of inclusionary housing does not lie in producing vast quantities of housing, it has the unique potential to contribute to tackling persistent race and class spatial segregation in a way that no other housing tool in South Africa has achieved since 1994. In the context of South Africa’s history of racial discrimination and land dispossession, it is essential to maximise on the unique potential of inclusionary housing to further the objectives of spatial transformation and land reform as envisioned in the Constitution. Inclusionary housing has been on the policy agenda at the national and provincial level since at least the mid 2000s. Despite this initial traction, an apparent lack of political will and push back from private sector actors (including the South African Property Owners Association) saw this initial interest peter off (Klug et al., 2013, p. 4). Years later, after the adoption of SPLUMA and LUPA asserted spatial justice as a priority, inclusionary housing resurfaced as a policy idea, gaining traction specifically in Johannesburg and Cape Town. In 2017, NU and other civil society actors like the Development Action Group and Reclaim the City became more vocal that local governments should do more to ensure that private developers make a larger contribution to the delivery of affordable housing and the fight against segregation. In 2019, having previously established ad hoc inclusionary housing initiatives, the City of Johannesburg became the first city in South Africa to formally adopt an inclusionary housing policy (Klug et al., 2013); and City of Johannesburg, 19 February 2019). In November 2019, under mounting pressure, including from NU’s objection strategy and litigation, the City of Cape Town publicly committed to implementing an inclusionary housing policy of its own. The announcement emphasised the need for policy certainty, stating that “[i]t is necessary to develop and adopt an inclusionary housing policy to provide clarity and the right incentives to developers who are very important stakeholders to help drive our vision of greater social inclusion in Cape Town” (City of Cape Town, 10 November 2019).

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With some municipal governments now driving the charge for inclusionary housing, the provincial governments of Gauteng and the Western Cape have reignited an initial interest in the tool.13 At the local level, at least Stellenbosch Municipality and the City of Cape Town are drafting their own policies at the time of writing. Although some interesting developments in inclusionary housing are occurring in different locations across the country, this chapter will focus on the trajectory in Cape Town.

2.3 Ndifuna Ukwazi Inclusionary Housing Objection Strategy In an effort to close the gap between lofty spatial justice aspiration and daily practice, over the last 5 years NU has used a strategy of objecting to private developments. This strategy has sought to leverage the largely underutilised legislated public participation mechanisms to compel developers to include affordable housing in their developments. The aim has been to put inclusionary housing on the political and policy agenda; apply pressure on the City to implement an inclusionary housing policy; and expand the MPT’s own understanding of its role, responsibility and powers. The intention of the strategy has been to ensure that the range of other actors involved in shaping the city, including private developers, urban practitioners and private funding institutions, are forced to confront their role in entrenching spatial apartheid, and consider how inclusionary housing could be used as a tool to mitigate this exclusionary impact.

2.3.1 The Objection Process The strategy makes use of the City’s requirement to conduct a public participation process14 on all developments that require a departure, rezoning or lifting of a restriction. In this process members of the public are invited to send written comments on the developments advertised weekly on the City’s website and in a local newspaper (the Cape Argus), with at least 30 days for public comment.15 The most common objections are self-interested and individualistic in nature, including the effect that the development will have on a neighbour’s views, on traffic congestion in the area, 13

At the time of writing, the Gauteng provincial government is drafting an inclusionary housing bill and the Draft Western Cape Provincial Government Inclusionary Housing Framework Policy is awaiting final council approval—see Western Cape Provincial Government (14 May 2021). 14 See Section 79–88 of the Municipal Planning By-Law 2019 (MPBL). 15 See Section 79–87 of the City of Cape Town Municipal Planning By-Law 2019 (“MPBL), and the City of Cape Town Standard Operating Procedure for the Notification of Land Use Development Applications, 2019, Table 1, pp. 9–12; See Section 81 of the MPBL, read with Section 21(1) of the Local Government: Municipal Systems Act, Act 32 of 2000.

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or on their property prices. In contrast, NU uses the public participation process to object to exclusionary large or medium size, residential and mixed-use developments that perpetuate spatial apartheid in Cape Town. We monitor all land use applications across the city advertised weekly in order to identify unjust developments which we identify according to the following five criteria: (1) whether the development is well-located in terms of access to economic, social and cultural amenities; (2) the quantum of additional development rights that the land use application is applying for; (3) the scale of the development; (4) the nature of the development; and (5) the impact of the development based on how exclusionary the likely sale or rental costs will be. We submit written objections to developments that meet these criteria, arguing that the MPT should require the developers to provide a contribution to affordable housing. The MPT is the decision making body established by SPLUMA16 to decide development applications.17 Members of the MPT are largely professional planners who represent developers in other development applications.18 A MPT panel can adjudicate on up to fifteen proposed developments in one sitting, routinely with little to no public oversight (Fig. 2.1). The Executive Mayor is the Appeal Authority with the final decision in the application if dissatisfied parties lodge an appeal on the MPT’s decision.19 While the Mayor is empowered to act alone, in practice, at least 3 consecutive Mayors in Cape Town have appointed advisory panels constituted by members of the Mayor’s Executive Committee (“MayCo”) to make recommendations on the appeals.20 This essentially elevates the decision from a technocratic and professional level at the MPT to the political level of the City. Whilst this is not to suggest that only political motives are considered, the members of the MayCo do not necessarily have any speciality or expertise in planning matters. There are no set rules for the proceedings of the advisory panel and oral hearings are purely discretionary. The best outcome of an NU objection and submission to the MPT or the Appeal Authority is that a development is approved with “a condition of approval” for affordable housing in terms of Section 100 of the By-law, i.e. a way to improve the development by mitigating its exclusionary defect.21

16

Section 35 of SPLUMA. Section 98 and 99 of the MPBL. 18 See Section 36(1) of SPLUMA, and Section 115(2) of the MPBL. 19 See Section 109(1), read with Section 114(3), of the MPBL; See Section 108 and 109 of the MPBL. The decision letter will include the email address of the appeal authority. 20 See Section 121 of the MPBL. 21 Section 100(2) of the MPBL. 17

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Fig. 2.1 Ndifuna Ukwazi and social movement partner, Reclaim the City, attend and make oral representations at the MPT hearing for the Harbour Arch development (24 October 2019), filling the usually empty gallery for public oversight (Credit: Jared Sacks)

2.3.2 The Results of the NU Objection Strategy Through the use of creative legal research and advocacy, NU (alongside the efforts of other civil society actors) has successfully used spatial planning legislation and policy to campaign for legal and policy change. The objection strategy has had a profound impact on Cape Town development industry at the height of a development boom and the affordability crisis. After more than 5 years of sustained pressure from civil society, many actors across the private and public spectrum, including the MPT and private developers, have (sometimes reluctantly) come to accept in principle that some form of contribution to affordable housing from private developers is at a minimum a reality to avoid delays in development due to objections. There has been a discernible trend of large mixed-use developments proposing, or agreeing after our objections and negotiations, to include affordable housing to substantiate the desirability of a proposed development. In lieu of policy22 NU has (at the time of writing) objected to more than 50 private developments across Cape Town, 16 of which have demonstrated either a material contribution, or serious consideration 22

There is currently no draft or interim policy in place in Cape Town while the municipality is still in the policy drafting process.

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for inclusionary housing (Fig. 2.2). In total, this amounts to roughly 600 affordable homes, although some of these contributions have subsequently been derailed (For profile and analysis of these contributions see Ndifuna Ukwazi [2022]). Importantly, the Western Cape Provincial Government, City of Cape Town, and Stellenbosch Municipality are in the process of developing policies.

Fig. 2.2 Private developments in Cape Town with considerations for inclusionary housing

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2.4 Inertia for Transformative Change: Disjuncture Between Framework and Practice Despite the success of the strategy so far, the impact of inclusionary housing has been limited by various factors, undermining the spatial transformation impact of this tool. NU’s experience of advocating for an inclusionary housing policy in Cape Town provides insight into the severe disjuncture between the progressive redressorientated Constitutional and planning framework, and the reality of urban governance. There are a range of factors that have curtailed the progress of our strategy, including political instability; and the limitations of the MPT as a democratic space.

2.4.1 Political Instability and Policy Uncertainty A major stumbling block to achieving inclusionary housing objectives was the political instability in Cape Town during the 2018–2019 period. A few months after the start of the objection strategy, the then Mayor, Patricia de Lille and MayCo member of Transport and Development Agency (“TDA”), Brett Heron, commissioned research into a formal inclusionary housing policy.23 However, at the end of 2018 a bitter political feud between De Lille and the Democratic Alliance (the political party in government) forced her and a number of other high-level political sympathisers out of the City administration (Olver, 2019). This political vacuum left the policy making process in limbo, frustrating various role players, including civil society, developers, and decision makers. For instance, at several MPT hearings, the Chairperson David Daniels added a note to the decision urging the City to “accelerate its discussions on devising a policy to guide the inclusion of affordable housing policy in private development proposals as a matter of urgency” (For instance, see Vogue [Case ID: 70352880] and DeZitch [Case ID: 70367536]). In 2019 the Chairperson of the Western Cape Property Developers Forum (a powerful property lobby group), Deon van Zyl, stated publicly that “[i]t is vital that such a policy be established to at least in some way address the backlog of accommodation in Cape Town. But, at the same time, it also needs to give certainty to the development and construction sector in terms of how it will impact that sector in terms of feasibility” (Smile, 19 November 2019). Cape Town as a whole also suffers, with exclusive developments being approved on a monthly basis without any form of mitigation and completely contrary to post-apartheid urban governance obligations and aspirations. Although a side effect of the political instability, the in fighting was a major distraction for the policy-development process as well as the success of the objection strategy which relied on mounting pressure on developers to compel the City to fast-track the policy process. As a response to this context, we decided to litigate 23

The MayCo approved a research document titled ‘City of Cape Town Inclusionary Housing Concept Document’ in August 2018.

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against the City in the Vogue case (The Trustees for the time being of the Ndifuna Ukwazi Trust v City of Cape Town [Case No.: 15767/2019]) in order to elevate the policy as a political priority amongst the chaos of City politicking. Launching a case that directly challenged the City on its priorities proved fruitful. Just two months after instituting the Vogue case, in November 2019, the City publicly announced its intention to develop an inclusionary housing policy by the end of July 2021 (City of Cape Town, 10 November 2019). Despite these public commitments and after lengthy delays, to date the policy process has been further disrupted by the political election cycles, and the lack of consistency between the priorities of the three different mayors that have held office over the span of NU’s objection strategy. These successive political changes and the related institutional restructurings have compromised the efficiency of drafting a policy that is, at present, two years behind schedule. These protracted delays are incredibly frustrating, especially because there is a level of consensus among civil society, many developers, and city and provincial officials that inclusionary housing is a necessary policy intervention needed in Cape Town.

2.4.2 Re-claiming Decision-Making Spaces: The Role of Civil Society in Driving Change Despite very clear obligations towards spatial transformation, the current planning system is still vulnerable to Not-In-My-Back-Yard-ism (NIMBY-ism)24 —i.e. selforganised neighbourhood groups exerting political influence on politicians to “reproduce their spatial supremacy and prevent substantive transformation of the suburbs” (Appelbaum, 2019, p. 16). We have observed a pattern in private development applications that include considerations for inclusionary housing, where middle and upper class residents are able to entrench existing spatial hegemony through leveraging their influence over land use decisions (Ibid., p. 22). A prime example of this is the power that Sea Point residents’ objections had over the decision on a high-rise development with inclusionary housing. Neighbours from the surrounding areas appealed a MPT decision for the development to go ahead, mainly on the basis of height, traffic, privacy, property devaluation and the impact on their views (although the design specifically aimed to minimise this). NIMBY-ism reveals itself in the objections to varying degrees of opaqueness: “[s]eems like the developer is hoping to encourage the building of a large number of liveable homes for a lower income group. This will lower the area, which will reduce the value of properties” (15 Kloof Road, Sea Point [Case ID: 70422207]). Echoing concerns of surrounding neighbours, the Mayor and MayCo chose to deny access to additional rights through rezoning. The financial feasibility of providing inclusionary housing 24

For more information on NIMBYs generally see Fischel (2001, pp. 144–152); for an analysis of NIMBY-ism in Cape Town see Spinks (2001, pp. 26, 29, and 30).

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is most often, such as in this case, closely tied to the ability to access additional land use rights which meant that the decision to deny the additional rights effectively derailed the inclusionary housing contribution. This political decision at the end of a multiple year process of negotiating some form of affordable housing within the development saw the Mayor and MayCo essentially siding with the self-interest of neighbours at the expense of inclusive densification and the promotion of spatial justice and access to well-located affordable homes. The NIMBY tactics used in the above example are a manifestation of spatial inequality where more affluent neighbourhoods, who have access to resources, have a direct impact on decision-making processes. This narrow self-interest has successfully derailed the provision of more affordable homes in well-located areas. At the same time, the working-class people that travel long distances to work in these areas do not get a say on whether the development would benefit them (15 Kloof Road in Sea Point [Case ID: 70422207], 5 Carisbrook in the Central Business District [Case ID: 70421519] and PRASA in Diep River [Case ID: 70355981]). The impact of who is able to exercise their voice in the decision-making space around developments is to insulate these well-located communities from social and spatial change. This is largely a function of who has access to privilege in the form of location, information, time, resources and social capital to participate in the process. These private developments remain out of reach for most poor, working-class people and thus sustain the unequal status quo. It is clear that more needs to be done to galvanise broader and thicker public participation, especially from civil society groups advocating for spatial justice and those whom inclusionary housing aims to benefit.

2.4.3 The Municipal Planning Tribunal as a Democratic Space As a decision-making tribunal, the MPT has tremendous power to shape the future of Cape Town one application at a time. The outcomes of these decisions, accumulatively assessed, have the potential to either cement the socially and environmentally unsustainable trajectory of the past, or to forge a bold new urban future. The significance of these incremental decisions necessitates that the MPT be a meaningfully democratic forum, but the reality reflects a highly technocratic, untransformed and largely inaccessible space that, intentionally or not, undermines public participation. There are multiple profound structural issues that pervade this space. In a country where white people constitute 7.8% of the population (Statistics South Africa, 2020), the members are largely white, middle-aged males. Our analysis of the publicly available information on tribunal members between 2015 and June 2021 shows that the members have been 90% male and 60% white over this time (Ndifuna Ukwazi, 2022). While ideological inclinations cannot be exclusively attributed to one’s prevailing social attributes like race, class, or gender, the lack of broader gender, class and racial

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representation within the MPT is symptomatic of the lack of transformation within the planning profession generally. This reflects the need to radically shift professional roles and decision-making power into the hands of those who more honestly reflect the experience and interests of the majority of residents. Additionally, although decisions are technically open to the public, decisionmaking is obscured through a process that most people are oblivious to, and that procedurally prejudices broader public involvement in various ways. For instance, the objectors (many of whom are doing this in addition to their employment commitments) are given only a few days warning to go through the onerous and highly technical documentation—in some cases more than 3 268 pages (River club development [Case ID: 70396369])—in order to make an informed presentation to the MPT. In these few days they are also expected to arrange time off from employment commitments needed to travel to, and participate in the hearings (held during work hours). Procedural requirements, which should facilitate rather than stifle public input, are also often layered in multi-legislative processes that make it tedious at best to follow. The proceedings are often overly technical in inaccessible language, making it intimidating and difficult for those not familiar with the jargon to engage with. Multiple objectors (strangers often with strongly opposing views) are routinely expected to appoint two spokespersons at short notice to present all objections in ten minutes. This shifting of the responsibility of facilitating participation onto the public themselves is onerous, challenging and can lead to tensions between those wishing to participate. The limited time can also see opposing groups frantically negotiating for the scraps of representation amongst themselves. These aspects of the MPT raise serious concerns around the ability of ordinary residents to contribute to city building, including issues of capacity, language, literacy and time. The types and personalities of decision-makers at the MPT also deserve attention. We have observed a wide range of personal philosophies among the MPT members, which strongly influences the ability of profit driven and middle to upper class interests to influence the outcome of decisions. That members rotate makes consistency of decision-making an issue, with decisions being determined by who happens to be in the room on a given day rather than a consistent and precedent building practice. On the one hand, a bolder tribunal member is willing to explore inclusionary housing contributions, even when developers have not volunteered this contribution. Instances that reflect the role that individual boldness of tribunal members result in small gains towards more just private development include the Zero2One application in the Cape Town CBD where a 20% affordable housing was reserved for Finance Linked Individual Subsidy Program (“FLISP”) state subsidy applicants. Regardless of the merit of these contributions (because they are in no way perfect), these instances show that in lieu of policy some decision-makers have been willing to act on their legal obligations and powers to advance spatial justice through exploring inclusionary housing and testing the boundaries of what is possible and feasible. It also shows that depending on an individual’s ideology, decision-makers are not always weighed down and restricted by the influence of neoliberal property power. On the other hand, a risk-averse conservative decision-maker will hold the neoliberal property line, only imposing inclusionary housing conditions when these are

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offered by the developer, and prefer to concentrate on other, more traditional and technical, aspects of the planning application. While depoliticising institutions and decision-makers is an unrealistic goal, the current framework appears to be vulnerable to swaying political interests, especially at the appeal level. The main concern is that this leads to unpredictable decision-making that doesn’t always reflect on previous decisions and means there’s a lack of consistency and loss of institutional knowledge when a new set of MPT or AA members are selected to serve.

2.5 Conclusion Over 5 years of legal and advocacy tactics, we have learnt that urban land governance cannot avoid the inherent ideologies and power dynamics between various interest groups. Urban land governance is a complex spectrum of conflicting private and public interests. The role of administrators and politicians in managing these interests becomes particularly difficult and contested in the context of a highly unequal society with a history of systematic dispossession and spatial apartheid. To redress this past, the Constitutional and planning framework provides an obligation for the state to regulate private development to more spatially just ends, and provides the foundation for NU’s objection strategy, which has cleaved open space for democratic participation in the land use application process. Despite the foundation that this framework provides, our experience has revealed and sought to disrupt inertia from a range of public and private actors to implement the transformative vision envisioned by this framework. While there are a myriad of factors that contribute to this inertia, this chapter has reflected a selection of these factors; how political instability has undermined inclusionary housing, and has used the MPT as a lens through which to reflect on the need to reclaim decision-making spaces around development for democratic decision making. These reflections point to a need for thicker participatory processes around development and more transformed decision making bodies. Crucially, NU’s experience also points to the importance of sustained social justice-oriented civil society pressure that finds and maximises the spaces of opportunity and pressure points, including within the procedural and regulatory framework. Without these shifts and persistent campaigns, private developments will likely continue along the path of entrenching segregation.

References 15 Kloof Road, Sea Point (Case ID: 70422207). 5 Carisbrook Street, Central Business District (Case ID: 70421519).

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Adonisi and others v minister for transport and public works: Western Cape and others; Minister of human settlements and others v premier of the Western Cape province and others. (2020). ZAWCHC 87. Appelbaum, A. (2019). The micro-politics of state-led spatial transformation: The suburban middle class in a Municipal Tribunal. In M. Myambo (Ed.), Reversing urban inequality in Johannesburg (pp. 13–23). Routledge. Badenhorst, P., Pienaar, J., Mostert Silberberg, H., & Schoeman. (2006). The law of property (5th ed). Calavita, N., & Mallach, A. (Eds.). (2010). Inclusionary housing: An international perspective: Affordable housing, social inclusion, and land value recapture. Columbia University Press. Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa. Citymark South Africa Dashboard: Overview of housing stock and transactions by metro (2010–2021). https://housingfinanceafrica.org/docume nts/citymark-south-africa-eight-metro-municipalities-deeds-data-dashboard/ City of Cape Town. (2018). Municipal spatial development framework. City of Cape Town. (2019). City of Cape Town municipal planning by-law, 2015 as amended 2019. City of Cape Town. (2022). Draft integrated human settlement sector plan. City of Cape Town Mayoral Committee. (2018). City of Cape Town inclusionary housing concept document. City of Cape Town Mayoral Committee Member for Human Settlements, Councillor Malusi Booi. (10 November 2019). Feasibility analysis in the works for City’s proposed inclusionary housing policy. https://www.capetown.gov.za/Media-and-news/Feasibility%20analysis%20in%20the% 20works%20for%20City’s%20proposed%20inclusionary%20housing%20policy City of Johannesburg. (2019, February 19). Inclusionary housing incentives, regulations and mechanisms 2019. https://www.joburg.org.za/documents_/Pages/Key%20Documents/policies/ Development%20Planning%20%EF%BC%86%20Urban%20Management/Citywide%20Spat ial%20Policies/City-Wide-Spatial-Policies.aspx. DeZitch, Richwood (Case ID: 70367536). Fischel, W. (2001). Why are there NIMBYs? Land Economics, 77. Hickey, R., Sturtevant, L., & Thaden, E. (2014). Achieving lasting affordability through inclusionary housing. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy working paper WP14RHI, (pp. i). Jacobus, R. (2019). Inclusionary housing: Creating and maintaining equitable communities. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Klug, N., Rubin, M., & Todes, A. (2013). Inclusionary housing policy: A tool for re-shaping South Africa’s spatial legacy? Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 28, 4. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s10901-013-9351-8 Ndifuna Ukwazi. (2022). Regulating the private sector: Case studies of inclusionary housing developments in Cape Town. https://nu.org.za/regulating-the-private-sector/ Olver, C. (2019). A house divided: The feud that took Cape Town to the brink. Jonathan Ball. PRASA, Diep River (Case ID: 70355981). Republic of South Africa. (1996). Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. Act 108 of 1996, Issued May 2011. Republic of South Africa. (2013). Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act 16 of 2013. Government Gazette, Vol. 578, No. 36730. River Club, Observatory (Case ID: 70396369). Singer, J. W. (2000). Entitlement: The paradoxes of property. Smile FM. (November 2019) The honest truth: Inclusionary housing policy must make business sense https://smile904.fm/the-honest-truth-inclusionary-housing-policy-must-makebusiness-sense-says-property-forum/ Spinks, C. (2001). A new apartheid? Urban spatiality (fear of) crime, and segregation in Cape Town, South Africa. Statistics South Africa. (2020). Mid-year population estimates 2020. Statistical Release P0302. http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0302/P03022020.pdf

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Thaden, E., & Wang, R. (2017). Inclusionary housing in the United States: Prevalence, impact, and practices. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Working Paper WP17ET1, (pp. 41–49). https:// www.lincolninst.edu/publications/working-papers/inclusionary-housing-united-states The Trustees for the time being of the Ndifuna Ukwazi Trust v City of Cape Town (Case number 15767/2019). Underkuffler, L. S. (2003). The idea of property in law: Its meaning and power. Vogue, Central Business District (Case ID: 70352880). Wang, R., & Balachandran, S. (2021). Inclusionary housing in the United States: Prevalence, practices, and production in local jurisdictions as of 2019. Grounded Solutions Network (pp. 5). https://groundedsolutions.org/tools-for-success/resource-library/inclusionary-housingunited-states Western Cape Provincial Government. (2014). Western Cape Land Use and Planning Act 3 of 2014. Provincial Gazette, 7250. Western Cape Provincial Government. (2021, May 14). Draft Western Cape Inclusionary Housing Policy Framework. https://www.westerncape.gov.za/eadp/files/atoms/files/Draft%20WCIHPF_ PPP_13052021%20FINAL.pdf

Jonty Cogger is an attorney at Ndifuna Ukwazi Law Centre, an activist organization in Cape Town, where he specialises in constitutional property law and human rights litigation. He is part of a dynamic interdisciplinary team that has over the last five years sought to expand and protect access to affordable housing and to build a more equal and spatially just city. A central strategy of this team is to pressurise municipal planning authorities to realise their constitutional and statutory obligations to regulate land use in a manner that transforms racial and class-based segregation. Jonty Cogger also represents various communities experiencing homelessness in litigation to challenge discriminatory practices at the hands of local law enforcement. Robyn Park-Ross is a researcher at Ndifuna Ukwazi where she co-ordinates the team working on Equitable Access to Land and Housing. At the organisation she works on the release of well-located public land for affordable housing and the regulation of the private development sector towards more spatially just ends. She holds a Master’s degree in Urban Planning where her research focus was on how planning can support the integral food security function that informal trade plays in African cities. She has a special interest in people-driven, spatially-targeted solutions to issues of inequality and injustice in South African cities.

Chapter 3

The Production of Scale Through Large Private-Led Housing Developments in Windhoek Guillermo Delgado , Phillip Lühl, and Jennilee Kohima

3.1 Introduction New large-scale residential developments have emerged in the periphery of Windhoek, Namibia, purportedly presenting opportunities to tackle the housing shortage through providing liveable spaces “affordably” for thousands of people. We argue that these spaces are an iteration of an on-going and long-standing process mobilising housing for the production of surplus profit, producing an unprecedented institutional and geographical scale in Namibia. We study three contemporary cases, arguably the largest housing developments in Namibia so far. Two have begun construction (Ongos Valley and Osona Village); and one (Osona Village) has completed housing units, some of which are inhabited. The third case, Monte Christo is at an advanced planning stage. We place these cases in the context of Namibia’s urban development, which is arguably in a state of crisis. We also reflect on these developments vis-à-vis a produced land scarcity, the expansion of the municipal boundaries in 2011 and its significance for land speculation, and earlier housing developments since the 1980s. The chapter discusses the governance of the process of developing such estates, as well as the internal governance of the estates once complete. We argue that these estates are not only physically separated from the urban fabric; but that they increase G. Delgado Institute of Land, Livelihoods and Housing, Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, Namibia University of Science and Technology, Windhoek, Namibia P. Lühl School of the Built Environment, Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, Namibia University of Science and Technology, Windhoek, Namibia J. Kohima (B) Department of Architecture, Planning and Construction, Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, Namibia University of Science and Technology, Windhoek, Namibia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rubin et al. (eds.), Housing in African Cities, Urban Perspectives from the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37408-1_3

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the ‘distance’ between residents and local government and warp the scale of neighbourhood and city driven by the needs of commercial finance as much as possibly allowed by regulations. The chapter raises a number of emerging issues regarding these estates and does not aim to be conclusive, but rather to initiate a research agenda on these issues and provoke a discussion around it.

3.2 The Production of Scale and Housing in Namibia The debate about the production of scale started in the 1980s and held sway in the 1990s with the work of Smith,1 and has consolidated into a vibrant field ambitiously claiming to give a “scalar turn” to urban studies (Brenner, 2019, p. 4). One of the key tenets is to understand urbanization as “a question of scale”, ranging from geographical scales (city, region, nation, global) to other spatial fields commonly relegated to human geography or other disciplines, such as the body or the house. Others have challenged the notion of scale as a useful measure in understanding issues of social reproduction, arguing that scale creates hierarchies and reduces complex phenomena to a matter of capitalist production (Marston et al., 2005). In this piece, we use the concept of scale as a way to understand a spatial process developing throughout decades. We do not delve on the social implications on the phenomena observed, such as perceptions at the household level or across the city. We therefore rely on authors that understand scale not only as a category of analysis, but in terms of the production of scale; more specifically, on the “spatial scales produced by capital” (Smith, 2010, p. 180). In this way, one can conceptualise socio-spatial processes as being part of an on-going and long-standing trajectory expanding the field of capitalist accumulation. While there may be many drivers for this particular socio-spatial transformation of scale, here we deliberately focus on those that we argue are driven primarily by processes of accumulation of profits through housing. Specifically, we trace the geography of capital-led housing production in Windhoek by looking at the development of housing estates. Smith argues that capitalism “produces real spatial scales which give uneven development its coherence” (Smith, 2010, p. 7), opening up the full scope of scales to analysis and scrutiny: from the body to the planet. In this paper, we shed light on some of these scales and recognise that, while there are implications at other scales, these remain outside the scope of this chapter. As some of us have argued elsewhere, the 1990s in Namibia were a period where the housing policy was neoliberalized (Delgado & Lühl, 2013). This can be illustrated in the transition from a first national housing policy that was social-democratic in nature, comprehensive and to a certain degree “inclusive”; to a revision in the 2000s in which the field of “affordable housing” was activated as a site for profitdriven interests. This would follow the global zeitgeist of seeing housing as a tool to “enable markets to grow” (World Bank, 1993). This process culminated in the 2013 Mass Housing Development Programme, in which several private developers were 1

For an overview of his work, see Jones et al. (2017).

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engaged directly by government in multi-million dollar contracts to build “affordable houses” which in practical terms were credit-linked single family houses only accessible to a small number of people that by local measure were effectively middle class (Lühl & Delgado, 2016). We recognise that there has not yet been a comprehensive theorization about the production of housing or urban development in Namibia (Delgado, 2018). Some literature has posited that new gated and securitised residential developments in Windhoek are a distinct neoliberal feature circulated globally as neoliberalism itself does (Morange et al., 2012); and how this is in fact something observable in Southern Africa regionally (Bénit-Gbaffou et al., 2012). Peripheral developments in Windhoek have been the focus of scholarship since the early 1990s (Peyroux et al., 1995) to this day (Metsola, 2018), but have had a consistent focus on the poorest “informal” settlements; while this paper focuses on those developments—also part of the same phenomenon—that target the upper incomes. Theorising urban development in Namibia overall is naturally a task beyond the scope of this chapter, but we mobilise here a brief narrative framing the housing question in Namibia as a process of neoliberalization, financialization, and ultimately—as the chapter suggests—a process of production of scale. We undertook semi-structured interviews with two sets of actors. The first were the developers of the three projects.2 In two cases (Monte Christo and Ongos Valley), the engagement with these actors was through a series of public discussions organised at the university where the three authors are based.3 The authors visited the Osona Village development to interview the developers at the site office and examine the development. The actors were requested to deliver a general presentation about the project, after which we prompted presenters to tease out governance-related aspects. The second set of actors were professionals in the town planning and land surveying discipline, an experienced official in local government affairs, and a senior official at the City of Windhoek. Actors were presented with the objectives of the research, and verbally agreed to participate. With the available resources, it was beyond our reach to trace the initial developers of the three earlier housing estates discussed here (Omeya, Elisenheim and Finkenstein estates). However, these are mainly used as references; the focus remains instead on the three more recent developments. To triangulate the information we gathered extensive documentation about all the developments, including: plans, articles of registration, property management documents, rules and regulations, environmental plans, architectural guidelines, and promotional material. Relevant newspaper articles were also consulted. We are familiar with all

2

In the cases of Osona Village and Monte Christo the main developer was interviewed; and in the case of Ongos Valley the developer’s sales team was interviewed. 3 The Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST). These conversations took place with most participants present via online platforms due to Covid-19 restrictions and are available online for further consultation. See: https://ilmi.nust.na/public-outreach.

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developments and have visited them on various occasions. We analysed the information gathered in a series of workshops. The information was organised chronologically and in terms of the process (conception, development, sale, maintenance); the product itself (the housing estate); and other specific aspects that appeared to speak directly to the hypotheses formulated at the onset, such as the land development model, the funding strategies, and the governance of both the process and the product. This material is also to serve as a basis for further teaching and inquiry at the university where we are based through a dedicated programme on housing.

3.3 Housing in Namibia, and the Production of Urban Land Scarcity in Windhoek 3.3.1 The Housing Crisis The decades preceding Namibia’s independence from South Africa in 1990 were marked by the consolidation of apartheid spatial policy in rural and urban areas. This was done by arguable the most comprehensive planning of the territory by the 1964 “Odendaal Plan”,4 which built on foundations laid by the earlier German colonial occupation. Municipalities and corporations were held liable to provide rental housing for their black urban labour force and a system of urban influx control was policed through infamous pass laws (Hishongwa, 1992). Landownership for blacks was generally not permitted, which only changed under a reformist transitional government from 1977 to 1983 when much of the racially discriminatory legislation was gradually repealed (Simon, 1996). A state-owned enterprise was established in 1978 deliberately to deliver homeownership for blacks in urban areas through credit-linked housing provision. Setting aside a critical assessment of the objectives and ways of such enterprise, the company was known to be competent and delivered considerable numbers of housing units through a professional-led approach. At independence the company was transformed into the National Housing Enterprise (NHE) but with the rapidly escalating migration to urban areas and rising need, housing production through this mechanism quickly became negligible vis-à-vis the need. To put this in perspective, the population in urban areas currently grows between 3 and 4% annually. This represents a need of 30,000 new housing opportunities every year (Asino & Christensen, 2018). The NHE delivered less than a hundred units annually during 2009–2014, despite considerable state support (NHE, 2014). While such slow pace of delivery can be attributed to institutional shortcomings, changing roles of the state in housing delivery, and land shortages; a structural factor may well be the increasingly questioned reputation of state-owned enterprises in Namibia regarding corporate governance and delivery (Weylandt, 2016). The meagre outputs 4

The Commission of Enquiry into South West Africa Affairs, or Odendaal Commission, named after the lead Commissioner, was established by the South African government to promote the closer integration of the territory into the political and economic structure of apartheid South Africa.

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of state-owned housing enterprises indicated above vis-à-vis the cost of running entire institutional apparatuses with public funds in a context of economic depression, is furthermore taking a toll on the legitimacy of state operations at large. In this chapter we focus on the changing role of the state in housing production. The aggravating situation regarding living conditions in urban areas along with the search for a “legacy project” for outgoing president Pohamba (2005–2015), led Government to launch the Mass Housing Development Programme in 2013. It was conceived as the largest state intervention since independence, and aimed to construct 180,000 houses until 2030. This attempt quickly became mired in mismanagement and corruption, resulting in only a few thousand houses. But more importantly its overt focus on expensive, credit-linked housing production through a contractor-led approach coordinated by the NHE did not meet the effective demand in the various localities, resulting in a high degree of vacancy for years after completion of houses. The lack of proactive land servicing as part of the programme furthermore led it to consume considerable portions of available land serviced by local authorities, at the expense of other housing initiatives. The key omission was, however, a lack of any support for the Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia (SDFN) in the context of this programme. SDFN is a grassroots movement which has achieved more improvements of living conditions to the urban poor than any other organisation (Chitekwe-Biti, 2018). This omission has been accounted as the result of an “incremental approach”5 in the implementation of the programme. The argument was that the first phase would focus only on the sub-programme of delivery of credit-linked housing; while others, like the one focused on “People’s Housing Processes”, would be implemented later on. This appears today rather as an act of dispossession of public resources from the very poorest, to channel them to housing projects yielding profits to contractors and ultimately benefitting those in better off conditions (i.e. those with regular income) amongst the vast number of those in need of housing.

3.3.2 Windhoek, and the Production of Land Scarcity Windhoek is a paradigmatic case in urban development in Namibia. It is by far the largest urban area, the most technically capacitated local authority and has the largest economic base to ensure adequate revenue collection. However, rapid population growth, increase in informal settlements, restrictive and compartmentalised land use, inflated land values, increasingly scarce natural resources, and public health crises make the situation critical for most of the inhabitants of the City. In the coming three decades, an additional two million people will be living in urban areas (Lühl & Delgado, 2018); and most of this growth is expected in the Khomas region, whose virtually only urban area is Windhoek (Asino & Christensen, 2018). Windhoek has less than half a million inhabitants, but it is by far the largest urban area in the 5

In the context of our engagements with government and other partners, this has been the way that the exclusion of SDFN in the first round of the MHDP has been accounted for.

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country, with the second largest being nearly five times smaller (NSA, 2017). The city is unequal and, therefore, living standards comparable to those found in the socalled Global North coexist along vast extensions of informal and precarious settlements providing sub-human living conditions. This inequality is in part produced by processes like the active production of land scarcity. The mandate for the delivery of serviced land lies with local authorities as per the Local Authority Act of 1992 and its amendments. Until the recent promulgation of the Urban and Rural Planning Act (URPA) of 2018,6 various pre-independence town planning ordinances regulated the administrative process to turn land into titled property (Ulrich & Meurers, 2015). In addition, the Subdivision of Agricultural Land Act of 1970 regulates the process of urban expansions into formerly agricultural land, and an array of further legislation requiring the involvement of various professions is applicable in land delivery. This professionalised fragmented regulatory framework resulted in the statutory land delivery process taking up to 34 months from land to stand (Tjipetekera, 2014). As anticipated as URPA has been, it does not substantially alter the existing framework that enhances land scarcity. Since the 1990s, the City of Windhoek has been experiencing a lack of access to serviced land for the urban poor in particular and a related shortage of housing delivery. This slow pace and market-driven nature of land and housing delivery in a context of a majority of urban residents with extremely low incomes has contributed to the sprawling of informal settlements northwest of the city. However, despite some state-led approaches to support low-income housing delivery,7 in this chapter we focus on the middle- and high-income groups who are able to participate in the property market, essentially defined by mortgage lending. It is important to understand how this market segment dispossesses the lowest income groups from the benefits of serviced urban land through speculation. Simultaneously the effective curtailing of supply of serviced land has resulted in large increases in land and property values in these segments. This has partly been attributed to the now suspended sale of serviced land through public auction. Until recently, this was one of four land delivery methods, alongside offer to purchase, tenders and private treaty. Public auctions favoured the highest bidder, which maximised revenue for local authorities. Middle and high-income groups would buy property through private land developers who recuperate the full cost of land servicing. Scarcity is further exacerbated by Windhoek’s geographical constraints, as it is surrounded by hills and mountains to the east, south and west of the city, further increasing the cost of providing services, especially for sewerage. Such constraints have prompted a leap beyond the mountains (Omeya, Elisenheim and Finkenstein estates) through subdivisions of agricultural 6

As the Act became fully functional only in 2020 it is difficult to evaluate its impact on the land delivery process. Preliminary analysis suggests that approval processes will be faster as two separate approval boards have been merged. 7 Apart from the existing programmes (Lühl & Delgado, 2016), the latest effort in Windhoek is an “Informal Settlement Upgrading” programme that was launched in 2020 as a partnership between the Ministry of Urban and Rural Development, the City of Windhoek, the Khomas Regional Council and the National Housing Enterprise; aiming to develop around 600 houses at a total cost of N$65 million (The Namibian, 2020).

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land. Windhoek Municipality remains therefore a generally hostile place for bottomup, co-productive land delivery processes by organised communities and NGOs who do not have earning a profit as an objective. While central government supports these endeavours, none of the bottom-up efforts have had any substantial land delivery achievements in Windhoek.8 This reflects in part the overall stance of the Municipality, which in its most recent strategic plan is branded with “a smart and caring city” as a tagline (City of Windhoek, 2018), but remains less legible with respect to actual measures for integrating a former apartheid city. The failure of Windhoek to support bottom-up-led land delivery exacerbates the scarcity and delays further the promise of transformation.

3.3.3 Early Private Housing Estates and Expansion of the City’s Boundary The land scarcity created within the municipal boundaries of Windhoek provided incentives for developers to create private housing estates along the main national highways to the north, south and east of the city. Ordinarily, the city’s growth developed through so-called “township extensions” continuous to the urban fabric; with only some recent developments expanding the fabric through development “pockets” separated from the main fabric of the city. Two of the three housing estates we will introduce here were developed on subdivisions of hitherto agricultural land outside the municipal boundary, and thus required approval by the Khomas Regional Council9 and the Ministry of Agriculture, instead of the Windhoek Municipality. Finkenstein Estate is a residential development 12 km east of Windhoek which was developed on subdivided agricultural land around 2007. The development comprises 222 erven and is governed by the Finkenstein Homeowners Association. Individual properties in the estate are large (1 hectare on average) and landowners are allowed to develop and fence-in only about a quarter of the land to allow the free movement of game throughout the estate.10 While design guidelines exist the individual articulation of properties is encouraged. More recently the estate has been complemented with the Finkenstein Manor and Village residential development of 260 additional erven between 400 and 700 m2 , which provide denser and architecturally harmonised (plot and plan) development.11 It is telling to observe how the sense of abundance 8

A newly-established NGO has in its three years of existence been developing 2,000 land opportunities; and the Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia supported by the Namibia Housing Action Group are currently developing 5,000 land opportunities in ten different local authorities (National Alliance for Informal Settlement Upgrading, 2020). Also see: http://dw-namibia.org/low-cost-landfor-housing-2021-outlook/. 9 The Khomas Regional Council is the regional governing authority serving all areas falling outside local authority jurisdiction in the Khomas region, where Windhoek is located. Namibia has currently fourteen regions. 10 www.finkenstein.org, accessed on 04.06.2021. 11 www.finkensteinmv.com, accessed on 04.06.2021.

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conveyed by the land sizes and other aspects of these estates stands in contrast with the overall land scarcities in Windhoek. Omeya Golf Estate was initiated in 2010 and is situated 30 km south of Windhoek on the B1 highway. It is governed by the Omeya Homeowners Association and is marketed to provide a “care-free lifestyle to people in all phases of life”. Once complete the estate will consist of 384 residential erven, 14 townhouse developments with approximately 240 units, a retirement village with a care centre, a private school, a business village and an 18-hole golf course, altogether housing about 900 families. The marketing brochure emphasises the notion of a “harmonious community” and foregrounds a Christian orientation in through its primary school curriculum and a community church.12 These objectives extend into the aesthetic realm as homeowners are contractually bound to extensive architectural guidelines that aim to enable a “unique cohesive architectural character” for the development.13 Elisenheim Lifestyle Village Estate is situated 15 km north of Windhoek within the old municipal boundary with a total land area of 1186 hectares of which 628 hectares is for 6,000 residential units, as well as commercial, business, institutional educational uses while 558 hectares is held in reserve for environmental conservation. The land was rezoned for urban development in 2007/2008 and the Elisenheim Owners Association governing the estate was established in 2012.14 The association is guided by conduct rules, and extensive design and town planning guidelines and an environmental management plan. The estate is marketed as providing the market with an affordable opportunity for homeownership in response to the shortage of residential properties. As the estate was planned form the outset within the municipal boundaries, municipal standards with regard to all infrastructure development were adhered to and the infrastructure was since handed over to the city council for maintenance purposes. In 2011 the then Ministry of Regional, Local Government and Housing (MRLGH) (today Ministry of Urban and Rural Development) led the expansion of the municipal boundaries of Windhoek, increasing its area of jurisdiction nearly eight-fold over surrounding large-scale commercial farms (City of Windhoek, 2018) (see Fig. 3.1). There are different narratives that the authors were able to document. The first one is that the then Minister at MRLGH, after a trip to China and being exposed to much larger cities there, decided that the solution to the capital city’s land shortage was to expand its municipal boundary. In Namibia, ministers often do not have disciplinary knowledge related to their portfolio, and often anecdotal evidence and linear cause-effect understandings override evidence-based decisions. In this case, the minister had reasoned that if the housing crisis was caused by the lack of available land, then availing more land would solve the issue. This is despite increasing awareness and calls from grassroots organisations that the actual need is for serviced land to be released to the lowest income groups for development through partnership approaches (Delgado et al., 2020). The expansion of boundaries of urban areas 12

Omeya Welcome Brochure downloaded from www.omeya.com.na on 11.12.2020. Omeya Architectural Guidelines downloaded from www.omeya.com.na on 11.12.2020. 14 www.elisenheim.com, accessed on 04.06.2021. 13

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normally follows a “bottom-up” approach, in which local authorities present a motivated submission to the statutory bodies within central government. However, in this case the process was inverted, and the line ministry led the process. It is not well documented how the local authority received this and which other interests were involved (e.g. neighbouring privately-owned commercial farms). The measure appeared to be an isolated decision rather than a measure within a wider planning strategy. A more common narrative suggest other agendas behind this intervention. It posits that at some stage, central government perceived that the higher income groups were “fleeing” the city to the high-income estates introduced above, and therefore represented decreasing Municipal revenue and political influence; hence the need to “recapture” them within the city’s jurisdiction. Another, linked to the previous, is a more politicized one; which states that the more radical members within the (largely black) ruling party saw wealthy (largely white) residents escaping the city and therefore the need to prove there was no “escape” from a black government in “the new” Namibia. In this way, these developments represent an “African urban fantasy” in reverse (Watson, 2014); representing a reactionary utopia led by a small monied minority, elite. It is documented that the access-controlled estates reminded the minister of Apartheid spatial segregation and the control of domestic staff reminded him of the

Fig. 3.1 Map of Windhoek indicating surrounding private housing estates (Source Authors, 2021)

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infamous pass laws.15 Some narratives argue that this was the underlying reason for the minister’s instruction to the city council to expand the municipal boundaries. The expansion of the municipal boundary had as a direct consequence that large swathes of agricultural land were turned into potential developable urban land overnight. Previously, this required approval by the Khomas Regional Council and the then Minister of Agriculture, Water and Forestry to allow subdivision for urban development. Farms within the new boundary were instantaneously exempted from the provisions of the Agricultural (Commercial) Land Reform Act of 6 of 1995, including payment of land tax and the state’s right of first refusal for farmland on sale, based on the “willing buyer willing seller” principle underpinning land reform (Werner, 2015). In this way the agricultural land, especially that situated in accessible areas close to the major highways out of Windhoek, increased in its potential land value through a change from being measured in hectares to square metres. A municipal town planner who conceptualised the expansion at the time held that the expansion was considered to provide the means for the city council to control planning and management of private urban development in the absence of municipal financial resources to fund urban development. She conceded that the implications of the extension on land values increases were not considered and attributes this to the lack of integrated planning at the Municipality, with divisions of forward planning and planning control located in separate Departments.16 This chapter does not aim to reach conclusions about the boundary expansion, but to demonstrate its significance for the leap in scale and transformations in governance.

3.4 The Three Housing Developments Ongos Valley Development Project is a recent private urban development comprising 1,743 hectares of land 14 km north-west of the Windhoek Central Business District (CBD), beyond the former black township of Katutura. It is planned to become a 28,000-dwelling mixed-used village that will include more than 20 schools, numerous malls and service stations, as well as institutions and businesses valued at N$25 billion. The developers refer to Ongos Valley ‘as a city, within a city’ rather than a suburb and hold that this would reduce the need for commuting (Ongos Valley, 2021: online). The developer maintains that Ongos Valley is a response to the critical need for affordable housing in Namibia. This is facilitated by a purpose-designed rentto-own financial instrument that aims to facilitate previously non-bankable persons to become bankable over a period of five years of renting their future property and access a mortgage bond to purchase it. It is thus apparent that the target market is an emerging middle class rather than the established middle- and high-income target market of the earlier estates. This equally has implications for the scale of the intervention. It offers single residential erven with sizes ranging from 300 m2 to 370 m2 15 16

Interview with a former planner at CoW. Interview with a former planner at CoW.

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priced from N$654,000 to N$1,029,000 (USD 34,000–USD 54,135) (Ongos Valley, 2021: online). The Monte Christo Development is integrated into the “Harambee Valley” urban development project that aims to develop a new symbiotic urban settlement close to Windhoek in anticipation of the creation of a future Windhoek metropolitan region. It has an area of 3,811 hectares, and it is estimated to house 50,000 dwellings with a targeted population of 185,000 people. It is located northwest of the city, approximately 20 km from the CBD beyond Ongos Valley. Monte Christo is marketed to incorporate a “traditional African design” in the form of “fractal villages” grouping houses around a centre (A1V2, 2017, p. 2). Several fractal villages together form a cluster or “fractal subcentre” with a higher level of urban amenities and surrounded by “circle parks” and ecological zones. The developer also stressed in his presentation that the development aims to be inclusive for a broader range of income groups, with a specific portion called the “Free Town” dedicated for construction workers involved in the project. Lastly, Osona Village is located approximately 60 km north of Windhoek in the Okahandja municipal area and covers 1100 hectares. It is a new settlement aiming to develop at least 10,000 dwellings units, a vocational training campus, a light industrial area, and land for institutional and commercial buildings (Dennis Moss Partnership, 2019: online). This project is an initiative supported by the Government Institutions Pension Fund to build houses affordable to uniform officers and civil servants. It promises to deliver low-income housing with erf sizes ranging from 330 m2 to 414 m2 priced from N$575,000 to N$1,059,000 (USD 30,250–USD 55,713) (Dennis Moss Partnership, 2019: online).

3.5 Thinking Through Governance We discuss two kinds of governance in this chapter. The first one deals with the governance in the process of the production of housing, while the second one on the governance of the housing development itself.

3.5.1 Regarding the Governance of the Process of Production of Housing The role that the local government plays in these developments is arguably shrinking. From being historically the developer of land extensions for housing, today local government’s role is reduced to a stakeholder to be consulted. In some of the cases it is convened to facilitate some accompanying measures enabling the implementation of the project. In all of the projects discussed here, the delivery of municipal services remains primarily the responsibility of the developers, while in one case (Osona) the infrastructure will be eventually “handed over” to the local authority

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(Okahandja). As the city official argued, these developments represent “no economic benefit to the city”, admitting that it is private developers who are “at the benefitting end”. He elaborates by saying that the rates and taxes raised within these developments “do not even come close to what is required for infrastructure management and other replacements”. Some developments (Ongos) require infrastructural interventions such as roads, that even as they may become funded through the project will require municipal intervention to manage the significant displacement that will be caused in one of the most populated and vibrant areas of the city. Traditionally, only larger local authorities were able to provide services and bulk infrastructure, with smaller local authorities relying on capital budget applications to central government for this purpose. However, as one of the developers argues, the idea of “big infrastructure [i.e. reliance of large state-owned utilities] is from the past”, explaining that today there are solar solutions, small treatment plants, and other off-grid solutions allowing new developments to take place fairly independently from the city’s grid. From this perspective “this reliance on bigger infrastructure is not feasible anymore”, signalling a change in the governance of urban services in the future. One can also speak of the structural impossibility of achieving actual “low cost” in these developments in order to reach the larger numbers of people in the lower income groups. In this case, this has significantly to do with the City’s approach to standards and investment imperatives. As one of the town planners put it, “the city wants to get a certain standard, while the developer could be thinking of a low-cost solution”. From this point of view, it is not the lack of more affordable options for land servicing and housing that raises costs, but the fact that “the city needs to protect its infrastructure”. However, as one of the developers argues, “the same standards of 1970s are kept”, which ensures some durability with maintenance costs that match with the income levels of the inhabitants. In short, even as private sector logic was able to reduce costs, official regulations would impede the execution of these based on their standards. Structurally, even with innovations that make infrastructure more sustainable or housing options more affordable, the municipal regulations remain a bottleneck. This emerges here as a factor in the repositioning of the municipality’s role from key driver/implementer to one of a regulator which, in this case, limits affordability.

3.5.2 Regarding the Governance of the Housing Development One feature of large housing developments is the recourse to sectional titles known as condominiums. This is governed by legislation separate from that of the ordinary land delivery process (Sectional Titles Act 1971 as amended), which allows one to circumvent some of its restrictive aspects such as the minimum land sizes. This impacts the governance of the housing development itself, as sectional titles require internal governance for the management of the development in question. For

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instance, in the case of Osona, the in-between spaces outside the boundary of the sectional title becomes the responsibility of the management company. Elsewhere in the city, the management of these spaces (e.g. streets, parks) is the responsibility of the local authority. In Elisenheim, the infrastructure, once completed by the developers, was transferred to the local authority for maintenance purposes. The phenomenon in question here is a property management company or the body corporate of the sectional title development acting as the de facto local government. This is relevant even if only temporary in nature, as it signals that a third party is needed to mediate between inhabitants and the local authority.

3.5.3 Peaceful Separation, Violent Urban Form While the first generation of large residential estates in the outskirts of Windhoek may have been an elite-driven retreat from the city, the fact that the second generation focuses instead on “affordable housing” seems to suggest it is not aimed at the elite but a substantially larger and hitherto under-serviced middle-income market. With the higher-end “housing market” effectively saturated in the city—and, perhaps, throughout the country—the needs of lower income groups becomes the focus of developers. However, to achieve the profits required to incentivise private investment, two key aspects appear to be a prerequisite: some form of public subsidy (e.g. in the form of land and bulk infrastructure, or end-user finance or other demand-side stimulus) and scale. The latter refers to a critical number of units that, cumulatively, would yield sufficient profit for private investment to realise itself. This influences some aspects of the project that can be best understood in these terms: for instance, the location of the project beyond the periphery of the built-up urban area, allowing large extensions for development that are not anymore available within more central areas. Another feature might be the materiality of the houses themselves, which are built in the image of high-income housing including spatial features such as en-suite bathrooms and swimming pools, but executed with the most affordable materials available and minimally dimensioned. This suggests that a new product, something we would call affordable luxury, is at play here. This is a key difference between the first and the second generation of large residential estates. As the local government expert states, earlier estates were “more like gated communities, whose aim was not to solve the housing question, but how to peacefully separate [from the “chaotic”, “dirty”, or “dangerous” city]”. One of their key features is their securitised nature, which creates a defensive stance even when their geographical location may be at a considerable distance from the urban fabric itself. Current housing developments in contrast, he argues, aim at creating a balance of income groups; in some cases (Monte Christo) making provision for the lowest income groups (i.e. construction workers). However, the main target groups in the three developments are in practice those with formal employment; which in the

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context of Namibia represent the minority.17 These projects in effect capitalise on social pressure for government to enable housing and urban land delivery. Housing and urban land delivery in Namibia is a generally welcome event, even if the product delivered is not reachable for most. These projects aim at capturing as many potential buyers as possible, through flexible arrangements such as “rent-to-own” schemes and collective purchasing options (Ongos). These measures are branded as ways to making housing inclusive and affordable,18 but from the perspective offered here, this instead appears more as casting the housing finance net wider; more specifically, commercial finance. This precision is necessary as there is no subsidy entailed in this equation and no system of grants available that could potentially bridge the gap between the clients of developments like Ongos and comparable commercial property available elsewhere in Windhoek through commercial finance. The success of these schemes remains to be seen, as while higher income groups can afford to “peacefully separate” themselves (e.g. paying transport costs, accessing economic opportunities wherever needed), in other similar but higher-end developments, the impact that the separation will have on those lower-income groups inhabiting these new housing developments remains to be seen. It therefore appears that for the case of Windhoek, new large-scale housing developments are profit-led and require a distinct scale and governance to take place. The warping of scales in terms of new developments is worth noting, as it is shifting not only the governance of the process of housing development but also expanding the size of the urban fabric at unprecedented leaps. More specifically, the governance of the production and management of these housing developments has changed. For the former, the private developer becomes the driving force of many—if not nearly all—aspects related to the development; for the latter, the places produced become effectively run by either a property management company or a body corporate. While the narrative of provision of urban land for housing is popular vis-à-vis the housing crisis, more sustainable but perhaps more complex or less profitable options such as informal settlement upgrading, densification, and mobilisation of underutilised land are less explored. The argument here is that the developments in question require and effect a transformation of scale between the house, the neighbourhood and the city in order to exist, which is laid bare in slogans such as that of “a city within a city”. A corollary of this would be “you don’t live in a neighbourhood, but in a city within a city”. This suggests a form of rescaled and privatised urban governance creating a mental conception of “a city” with “luxurious-yet-affordable” housing options.

17

According to the Namibia Labour Force Survey, two-thirds of those who are considered to be employed find themselves in the so-called “informal” sector (NSA, 2019). 18 Sources: Monte Christo https://www.a1v2.pt/en/portfolio/development-plan/ and Ongos https:// www.ongosvalley.com.na/.

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3.5.4 The Expansion of the Surface for Further Scale Production The expansion of the city’s boundaries is essentially what enabled the large-scale developments being discussed here (except Osona) to exist. While the rationale behind it remains contested, it is possible to agree with the local government expert who sees this as “a political statement, with far-reaching consequences”. These include exponential inflation of land prices, expansion of the jurisdiction of a municipality that is not able to cope with its current mandate, and ultimately signalling that what is required to address the housing crisis in urban areas is “more land”. This is coupled with the absence of directives regarding the governance of commercial farms in terms of land tax. Another recognisable feature in the reasoning behind the expansion of the municipal boundaries is the mental conception that the local government expert describes as “a mentality of the village”. This refers to the “bigger is better” approach to one’s urban household, applied in this case to the scale of the urban fabric; which is antithetical to densification and more economic use of urban land. This therefore renders the process of expansion of the city a political exercise, even in the scenario of an ill-informed decision. Key in the rescaling process is the expansion of the boundaries of the city of Windhoek. Across the different narratives about this, it is safe to say this was a political decision that expanded the limits of a kind of state-led capitalist urbanization and control. This significantly transformed the “property market”. Agricultural land prices, while obeying also real estate dynamics, are only a small fraction of what urban land prices are. Overnight, entire settlements and the three large housing estates of the first generation were located within city boundaries. The municipality was bypassed in this decision and the primary beneficiary of these estates are developers themselves. The municipality’s role in the processes described in this chapter appears—again as in the case of the development of large-scale housing estates—as secondary. The scalar production documented here contributes to the literature as it presents a case with distinct specificities related to the context and situation, such as a stateled intervention by a government with limited economic and technical capacity, implemented by a well-endowed and technically capable local authority, and private developers operating in a deeply uneven context with a very limited margin for profit-led housing.

3.6 Conclusion As mentioned above, this chapter aims to raise emerging issues of a research agenda focused on the significance of large scale housing developments in Windhoek. However, some preliminary conclusions can be drawn subject to further investigation and analysis. Firstly, is the argument of the expansion of the market frontier in landed investments through such developments. As large-scale investments in

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single family housing are increasingly difficult to realise within the confines of the existing urban fabric, the geographical frontiers are expanded, and new territories are activated for the production of a housing product suitable for profit. Such housing emerges at the intersection of profit-led investment and official regulations setting a minimum that often is above what the private sector would be able to offer; which is in any case considerably above the affordability threshold of the vast majority. These interventions are enabled by measures like the expansion of city boundaries, which emerges as a political act that in effect enables a form of state-led capitalist urbanization. This round of expansion, differently from the earlier one which was perhaps ‘escapist’ and selling ‘lifestyle’ as a luring factor for higher incomes, aims to capture the remaining market niches (frontiers) in the lower middle-income groups. This round emerges also as a more corrosive iteration, raising questions on the effects that these peripheral developments will have for those who might not necessarily be able to afford “peaceful separation” from the opportunities of the urban fabric. Furthermore, the execution of the house is “bipolar”, conveying affluence at the visual level but delivering spatial and material scarcity. Further research is also required to assess the quality of the infrastructure provided and the financial mechanisms enabling these projects. Particularly on the latter, it remains to be clarified whether it is indeed the “end user” who is financing not only the production of the housing unit and its environs, but also the profits of those involved for commercial purposes. What is then the role of “the public” in such developments? Local government appears as “a party to be consulted”, a fixer of the consequences of these interventions (e.g. handling the displacement caused by the widening of a road required for a project), and the enforcer of standards, clearly not having a leading role in these operations. Homeowner associations and property management companies appear to perform the role that local government performs in ordinary neighbourhoods elsewhere in Windhoek. The notion of being “a city within a city” therefore conveys the message of a separate reality from that governing the “actual city”. However, the long-term liabilities in this operation of separation appear to be squarely placed on inhabitants themselves and, in some cases, eventually on the local authority. The private developer, currently leading actor in the equation, does not appear to have a role in the medium to long term. In conclusion, a clear shift or warp of scale appears to be taking place through the emergence of such housing developments. These appear to be a new iteration in a sequence of capital-led interventions in urban development producing housing estates that are increasingly larger in size, geographically further away from the city’s fabric, targeting larger numbers and lower incomes, transforming the governance of both housing production and of the running of the places themselves. This chapter presents a case for a broader research agenda focused on in-depth studies of each of the cases mentioned, as well as for other studies exploring this with a more quantitative focus. Further research on each of these phenomena is required to understand more about the nature and direction of urban development in Namibia, as well as the way capital behaves as it reaches its limits for expansion through spatial production.

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Websites A1V2. (2017). Monte Christo development plan. Retrieved from: https://www.a1v2.pt/en/portfolio/ development-plan/ Dennis Moss Partnership. (2019). Osona Village, Okahandja-Namibia. Retrieved from: http://www. dmp.co.za/projects/osona/ Finkenstein Estate. (2020). Finkenstein homeowners association: Design manual. Retrieved from: https://www.finkenstein.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/2023_DesignManualRevised 21June.pdf Omeya Golf Estate & Residential Oasis. (2018). Welcome Pack Brochure. Retrieved from: https:// omeya.com.na/sites/default/files/Welcome%20Pack%20brochure.pdf Ongos Valley Development. (2021). Ongos Valley—Your own home starts here. Retrieved from: https://www.ongosvalley.com.na/

Guillermo Delgado is an architect born in Mexico and based in Namibia. He is senior lecturer at the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, at the Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST); where he directs the Institute for Land, Livelihoods and Housing. He was part of the leadership of the team that revised the national housing programme and policy in Namibia, and has served on different task teams, panels and committees of national projects on housing and urban land. He has taught a variety of courses and supervised master and PhD theses. He holds an architecture degree from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City; a masters in architecture from the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, the Netherlands; and a doctoral degree in architecture and planning from the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He has

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worked in several projects focused on urban development, land rights, governance, housing, social protection, informal settlements, and co-productive spatial practices. Phillip Lühl holds a PhD in architecture from the University of Westminster, UK and a Master of Science in Architecture with distinction from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. In 2011 he helped establish the first school of architecture in Namibia at the Namibia University of Science and Technology, a school now called the Department Architecture, Planning and Construction. Since 2023 he heads the School of the Built Environment as Associate Dean. His research focus includes housing, participatory design and planning, urban informal economies, and more generally socio-spatial cultural production. He has led the technical team reviewing the National Housing Policy as well as the Mass Housing Development Programme for the Ministry of Urban and Rural Development and acted in various advisory capacities for housing- and land-related matters in Namibia. Phillip is a registered architect and has completed a range of projects from built work to local and international exhibitions, aiming to bridge the practice-research divide. Jennilee Kohima is a Spatial Planning Lecturer in the Department of Architecture, Planning and Construction at Namibia University of Science and Technology. She obtained her Bachelor of Technology in Land Management specializing in Land Use Planning from Polytechnic of Namibia, Master of Science in Land Management and Land Tenure from Technical University of Munich and both Bachelor Honours in Spatial Planning and Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from University of the Free State (UFS). She has over 15 years work experience in the public, private, development and academic sectors in various development and planning fields. Currently she is a PhD candidate at the University of Free State, and her research interests are on issues of urban informality, land use management, bottom-up planning, urban planning policy and practice, housing and governance, and planning education.

Chapter 4

Making Land ‘Developable’ for Market-Driven Affordable Housing in Gauteng, South Africa Siân Butcher

4.1 Introduction In Johannesburg, South Africa, 30% of ‘formal’ residential property is categorized as ‘affordable’.1 It is a housing submarket that is both quantitatively and qualitatively significant. Aimed at an emerging middle class, dynamics in this submarket shed light on how the city’s housing ladder functions, how its patterns of urbanisation unfold, and how a growing but often vulnerable middle class finds housing in a cityregion where the average housing price (close to R1 million) is affordable only to the higher end market (CAHF, 2019).2 Furthermore, affordable housing constituted 23%-45% of Johannesburg’s new residential construction per year from 2012 and 2017, and the majority of the city’s freehold housing development (CAHF, 2019).3 These largely took the form of 1 One of South Africa’s four housing submarkets according to housing market data: ‘the entry market’, often publicly subsidized, where properties are worth less than ZAR 300,000 (USD 21,000 at 2019 average exchange rates); ‘the affordable market’, where properties are worth ZAR 300,000– 600,000 (USD 21,000–43,000), and can include properties that were government subsidized and now increased in value through extension, new centralities, etc.; ‘the conventional market’ for properties valued at ZAR 600,000–ZAR 1.2 million (USD 43,000–86,000); and ‘the high-end market’ for properties worth more than ZAR 1.2 million (USD 86,000) (CAHF, 2018, 2019). These categories do not include the ‘informal’ housing submarkets that also house city residents. 2 Approximately USD 71,000 at 2019 exchange rates. 3 Freehold being the form of tenure, as opposed to leasehold or sectional title (condominium ownership). Freehold is a mode of registered and titled ownership of land and the immovable structures attached to that land in perpetuity.

S. Butcher (B) Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2030 Natural History Building, 1301 W. Green St, 61801 Urbana, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rubin et al. (eds.), Housing in African Cities, Urban Perspectives from the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37408-1_4

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Fig. 4.1 ‘Affordable’ housing development in the south of Ekurhuleni, Gauteng (photo taken by author, 2018)

sprawling extensions of ‘Res 1’ (single stand/plot, stand-alone, freehold) 40–70 m2 houses on 300–400 m2 plots, mass-produced by a handful of developers, with few amenities at increasing distance from the city-region cores (Fig. 4.1). In meetings and workshops, local planning officials expressed frustration with these developments’ fundamental mismatch with post-apartheid spatial plans, which advocate compact, densified, well connected, well amenitied neighbourhoods. Housing provision aside, the future cost of such extended urbanisation is daunting. My research has sought to understand this mismatch, and why new greenfield affordable housing development in Johannesburg and its wider city-region of Gauteng4 has not by and large taken more creative forms in more integrated spaces in a changing policy context. I have followed two lines of enquiry: one, to investigate developer and financiers’ business models, which drive the mass production of housing at the largest scale on the cheapest land (Butcher, 2020). The other, and the focus of this chapter, examines the practices, processes and instruments which shape the terms of engagement between developers and the state. This begins years before houses appear on the ground: through land assembly and, in South African cities, “township establishment”. Township establishment, or what is colloquially called ‘turning land into stand’, is “a legal process whereby agricultural land is converted into individual sites to which certain land rights are allocated” (Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality, 2003, p. 5) by the state and by law, in negotiation with developers, financiers, other private sector actors and public sector actors. These multiple actors are all invested in some way in capturing the ‘development gain’— the property value uplift—that accompanies the conversion of land to serviced stand 4

Gauteng is also the province in which Johannesburg is situated.

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and then house, whether as profit or tax (Harris, 2014), and thus in negotiating how the costs and externalities of that development gain will be shared. Township establishment—housing’s pre-history—offers a productive, often black-boxed site for understanding the way power is exercised in the delivery and management of housing by multiple actors. It also provides insight into housing production in an African context where self-building and informal land development processes are just one mode of urbanization.5 Focusing on market-driven greenfield residential township establishment for affordable housing, this chapter draws on qualitative fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2020 in two Gauteng metropolitan municipalities. Main sources include eleven semi-structured and unstructured interviews with current and former officials from municipal development planning and related departments, consulting town planners, an institutional investor, and developers of entry-level mortgaged greenfield housing.6 It also includes observations from three municipal planning tribunals between September and December 2018.7 Following presentations of the literature and wider context, the chapter details the processes, practices and instruments of the local state around township establishment. Opening this technical black-box reveals five elements of the everyday workings of state–developer relations in making land ‘developable’ for affordable housing which in the main shore up the production of the repetitious kinds of built environments that concern post-apartheid planners. First, I discuss the routinised, bureaucratic but also intimate, negotiated relations between local government and established developers around township establishment; then, continuities with past practice despite new ‘modernised’ and standardised land use legislation, and the power of large developers to negotiate, leapfrog, wait out or contest parts of the process. I also highlight frictions within this development process: between equity and efficiency in new land use management policy; between the state and developers over timing; and within the state itself over managing its contracts. These together with new policies and new spaces of formal contestation may shape Gauteng’s affordable housing development differently in the future.

4.2 Framing Literature This chapter, and its approach to housing governance, is in conversation with three literatures: interdisciplinary studies of the everyday heterogenous state and its practices in cities of the south; new critical geographies of land use management that open 5

According to a recent analysis of GeoTerraImage data, “82% of Gauteng’s residential land use is formal (excluding cluster housing), 13% is informal and 5% is in cluster housing” (Ballard et al., 2021a, p. 17). 6 Municipality and participant names are withheld to protect anonymity. 7 Municipal planning tribunals are mandated since 2013 legislation to adjudicate on outstanding land use and development applications in their jurisdiction, with at least 5 members made up of municipal officials and invited experts (Republic of South Africa, 2013, pp. 44, 46).

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up opaque technical processes and the legal processes involved in the production of space; and South African research on private sector housing development. South African scholars have investigated state–society relations around land and housing for some time, largely through the “everyday practices and politics of accessing the state and state resources” (Bénit-Gbaffou & Oldfield, 2011). New directions in anthropology, critical policy studies and new institutionalist studies focus on the state’s internal practices themselves, rather than the state–society interface. South African examples include officials’ practices in street trading (un)governance (BénitGbaffou, 2018a), public housing provision (Charlton, 2018) and informal settlement upgrading (Rubin, 2018). Theorizing from socio-ethnographies at “the margins of the state”, Bénit-Gbaffou in particular inspires this chapter to think through the relationship between everyday practices of state officials, policy instruments, and political norms and incentives to action (2018b). Those norms and incentives have also been shaped by trends towards decentralisation and privatisation in South Africa’s public procurement bureaucracies (PARI, 2014). Prompted by the “desire to modernise the state [under New Public Management principles] as well as to use government agencies as a catalyst for black economic empowerment” (PARI, 2014, p. 7), public services are increasingly provided by the private sector though funded by the state, and government departments have had to become experts at managing legal contracts. “What was called ‘state capacity’ is now predicated upon the ability of the state to tap into and manage, through contractual relations, private sector capacities” (PARI, 2014, p. 8)—the “contract state”, rather than outright privatization. Understanding these fundamental shifts at higher scales pushes us beyond critiques of municipal ‘skills shortages’ (PARI, 2015), and demands a relational view of governance, negotiated between multiple state and non-state actors. As such, the “contract state” unfolds unevenly across local municipalities, in relation to complex local politics (Phadi & Pearson, 2017), profoundly shaping the terms of service delivery. Alongside the emergence of the contract state, there is renewed interest in opening up the “black box of land use” law on the part of critical urban and legal geographers (Blomley, 2017; Lombardo & Wideman, 2018). These have excavated land use plannings’ relationship to private property, and its role in producing space and what is valued and excluded, rather than simply describing or imagining it. In South Africa, it is impossible to forget the power of land use instruments in creating and reproducing the segregated and fragmented apartheid city. Although land use law is only one part of land bureaucracy, as Tang and Benjamin (2021) remind us, it has been a particularly powerful piece in shaping South African space and society historically (Robinson, 1996). Change in land use instruments subsequently has been slow. Until recent reforms (Nel, 2016), apartheid-era land use schemes, despite great variation across localities, continued to reproduce segregation and fragmentation through zoning and the protection of private property rights above all else (Berrisford & Kihato, 2008), in tension with post-apartheid spatial planning. From 1996 to 2013, there was greater national and local attention to transforming planning instruments (through Spatial Development Frameworks, etc.) rather than land use management instruments, which relied still on patchy, outdated, provincial ordinances (De Visser,

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2016). How the subsequent reforms in land use management policy (discussed below) will shift the mechanics of township establishment and the wider political economy of housing remains to be investigated. Within that political economy, post-apartheid public housing programmes are well researched (Lemanski et al., 2017) compared with market-driven housing development. Recent scholarship has begun to explore the current “work of developers” in South African residential real estate development, not as all-powerful ‘big men’ shaping the city in their own image, but as assembled and contingent networks active in connecting finance to land and housing in contextually specific projects (Ballard & Harrison, 2019; McGaffin et al., 2019; Mosselson, 2019; Rubin & Harris, 2018; Todes & Robinson, 2020), with “polymorphic” relationships to the state (Pillay, 2022). Rather than an actor, project or market-segment focus, this chapter uses a process—township establishment—and relationships therein, to understand the governance of development of market-driven housing for a growing middle class in this context.

4.3 Gauteng Administrative and Policy Context The province of Gauteng is the country’s economic heart with the greatest population density and highest spending power, spread unevenly across its nine wall-to-wall municipalities. It includes three metropolitan municipalities (Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni) and six local municipalities. Like municipalities across the country, these have been sites of various forms of decentralisation and institutional restructuring to empower local government since the late 1990s (van Donk et al., 2008). Most recently, local government has been empowered to more effectively coordinate land use management and spatial planning through the Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act (SPLUMA) of 2013 (Nel, 2016). This new legislation is heavily based on what the City of Johannesburg had been doing for some time: working to control local development locally, rather than provincially. In fact, it was the City of Johannesburg’s legal challenge to the constitutionality of provincial power over local land use and planning development decisions that led to the passage of SPLUMA. Johannesburg is a powerful municipality with a postapartheid vision of integration, densification, spatial justice and inclusive growth (Pieterse, 2019; Todes, 2014).8 However, this vision is not always manifest in practice, as its implementation is shaped by other powerful vested interests, obdurate legacies, contradictions between revenue generation and redistribution, and competing approaches between growth and development (Ibid). The same can be said at the cityregion scale: “The spatial configurations of Gauteng result from a political economy as much as from an urban vision” (Ballard et al., 2021a, p. 43).

8

For more on post-apartheid planning in Ekurhuleni, another Gauteng metropolitan municipality, see Todes et al (2010).

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Gauteng’s nine municipalities demonstrate a wide range of population sizes (from 100,000 in Lesedi municipality to five million in Johannesburg), economies, levels of urbanization and service delivery, and resources available (from ZAR 1 billion to ZAR 68 billion in total annual revenue reported for 2020/2021).9 Each of Gauteng’s metropolitan municipalities are currently run by coalition governments. Despite challenges in these, Gauteng’s three large municipalities – two of which are the focus for this chapter—cannot be written off as incapable, failed, or authoritarian, as some theories of the state in Africa claim (see Bénit-Gbaffou & Oldfield, 2011).10 Neither can these state institutions be relied on always to grease the wheels of private profit as a “real estate state” (Stein, 2019). Mutual suspicion between municipalities and developers has been documented (Oranje et al., 2008). Nor has the state in these contexts completely delegated their power to the private sector in a wholesale privatisation of planning and “privatized urbanism” (Murray, 2015). There are examples of the City of Johannesburg’s refusal to allow private projects that go against their spatial development visions (Ballard & Harrison, 2019).

4.4 Housing Market Context Sitting ambivalently within those spatial development visions is one segment of the housing market that is the empirical entry point for this chapter. Called “new aspirational middle-class townships” by some (Harrison & Harrison, 2014, p. 310), these tracts of developer-driven houses for an aspirant but economically precarious black middle class visible on the edges of Gauteng’s cities and their townships (the blue spheres in Fig. 4.2) are termed the ‘affordable housing’ submarket by the property industry.11 While sharing some similarities with global definitions of “affordable housing” as that in which occupants spend no more than 25–30% of income on housing costs, in South Africa it has become shorthand for the housing submarket that caters to those who earn too much to qualify for public housing but too little to easily find mortgage finance or housing to purchase in the private market (Chimphondah, 2018). Technically this includes up to 40% of Gauteng’s households (earning between ZAR 3,500 and ZAR 25,000/month - USD 184–USD 1319) (GCRO, 2021), but in practice mortgage finance is only available to households earning more than ZAR 12,000/ month (USD 633) (10% of Gauteng’s households), excluding many potential home buyers (in what has also been called the ‘gap’ housing submarket (Cirolia, 2016)). As this affects the state’s own employees (nurses, police, teachers, etc.), the state has 9

Data from https://municipalities.co.za/ At the time of writing (not research), 2 of Gauteng’s smaller local municipalities are officially considered dysfunctional and under administration of some kind (Emfuleni since 2018 and Merafong) (COGTA, 2022). 11 In the 1980s, developers and the state called it private ‘black housing’; Marxist academics called it commodified ‘black housing’, and occupants and residents of adjacent townships called it ‘bonded housing’—housing financed by a mortgage, rather than rented from the state (Parnell & Pirie, 1991). 10

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Fig. 4.2 Gauteng’s distribution of residential properties in the three metropolitan municipalities. Blue represents the category called ‘affordable’ (Ballard et al., 2021b)

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sought to assist the ‘gap’ and ‘affordable’ markets in limited ways with mortgage down payment subsidies, reduction of property transfer taxes and some infrastructure financing. Developers too experiment with other forms of end-user financing such as rent-to-buy installment packages to grow their market beyond who the banks will mortgage. In Gauteng, a small cohort of local developers dominates the production of greenfield affordable freehold housing. Most other developers pursue higher-end greenfield development or affordable rental brownfield redevelopment that does not carry the same land development costs (estimated at 30–50 per cent of housing costs [McGaffin, 2017]). Key to this cohort’s success in an apparently low-profit, highrisk, low-information market has been substantial land holdings and the capacity to control development of that land into ‘stand’ (serviced plot) and then house. They built this power through years of experience of land assembly, vertical integration and increasing scale of production; the growth of substantial equity and development subsidiaries, as well as racialised professional networks and long-standing relationships with state actors (Butcher, 2020). Since the early 1990s, they have been producing versions on the same theme (Fig. 4.3 (a)–(c)), although with some higher density experiments recently by one developer (Fig. 4.3 (d)). It is here that entrylevel home buyers can access monopolised urban land in a place which the banks will mortgage, which is eligible for some state assistance as mentioned, where one can extend and renovate when possible, where one can rent accommodation to others, and where one can sell and move up the ‘property ladder’.

Fig. 4.3 ‘Affordable’ housing developments a In Ekurhuleni; b South of Johannesburg; c On the West Rand; d In Johannesburg South (photos taken by author, 2012–2019)

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In what follows, I open up experiences of township establishment from both officials’ and affordable developers’ perspectives to explore their implications on housing governance long before houses are actually constructed. These illustrate how modernist, single-use sprawling housing developments are reproduced by way of a routinised, negotiated, slowly changing land use planning process that privileges large developers’ capacities and depend on the state’s ability to manage those capacities (or not). I also highlight emergent tensions which can disrupt that process, and new spaces of possibility for doing things differently under SPLUMA.

4.5 A Routinised, Intimate Land Development Process Township establishment is both a structured, routinised set of technical and legal interactions guided by a host of development frameworks, land use and town planning schemes and an intimate, negotiated set of relationships (Fig. 4.4). From submission of the development application until township proclamation—when building can begin—the ‘applicant’ (usually town planning consultants for a landowner or developer, or sometimes an internal planner for large developers) is in constant contact with various state departments and entities. Central to this process is the municipality’s development planning department, and in particular two sections within it. Before development approval is granted, applicants deal with the land use management section; after initial approval, the legal administration section takes over, to ensure compliance with approval conditions, do proclamation notices, etc. One official I interviewed called them “reactive departments”, reacting to applicants’ proposals (Interview, 8.10.18) but, in reality, their role is a more powerful one, fundamentally shaping “‘the allocation, distribution and alteration of property rights’ (Jacobs & Paulson, 2009, p. 135” quoted in Blomley, 2017, p. 352). Land use officials12 in Gauteng’s metropolitan municipalities each deal with, on average, 60–80 land use applications a month, of which 5–10 can be township establishments mostly on the urban edges. Officials are allocated certain parts of the city and get to know the developer applicants from those areas—or their consulting town planners, who can be “quite territorial” (Interview, 8.10.18), having developed microlocal expertise, for example of geotechnically complex sites, and established relationships with the municipality’s various departments and entities. In some instances, developers hire former city officials (Interview with developer rep, 10.10.18), which makes for even closer relations and potentially easy access to the state (Olver, 2019). Theoretically, if engineering services such as water, sanitation and electricity can be supported, approval to develop, or ‘development rights’, are given. Conversely, “If we [the municipality] can’t service, we can’t support the rights [to develop]. Because once rights are in place, the City is obliged to service” (Interview with local official, 12

I use the term ‘official’ to differentiate municipal planners from private sector planners, and to include both planning and legal officials that are part of the township establishment process.

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S. Butcher Pre-submission phase (in some municipalities) Pre-consultation of applicant with municipalities, especially on bigger housing developments, to advise on whether application “in principle would be approvable without making any promises, so that most problems get sort out before the application gets submitted and nobody gets surprised.”

In public-private partnerships, negotiations and a development agreement draw up between partners

Some new by-laws require applicants to circulate township application to various external state agencies before submitting application to municipality

Pre-approval

Submission & circulation phase Applicant submits application to municipality to secure development rights (incl. geotechnical reports, outline maps and reports, traffic impact studies, environmental assessment, etc. as required by town planning scheme or municipal bylaw)

Application goes to municipality’s registration department, who makes sure all the requisite pieces are there, and start a “planning file” for the application

Application is advertised for public input on proposed township establishment

If public objections, application goes to municipal planning tribunal now required under SPLUMA Within the municipality, application is circulated by registration department to all relevant internal departments (power, water, electricity, environment, parks, etc.) for 60 days to gather comments. Internal departments support or query application, as per their own departmental plans and guidelines for the water network, road network, power supply, etc. If concerns raised, applicant is given a period to respond.

After circulation period, application is allocated to town planner in municipal land use management division to evaluate vis-a-vis spatial and strategic policies and frameworks, town planning and land use schemes. Recommends whether to approve application or not, and with what conditions attached.

Post-approval phase (prior to township proclamation)

Post-approval

If and when development rights (to x houses, services, etc.) are approved, applicant proceeds to compile and comply with conditions of establishment in the approval – managed by municipality's legal administration section.

Applicant submits general layout plan with cadastral data indicating stand sizes, land uses, etc.

Once approved, new stands registered at Deeds Office

Services are put in place and signed off/cleared by relevant service departments. SPLUMA now requires a documented service agreements between parties, done through municipality’s legal administration section

Installation of bulk infrastructure (internal to township and external connections to wider networks)

Bulk contributions paid by developers to municipality for servicing

Once all assurances are there that conditions of establishment are met, successful applicant awarded Section 82 certificate from municipality’s legal administration to proclaim/open township

Post-proclamation Land-use rights within the township added to town-planning scheme

City rates and taxes start getting charged Applicant submits building plans to municipality’s Building Control department

Top structure construction commences

Fig. 4.4 Township establishment process as shared in interviews (Adapted from Rubin and Harris [2018])

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8.10.18). “Council is obliged to provide services, so if [it’s] not in the budget, it won’t be approved”. That said, I was told by one of the biggest affordable developers that this was a more negotiated than cut-and-dry process: often they will call us in and we sit around a table and we discuss things: accesses, storm water issues, upgrades of engineering services, what is the density that we are applying for, … whether we want the parking relaxation because you might be close to a very important mobility route, so they will increase your density and relax your parking because they want these people to make use of the public transport and not use cars … (Interview with developer rep, 10.10.18)

Requiring less parking spaces than zoning regulations permit allows for the possibility of constructing more units. These ‘around a table’ conversations demonstrate the flexibility of land use zoning in practice, through the everyday negotiations by which township establishment takes place, for well-known applicants at least.

4.6 Slowly Transforming Land Use Instruments: For Equity or Efficiency? Until recently in Gauteng, the main township establishment ordinance was from 1986 and in dire need of “modernising”, as one official put it. Despite the mergers of local authorities in 2000 to create ‘unicities’, underpinned by the values of crosssubsidisation and post-apartheid integration, multiple and outdated planning schemes remained in operation. Before its 2018 consolidated scheme, Johannesburg had 16 overlapping town planning schemes, some dating from the 1970s, the legacy of its former 13 racialised local authorities; Ekurhuleni had 18. In Gauteng more broadly, large swathes of territory were not included in municipal town planning schemes at all, demarcated as ‘peri-urban’ under provincial management (Interview with local official 11.6.19). These multiple instruments are only now in the process of being repealed and replaced by single, consolidated instruments, as required by SPLUMA in effect since 2015.13 SPLUMA aims to “promote an inclusive, developmental, equitable and efficient planning framework which seeks to address racial inequality, segregation and unsustainable settlements patterns”. While spatial justice was mentioned in one of my interviews with an official—“that’s a constant drive to get that spatial pattern resolved and get people closer to their work” (Interview, 19.11.18)—developers placed greater emphasis on the possibilities of efficiency and “good administration” through SPLUMA’s ‘modernising’ and ‘streamlining’ of arcane “red tape”. According to the manager in a large affordable housing development firm who had previously been a municipal official: “The single biggest problem with housing development, especially affordable housing developments, and why there is such a huge 13

In Johannesburg for example, township establishment applications are now made under Section 26 of the City of Johannesburg Municipal Planning By-law, 2016.

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housing backlog in the country is because of cumbersome red tape processes of municipalities in the country …” (Interview, 10.10.18). SPLUMA’s drive for single, consolidated planning schemes are seen as a solution to this. The large metros have led the consolidation process, creating by-laws that repeal all previous schemes and prepare the way for new consolidated ones. Other municipalities are apparently cutting and pasting their new legislation from the large metros (Interview with developer rep 10.10.18). However, that does not mean they implement similarly—a private town planner found some municipalities more flexible in their interpretation of consolidated planning schemes than others (Interview, 7.12.18). But despite the new Act and municipal by-laws, not much has changed in everyday practice around township establishment, for large metropolitan municipalities in Gauteng at least.14 As some current and former officials explained: “the [1980s] ordinance process and our by-law process are very similar … we’ve just streamlined certain processes”; “the approach has not changed; the principle has not changed”; “SPLUMA is just framework legislation, it’s not operational legislation.” Everyone still uses the old town planning ordinance numbers from 1980s legislation to refer to various stages of the township establishment process—certificate 82, 101, etc. It is still early days. SPLUMA’s red-tape-cutting dimensions have yet to be tested or incentivised. Various “teething problems” are still appearing and being sorted out. The municipality’s legal advisors are busy providing legal opinions on the legislation. “There are still things that are not clear, things that need clarification and discussion and sorting out” (Interview with local official, 19.11.18).

4.7 Tensions Around Temporalities of Township Establishment As part of modernising, professionalising and streamlining land use and development planning, SPLUMA attaches time frames to processes, when there were no obligations previously. For example, the municipality has 3–5 months to approve rights; affected departments and agencies have 60 days to comment on a circulated application; the applicant has a year to respond to those comments or has to resubmit. At the time of research, there were no accountability clauses for non-compliance with these timelines, and municipalities were still dealing with pre-SPLUMA applications in many cases, meaning that processing times remain as they were. Now legislated to take 7 months under SPLUMA, township establishment in practice usually takes 2–3 years according to public and private planners; 2–4 years, according to developers, and sometimes 2–4 years for just the pre-approval process (Interview with developer rep 10.10.18). This is because the municipalities have too few planners managing too many applications in too big a jurisdiction—“people are just snowed under” 14

Municipal planning is a much newer responsibility in other provinces such as the Free State and Limpopo according to my interviews.

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(ibid). One official explained that their municipal territory had increased substantially through city unification processes in the 1990s, including incorporation of areas historically under the 1980s Black Communities Development Act that did not have land use planning departments historically (Interview, 11.6.19). When asked how they manage this workload, another official said they have to anticipate where they can; it helps when they are informed ahead of time (Interview, 8.10.18). However, planning officials also said they were not the only ones slowing things down. One long-time official explained that “things don’t happen as quick as it happened in the past” not only because of higher workloads and time-consuming circulation among multiple departments, but new management structures. Divisional heads are all on contract positions “with their own milestones and goals to meet to comply with their contract requirements … our requirements are not always their priority” (Interview with local official, 7.6.19). This adds multiple layers to the notion of the “contract state”. There are also lengthy negotiations between planning departments, engineering departments and applicants about service contributions. Other officials pointed to developers’ own timelines: “developers can slow things down. And suddenly when they’re ready, they’ll call everyday” (Interview, 18.9.18). Some applicants will drop off the radar due to funding constraints or challenges (Interview with local official, 8.10.18). Other developers split up big township applications into multiple smaller ones for funding reasons, each becoming an application in themselves, which “create a lot of work” (Interview with local official, 11.2.20), or chop and change their zoning requests as their development plans change (Interview, 7.6.19). Developers, with the right kinds of capital and internal expertise (such as their own town planners and professional engineers), have ways of shifting the temporalities of township establishment, particularly “post-approval”. Developers are responsible for the installation of services on their site (internal services); the municipality then does the link infrastructure (external services), for which developers pay bulk contributions (or development charges), except if they are building subsidised housing in which case they are exempt. These contributions are determined by the fixed formulas that each utility within a municipality sets. In practice, an official described the ‘grey space’ around these service contributions, which resulted in protracted negotiations between developers, planning officials and municipal engineers over every stand’s particular “basket of rights”, as “the categories [which the municipal engineers] built into their policies don’t align with the categories of our [planning] scheme … Now they [engineers] have to make certain interpretations.” (Interview, 7.6.19). Under SPLUMA, service contributions can now be paid by installment. Meant to incentivise development, this has produced a lot of defaulters: “and not Joe Soap [defaulting]. Big developers are defaulting and not honoring their agreement, then it becomes a legal problem” and the municipality needs to “litigate on the contract” (Interview with local official, 19.11.18). Often a substantial number of contributions from multiple applicants are necessary to make the extension or upgrading of link services possible (Interview with local official, 8.10.18). This adds to the time township establishment takes. Intra-state disagreements can also slow things down. A developer explained how intra-state arguments had affected them: “we’re currently building a substation there which

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was supposed to be built by the city and the [national] Department of Energy … [but] there is politics between DoE and [the municipal power company] … we’re caught in the middle because we can’t develop without power so now we’re trying to fund it” (Interview, 10.10.18). Developers who can do these external services themselves, and negotiate an engineering services agreement with the municipality, can ensure the township is proclaimed faster. “[A]t least the post-approval process can be run by us, it’s more or less in our hands on how quickly that process goes” (Interview with developer rep 10.10.18). Self-servicing – “because they want to develop” (Interview with local official, 18.9.18) and sites can only be sold once all services are certified—becomes a way of no longer “waiting for the state” (Oldfield & Greyling, 2015). But this path is only available to the biggest developers with the capacity, expertise and funding, although they can offset those external servicing investments against their bulk contributions. Sometimes, self-servicing is not possible. Developers operating in the lower-value markets, dependent on development finance from banks at relatively high interest rates, can struggle to get their infrastructure installed. A developer’s project manager explained how they had been waiting for seven years for their township proclamation certificate because they were still negotiating who was going to pay for electricity lines, sewers, water (Interview, 26.10.18). In the meantime, most of the phases have not been built, and the development is a relative ghost town (Fig. 4.5), the most visible residents being security guards patrolling the perimeter fence to prevent the pilfering of building supplies. Besides installing external services, there are other ways to ‘get things going’ on site and negotiate the temporalities of township establishment. Some developers start internal servicing before the township is approved, if they are certain this will

Fig. 4.5 Stalled West Rand affordable housing development (photo taken by author, 2018)

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happen. They might also apply for provisional building approval and start construction before proclamation. Phasing is another way to manage time and cash flow over time. Provisional, exceptional accommodations can all be motivated, especially for established developers in long-term relationships with officials.

4.8 Contesting Township Establishment: The Space of the Municipal Planning Tribunal Some development applications end up before the municipal planning tribunal, which adjudicates in the event of objections. In the larger municipalities there can be three tribunals a week, with two to three hearings per session. Applicants’ representation and the tribunal members often know each other: in the small community of planners, public and private, most everyone is a familiar face. According to the developer’s representative who used to work for the state and sit on such tribunals: All of the objectors get invited to come and state their case, the applicants get invited and there is a representative from the City’s planning department … and then the tribunal consists of internal experts that’s trained in planning or spatial planning or the law on planning, there’s also that requirement in SPLUMA. And then everybody’s heard and then the tribunal takes a decision … if it’s approved it goes from there; if it’s refused you can appeal—there’s an appeal mechanism and then you appeal to the City manager, who then refers it to the executive Mayor as the appeal authority. (Interview, 10.10.18)

The tribunal can make a decision based on ‘site merits’, contrary to the planning department’s recommendations, as allowed by SPLUMA. There is room for maneuver and interpretation: “the department’s recommendations are normally informed by policy and guided by that, so they very seldom deviate from a policy position, but that door is open for the tribunal to look at it, listen to argument and to come to an independent decision” (Interview with local official 19.11.18). The tribunal’s recommendations can include that the development must incorporate municipal priorities such as more inclusionary housing or higher densities in affluent neighborhoods. Often the tribunal’s decisions are challenged by affluent communities and their consultants and attorneys: “you know this city is very litigious and people have money” and they all use the same consultants and attorneys (Interview with local official 19.11.18). Yet the geography of objection is uneven: affluent communities with the money to pursue expert opinions and litigation can object and appeal more often than less affluent ones. The tribunal is a space of legal, not just planning, discourse and practice. Municipal tribunals have been around for decades, but there has been a distinct move over the last decade to depoliticise, professionalise and strengthen them. After metropolitan restructuring in 2000, there were various moves to reduce the power of ward councillors in the planning tribunals, given the opportunities for clientelism and corruption:

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S. Butcher “developers will go straight to, behind the scenes to a councillor and say ‘look we will pay whatever into your fund, just watch out for our application, make sure it gets approved’ … from 2004 onwards [tribunals] consisted of officials [only] … and then SPLUMA came in and just confirmed it.” (Interview with developer rep 10.10.18)

Nowadays, “councillors are not allowed to sit on planning tribunals in a decisionmaking capacity” (Interview with local official 19.11.18). The professional panel of officials with requisite planning and legal expertise is chaired by a legal advisor from the municipality’s legal and compliance department, who usually works closely with the planning department. The [municipality] obviously is quite a big bureaucracy so what they have done is they’ve created this legal department. So all of us, we’re quite a lot of legal advisers, have been delegated to certain departments to look after their legal needs and to resolve issues that they might have of a legal nature. (Interview with local official 19.11.18).

This legal support is not necessarily new but it is being strengthened under SPLUMA’s “good administration” and compliance principles. Legal advisors chair the tribunals in an advisory, not decision-making, capacity, in case “there are any issues pertaining to interpretation on the scheme and by-laws” (Ibid). From my own observations, this legal guidance has less to do with the specificities of the policy or application, but more about the process. There was not always consensus between planning and legal dispositions.

4.9 Conclusion This chapter has sought to excavate affordable housing’s pre-history through exploring some mundane, bureaucratic and technical practices and instruments of land use management. From its outline of township establishment processes in Gauteng, we can learn about multi-actor governance of urban land development in South African cities: namely, the relations within a local state, and between it and private developers, that continue to shape housing delivery after ground is broken. In this context, township establishment is a lengthy, slowly changing, negotiated process, increasingly mediated by contract and various forms of technical and legal expertise, and the state’s ability to “manage, through contractual relations, private sector capacities” (PARI, 2014). These produce new spaces such as the tribunal hearing, and the legal, not just planning, expertise required therein. What this means for smaller, local municipalities with fewer resources and significant development challenges, as well as less room for other forms of non-technical expertise, requires further research. Furthermore, these processes play a part in the way in which developers deliver affordable housing and in what form where. The township establishment process privileges the well-known applicant, the expert, those legally au fait: in this case, the macro developers with the cash to pay for that expertise (either with their own

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“in-house” planning and legal departments, or the means to retain the best consultants) and the ability to hold land for substantial periods of time while the process unfolds. Inexperienced or less legally competent consultants struggle to get their applications through, despite its low-tech, paper-based format. This impacts the kinds of developments approved. Macro-developers’ greenfield development ‘machine’ works on the basis of producing as many single-stand houses as possible, in successive extensions on peripheral megasites where economies of scale are possible and land is cheapest. How SPLUMA’s consolidation and institutionalisation will shift these patterns (or not) is a space for ongoing research, and policy attention. Finding ways to support more experimental, innovative housing forms from different, smaller applicants through the township establishment process could produce more sustainable neighbourhoods that better meet the needs of their residents (see Harrison, this volume). More fundamental to creating actually affordable housing would be public support for alternative land development and property models altogether—such as community land trusts. Land—its access and affordances, its development and rights to it—is one key root of housing challenges across the continent and beyond (UN Habitat, 2021; Ren, 2020). Opening up its technical development, through analysis of underlying practices, processes and instruments, can illuminate new spaces for progressive planning around housing, and more democratic participation and contestation in those processes and those of the “contract state” more broadly, beyond the “rule of experts” (Mitchell, 2002). Acknowledgements Thanks to the Urban Governance through the Lens of Housing workshop group, two anonymous reviewers, and co-editors Margot Rubin, Sarah Charlton and Neil Klug for their time and input on multiple versions of the chapter. Earlier versions also benefited from feedback received at the 2019 American Association of Geographers’ panel Spatializing the Land Bureaucracy (in the Postcolonial World) organized by Sangeeta Banerji and Tom Cowan, with generous discussant Dr Sivaramakrishnan. I am grateful for the Urban Studies Foundation support during analysis; the University of Witwatersrand Science Faculty Research Council for assistance with fieldwork and transcribing costs; Yulea Roopai, Rachel Ibbetson and Nathan Seiler for transcribing; Russell Martin for proofreading an initial draft, and to local officials, developers and consulting planners for their time and insight on these processes of township establishment. The interpretation, and its limits, are my own.

References Ballard, R., & Harrison, P. (2019). Transnational urbanism interrupted: A Chinese developer’s attempts to secure approval to build the ‘New York of Africa’ at Modderfontein, Johannesburg. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 52(2). Ballard, R., Hamann, C., & Mosiane, N. (2021a). Spatial trends in Gauteng. GCRO Occasional Paper, #19. Gauteng City Region Observatory. Accessed 26 August 2022. https://cdn.gcro.ac. za/media/documents/Ballard_Hamann_Mosiane_2021a_Spatial_trends_in_Gauteng.pdf Ballard, R., Namponya, A., & Tshangana, A. (2021b). Distribution of residential properties by market segment. GCRO Map of the Month, June. Gauteng City Region Observatory. Accessed 7 September 2022. https://cdn.gcro.ac.za/media/documents/June_PDF_Map_V2_1.pdf

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Mitchell, T. (2002). Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. University of California Press. Mosselson, A. (2019). Habitus, spatial capital and making place: Housing developers and the spatial praxis of Johannesburg’s inner-city regeneration. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 52(2), 277–296. Murray, M. J. (2015). Waterfall city (Johannesburg): Privatized urbanism in extremis. Environment and Planning A, 47(3), 503–520. Nel, V. (2016). Spluma, Zoning and effective land use management in South Africa. Urban Forum, 27(1), 79–92. Oldfield, S., & Greyling, S. (2015). Waiting for the state: A politics of housing in South Africa. Environment and Planning A, 47(5), 1100–1112. Olver, C. (2019). A house divided: The feud that took Cape Town to the brink. Jonathan Ball Publishers. Oranje, M., du Toit, J., Landman, K., & Lodi, J. (2008). Beyond policy frameworks: Listening to the voices of developers and municipalities in urban land development in South Africa. Prepared for Urban Landmark by University of Pretoria, Town Planning. http://www.urbanlandmark.org/ research/x09.php. PARI (Public Affairs Research Institute). (2014). The contract state: Outsourcing & decentralisation in contemporary South Africa. Public Affairs Research Institute. http://pari.org.za/contract-state/ PARI (Public Affairs Research Institute). (2015). Hollowing out the local state: Managerialism and skills in the water sector. Public Affairs Research Institute. https://pari.org.za/hollowing-localstate-managerialism-skills-watersector/ Parnell, S., & Pirie, G. (1991). Johannesburg. In A. Lemon (Ed.), Homes apart: South Africa’s segregated cities (pp. 129–145). Paul Chapman. Phadi, M., & Pearson, J. (2017). The Mogalakwena local municipality in South Africa: An institutional case study conducted by the Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI). Public Affairs Research Institute. Pieterse, E. (2019). Urban governance and spatial transformation ambitions in Johannesburg. Journal of Urban Affairs, 41(1), 20–38. Pillay, S. (2022). The Polymorphic State and Real Estate: Rethinking the relationship between the state and real estate through Johannesburg & Bangalore. Doctoral dissertation. Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of the Witwatersrand. Ren, X. (2020). Governing the urban in China and India: Land grabs, slum clearance, and the war on air pollution. Princeton University Press. Republic of South Africa. (2013). Spatial planning and land use management act (Act 16 of 2013). Tshwane. Robinson, J. (1996). The power of apartheid: State, power, and space in South African Cities. Butterworth-Heinemann. Rubin, M. (2018). At the borderlands of informal practices of the state: Negotiability, porosity and exceptionality. The Journal of Development Studies, 54(12), 2227–2242. Rubin, M., & Harris, R. (2018). An effective public partnership for suburban land development: Fleurhof, Johannesburg. In R. Harris & U. Lehrer (Eds.), Suburban land question: A global survey (pp. 258–279). University of Toronto Press. Stein, S. (2019). Capital city: Gentrification and the real estate state. Verso. Tang, W. S., & Benjamin, S. (2021). Land as situated spatio-histories: A dialogue with global urbanism. In M. Lancione & C. MacFarlane (Eds.), Global urbanism: Knowledge, power and the city (pp. 284–290). Routledge. Todes, A. (2014). The impact of policy and strategic spatial planning. In P. Harrison, G. Gotz, A. Todes & C. Wray (Eds.), Changing space, changing city: Johannesburg after apartheid (pp. 83–100). Wits University Press. Todes, A., Karam, A., Klug, N., & Malaza, N. (2010). Beyond Master planning? New approaches to spatial planning in Ekurhuleni, South Africa. Habitat International, 34(4), 414–420.

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Todes, A., & Robinson, J. (2020). Re-Directing developers: New models of rental housing development to re-shape the post-apartheid city? Environment and Planning a: Economy and Space, 52(2), 297–317. UN Habitat. (2021). The role of land in achieving adequate and affordable housing. Nairobi. Van Donk, M., Swilling, M., Pieterse, E., & Parnell, S. (Eds.). (2008). Consolidating developmental local government: lessons from the South African experience. Juta and Company Ltd.

Siân Butcher is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research explores the mundane forms of urbanization through private development that shape our built environments and their politics, particularly in the spaces between elite gated communities and informal settlements in cities of the Global South. Her recent research focuses on developer-driven housing for a growing black middle class on the edges of Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the author of numerous scholarly texts and teaches a number of undergraduate and post-graduate courses on urbanism and development.

Chapter 5

Are Social Movements Achieving the Right to Adequate Housing in Lagos, Nigeria? Oluwafemi Olajide

and Taibat Lawanson

5.1 Introduction The right to adequate housing is central to urban struggles and has become important in contemporary urban governance and development discourse, especially in many African cities where rapid urban (re)development predisposes the poor to constant threats of forced eviction (Olajide & Lawanson, 2022; Lawanson et al., 2019). Since 2000, when Nigeria returned to democratic rule, there have been several large-scale urban development activities, often accompanied by violent spatial displacement of urban poor communities in Lagos. This has resulted in an increase in related social movement actions - the most prominent being the emergence of the Nigerian Slum /Informal Settlement Federation (the Federation). It is generally believed that social movements can enable the collective actions of deprived and marginalized communities in claiming the right to the city (Domaradzka, 2018), encompassing various forms of rights, including right to vote, right to information, right to property and housing. Agrawal (2022, p. XII) notes that “the right to the city calls for all inhabitants to be able to fully enjoy, contribute to, and participate in city life, with all that it offers”). Housing is one of the most prominent areas where right to the city struggles manifest (Aalbers & Gibb, 2014; Huchzermeyer, 2021), being the gateway to many other basic needs and urban life (Satterthwaite, 2020). Thus, for the Federation, like many other urban poor Federations across Africa, the right to adequate housing is central to urban struggles and O. Olajide (B) Lincoln University, Lincoln, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] T. Lawanson University of Lagos, Lagos, Nigeria

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rubin et al. (eds.), Housing in African Cities, Urban Perspectives from the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37408-1_5

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claiming the right to the city. However, the extent to which social movement struggles contribute to achieving the right to housing for deprived urban communities in Nigeria is generally less visible and often under-researched (Olajide & Lawanson, 2022). This chapter is underpinned by two questions: How are marginalized and deprived communities navigating the governance space in claiming their right to adequate housing? To what extent is their collective action resulting in access to adequate housing? In answering these questions, we draw on literature, policy documents, interviews with civil society and policy actors, and insights from the collective actions of the Nigerian Slum/Informal Settlement Federation. The combined concepts of social movements, right to the city and adequate housing, located within the broader governance discourse, provide the conceptual and theoretical underpinning for the empirical analysis. This chapter is structured as follows: the next section briefly engages with the literature of governance, social movements and the right to the city, and the centrality of adequate housing to the struggles of the urban poor. The third section presents the development and governance contexts in Lagos that structure everyday life and struggles of the urban poor communities for adequate housing. We then illustrate the different tactics the Federation deploys in claiming the right to the city, and the extent to which their collective actions deliver the central objectives of the right to adequate housing. The concluding section highlights the need for co-operation and synergy among the different actors within governance as well as the need to address the prevailing fractured power relations in order to make progress towards achieving the right to adequate housing for the urban poor.

5.2 Interface of Urban Governance, Social Struggles and the Right to Adequate Housing: Conceptual and Theoretical Discourse Urban development is an area where complex governance decisions and conflicting priorities manifest. We acknowledge that there are different conceptualizations of governance (see Obeng-Odoom, 2017; Smit, 2018; UNDP, 1997; World Bank, 1989). Following UNDP (1997), we deployed governance as the mechanisms through which citizens and groups articulate their interests, exercise their legal rights, meet their obligations and mediate their differences and argue that governance is essential in mediating conflicting urban development decision-making (Moe, 1990). Defining governance in this way means that it involves “complex ways through which groups and individuals engage with each other to make and operationalize decisions” (Smit, 2018, p. 55). In many African cities, tensions arising from governance of urban development usually relate to the challenges of inadequate investments in infrastructure and urban

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services (UN-Habitat, 2016) and inability to distribute development benefits equitably among different socioeconomic groups (Smit, 2018). This is evident in the widespread socio-spatial inequalities, poverty (Brown & Kristiansen, 2009) and housing precarity of the urban poor (Satterthwaite, 2020). Also, observable is the increase in urban social movements’ collective actions against exclusionary urban development (Olajide & Lawanson, 2022; Uitermark et al., 2012). For example, in several African countries Slum Dwellers International has supported the formation of social movements as marginalized urban communities struggle to claim the right to the city.1 The right to the city, as a “cry and a demand” (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 158), provides an alternative framework for demanding that the city governments deliver the globally agreed human rights as envisioned in the international declarations (United Nations, 2017). The right to the city advances struggles over access to the benefits of urban development and city at large (Omoegun, 2015). In this sense, it provides the conceptual framing for counter and radical action against oppressive governance structures (Mitchell, 2003) and exclusionary urban development (Huchzermeyer, 2014). Thus, the right to the city discourse provides the platform through which deprived and marginalized groups can articulate their needs and claim rights of participation in urban development processes (Brown & Kristiansen, 2009). One of the prime examples of right to the city movements in Africa is the case of the shack dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo in Durban, South Africa, formed in 2005 through protest action against eviction threats (Huchzermeyer, 2011, 2014). As noted by Huchzermeyer (2011), this movement has explicitly and consistently employed a notion of the right to the city in its urban struggles against forced eviction and demolition. Struggles for the right to the city often manifest in housing (Aalbers & Gibb, 2014). Housing determines whether or not one is able to access a range of urban services and livelihood opportunities (Mitlin & Bartlett, 2020; Satterthwaite, 2020), and it is central to urban life, as The right to adequate housing is fundamental to guaranteeing a dignified life to all. In an increasingly urbanized world, the right to housing means more than just a right to private property or “owning a home”. It also means the right to the city’s opportunities, as recommended by the New Urban Agenda, which placed housing at the centre of the agenda for fairer and more inclusive cities. (Ferreira et al., 2020, p. 333)

The United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1991) provide indicators in measuring adequate housing. These include affordability especially in relation to basic needs, habitability including protection from weather elements and health hazards, accessibility to all including disadvantaged and marginalized groups, accessibility to basic services and locational proximity to social services and livelihood opportunities, as well as tenure security and legal protection against forced eviction. Most of these indicators are central to the endemic housing and livelihood challenges in urban poor communities. 1

The Know Your City Campaign Hard Data & Rich Stories—Community-driven data on slums. https://sdinet.org/explore-our-data/

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In navigating the governance space relevant to adequate housing, the urban poor deploy different strategies but rely primarily on social networks and collective actions (Lawanson, 2015) through the invited and invented spaces of participation (Gaventa, 2003; Miraftab & Wills, 2005). Invited spaces are those occupied by grassroots and their affiliated civil society organizations that are authorized and mediated by government interventions, while invented spaces are the collective actions of the grassroots, as counter-hegemonic practice in defiance of the authorities and the status quo (Miraftab, 2004). Through the invited spaces of participation, marginalized communities are engaged to participate in urban development decision-making within the participatory governance structures developed by the state (Gaventa, 2003). Full participation in decision- making builds grassroot capacity for governance and promotes the agency of the local communities in offering solutions to their urban challenges (Farha & Schwan, 2020). However, connected to social movement struggles and the invited space of participation is the reality of power dynamics and asymmetrical power relations within the governance space (Phillips, 2017). Thus, invited spaces often offer mere tokenistic participation and often fail to ensure inclusive representation and the delivery of full development benefits for the local communities. Beyond the invited space of participation, deprived communities also adopt ‘resistance tactics’ (Miraftab & Wills, 2005). Thus, they draw on invented practices of urban contestation and activism in challenging exclusionary urban development practices (Ay & Miraftab, 2016) and the structures of public participation developed by the state (Freitas, 2019). Through invented spaces, deprived communities are able to innovate and (re)create their own terms of engagement (Cornwall, 2002) with the aspiration of holding government accountable (Miraftab & Wills, 2005, p. 202). Miraftab and Wills (2005, p. 207), drawing on Oldfield’s (2003) work, note that these ‘resistance tactics’ are social mobilization strategies and a collection of ideas and actions, ranging from “informal negotiations, capacity building, and training; to mass mobilizations in the form of peaceful protests, sit-ins, and land invasions; to defiant collective action such as illegal reconnection of services and repossession of housing.” These tactics are not mutually exclusive as social movements move between them and, at different points in their struggles, adopt different tactics and spaces of mobilization (Miraftab, 2004). Thus, social movements are characterized by senses of struggles and participation as they seek to deliver the benefits of urban development to the marginalized groups (Lawanson et al., 2018; Lawanson & Oyalowo, 2016). Social movements face a wide array of both internal and external challenges and contestations in advancing their right to the city struggles. For example, in South Africa, as in many other African countries, social movements continue to face state repression, NGO repression, and repression from left academics who still believe that it is their duty to think, represent, and take decisions for the poor (Abahlali baseMjondolo, 2012). Beyond external contestations, social movements also face internal challenges as noted by Abahlali baseMjondolo:

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The stresses of repression often cause comrades to panic and to fight amongst themselves. Comrades can get co-opted by NGOs or political parties. Sometimes very brave comrades who have done amazing things start to think that because of their years of commitment they have a right to be in charge. Sometimes the way in which the media and some donors and NGOs individualize movements has contributed to some of these problems. Sometimes the politics of ethnicity or individual ambition enter movements. (2012)

The case of the Federation in Lagos as subsequently discussed also provides a pertinent example which raises questions about how marginalized and deprived communities navigate the governance space in claiming the right to adequate housing, and the extent to which their collective actions result in access to adequate housing.

5.3 The Lagos Urban Development Trajectory and Housing Challenges Lagos faces unprecedented population growth with uncoordinated urban expansion (Gandy, 2006), accompanied with long term neglect and dis-investment in infrastructure and housing provision (Agunbiade & Olajide, 2016). The spatial manifestations are the proliferation of slums, informal settlements, inadequate housing and housing precarity. This is the urban development context and governance gap that structure the everyday life and struggles of the urban poor. What occurs in filling the gaps in formal housing and infrastructure provision is what has been referred to as “Urbanization from below” (Lawanson, 2018) in which the citizens respond to everyday challenges outside formal institutional structures (Miraftab, 2009). In Lagos, over 60% of the population live in informal settlements and make a living in the informal economy (World Population Review, 2021), thus typifying this approach. There is an ongoing effort by the state to make Lagos an African model megacity and a global economic and financial hub that is safe, secure, functional and productive, through urban infrastructure renewal and a series of urban development projects (Lagos State Government, 2013). However, most of these projects are megaprojects with scant relevance to extant challenges of the majority of the urban poor (Olajide et al., 2018). A major consequence is the recurring incidence of forced evictions of local communities (Lawanson & Agunbiade, 2018; Olajide, 2015). Amnesty International (2017a) reports that the Lagos state government forcibly evicted about 20,000 people from Badia East and West between 2013–2015 and close to 10,000 residents of Otodogbame, Ilubinrin and other waterfront communities in the 2016–2017 period. Nine villages in the Ibeju Lekki axis were also forcibly removed to make way for the Lekki Free Trade Zone (Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 2018). The urban poor, especially those located in prime locations are considered to not accord with “good-paying customers” (Miraftab & Wills, 2005, p. 202). The essence of this was captured in the July 2012 eviction notice issued by the Lagos state

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Fig. 5.1 Eviction notice issued by the Lagos state government to Makoko/Iwaya community

government to residents of Makoko/Iwaya community (see Fig. 5.1), an informal settlement along the Lagos Lagoon: Evidently, urban development approaches by the state and the lived realities of the urban poor intersect in damaging ways, as many urban poor become more vulnerable, losing assets, social capital and in extreme cases even their lives due to state-led spatial displacement exercises (Olajide & Lawanson, 2022; Olajide et al., 2018). Not only are people displaced, but the terms and manner of displacement are extremely abrupt and harsh. In response, low-income communities have mobilized to push back against the seemingly unending assault on their homes and livelihoods. The most prominent mobilization has been that of the Nigerian Slum/Informal Settlement Federation.

5.4 Social Movements and Claiming the Right to Housing in Lagos: The Nigerian Slum/Informal Settlement Federation Historical accounts of protests in Nigeria dated back to the colonial era till date, which have seen series of protests organised against the colonial and postcolonial governments. Some of the major protests include the Aba women’s riot in 1929, Abeokuta women’s revolt in 1947, ‘Ali must go’ protest in 1978, anti-SAP riots 1989, and the June 12 protests in 1993. These protests were organised around various issues. For example, the 1929 and 1946 protests were against unfair tax regime and the demand for improved welfare and better life, particularly for women. The 1978

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protests were against increase in student fees while those of the 1989 were against the effects of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-imposed Structural Adjustment Program and those of 1993 were against the annulment of 12 June 1993 presidential elections. More recently protests have demanded improved welfare, an end to oppressive regimes, a fair right to life, the right to be heard, the right to basic amenities, and an end to exclusionary urban development. A major response to the upsurge in urban development projects and associated forced evictions has been the emergence of social movements led by the urban poor (Olajide & Lawanson, 2022). These movements have become important platforms for collective action against forced eviction, spatial displacement and economic marginalisation. The 2013 Badia East forced eviction and subsequent demolition, which displaced about 9000 persons to make way for government middle-income housing projects, triggered a series of public protests by the evictees. The protests enjoyed wide media coverage (The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), 2015; UN News, 2015), and attracted the attention of local and international NGOs, human rights and development organizations. The evictees organized themselves into saving groups, who then joined the Lagos Marginalized Community Forum (LAMCOFO), an initiative of the Social and Economic Rights Action Centre (SERAC)2 to bring all marginalized communities together. Under SERAC, the groups metamorphosed into the Rural and Urban Development Initiative (coalition of 74 communities).3 However, as noted by one of the Federation members whom we interviewed, the relationship between SERAC and the groups of marginalized communities fell apart, owing to the allegations of lack of accountability and transparency against the leadership of SERAC. The interviewee also noted that the leadership was accused of getting involved in the state government politics with negative consequences on the housing struggle of the marginalized communities. Subsequently, through contact with and the support of Slum Dwellers International (SDI), the groups of marginalized communities crystallized into the formation of the Nigerian Federation of Slum/Informal Settlement Dwellers. The Federation thus became part of the SDI, the global movement through which low-income communities pursue their right to the city. The Community Legal Support Initiatives, operating as Justice and Empowerment Initiatives (JEI), won a bid from the SDI, as the supporting NGO,4 to provide technical support for the Federation. As of 2021, there are over 140 communities in the Lagos branch of the Federation, though an accurate account of the number of members could not be ascertained. 2

The Social and Economic Rights Action Centre (SERAC) is dedicated to the full realization of economic, social and cultural rights as established under the International Bill of Rights in accordance with the principle of indivisibility and interdependence of all human rights. https:// www.escr-net.org/member/social-and-economic-rights-action-centre-serac. 3 The initiative brought together both rural and urban communities who are experiencing marginalisation and threat of forced eviction or actual forced eviction. Our focus is however on the urban context. 4 JEI seeks to empower the poor and marginalized individuals to lead the changes that they would like to see in their communities—https://www.justempower.org/.

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The objectives of the Federation include (i) to build strong relationships between the urban poor and government; (ii) to lead the change they desire to see in their communities; (iii) to educate marginalized and deprived communities about their fundamental human rights; and (iv) to empower them to develop collective actions against the destructive practices of the state. As noted by one of the Federation members, the purpose of the federation is: For people of similar communities facing the threat of forceful evictions to come together to organize themselves, inform and strategize on ways of developing their communities. To prevent their communities from forceful evictions. To secure land tenure. To save money to build befitting structures in their community and support their children’s education. (Interview, February 2021)

Through the account of one of our interviewees, we found that, beyond guiding against the displacement of their communities, the Federation also engages in community-based savings groups for economic empowerment of individual members, and also make efforts to partner with the government towards longer term inclusive urban planning and governance. The Federation deploys different tactics in advancing their core objectives and in response to various incidents of marginalization by the state, with varying degrees of successes and failures. The dominant ones are discussed below under the rubrics of what Miraftab (2004) referred to as invited and invented spaces of participation.

5.5 Tactics by the Federation for Claiming Their Right to Adequate Housing Similar to the SDI mobilising strategies across its different networks, the Federation deploys a combination of tactics in response to various incidents of marginalisation by the state, with varying degrees of successes and failures. As documented in various literature, the tactics include savings, engagement and participation, protests, legal actions, advocacy, social media engagement, surveys and community mapping, community-driven enumeration, multimedia documentation and media advocacy (Patel et al., 2001; Beck & Purcell, 2013). The dominant tactics deploy by the Federation are discussed next under the rubrics of invented and invited spaces of mobilising.

5.5.1 Invited Spaces of Participation Through the invited spaces of participation, the members of the Federation also make efforts to engage the government in the urban planning processes. The process of engagement is, however, curated by the state government essentially to support

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its overall development agenda of urban modernity and Lagos megacity aspiration, which disproportionately exclude the urban poor. Some of the main challenges towards effective engagement revolved around the issues of accessibility, acceptability, legitimacy and recognition of the Federation by the state government. Also, observed is the inability of the government to willingly and readily accept the Federation as part of the citizens to plan with. Instead, the Lagos state government engages local communities through their community development associations, many of which are political appendages to the prevailing government structure (Olajide, 2015). This approach provides little participation space for the articulation, discussion and dialogue of the interests of the deprived communities. In this sense, the state government generally adopts tokenistic public participation approaches that are curated to support extant political interests. However, looking beyond the narrative of monolithic state within the context of state-society relations, members of the federation have engaged with some Lagos State government agencies especially the Ministries of Physical Planning and Urban Development and Housing, as well as the state Urban Renewal Agency. A measure of success has been achieved in these engagements as noted by one of the Federation members: The main success story has been that of the partnership with LASURA,5 particularly with the former MD, and presently we are trying to see how to continue the partnership with the current MD in achieving our common desire. (Interview, February 2021)

The partnership has continued as two members of the Federation were appointed in February 2021 as members of the Lagos state technical committee on slum identification, while other members also regularly interact with the Ministry of Housing on issues relating to social housing and housing finance. For a large part, invitation to these groups indicates acceptance and recognition. However, active collaboration in protecting housing rights is yet to be achieved.

5.5.2 Invented Spaces of Participation Street protests were deployed in the cases of Badia East, Otodogbame and Tarkwa Bay forced evictions. As noted by one of our interviewees, a Federation member, the protests were intended to bring the issues of forced evictions to public attention and also to get the state government to engage with the evictees in order to suspend further evictions, enhance tenure security, get compensation, relocation and/or resettlement as well as the opportunity to be involved in developing an alternative vision for their communities. While the protests brought the issue of forced evictions to public attention, they were dissipated by oppressive state responses (Amnesty International, 2017b), 5

The Lagos State Urban Renewal Authority (LASURA) established to facilitate the process of improving the living conditions, upgrading and empowerment of slum communities thereby creating a sustainable environment.

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essentially through police brutality and harassment. Thus, the protests have been less productive in engaging the attention of the state government for meaningful engagement. As stated by one of the Federation members: ...the Federation has not really recorded the desired success of any form through protest in the pursuit of her main goal which is to end forced eviction. Like the case of Otodogbame, there has not been a success because rather than using dialogue and negotiation there have been the use of protest and court process which have not produced any positive results. This same process has been used for the 2018/2019 forced eviction of Tarkwa Bay. This has not given the evictees any hope or little hope to continue their protests[...]. (Interview, February 2021)

As indicated in the quote above, the Federation has also instituted legal processes to seek redress against forced evictions. However, what is observable is the issues of the flagrant violation of court orders by the state government to stop forced evictions and illegal demolition of slum communities. Despite court injunctions and even a 2017 court judgement in favour of the Otodogbame evictees,6 spatial displacements have not been mitigated. According to a Federation member: Over the years, the Federation has engaged in some legal struggles but [the] majority of them have not yielded success for infrastructure and housing provision by the government. Even two years after the court ruling, there is no justice for OtodoGbame, a core federation community. (Interview, March 2021)

The Federation also intervenes in service provision. In some communities, efforts have been made towards improving basic services especially in the areas of electricity (solar panels) and sanitation (biofil toilets).7 The Federation also conducts periodic ‘Know Your City’, community profiling exercises to gather information on socioeconomic characteristics, infrastructure and basic services. As of 2021, even though over one hundred communities had been mapped, information on only forty-six communities was publicly accessible on the SDI website (https://sdinet.org/exploreour-data/). Interestingly, data on the communities is locally inaccessible, largely due to JEI’s reluctance to share the Federation’s data with researchers and others who have requested it. According to a Federation member: Due to the monopoly of power on the side of the supporting NGO, the Federation has not really recorded the desired success of any form in the pursuit of her main goals which is to end forced eviction. (Interview, February 2021)

The Federation is built around women-led savings groups who contribute to two main funds—the Urban Poor Fund for slum upgrading and individual savings for economic empowerment. The savings groups in many communities have not been 6

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/535d0435e4b0586b1fc64b54/t/58947fc686e6c0558d87e 37e/1486127074123/170126+Ruling+-+Akakpo+Agemo+%26+Ors+v+LASG+%26+Ors.pdf. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/535d0435e4b0586b1fc64b54/t/5824bbf0bebafb37e4e6f 159/1478802426166/Injunction+Order+from+Lagos+State+High+Court+%287+Nov+2016% 29+-+Nov+10+2016+-+12-48+PM.pdf. 7 Official Launch of Toilets at Daramola Community, a project by Nigerian Federation with a target of building more than 60 toilets in differents communities around the State. https://nigerianfederat ion.wordpress.com/2017/10/03/official-launch-of-toilets-at-daramola-community/

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active since 2018 because of their inability to access funds already saved in the banks. While the savings groups are coordinated by Federation members, JEI (as supporting NGO) is the custodian of the bank accounts, and allegedly claims that a lien was placed on the funds by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.8 According to a federation member: ...But most communities got discouraged and have stopped (saving), until JEI gives them access to their account. (Interview, March 2021)

JEI has been accused several times of a lack of financial transparency and accountability by federation members. In fact, members of Otodogbame community (https:/ /twitter.com/otodogbame) raised an alarm on X about how the funds being raised by JEI on their behalf were being spent. (See https://twitter.com/justempower/sta tus/853563639214821381); In response to a fundraising appeal by JEI, Otodogbame community stated that: The impact of the donations so far has not been felt by the community at large, we insist that we need to sit down and plan to use the funds (https://twitter.com/otodogbame/status/ 856277270780137473)

The Federation has an active public communication structure. This is done through multimedia documentation, media advocacy and social media engagement (especially twitter—https://twitter.com/NaijaFederation?s=20). The Federation has also had some photo exhibitions at the Lagos Photo festival and Eko Hotel, showing documented cases of forced evictions, protests and community mobilization efforts against forced eviction in Lagos. These advocacy approaches have been quite effective in capacity development of the Federation members and also in engaging international audiences on the plights of the urban poor in Lagos. However, these approaches and the Federation’s engagement with the international press have been considered more of a deliberate attempt to embarrass the Lagos state government and/or portray the city in a negative light and is often met with hostility in local circles (Anderson, 2010; Edosa, nd).

5.6 Are the Federations Tactics Effective in the Quest to Achieve Their Right to Adequate Housing in Lagos? While the residents of marginalized and deprived communities are not homogenous, they seem to demonstrate unity of purpose through the Federation. Central to their struggles is the desire to protect their communities from forced evictions and have access to adequate housing as the gateway to other urban benefits. Though some of their mobilising tactics have recorded some progress in creating opportunity for savings, public awareness around housing issues, intervention in services and link to some of the government agencies, they are yet to achieve their quest for adequate 8

A note on the fact that this is ongoing research and JEI leadership is yet to be interviewed.

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housing and protection of their communities from threat of forced eviction. This is mainly due to the fact that the governance context with which the Federation mobilizes collective action mediates the outcome of their struggles. The prevailing governance practice, in which the livelihoods aspiration and housing needs of the urban poor are ignored by government in the development process, continuously hinders the possibility of progress towards claiming the rights to adequate housing. Similarly, lack of effective co-operation and synergy, and the fractured power relations between the Federation and the supporting NGOs form part of the governance context which hinders progress towards the attainment of adequate housing. In recent years, the state government has embarked a series of urban development projects and policy reforms, including Eko Atlantic City, Lekki Free Trade Zone, Lagos Home Ownership project, extensive market redevelopments and city beautification projects. The vision and the policy thrust of these urban (re)development projects, as stated in the Lagos State Development Plan 2012–2025, ostensibly aimed to guide Lagos towards its megacity aspiration of poverty alleviation and sustainable economic development (Lagos State Government, 2013). However, the actions and inactions of the state government, during the implementations of these various projects, contradict the whole essence of poverty alleviation and sustainable economic development, but seem like deliberate attempts to punish the urban poor (Olajide et al., 2018). The implementations resulted in dispossession, spatial dislocation, and loss of livelihood opportunities, through avoidable demolition of the living and working spaces of the urban poor, with little or no compensation or alternatives (Olajide, 2015). Therefore, while the Lagos government often has the notion that its urban (re)development projects provide opportunities for better housing conditions, the reality for the urban poor, who often become the major victims of these projects, is that such projects result in more hardship and a step further away from access to adequate housing. According to various members of the Federation, the challenges often revolve around the issues of accessibility, and the inability of the government to willingly and readily accept the Federation as partners in the urban development process. It is often difficult to negotiate with the government for no forced eviction, particularly when the locations of the urban poor settlements stand in the way of the development aspirations of the state. Badia-East, a prime location in the city’s core, has experienced several threats and actual forced evictions in 2013, 2015 and 20179 . It was earmarked for middle income housing and is now a private gated community. Availability of infrastructure and services, at both community and household levels, are central to the notion of adequate housing (Satterthwaite, 2020). Where the services are physically available, access may be restricted by cost, thus the capacity to pay rather than availability determines access. As such we look beyond ‘availability’ of services and infrastructure at the community level to ‘access’ at household level as a key requirement for adequate housing. Provision of services is one of the major responsibilities of the government. However, there are gaps in the provision and what

9

https://spacesforchange.org/factsheet-on-badia-east-demolitions-2017/

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is required to meet adequacy across the city. This is acute in the urban poor communities of Lagos and predisposes them to multiple urban vulnerabilities. Despite the struggles of the urban poor in Lagos for adequate housing, the majority continue to live in extreme situations, in which they are unable to access urban services and resources. Where services are available, they are often privately provided, of lower quality and at significantly higher costs. While government is often the object of social mobilization, some government agencies may share similar aspirations and ideas with the central demands of the deprived groups while others may serve as an obstruction (Heller, 2001). Therefore, on some occasions, support for grassroot movements by individuals in government institutions have produced some levels of access to some development benefits which may partly provide the pathways in addressing housing needs of the urban poor (Satterthwaite et al., 2011). However, what is observable is that such benefits are often short lived and have narrow foci due to change in administrations and the associated change in government development priorities. In the case of Lagos, there is an ongoing positive engagement with LASURA regarding urban renewal, largely due to the deliberate pro-poor posture of the current leadership of this organization and willingness to adopt an inclusive governance approach. There are strong differences of opinion between the Federation and many other government agencies regarding what really constitutes adequate housing and indeed the right to the city. For the urban poor, housing is more than just shelter, but also a means of economic production (Lawanson & Oyalowo, 2016) and social reproduction, and a gateway to accessing other urban development benefits. Therefore, adequate housing implies a location that supports livelihoods, and enables access to job opportunities, and basic services at affordable cost, alongside guaranteed security of tenure. The urban poor will endure precarious housing conditions in exchange for being optimally located in proximity to livelihood opportunities (Olajide, 2015). On many occasions, the Lagos State government’s urban (re)development initiatives threaten these livelihood opportunities. The government rarely considers relocation or provision of alternative accommodation even in the face of what may be considered as inevitable evictions. When relocation is considered, impacted communities are often moved against their will to peripheral locations without economic potential and basic services. Essentially, this worsens both the housing and livelihood conditions and also calls to question the validity of government interventions (Buckley et al., 2016). In 2015 for example, some Badia east evictees were offered relocation to Imota, a rural community on the outskirts of the city. A Federation member/Badia evictee noted that: What is the point of providing alternatives when one is being forced to move to a location which makes it hard to make a living, a place far away from friends and relationships of many years, far away from basic infrastructure? This does not just add up to my aspirations and struggles for improved living conditions. (Interview, February 2021)

A discussion with a government official presents a different perspective, noting that: The government is committed to achieving poverty alleviation and improved standard of living. While government’s urban transformation plans may result in eviction and spatial

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Juxtaposing these two perspectives demonstrates how disconnected urban development policy can be from the aspirations and needs of the urban poor. It equally demonstrates how government understanding of what constitutes adequate housing conflicts with the survival priorities of the urban poor. This often limits the effectiveness of the collective actions and tactics of the urban poor against forced eviction and spatial displacement of their communities, particularly when the locations of their settlements stand in the way of the development aspirations of the state. Akin to this is also the relationship between the Federation and JEI, their supporting NGO. The support of JEI, on the one hand, aided the Federation to form a city-wide and national network and become part of the international network through which slum/informal settlement dwellers pursue their common objective. On the other hand, it also became a problem in the wheel of the progress of the Federation in actualizing their localized objectives. Since 2015, there have been recurrent tensions between JEI and the Federation leaders regarding JEI oversight activities on Federation’s internal governance mechanisms and the Federation’s interface with both government and the general public. As noted by a Federation member: As noted earlier in this chapter, a federation member drew attention to the problem of the ‘Monopoly of Power’ that the NGO has, and the limits this has placed on the federation achieving its goals.

The federation members believe JEI is deliberately denying them autonomy, by not supporting the formation of an executive committee for the Federation as is the case in other countries, preferring to operate through an undemocratic system in which coordinators report exclusively to JEI. As one of them noted: The savings group from different communities send a request to the Federation executive while the executive discusses the request with the supporting NGO. But unfortunately, Nigerian Federation has no executive structure, which is one of the major issues we have with JEI. (Interview, March 2021)

The varying opinions on tactics has led to an exodus of Federation members, fractionalization of the Federation and a general state of reduced impact of their struggles for adequate housing. This also points to another challenge the Federation is confronted with in their struggles towards attaining the right to adequate housing.

5.7 Conclusion This chapter has explored how marginalized and deprived communities navigate the governance space in claiming the right to adequate housing and the extent to which their collective actions result in access to adequate housing. The empirical analysis is

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grounded in the case of the Lagos chapter of the Federation of Slum/Informal Settlement Dwellers (Federation). We discuss their housing struggles and the different tactics they deploy in navigating the governance space and how effective they have been in their quest to achieve the right to adequate housing. The Federation deployed both invited and invented spaces of participation with the hope of influencing governance and urban development decision-making for adequate housing in the broader context of right to the city. Our findings reveal that the invited spaces of participation are essentially tokenism which only provide little space for the articulation of the interests, needs and demands of the deprived communities. While the Federation engagements with the government, through the invited spaces, the various avenues for engagement are curated by the government. So, when they are invited to participate in the urban development process, it is essentially to legitimise the exclusionary development agenda of the state government and not necessarily to cause policy change towards addressing the cry and demand for adequate housing and right to the city of the urban poor. The government essentially sets the “rules of the game” which dictate the governance setting in which engagement and decision-making take place. As such, invited spaces of participation become an ideology foil which masks exclusion within governance space. Our findings thus demonstrate that the invited spaces represent selective inclusion and governance from above (top-down), focusing on curating and sanctioning the activities of the marginalized communities and the extent of interaction and their involvement in governance and urban development process. This is coherent with Miraftab (2004) who articulated invited spaces as the ones occupied by grassroot movements and their supporting NGOs that are legitimized by government interventions. The production of the invited space must be seen as a social process, in which governments and citizens interact, exert power and play different roles (Visser et al., 2021). The process of production of the invited space ultimately determines the success or otherwise of governance interactions. The openness of the process is, therefore, important to move the invited spaces beyond tokenism. In this sense, government would need to maintain close relationships and work collaboratively with the Federation, pay special attention and grant legitimacy to their collective actions in a way that recognises and put their demands at the center of urban development decision making. This will move governance from tokenism to one in which urban poor become co-creators of urban development. This kind of co-production will strengthen the legitimacy and recognition of the Federation housing struggles. Beyond the invited spaces of participation, the Federation also deploys more radical approaches of invented spaces of participation such as protest, contestation, resistance, and legal procedure. While the Federation deploys these radical tactics to push back against government’s (re)development projects which promote urban commodification and dispossession, through the invented spaces, they also engage in empowering practices such as savings, direct service provision, community survey, multimedia documentation, media advocacy and social media engagement. In this sense, on the one hand, the invented spaces become an arena for innovative tactics

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of governance from below, contributing to filling governance gaps in infrastructure provision. On the other hand, invented spaces become an arena of push back and contestation against government’s redevelopment projects which promote urban commodification and dispossession. This is consistent with Miraftab (2004) who articulated invented spaces as those occupied by the grassroots and claimed by their collective action, but directly challenging the status quo and the dominant actors and power relations within the governance space. The outcomes have, however, only produced marginal impacts on their quest for adequate housing. While the Federation has made some gains through the invented spaces, they have not resulted in significant policy change toward achieving adequate housing. They face governance challenges which limit the outcomes of their collective actions. Central to the challenges are the lack of legitimacy and recognition for the invented collective actions of the Federation members and the inability of the government to accept them as legitimate actors with valid interests in urban development. The invented spaces, particularly the more radical tactics, are rhetorically criminalized as undertakings by extremists (Miraftab, 2004). This often creates tension within the governance space. Governance models how multiple actors, including state and non-state, interact and collaborate to formulate and implement policies. Effective interaction involves accountability and cooperation between multiple actors. Our findings further reinforce the central importance of cooperation and accountability, which are generally lacking in our case study, for effective governance. This a need for co-operation and synergy for a common agenda between the Federation and the supporting NGOs for their collective actions to make positive significant impacts within the governance space. The supporting NGOs must become real partners in progress to the Federation rather than using the platform of collective action to pursue personal agendas for financial benefits and political recognition. The Federation generally perceived the supporting NGOs as obstructionist to their housing struggles and as such untrustworthy. Central to our findings also is the fractured power relations, within the governance space of participation, which hinder progress towards achieving the Right to Adequate Housing for members of the Federation. Navigating the fractured power relations in the governance space is essential in making progress towards access to adequate housing.

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Lawanson, T. (2015). Potentials of The urban poor in shaping a Sustainable Lagos megacity. In A. Allen, A. Lampis, & M. Swilling (Eds.), Untamed urbanisms. Routledge advances in regional economics, science and policy series (pp. 108–118). Routledge. Lawanson, T. (2018). A place to call home? Housing in Nigeria. West Africa Insight, 6(3). Urbanization in West Africa. https://www.africaportal.org/publications/west-africa-insight-vol-6-no3urbanization-west-africa/ Lawanson, T., & Oyalowo, B. (2016). Climbing out of poverty: The role of social cooperatives in Lagos, Nigeria. Journal of Environmental Design and Management, 8(1&2), 92–101. Lawanson, T., Odekunle, D., & Albert, A. (2019). Urban redevelopment and the right to the city in Lagos, Nigeria. In I. Albert, & T. Lawanson (Eds.), Urban crisis and management in Africa (pp. 295–314). Pan African University press. Lawanson, T., & Agunbiade, M. (2018). Land governance and megacity projects in Lagos, Nigeria: The case of Lekki free trade zone. Area Development and Policy, 3(1), 114–131. Lefebvre, H. (1996 [1968]). The right to the city. In E. Kaufman & E. Lebas (Eds.), Writings on 664 cities (pp. 63–181). Blackwell. Miraftab, F. (2004). Invited and invented spaces of participation: Neoliberal citizenship and feminists’ expanded notion of politics. Wagadu, 1, 1–7. Miraftab, F. (2009). Insurgent planning: Situating radical planning in the Global South. Planning Theory, 8(1), 32–50. Miraftab, F., & Wills, S. (2005). Insurgency and spaces of active citizenship: The story of Western Cape anti-eviction campaign in South Africa. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 25(2), 200–217. Mitchell, D. (2003). The right to the city: Social justice and the fight for public space. Guildford Press. Mitlin, D., & Bartlett, S. (2020). Acquiring housing–understanding outcomes, improving choices and “leaving no one behind.” Environment and Urbanization, 32(2), 317–332. Moe, T. (1990). Political institutions: The neglected side of the story. Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, 6, 213–253. Obeng-Odoom, F. (2017). Urban governance in Africa today: Reframing experiences, and lessons. Growth and Change, 48(1), 4-21F. Olajide, O. (2015). Understanding the complexity of factors which influence livelihoods of the urban poor in Lagos’ informal settlements. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, Newcastle University Olajide, A. O., Agunbiade, M. E., & Bishi, H. B. (2018). The realities of Lagos urban development vision on livelihoods of the urban poor. Journal of Urban Management, 7, 21–31. Olajide, O., & Lawanson, T. (2022). Urban paradox and the rise of the neoliberal city: Case study of Lagos, Nigeria. Urban Studies, 59(9), 1763–1781. Oldfield, S. (2003). Polemical politics and the practice of community-organising in Cape Town. Unpublished Research Report, University of Cape Town. Omoegun, A. (2015). Street trader displacements and the relevance of the right to the city concept in a rapidly urbanising African City: Lagos, Nigeria. Unpublished Phd Thesis submitted to School of Planning and Geography, Cardiff University. Patel, S., Burra, S., & D’Cruz, C. (2001). Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI)—Foundations to treetops. Environment & Urbanization, 13(2), 45–59. Phillips, N. (2017). Power and inequality in the global political economy. International Affairs, 93(2), 429–444. Satterthwaite, D. (2020). Getting housing back onto the development agenda: The many roles of housing and the many services it should provide its inhabitants. Environment and Urbanization, 32(1), 3–18. Satterthwaite, D., Mitlin, M., & Pate, S. (2011). Engaging with the urban poor and their organizations for poverty reduction and urban governance. An issues paper for the United Nations Development Programme. United Nations Development Programme. Ferreira, S. W., & J., Rojas, E., De Souza Carvalho, H. R., Rago Frignani, C., & Santi Lupo, L. (2020). Housing policies and the roles of local governments in Latin America: Recent experiences. Environment and Urbanization, 32(2), 333–350.

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Smit, W. (2018). Urban governance in Africa: An overview. African cities and the development conundrum, pp. 55–77. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. (2015). How the World Bank broke its promise to protect the poor. Uitermark, J., Nicholls, W., & Loopmans, M. (2012). Cities and social movements: Theorizing beyond the right to the city. Environment and Planning a: Economy and Space, 44(11), 2546– 2554. UN News. (2015). Nigeria must halt evictions threatening tens of thousands with homelessness – UN. UN-Habitat. (2016). Urbanization and development: Emerging futures. World Cities Report 2016. United Nations Human Settlements Programme. United Nations. (2017). The new urban agenda. The United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) in Quito, Ecuador, on 20 October 2016. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). (1997). Governance for sustainable human development. United Nations Development Programme. Visser, V., van Popering-Verkerk, J., & van Buuren, A. (2021). The social production of invited spaces: Toward an understanding of the invitational character of spaces for Citizens’ initiatives. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 32, 869–880. World Bank. (1989). Sub-Saharan Africa, From crisis to sustainable growth, a long term perspective study. The World Bank. World Population Review. (2021). Lagos population 2021. https://worldpopulationreview.com/ world-cities/lagos-population

Oluwafemi Olajide is a Senior Lecturer in Planning at the Department of Environmental Management, Lincoln University, New Zealand. Prior to this, he was a Lecturer in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Lagos, Nigeria and an ERC Research Fellow at the Polytechnic of Turin. He holds a Ph.D. in Planning from Newcastle University, United Kingdom. He is profoundly concerned about urban affairs, with a particular focus on the intersections of governance and urban development within the domains of urban livelihoods, poverty, informality, housing rights, participation, and social movements. He is concerned about seeking ways to improve the living conditions of the urban poor. He explores how urban realities are mediated by the institutional structures and governance dynamics, including how the unfinished business of colonisation and neoliberalism shape governance and development ideology locally, and its implications on the livelihoods of the urban poor. Oluwafemi is a 2018 fellow of Brown International Advanced Research Institutes (BIARI), Brown University, USA, and a Research Fellow on the ERC Project Inhabiting Radical Housing at DIST/Politecnico di Torino, where his research focuses on housing precarity, homelessness and the politics of inhabitation in sub-Sharan African and New Zealand. Taibat Lawanson is Professor of Urban Management and Governance at the University of Lagos, Nigeria where she leads the Pro-Poor Development Research Cluster and serves as Co-Director at the Centre for Housing and Sustainable Development. She holds a Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning from the Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria. Her research focuses on the interface of social complexities, urban realities and the pursuit of spatial justice in Africa. She is well known for her inter-sectoral work which engages students, policy makers, local communities and civil society actors, and has published widely. Taibat serves on the international advisory committee of UNHABITAT’s flagship ‘State of the World’s Cities’. She is also a member of the editorial/advisory committees of major urban studies journals including Urban Studies, Housing Studies, Urban Forum, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and Area Development and Policy. She serves on a number of other boards and committees.

Chapter 6

What Lies Inbetween: Self-Built Housing and the Struggle to Remain in Place in Dar es Salaam Priscila Izar , Tatu Mtwangi Limbumba , and Albert Nyiti

6.1 Introduction Across the Global South, housing and neighborhood self-building is a way of producing peripheral spaces (Meth et al., 2021), through unstable, improvised and fragmented ways and relationships between citizens and the state (Caldeira, 2017).1 Following Santos (2011), in this paper, peripheral refers to a condition of marginality in relation to formal state planning and investment. Geographical location is relevant to the notion of periphery as it defines context, meanwhile, peripheral territories can be at the center and the edges of cities. Fast population growth and urbanization rates are, today, characteristic of African cities, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city and economic capital, is an important example. With estimated population of 7.1 million (World Population Review, 2021), Dar es Salaam’s average yearly urban growth rate in the last decade was 6.5%. In Tanzania, these account, respectively, for a total population of 59.4 million people and a growth rate of 5% (URT, 2018). Individuals and families of different income levels (self) build and finance 98% of Tanzania’s housing stock (MLHHSD, 2018). In Dar es Salaam, housing self-building is present in neighborhoods developed out of formal plans and served by public infrastructure 1

Adopting the terminology from Latin American studies, Caldeira (2017) refers to self-building as autoconstruction. We have adopted the term self-building in this paper as it is more popular in the Tanzanian context. P. Izar (B) School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand, John Moffatt Building, 1 Jan Smuts Road, Braamfontein Campus East, Johannesburg, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] T. M. Limbumba · A. Nyiti Institute for Human Settlements Studies (IHSS), Ardhi University, P. O. Box 35124, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rubin et al. (eds.), Housing in African Cities, Urban Perspectives from the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37408-1_6

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systems, as well as in peripheral territories, locally described as informal settlements and developed without a government survey or plan (Kombe, 2005). Moreover, an estimated 75% of urban dwellers access housing by renting rooms in self-built houses in peripheral neighborhoods, for affordable prices (Cadstedt, 2010). Our study takes as a point of departure these informal settlements, here described as peripheral territories, which emerge from multiple forms of housing and neighborhood self-building, overlapping land management and tenure logics, context-specific temporalities and transversal relationships between residents and the state (Caldeira, 2017; Karaman et al., 2020). The Dar es Salaam Master Plan (2016–2036, p. 55) estimates that 48.6% of the urban footprint consists of informal settlements where decades-long processes of housing and neighborhood building have facilitated the permanence of low-income dwellers by enabling spaces of social and cultural significance (Limbumba, 2010), and accommodating micro-level variations of use, function and spatial organization that also contribute to residents’ feelings of belonging and emplacement (Izar, 2022). Drawing from a post-colonial interpretations of the state, state policy and governance as complex, contradictory, fragmented and unstable (Haid & Hilbrandt, 2019), we approach housing and neighborhood self-building as forms of citizens and state’s practices and articulations that evolve “through complex, multiple and contingent ways” (McFarlane, 2012, p. 103). Urban production in peripheral territories, although happening outside formal state rules and policies, is instrumental to the state (Roy, 2005). Formal and informal land management and urban production models and systems happen in a continuum (McFarlane, 2012), while the state attempts to strategically determine which arrangements are legal and which are illegal, according to its own political interests and agendas (Kuyucu, 2014). Meanwhile, city dwellers “engaging transversally with official logics” and “operating in special niches of the capitalist market of land, credit and consumption, make themselves into citizens and political agents, claiming the cities as their own, [as] agents of urbanization, not simply consumers of spaces developed and regulated by others” (Caldeira, 2017, pp. 1–5). A grounded analysis of housing self-building in Chamazi, a neighborhood in the outskirts of Dar es Salaam, about 20 km from the city center, in the district of Temeke, informs this study. Since the 1960s when residents first settled there, different modalities of housing self-building have emerged. Specifically, we investigated three distinct and overlapping modalities, taking into consideration how the state relates with each one of them in contradictory and fragmented ways, the lived experiences of different agents of self-building—homeowners and renters—as narrated by them (Meth et al., 2021), and finally how these different modalities unfold, materially, on the ground. Empirical data is based on fieldwork between November 2020 and January 2021. This involved three site visits to identify the self-building modalities and associated actors, i.e., local government authority (Chamazi Ward Leader’s Office), communitybased organizations, local housing builders, and residents. A focus group discussion

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was held in January 2021. Semi structured interviews were conducted with 12 households/builders from the three modalities identified. Follow up semi structured interviews were conducted with local housing builders and representatives of a local housing co-operative. Site analysis, field observation and review of land legislation supported the investigation.2

6.2 Housing and Neighborhood Self-Building as Forms of State and Citizen’s Everyday Practice Everyday, incremental urban transformation occurs in dissimilar ways. Through a cross-national comparison of self-building, Streule et al. (2020, p. 1) allude to “popular urbanization” to emphasize “collective initiatives, various forms of selforganization and the engagement and labor of mostly poor or low-income urban dwellers,” while Karaman et al. (2020, p. 1125) refer to plotting urbanism as a process that can happen along with popular urbanization, with “more individualized strategies of urban development and intensification of land use, strong processes of commodification and often a marked differentiation between property owners and tenants.”

6.2.1 An Enabling State with a Homeownership Bias Tanzania is depicted as having two systems governing land and urban production (Kombe, 2005): a formal system, based on the government’s issuance of right of occupancy titles, playing a marginal role, and a de-facto system, where land sales are based on the “social recognition of ownership rights from adjoining landowners and elected local leaders, commonly legitimized through informal sales agreements, legal contracts, and the practice of local leaders acting as witnesses and verifying that the seller is the rightful owner” (Andreasen et al., 2020, p. 92). Unable to facilitate housing access via direct production or through private credit, the Tanzanian state today acts as enabler of housing and neighborhood self-building (Nnkya, 2021). This is a departure from the post-independence years, when it sought to facilitate adequate housing for all Tanzanians, particularly through the National Housing Corporation (NHC), created in 1962 (Kironde, 1992). In 1967, the Arusha

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This paper is part of a larger research effort that the first author coordinated during a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Human Settlements Studies (IHSS) at Ardhi University (2018–2020) and the Dar es Salaam City Laboratory (2020–2021), an action research platform anchored at IHSS. We are thankful to Upendo Mbunda and Gwamaka Lucas, Research Assistants at the CityLab, and Mariam Genes and Richard Prosper, Assistant Research Fellows at IHSS, for their contribution to the fieldwork that supports this paper.

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Declaration set the basis for the construction of a socialist society based on selfreliance (Ujamaa), nationalizing all means of production, including land. While prioritizing rural development based on collective farming and self-organizing through villagization (Lugalla, 1997), the Arusha Declaration reaffirmed the role of the state as a provider of housing, enhancing NHC’s mandate (Kironde, 1992). Then in the 1970s, a credit crisis pushed Tanzania towards regime change and market-based reforms. The national housing finance system was dismantled. A decline in state subsidies led NHC to operate on a commercial basis, prioritizing financial sustainability over housing delivery (Kironde, 1992). NHC moved away from constructing and renting out affordable housing to, more recently, dedicating its focus and budget to the market rate residential and commercial sectors (Izar & Limbumba, 2021). The Tanzania Land Policy of 1997 and Land Act of 1999 legally recognized land ownership in informal settlements, granting homeowners a considerable level of tenure security (Kombe, 2005). Typically, residents do not wait for the state (Oldfield & Greyling, 2015) to provide them with housing, but rather house themselves (Nguluma, 2003). Over the years, state strategies have evolved to formalize self-built housing, through site and service schemes in the 1960s and 70s and community infrastructure upgrading (1980s to early 2000s). However, very limited state investment in neighborhood infrastructure and services in informal areas (e.g., water and drainage, waste management), and minimal support to microfinancing and site and service schemes (Kyessi & Furaha, 2010) push communities into situations of environmental risk as neighborhoods consolidate. Recently, forced displacements to open the way for post facto infrastructure development have disrupted critical livelihoods (Mteki et al., 2017). The lack of recognition of the rights of tenants, a key grouping in the self-built neighourhoods, excludes the largest and economically poorest category of urban dwellers from state support during evictions to pave the way for developments (Ndezi, 2009). State compensations concentrate on homeowners and fabricates class divisions (Campbell, 2014).3 Today, Tanzania’s main instrument for land and property regularization is the MKURABITA, a national land formalization program implemented locally by district level authorities through the issuance of titles to regularize housing and commercial projects. The outcomes of this program are limited and skewed towards the economically better off class of property owners. For example, until May 2022, one million properties had been surveyed through regularization but only 14% (almost 143,000) had their certificates of right of occupancy issued to residents (MLHHSD, 2022, p. 45). Unable to afford the costs of property marking down and titling, low-income property owners may opt out of the program. The Tanzanian government tries to address this issue by, for example, reducing the program’s cost (recently it went from TZS 250,000 to TZS 150,000—USD 107 to USD 64 3

A National Housing Policy Draft elaborated in 2018 includes guidelines for addressing the rental sector and recognizes its relevance, particularly for low income households.

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respectively—per property surveyed). However these measures are still insufficient to attract low-income dwellers, to whom the program remains unaffordable. Lately there have been efforts to link MKURABITA to financial institutions, with residents acquiring loans to pay for regularization costs, using their properties as collateral (MLHHSD, 2021, 2022, p. 45). However, evidence shows that property title alone has not incentivized low-income individuals to borrow credit because of, among other reasons, high interest rates and irregular incomes (Magina et al., 2020).

6.2.2 (State) Fragmentations and Contradictions Through Stalled Decentralization Decentralization was a major goal of the market-based reforms introduced in Tanzania in the 1990s, however, de-facto local government authority has been quite limited (Pastory, 2014). According to Kombe and Namangaya (2016), limited access to local government’s revenues compromises local authorities’ ability to develop capacity to address urban planning, development and management issues. The Land Policy of 1997 (URT, 1997, p. 19) mandated local level authorities with “registering and maintaining the records of the rights of residents in unplanned urban settlements.” Accordingly, appointed and locally elected leaders at local ward and sub-ward offices are responsible for endorsing informal buying and selling of land and housing. Through their municipal councils, district authorities control self-built housing, requiring housing builders to obtain a building permit from the local government authority’s (LGA) office prior to construction. Ward and sub-ward officers are charged with endorsing forms and presenting them to the municipal council for issuance of permits. This process also enables LGAs through their town planning department to verify disputes around plot boundaries, and/or discrepancies between drawings and actual geographical location (Omar, 2018).4 However, these mandates neither enable nor capacitate local authorities to participate in local level development decisions (Magina et al., 2020). Local authorities are mostly implementers of policies designed by the national government, despite their knowledge of their own territories.

6.3 Local Context: The Chamazi Neighborhood Dar es Salaam is divided into five districts, further divided into wards and sub-wards (see Fig. 6.1). Chamazi is a ward in Temeke’s district. In 2016, Chamazi’s estimated population was 78,500, and 5.5% annual growth rate. The area was first settled in the 1950s, before the country’s independence, when access to rural land was almost 4

Notably, the plot’s marking down is done at the housing builder’s cost. This requirement can also discourage housing builders, especially those of low income, to pursue building permits.

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KINONDONI

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TEMEKE Keko Kurasini Chamazi Mbagala

KIGAMBONI Dar es Salaam district boundaries ward boundaries Indian Ocean

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Fig. 6.1 Dar es Salaam administrative subdivision and highlighted wards. Based on Resiliency Academy Tanzania. Courtesy of Linda Heiss (Source Linda Heiss, based on Resiliency Academy TZ)

free and exchanged through customary agreements outside of urban areas.5 With the agreement of families already settled there, newcomers would be pointed to a piece of land for almost no cost. Agriculture was the main source of livelihood. Major crops included cashew nuts, cassava, coconut, sugarcane, and fruits such as mangoes and pawpaws. In the framework of the Arusha Declaration of 1967, villagization ruled land distribution in Chamazi, with transactions involving village government leaders, in addition to land buyers and sellers. Since the 1960s, profound spatial and social transformations have unfolded in Chamazi. During a focus group discussion, residents recalled how, before the 1980s, the area had no amenities. Access to the largest city market, Kariakoo in the city center was often by foot. For daily medical treatment, residents relied on local traditional 5

The colonial power prohibited land transactions between African nationals within urban areas.

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healers. Since the 1980s, road expansion has stimulated utility supplies, mobility, and an increase in economic activities, including a sizable fresh food market, the Chamazi Magengeni. Presently, Chamazi is one of the wards in Temeke targeted by MKURABITA, the national titling and formalization program. During our interviews and focus group discussions, no mention was made of the relationship between land titling and access to credit, as emphasized by the program. Still, property formalization plays out on resident’s perceptions of their territory. During an interview, a housing builder explained that in the future, with formalization, Chamazi will become more “like a city,” residents will enjoy more social and economic opportunities, including through the increase in the value of their houses. Large-scale urban redevelopment projects such as road expansion, the development of a city-wide bus rapid transit network, and expansion of the Dar es Salaam port by the Tanzanian government have led to a wave of resettlement citywide. This has contributed to a construction boom in neighborhoods such as Chamazi, to house evicted households, and urban dwellers looking for more affordable and/or more sprawled living. Interview data indicated that families evicted from a particular city area tended to resettle in proximity to each other, due to social ties, and the exchanging of information about housing availability. The redevelopment of the Kurasini area, with expansion of the Dar es Salaam international port, was quite relevant to the recent transformation of Chamazi and the evolution of at least two modalities of self-building there, described in the next section. Figure 6.1 shows the administrative division of Dar es Salaam, with its five municipalities and wards. The Chamazi ward is highlighted in Fig. 6.2.

Fig. 6.2 Chamazi neighborhood and study area. Based on Google Earth 2022. Courtesy of Linda Heiss

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6.4 Urbanization and Housing Self-Building in Chamazi We identified in Chamazi three main modalities of housing self-building, classified as traditional, co-operative-based, and build-to-sell. Our intention is not to offer an exhaustive list of self-building typologies unfolding in the territory as these are in constant transformation (Streule et al., 2020), but rather to examine how relations between state and agents of self-building vary across different housing modalities and play out in territorial transformation.

6.4.1 Traditional Self-Building The Swahili house represents a traditional form of housing self-building: a simple, one level, rectangular structure that is built incrementally (over a decade), through a family’s own savings. The Swahili house is not unique to Chamazi, rather, it is the most common self-building modality in the city (Nguluma, 2003). Construction happens room by room, accommodating living throughout the home building. In the process, the Swahili house constitutes a source of income through rental of rooms and installation of small commercial activities (Sheuya, 2007), through flexible arrangements (Izar, 2022). There are two generations of Swahili houses in Chamazi. The first, in the Kiduvini area, emerged in the 1960s in large plots of one to two thousand square meters (Fig. 6.3a). These matched the livelihood of original owners, with enough area for family farming and the gradual construction of new housing units to the expanding family. The Tanzanian Urban Planning Act of 2018 classifies settlements such as Kiduvini as super low density, with plot size varying between 1200 and 2000 square meters. Over time, the Swahili houses in Kiduvini have been updated while keeping their residential use and spatial character. In the future, original owners predict a more significant transformation of these housing arrangements, as their children inherit their properties, subdivide and sell them to individual buyers or to developers. Some original self-builders in Kiduvini indicated during the interviews their belief that their houses will likely be demolished in the future and their land converted into Jenga-Uza housing developments. A second generation of Swahili houses was built near the Chamazi market in the 1990s, in a more compact arrangement (Fig. 6.3b and c). There, plot sizes vary between 300 and 600 square meters. While houses in this location change at a faster pace, with permanent conversion of part or the totality of homes into commercial buildings, a transformation of the urban tissue in this more consolidated area, like it is expected in Kiduvini, is less likely.

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6.4.2 Co-operative-Based Self-Building A co-operative housing model characterizes the Federation houses, a 300-unit project located on a 30-acre plot (120,000 square meters), with provision for rental housing, community facilities and public open space. It results from organized grassroots pressure, particularly involving women, for state support to house low-income tenants who were forcefully removed, without compensation, from the neighborhood of Kurasini, in central Dar es Salaam. It included the eviction of 36,000 informal residents, and demolition of 7351 houses (Ndezi, 2009). When plans for port renovation in Kiduvini were issued in 2001, supported by the Land Policy of 1997 and the Land Act No.4 of 1999, the Ministry of Lands, as it is current practice, offered financial compensation for the eviction of property owners in Kurasini, while denying it to tenants. “Alienated, marginalized and left for their own devices” (Wamuchiru, 2017, p. 558), a group of evicted tenants, predominantly women, joined a local chapter of the Tanzanian Federation of the Urban Poor (TFUP). With the support of the Tanzanian-based Centre for Community Initiatives (CCI), a non-governmental organization, TFUP is affiliated to the Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI), a global network advocating for the rights of poor urban dwellers and of women.6 The Federation in Kurasini established a savings scheme to provide long-term support to the evicted tenants. It also conducted a survey of the population being forcefully evicted, finding that 70% of households were informal tenants being evicted without compensation and therefore adversely affected by the redevelopment plan (Ndezi, 2009). It also pressured the Ministry of Lands, with CCI support, for a solution to their forced eviction. In 2007, they bought a 30-acre plot in Chamazi (valued at 24 million Shillings, the equivalent to 66 million Shilling in today’s value, or USD 28,000), upon the District authority’s confirmation that land would be included in future infrastructure plans (Ndezi, 2009). Land ownership in the Federation houses is based on a collective landholding model, registered under one block title with the National Ministry of Lands, Housing and Human Settlements. This grants an equal ownership stake to every household (Wamuchiru, 2017). The Federation houses are incremental by design, a way to support low-income dwellers and female-headed households who are building their own homes for the first time, through their saving scheme (Fig. 6.3d–f). The startup unit, with a room, private bathrooms and kitchen, costs 5.8 million Shillings- approximately USD 2500 in today’s value. A full unit (two bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom and living room), costs 10 million Shillings (USD 4300). Federation members borrow capital from the saving scheme to finance the startup unit, through a long-term (eight-year) loan. Home expansion is only permitted once the original loan is fully repaid. Still, without state subsidy, resources are quite limited. Consequently, so far, 76 structures have been erected, with 18 houses completely finished, 26 completed at the start up stage, and 32 at different levels of construction prior to the completion of the startup phase. 6

Currently there are 874 Federations in Tanzania, with over 22,000 members, most of them women (field notes).

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6.4.3 Build to Sell Self-Building Locally described as Jenga Uza (meaning “build to sell” in the Swahili language), this modality of self-building consists of single-family houses that local-level builders construct and sell within the informal housing delivery system. A typical Jenga Uza consists of a stand-alone house with three bedrooms, bathroom and kitchen. Departing from the rationality of the traditional and co-operative-based modalities, a tall roof is often added not for thermal comfort but rather as a sign of economic status. Moreover, Jenga Uza houses are fenced off for enhanced security and privacy—signs of resident’s preference for modernization and desire to make their economic status apparent (Fig. 6.3g–i). While the Jenga Uza is not unique to Chamazi, its local expansion, which began in the early 2000s and boomed in 2009, is a direct result of the port development in Kurasini. Evicted property owners from Kurasini, unlike evicted tenants, were compensated by the government for their displacement and bought Jenga Uza houses in Chamazi with their funds. Compensation amounts varied between 8 and 12 million Shillings per household—equivalent to USD 5900 and USD 8900 in 2009, and USD 8200 and USD 12,350 in today’s value and about the value of the Jenga Uza houses in this same period (Hooper & Ortolano, 2012). The short period between notification and removal from Kurasini, less than a month, created a rush for Jenga Uza houses in Chamazi. With buyers urging to move in, the building process was shortened, compromising important construction elements (concrete structures and bricks made on site), leading to permanent structural defects, which did not affect their commercial value. In fact, the unit price of Jenga Uza houses has increased significantly as described below. The construction of a citywide system of bus corridors, the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) by the Dar Rapid Transit Agency (DART), pushed up property prices in more centrally located neighborhoods such as Manzese, Magomeni and Kariakoo. Residents there sold their properties to investors and bought new homes in Chamazi. By then, as a newer and more remote neighborhood, housing prices in Chamazi were more affordable.7 In some cases property buyers had enough cash to commission construction of a second home for investment. This helped fuel the local housing boom. Some residents have also become successful local builders, as we were told during an interview: When I moved here in 2013 I built my first two houses. Initially I planned to rent one of them. However, I was approached by Dalalis (i.e., un-registered local real estate agents operating in the informal sector) who convinced me to sell the house instead of renting. Since the offer was good and I would get more profit by selling than renting it, I agreed. I sold that house

7

During the interviews, it was expressed that, as a less consolidated neighborhood in the outskirts of Dar es Salaam, housing prices in Chamazi were lower than in centrally located neighborhoods. The presence of a fresh food market, the Chamazi Magengeni, also kept food prices low, resulting in an overall lower cost of living, in comparison to more central city areas.

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at thirteen million Shillings. Later, in 2019, I built and sold another house at twenty million. This is how my business started; and in 2020 I was able to build and sell three more houses.8

Currently, Jenga Uza houses are spread throughout Chamazi, either mixed with Swahili houses in the central areas, or clustered in less dense areas. Modified forms of Jenga Uza are also found, with similar spatial arrangements built incrementally by their owners. Today, the selling price of this modality varies between 30 and 50 million Shillings (USD 13,000 and USD 22,700 thousand), twice as much as the selling value in the early 2000s. Figures 6.3 and 6.4 display the different modalities of self-building in Chamazi. The last row gives a sense of the urban morphology of each modality. The Federation and Swahili houses are significantly more compact than the Jenga Uza houses. The Federation and the Jenga Uza houses form a grid, while the Swahili houses (in Kiduvini, as displayed) are arranged organically, reflecting the different ways that land is used, including for family farming.

6.5 Politics of Formalization and Their Effect in Self-Building Modes of Practice According to Caldeira (2017, p. 10), in self-built territories, incrementality and transversal logics “permit the continuing improvement of peripheral urban spaces while simultaneously preserving the ability of the poor to inhabit these spaces and the metropolis that they build” (Caldeira, 2017, p. 10). In Chamazi, as Table 6.1 describes, different modalities of housing self-building reflect variations on the ability of the poor to build and maintain their spaces, and on their daily lived experiences. The selective state approach to the rights of urban dwellers partly explains these variations. In the Swahili and Federation houses, temporalities and building incrementality has enabled residents to inhabit the spaces that they have built over time, because they were able to plan for construction according to their ability to save. In the Swahili modality, residents followed traditional modes of incremental self-building. Accordingly, they build and inhabit more temporary structures made of mud and pole and eventually move into permanent structures in brick. Sometimes the temporary structures are repurposed and others converted into the permanent ones (Izar, 2022). On the one hand, incremental building can be costly, as builders waste materials and sometimes need to rebuild parts that were left unfinished for a long period. On the other hand, incrementality grants self-builders control over housing development. Unable to borrow credit, they build their homes gradually and according to their financial means. In addition, they repurpose their houses, for example by adding rental units, in order to finance their housing developments (Izar, 2022; Sheuya, 2007). In 8

Dalalis are “quasi-formal” regulators of land and housing markets, dominating such markets in urban areas. Dalalis are usually recognized by local government leaders who witness the lease/sale agreements that they facilitate (Komu, 2020).

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Fig. 6.3 Modalities of Housing Self Building in Chamazi’s Territory (a–c Swahili, d–f Federation and g–i Jenga Uza) (photo taken by authors)

Fig. 6.4 Federation Housing, Swahilli Housing and Jenga Uza Housing Clusters. Courtesy of Linda Heiss, based on Google Earth 2022

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Table 6.1 Chamazi’s self-built housing production models Housing production model/type/ temporality

Main agents Resident’s role Funding source involved in construction

Land allocation system and tenure status

Traditional/ Swahili Since 1960s

Residents, family members directly hiring small local contractors

Builders and/or Yearly savings, loans direct or help from family contractors members Homeowners and renters cohabitating

Land initially acquired through customary rights Tenure security based on recognition of customary agreement

Co-operative based/ Federation Since 2000s

Families, housing and water and sanitation NGOs

Advocates, Community-based facilitators and daily saving schemes builders Single family homes inhabited by homebuilders

Block title granted through negotiation between Federation and Central Government Tenure security based on collective property rights with prospects of single titles once loans are paid off

Clients Single family homes

Land commercialized through de-facto system Tenure security based on local authority’s recognition of sales agreement

Contemporary/ Local Jenga Uza developers hiring a Since 2010s team of small local contractors (fundis)

Cash originated from: (i) compensation for forced removal, (ii) sale of properties in other areas of Dar es Salaam, (iii) extra savings

the Federation houses, building incrementality is planned, as described above, with the aim that residents can afford incremental construction and avoid the extra costs of building interruptions. The goal is also guaranteeing the permanence of evicted low-income tenants and women-headed households engaging with homeownership for the first time. The Jenga Uza modality, meanwhile, lacks the incremental logic and in fact is aligned with speculative housing models based on fast construction and profit maximization. Jenga Uza’s residents, while not being burdened by the extra costs of housing incrementality, have less control over the process of home and neighborhood production. Instead, builders control the process, prioritizing economic gain and sometimes compromising construction quality or adding functionless housing elements, in a clear departure from the logic of the traditional and co-operative-based models. The Jenga Uza houses, while a modality of self-building, present a stronger association to the commodification of land and housing and connection to private market players than the Swahili and Federation housing models.

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6.5.1 Strategic Articulations and Ambiguities In peripheral territories, state agents relate transversally to building and planning rules in order to enable their own agenda (Kuyucu, 2014). In Chamazi, local level authorities favor private property formalization and business expansion by actions such as endorsing and presiding over the sale of property (Andreasen et al., 2020). Swahili houses that were brought up under the customary land system did not require the recognition of the ward leader for commercial operations, while currently the Jenga Uza houses do. The requirement that local leaders oversee their commercialization simultaneously places Jenga Uza houses on a more direct path towards regularization and raises their value. Since the signature of the ward leader in a sale agreement increases legitimacy of the commercial operation of any property, facilitating regularization and titling in the future, this process is followed even in the commercialization of Swahili houses. Meanwhile, there is an expectation that ward leaders who support local sales agreement will be supported in the local elections. Good relationships between land and house sellers and local leaders facilitate land transactions and help consolidate local political power, reinforcing the expansion of speculative housing markets. “Through legal action, [and more specifically the strategic articulation of ambiguous law], the state can determine what becomes private property” (Kuyucu, 2014, p. 610), in this case through requiring an official’s signature in the sale of property. MKURABITA is one of the most important ways in which the central government interacts in the territory, through coordination with the local authorities’ issuance of titles to regularize housing and commercial projects. Property titling enables title holders to borrow credit at commercial banks while also requiring payment of tax revenues and management of community infrastructure and services (Magina et al., 2020). However, with land titling coming at a significant cost to individual families, the better off are more likely to participate than the low-income dwellers.

6.5.2 Insurgency, Sense of the City and Ability to Stay Put Presently, while connected with their territories through cultural and social ties, residents of Swahili houses see their buildings and way of living as bound to change, through conversion into Jenga Uza-style homes.9 Mr. Urembo, a long-time resident of Kiduvini, expressed during an interview how his house represented more than shelter and rather a means to support his community, but subsequently indicated their belief that this would change:

9

This perception is stronger in Kiduvini, where land use is low density, and housing homeownership is quite high, as compared to central Chamazi, where occupation is denser, more consolidated and with greater presence of renters.

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....I have kept quite a big open space in front of my house (…). In case of any kind of ceremony whether burial or wedding, I know for sure people will need to gather and this space will be very useful.

Mr. Urembo is aware that his land will be subdivided once he is no longer there. “I know my children will not keep it as it is when I’m no longer here. They will sell all the open space and split the money among themselves.” Members of the Federation houses, despite their history of hardship and eviction, are more hopeful regarding their ability to stay put and maintain their way of living in Chamazi than the longtime residents of the Swahili houses who believe that their land will be subdivided and converted into Jenga Uza housing in the future. In the Federation houses, residents’ struggle to conquer land gave them hope that their history of forced eviction experienced in Kurasini will not be repeated (Wamuchiru, 2017) and that their home situation will improve gradually, as they gradually invest in home and neighborhood building and welcome new neighbors. A Federation member expressed during an interview that “the situation will be better in the future after other families have moved in.” Another member described her experience as follows: “(Our neighbors in Chamazi) when they see us they wish they could join, they ask us questions and they are impressed. They ask if these are police quarters, they are surprised how we as a low income group could afford to do this…if we could allow people to still join us here, there would not be enough space.” It is undeniable that residents of the Federation houses aspire to homeownership. During an interview, a resident noted: ...I am thankful for the Federation because instead of renting, I now own a house. Although my business is not doing so well here like it was in Kurasini, it gets me by and since I do not pay rent (which used to be the larger part of my monthly expenses), I can budget what I earn accordingly and cater for my basic needs.

However, as the above quote indicates, homeownership aspiration within residents of the Federation houses reflects their desire for security against forced removal without compensation, rising housing rent prices, and livelihood protection. This is similar to what Streule et al. (2020) described as popular urbanization, reporting on residents’ connection to their neighborhood for relationships that are primarily of use value. In contrast, some residents of Jenga Uza houses lack clarity about their length of stay in Chamazi, not due to forceful eviction, but for the expectations that home values might increase to a point that they can sell and start over somewhere else, in a condition similar to that described by Karaman et al. (2020) in their analysis of plotting urbanism.

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6.6 Conclusion This chapter investigated the governance of housing and neighborhood self-building through the case of Dar es Salaam, grounded in the realities of Chamazi, in the city’s outskirts. A prevalent mode of urban production in the Global South and in African cities, self-building shapes cities and neighborhood territories unevenly, through unstable, ambiguous and contested relationships between residents and the state (Caldeira, 2017). Our study adds empirical evidence and nuance to the notion that urban production through self-building, although often happening outside of government rules and policies, is instrumental to the state (Roy, 2005), and that governments attempt to strategically determine which arrangements are legal and which are illegal, according to their own political interests and agendas (Kuyucu, 2014). The state is not absent from peripheral territories and rather approaches self-building and informality strategically. Our analysis described how in Tanzania the state, while adopting an enabling approach, prioritizes property formalization and business formation when addressing self-building, and recognizes the housing rights of property owners but not of tenants. Simultaneously, that the state is “prone to contradictions, conflicts, irrationalities and inconsistencies” (Haid & Hilbrandt, 2019, p. 5) opens cracks through which organized residents’ groups can demand assistance and advocate for urban and housing rights, based on (newly gained) understandings of citizenship acquired through “vigorous community participation” (Wamuchiru, 2017, p. 559), engagement in networked governance, as well as practices of solidarity and care. In our case study, these groups are constituted particularly by women. This chapter described how different self-building housing modalities unfold unevenly in Chamazi’s territory, thanks in part to the state’s strategically narrow approach concerning housing tenure. Based on a narrow interpretation of the law, the Tanzanian government offers financial compensation for the forced eviction of property owners, while not assisting tenants, fabricating class divisions (Campbell, 2014). These state decisions affect housing production on the ground. We described how a particular self-building modality, the Jenga-Uza, boomed in Chamazi after the state paid for the compensation of property owners evicted from the Kurasini area, and how this modality relates more closely to speculative self-building practices (Karaman et al., 2020), when compared to the traditional Swahili self-built house or the co-operative-based, Federation house. However, as our analysis also describes, state action alone does not determine the lived experiences and the housing aspirations present in the different modalities of self-building. These are also forged on daily practices, community activism and struggle, networked governance and practices of care, particularly by women. Our study described how the residents from the Federation houses, which emerged out of the struggle of evicted tenants resettling in Chamazi from Kurasini express a very strong sense of belonging to their territory or, as described by Simone (2010), a strong sense of the city. Research should continue to explore these unstable and contested processes, practices and realities at expanding peripheral territories.

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MLHHSD. (2021). Ministry of lands, housing and human settlements development. Uzinduzi wa Mpango wa Kitaifa wa Urasimishaji Makazi. Newsletters. MLHHSD. (2022). Ministry of lands, housing and human settlements development Budget 2022/ 2023. Tanzania National Budget. Draft National Housing Policy. Mteki, N., Murayama, T., & Nishikizawa, S. (2017). Social impacts induced by a development project in Tanzania: A case of airport expansion. Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal, 35(4), 272–283. Ndezi, T. (2009). The limit of community initiatives in addressing resettlement in Kurasini ward, Tanzania. Environment and Urbanization, 21(1), 77–88. Nguluma, H. (2003). Housing themselves: Transformations, modernization and spatial qualities in informal settlements in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (PhD dissertation). Infrastruktur. Nnkya, T. J. (2021, February 16–17). The policy, structural and institutional context that has influenced housing transformation in Dar es Salaam Region. Workshop Paper presented at FES-Tanzania, Just City Platform Workshop, Dar es Salaam. Oldfield, S., & Greyling, S. (2015). Waiting for the state: A politics of housing in South Africa. Environment and Planning A, 47(5), 1100–1112. Omar, H. (2018). Building permit in informal settlements—“A measure of development control or source of municipal revenue”: The case of Ubungo Municipality. Researchjournal’s Journal of Geography, 5(2), 1–16. Pastory, P. (2014). Responding to decentralization acrobatics in Tanzania: subnational actors examined. The African Review: A Journal of African Politics, Development and International Affairs, 41(2), 154–184. Roy, A. (2005). Urban informality: Toward an epistemology of planning. Journal of the American Planning Association, 71(2), 147–158. Santos, M. (2011). Geografia e Planejamento: o uso do Território–Geopolítica. Revista Eletrônica: Tempo–Técnica–Território/ Electronic Magazine: Time - Technique - Territory, 2(2). https://doi. org/10.26512/ciga.v2i2.15414 Sheuya, S. A. (2007). Reconceptualizing housing finance in informal settlements: The case of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Environment and Urbanization, 19(2), 441–456. Simone, A. (2010). City life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the crossroads. Routledge. Streule, M., Karaman, O., Sawyer, L., & Schmid, C. (2020). Popular urbanization: Conceptualizing urbanization processes beyond informality. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 44(4), 652–672. United Republic of Tanzania. (1997). National land Policy. Ministry of Lands, Housing and Human Settlements Development, Dar es Salaam. United Republic of Tanzania. (2016). Dar es Salaam City Master Plan 2016–2036. Ministry of Lands, Housing and Human Settlements Development, Dar es Salaam United Republic of Tanzania. (2018). National Population Projections. National Bureau of Statistics and Office of the Chief Government Statistician, Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar. Wamuchiru, E. (2017). Beyond the networked city: Situated practices of citizenship and grassroots agency in water infrastructure provision in the Chamazi settlement, Dar es Salaam. Environment and Urbanization, 29(2), 551–566. World Population Review. (2021). Dar es Salaam Population 2023. worldpopulationreview.com. Accessed 12 April 2023.

Priscila Izar is currently a Centennial Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Urbanism and Built Environment Studies (CUBES), School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her research work and interest lie at the intersection of gender, housing self-building, peripheral urbanisation, and urban policy. Between 2018 and 2020 she was a postdoctoral fellow at Ardhi University’s Institute of Human Settlements Studies (IHSS) and a core member of the Dar es Salaam City Laboratory at IHSS. Subsequently, through an Urban Studies

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Foundation’s International Fellowship (2021-22) hosted by CUBES, Priscila worked on a series of journal articles and book chapters about housing self-building and peripheries, including this one, based on the case of Dar es Salaam. Priscila holds a PhD in Planning, Governance and Globalization from Virginia Tech in the United States. Tatu Mtwangi-Limbumba is a Senior Research Fellow working with the Institute of Human Settlements Studies (IHSS) at Ardhi University Dar es Salaam. She has more than 25 years experience in research related to human settlements’ development. Her main interests are housing, informality in urban areas, climate change, urban resilience and innovative basic service provision. Tatu has extensive experience working in informal settlements in the areas of housing and infrastructure. She has published journal articles on urban issues and coproduction solutions for housing and infrastructure and is interested in alternative understandings that capture the realities of cities in the Global South. Tatu has also been involved in drafting the National Housing Policy for Tanzania. Albert Nyiti is an urban planner, currently employed as an assistant research fellow at the Institute of Human Settlements Studies (IHSS), Ardhi University (ARU) in Tanzania. He holds an MSc. in Housing and a BSc. in Housing and Infrastructure Planning, both from ARU. His research areas of interest include: affordable housing and infrastructure; critical urban theory; just cities; urban food systems; and climate change. Albert is a Queen Elizabeth Scholar and a member of various national and international associations dealing with urban related issues, including, among others: the Tanzania Institute of Town Planners (TITP); the Just City Platform (JCP) in Tanzania; UN HABITAT’s global network of Planners for Climate Action—P4CA; East African German Transdisciplinary University Network (EAGER Trans-Net); and the Development Studies Association (DSA) of the United Kingdom.

Chapter 7

Beyond Funding Micro Property Entrepreneurs in Urban South Africa: Governance Innovation Through the uMaStandi Programme Kirsten Harrison

7.1 Introduction Across South Africa, rental housing in townships1 and informal settlements helps meet the needs of a growing urban population (Pieterse, 2019, p. 23). In the past five years,2 new forms of affordable rental housing in townships have emerged, shaped by the longstanding backyard housing model. This affordable rental market is attracting both micro-developers and entrepreneurs wishing to build up significant rental property portfolios in townships, and those who wish to build a modest number of rental units to provide a long-term revenue stream. Financiers such as BitProp, TUHF, isiDuli and iBuild, have recognised the potential in the market and are offering financing to support its growth (Di Lollo, 2020). TUHF21’s uMaStandi programme finances a broad range of affordable township rental housing including backyard accommodation. This chapter discusses the specific case of uMaStandi and its role in emerging urban governance practices that support these new forms of affordable

1 Pernegger and Goodehart (2007) indicate that there is not a formal definition for townships but that “townships in South Africa were originally created as separate areas for black people, generally located on the periphery of towns and cities” (Pernegger & Goodehart, 2007, p. 3). 2 Talking Transformation Podcast. Episode 30, 28 November 2020.

The uMaStandi case is used as an example for the broader discussion around urban governance and housing. K. Harrison (B) Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO), Johannesburg, South Africa

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rubin et al. (eds.), Housing in African Cities, Urban Perspectives from the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37408-1_7

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rental housing in townships.3 While rental practices in townships have long been shaping urban space through formal and informal means largely without the institutional support of local government, the more recent involvement of financiers and developers has brought to the fore the municipal interface and its unresolved dimensions. It is in this space that the uMaStandi programme has by necessity forged new practices through its role as an intermediary. The chapter highlights the obstacles that financiers and micro-developers face in scaling up their offerings in this sector due to local level procedural and other challenges, and in particular the role played by local government. The value that financiers are recognising in this housing is not matched by official sanction for this housing form, one that does not conform to conventional development codes. Regulatory difficulties in the development of this housing persist. The requirements are onerous and a deterrent for smaller entrepreneurs and developers wishing to benefit from the formal financing available (CDE, 2020; McGaffin et al., 2019). Yet the housing being supplied is widely recognised as fulfilling an important role. The chapter discusses this affordable backyard rental housing trend through the case of TUHF’s uMaStandi programme, presenting a detailed description of its way of working. The programme empowers micro-developers and entrepreneurs by providing both finance and mentorship in select metropolitan townships in South Africa. TUHF has long pursued the goals of enabling small-scale landlordism and of furthering a vision for transformed urban space. It has committed resources to activating the township property market and enabling alternative housing typologies. As it applies these objectives to the challenge of making backyarding bankable, along with derivative accommodation forms, uMaStandi plays an intermediary and negotiator role between the micro-developers it finances and local government departments. This chapter argues this role reaches into the realm of governance. Given the obstacles in the micro-development supply chain, uMaStandi is required to intervene, engage and cooperate with state and non-state actors throughout the development process. This role reflects the limitations of municipalities in being able to respond quickly and meaningfully to these developments. It also highlights the gaps in the governance space where non-state actors can insert themselves between residents and the local state and it questions the governance implications of this. Whilst these interventions empower micro-developers in their engagements with municipalities, they also further weaken the governance role of the state as non-state actors coordinate activities that are intended to be led by the local state. The chapter discusses uMaStandi’s role in the sector and the current constraints to institutionalising in a more systemic way the knowledge it has developed for local government. While 3

Affordable housing does not have a fixed definition and covers a range of income levels. However, some contend it is commonly associated with those households earning between ZAR 3000 and ZAR 7500 per month (Furlong, 2016). The Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa (CAHF) defines affordable housing as those residential properties valued between ZAR 300,000 and ZAR 600,000 (CAHF, 2019). Klug et al. (2013) in their work on inclusionary housing note that private sector developers consider the affordable housing market to be those who earn over ZAR 10,000 per month (2013, p. 674).

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TUHF has agency, power and ability outside of the state, these learnings have not as yet changed the municipal system. The research for this chapter was undertaken through a combination of desktop literature review, primary document analysis and qualitative interviews. 14 interviews were undertaken between August 2020 and February 2021. Interviewees included academics writing in the field, NGOs, financiers including TUHF, developers, consultants, and city government officials from two metropolitan governments. The interviews were structured around their views of the backyard rental market and affordable housing market, the role of the city government in supporting the sector, constraints to the growth of the sector and opportunities for improved urban governance. This chapter reviews the uMaStandi programme in three sections. It first lays out a brief history of backyard housing in South Africa and state responses to it before outlining the notion of innovative urban governance. The third section examines the specifics of the uMaStandi programme. The chapter concludes that the state is insufficiently present in the activities needed to facilitate backyard development for small-scale developers: it is not seizing the opportunity to help drive this innovation nor actively responding to the learning forged by others. Private intermediaries are playing a key role, but are hampered by local government inertia and resistance to change.

7.2 South African Backyard Rental Housing South Africa’s post-apartheid housing policy has largely focused on scale delivery. Its limitations in terms of providing a range of shelter solutions are well documented (Klug et al., 2013; Pieterse, 2019). Housing delivery has been predominantly based on the “ownership model” with an ongoing commitment to state subsidised housing, often built on the periphery of cities. The state has given little attention to alternative forms of housing (Pieterse, 2019, p. 23). Despite this, residents and now the private sector continue to respond with new approaches to building and financing affordable rental housing in metropolitan “townships”. Many of these responses are rooted in the organic housing solutions that have been a feature of township accommodation since the inception of apartheid townships. From the outset these settlements provided inadequate accommodation to meet the needs of black urban residents and residents responded by extending and constructing shelters in private yards where possible. Backyard rental housing is defined as “a form of small-scale rental housing provided (mostly informally) by private households in exchange for payment in rent or in kind” (Shapurjee et al., 2014, p. 19). It has a long history in South African townships, and has been well documented in South African literature (Bank, 2007; Lemanski, 2009; McGaffin et al., 2019; Rubin & Charlton, 2019, 2020; Scheba & Turok, 2020a, 2020b). Numerous studies highlight the extent of its growth, the resulting densification and the significant role it plays in shaping urban form. Scheba and Turok (2020b) argue that affordable rental housing is essential in the provision

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of accommodation in most cities in the Global South. Recent work emphasizes the particular importance of backyard rental housing in meeting the dire housing need in South African cities (Centre for Development and Enterprise, 2020; McGaffin et al., 2019; Scheba & Turok, 2020a, 2020b). Much backyarding is technically informal and transitory because it lacks regulatory approval (Brueckner et al., 2018). It has raised concerns around health and safety, posing a challenge to local municipalities (Shapurjee et al., 2014, p. 20). Further, given that it is not planned for, it puts additional strain on existing infrastructure. Backyarding has recently become more firmly established as a housing alternative in the South African affordable housing landscape. Collectively it accounts for a considerable amount of housing. A 2014 position paper on backyard dwellings by SALGA (South African Local Government Association which represents South African municipalities) indicated that two thirds of new households between 2006– 2011 were absorbed by backyard rentals (Tshangana, 2014, p. 2). Statistics SA data shows that between 2001 and 2011 there was a 58% increase in backyard dwellings (Rubin & Charlton, 2020, p. 222). The City of Cape Town notes that there are in excess of 230,000 households living informally in backyards in the city (2020, p. 3). In the province of Gauteng, GCRO research reveals between 2001–2016 backyard dwellings increased by 205%. In 2016, this represented 23.97% of total residential buildings in Gauteng (Ballard et al., 2021, p. 23). This growth is happening in and around historical townships in Gauteng. It is particularly striking how the footprints of these dwellings have expanded and intensified already high densities in settlements like Diepsloot.4

7.2.1 The Trajectory of Backyard Rental Housing Backyard housing in established townships such as Soweto has been prevalent for decades. Lemanski (2009) provides an historical overview of backyard housing in South Africa and indicates that there were more people living in backyard dwellings than in informal settlements. She notes much of the backyard housing was poorly constructed and inadequate (2009, p. 473). Nevertheless, backyard dwellings represented “the most common form of accommodation for new arrivals to the city” (2009, p. 474). Post apartheid, this trend has continued in the so-called Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) housing settlements and has been termed “hybrid” housing with homeowners of formal housing units supplementing their income with “informal backyard housing” (Geyer & Geyer, 2014, p. 48). Initially, backyard rental housing in Johannesburg and Cape Town was not enormously profitable (Gilbert et al., 1997, p. 138). Rentals were low but gave tenants access to municipal services.5 These low rentals were attributable to a lack of 4

Interview with urban researcher, 28 January 2021. It is difficult to provide an accurate equivalent dollar amount because of the currency fluctuation. However, as of 11 September 2022, 1 USD was equivalent to ZAR 17.31.

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capital outlay by the landlord with tenants responsible for constructing their own accommodation. Over time, this housing has adjusted to new conditions and more varied typologies have emerged. Research illustrates that the affordable rental housing market in townships is diversifying into different sub-sectors not only on the basis of the accommodation offered and costs, but also the goals of the developer. Scheba and Turok (2020b) characterize three types of landlordism in empirical work done in Delft South, Cape Town. These are subsistence landlords providing basic backyard shacks where the landlord resides in a house on the same plot on which backyard rental housing is accommodated; homeowner landlords providing micro-flats where freestanding units are constructed on the site and with better facilities; and entrepreneurial landlords who provide boarding houses. In this instance, the original house is demolished, and multiple rental units are built (2020b, pp. 118–125). In a similar categorization McGaffin et al. identify a new cohort of “microdevelopers”, distinguishing these developers from small-scale traditional landlords. They refer to the “homeowner-developer” and the “enterprise developer” (2019, p. 158). The “homeowner developer” develops on their existing property largely to supplement their income while the “enterprise developer” has a more commercial interest often with the intention to build up a property portfolio (McGaffin et al., 2019, p. 159). This exemplifies a growing segmentation in the market. This work, located in Cape Town, indicates that these developers have historically secured financing outside of formal financial institutions and rely on personal loans, stokvels6 and the selling of other assets (Scheba & Turok, 2020b, p. 127). Many of these developments remain “informal” (without formal planning permission). Some provide good quality rental housing, while others pose health and safety risks. Alongside these funding mechanisms, financiers such as TUHF, BitProp and iBuild are offering a formal and fully financed product for potential developers. Although their offerings are different, they all recognise the opportunity in this market and they fund small developers in need of capital. TUHF however has the longest track record in providing this kind of development finance and is arguably best able to influence a change in municipal governance approaches, discussed below.

7.2.2 State Responses to Backyard Rental Housing Backyard rental housing was historically overlooked but has more recently elicited a mixed set of responses from government. Two decades ago Gilbert (2003) argued that backyard accommodation was neglected by governments, while Bank (2007) highlighted how backyard tenants were at the forefront of municipal protests as local governments failed to provide formal housing. Work on state-led housing in the City of Johannesburg by Rubin and Charlton (2019) offers three types of diverse 6

“A stokvel is a type of informal credit union in which members agree to contribute a fixed amount of money to a common pool weekly, fortnightly or monthly” (Hutchinson, 2020).

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state responses to backyard accommodation: firstly, an authoritarian approach which sought to control the practice, secondly community self-management and thirdly, government-approved backyarding. They argue that the different responses reflect particular moments in state thinking, starting with a lack of acceptance of backyarding and thus pursuing eradication and formalization, and ending up in a kind of pragmatic acceptance and official support for compliant forms, but in practice showing little recent on-the-ground engagement with the phenomenon. (2019, p. 261)

Policy frameworks addressing backyarding have been developed by SALGA, the Gauteng Housing Department’s Backyard Rental Housing Policy (2008) as well as in the City of Cape Town’s recent report “Facilitating small scale rental units in Khayelitsha: Smart Citizen Action Adding Public value in the provision of affordable rental units” (2020). The SALGA position paper (although not an adopted policy) offers some guidance on backyarding. It acknowledges the importance of this housing sub-market in providing income, affordable housing and a social function. It suggests that local government should not intervene in this market and in fact should limit regulation. The paper acknowledges that health and safety regulations cannot be ignored (Tshangana, 2014, p. 14). Although municipalities are free to develop their own backyarding policies, few have. Despite these frameworks, and the recognition of its importance, cities have not collectively tackled the obstacles faced by small landlords wishing to build backyard accommodation and access financing.

7.3 Innovative Urban Governance It is not only the backyard and affordable rental housing market that is changing. The expectations of the role cities should be playing in governing this space is also shifting—specifically with writings on southern urbanism underscoring the need for cities in the Global South to accommodate and acknowledge their informality. The informal shaping of urban space remains a significant planning intervention in cities in the Global South (Roy, 2009). But city governments are not keeping up with the pace of change. Literature suggests that urban actors remain unable to support innovative institutional governance frameworks (Da Cruz et al., 2019; Pieterse, 2019). Policy makers are often unable to establish how best to intervene or assist or are paralysed by policy incoherence. Governments lack the political will. Furthermore, the default position of many local governments globally is to respond to inadequate policy through enforcement, regulation and compliance (Mukhija, 2004, p. 2233). In the absence of state-led innovation and facilitation of new governance approaches, in contexts such as South Africa intermediaries have the space to innovate and manoeuvre in city spaces to respond to and negotiate urban development problems. Also referred to as networked governance (Enroth, 2011), contemporary urban governance “emphasises the relationships and interactions between these actors

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as well as the conditions and rules that frames those relationships and interactions” (Da Cruz et al., 2019, p. 3). In their extensive overview of urban governance research Da Cruz et al. established that the governance challenges considered most pressing by city representatives were “politicisation of local issues, the complexity of managing urban issues and maladapted or outdated policy silos” (2019, p. 4). Despite the breadth of academic work on urban governance, empirical evidence which flags the optimal institutional arrangements to deal with social, environmental and technological change remains absent (ibid., 2019). Adaptive urban governance allows creative solutions to emerge to support city growth. Healey (2004, p. 11) argues that new approaches are required to forge ingenuity in governance “both in terms of its potential to foster creativity in social and economic dynamics and to creatively transform its own capacities”. By this Healey means, government themselves need to regenerate and review their policies in order to transform cities. This requires engaging with and supporting practices that emerge outside of government spaces. These new forms of governance are built slowly, incrementally and through supporting emerging practices (ibid., 2004, p. 18). Backyard rental housing is an example of this creativity in cities because it meets the real needs of urban residents. The infrastructure that enables a robust backyard housing rental market extends way beyond the physical space on which units are constructed. This infrastructure includes the processes, institutions, financing and technologies that facilitate development. Broadly these infrastructures are the purview of residents, financiers and of municipalities. Increasingly in this market that operates in a space of blurred formality, institutional roles are not discreet. Specific financiers are in practice interfacing both with potential landlords and municipal officials.7 However, these financiers do not choose to circumvent formal planning processes, but rather to navigate them on behalf of their clients. This kind of interface cannot easily be located in the governance literature that discusses relationships between state and non-state actors because the key non-state player and intermediary is a local level financier with a private sector role. uMastandi is not a community-based structure but rather a private sector player, although their actions highlight some of the flaws in the local governance system and may incrementally influence and mediate government policy. The uMaStandi case study does illustrate the possibility for creative urban governance in the housing sector. What then are the governance implications when the private sector provides a service that is in the domain of the state? Shatkin writes about the implications of the privatization of planning in developing countries in general (2007, p. 10). He cautions that in these processes of privatization, local government should continue to assert their influence over private sector interests by regulating their outcomes (2007, p. 11). A further question is what oversight local government should exercise over financiers and developers. In this South African context, uMaStandi does not reflect a neo-liberal urban governance framework whereby the state intentionally chooses to be non-interventionist by minimising its role relative to the market (Rosen & Razin, 2009, p. 1704). uMaStandi is not an urban real estate megaproject which 7

This will be discussed in detail in the remainder of the paper.

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undermines local economies nor is does it require the local state to surrender control to the private sector. It does however, through its intermediary role, demonstrate the point of interaction between a housing product generated by the market and local government (Rosen & Razin, 2009, p. 1704).

7.3.1 Regulation and Urban Governance Local government is not agile, and city governments are often unwieldy and fragmented. South African metropolitan governments are responsible for a wide range of deliverables, many of which are fraught with “unavoidable trade offs” (Pieterse, 2019, p. 22). Some of the critical urban governance issues that require resolution have not been dealt with. In the sluggish bureaucracy, policy positions remain out of date with the evolving local environment. Yet the allocation of functions across the state bureaucracy means that backyard rental housing has relevance for local, provincial and national government with the accompanying governance implications.8 There are changing attitudes to the value of rental housing as is evident in discussions with City officials. One City official suggests: The City can benefit by engaging in backyarding because it shapes the city. There is a move towards and realization that given the enormity of the housing challenge that here is a possible solution. But government needs to be more agile. Policy regulations are hindering economic growth and there does need to be a shift or rethink.9

Thus far South African local governments have not aligned practice to these sentiments nor actively adapted and adjusted their planning protocols, strategic frameworks and infrastructure budgets to accommodate the growth of these businesses. Many micro-developers in townships, like other township entrepreneurs, struggle to comply with the regulatory framework that disqualifies them from access to formal financing mechanisms. They can be stuck in “enforced informality” structured by the cost of regulation and compliance including building plan approvals, zoning and access to title deeds as well as the cost and lack of access to finance (Scheba & Turok, 2020a, pp. 82–84). Shapurjee et al. suggest that the state should “facilitate” the sector by providing more municipal support through land use management and spatial planning strategies’ (2014, p. 28). They should also provide infrastructure support. In practice the absence of clear policy commitments to enabling, and possibly formalizing, backyarding means decision-making in municipalities is discretionary. It is up to individual government officials to determine the likely approval of the developments. Where local governments are not allowing for this housing form in policy and where they are not consciously interrogating their planning systems for blockages and inhibitors to the development of backyard accommodation, they stall innovation 8

Although housing is a multi-sphere deliverable, this paper addresses local government dynamics specifically. 9 Interview with City official, 23 January 2021.

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and discourage upgrading. Planning protocols in these cases are not responding to the urban reality.10 Public sector innovation must ensure that greater public value and benefit is generated (Torfing & Triantafillou, 2016, p. 8) yet municipal innovation and efforts to carve the planning frames that would support densification and development on individual sites while securing health and safety are not prioritised. Instead, individual urban households have to navigate and negotiate a full spectrum of planning controls on a site-by-site basis.

7.4 The Case of uMaStandi and Its Role as Intermediary and Negotiator TUHF is one of several financiers who lend to micro-developers in townships. Established in June 2003, TUHF was a forerunner in the affordable housing market in the inner city of Johannesburg. TUHF is a property financing company. It has a record of affordable housing finance and a clear commitment to environmental social governance and other developmental approaches which it balances with its business imperatives. While many of the other backyard rental housing financiers are fairly new in the space, TUHF has experience and profile which aids and strengthens its intermediary role. TUHF also has relationships with national government through the Jobs Fund.11 Since inception, TUHF has grown significantly. TUHF’s loan book in 2019 was ZAR 3.8 billion, up from ZAR 2.5 million in 2004.12 Its geographical focus has expanded too. Over 17 years, TUHF has worked with 300 entrepreneurs to deliver 43,911 residential units in 679 buildings.13 It currently describes its mission as follows: In declining areas, we see thriving property markets. In run-down buildings we see the potential for families to live in a safe and secure environment. In people, we see the entrepreneurial capacity to create well-run businesses, providing employment and multiplying our economy. (www.tuhf.co.za)

In 2016, TUHF piloted its township project uMaStandi in Bramfischerville—a statefunded-low-income housing development in the west of Soweto, Gauteng. A new initiative, uMaStandi was a departure from TUHF’s more traditional inner city funding projects. uMaStandi funds property entrepreneurs in well located areas in metropolitan townships where there is access to schools, public amenities and transport, thus ensuring end-users are able to access facilities. The uMaStandi project initially financed projects in the City of Cape Town in Khayelitsha, Mandalay, 10

Interview with City official, 20 January 2021. The Jobs Fund is an initiative of National Treasury which provides support to programmes that promote job creation in both the short and the medium term (http://www.treasury.gov.za/docume nts/national%20budget/2020/JobsFund%20Budget%202020.pdf). 12 Data provided by TUHF, 21 January 2021. 13 Data provided by TUHF, 21 January 2021. 11

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Delft and Delft South, but has since expanded to Gugulethu, Langa, Montclair, Eerste River, Mitchells Plan and Blue Downs. In Gauteng, it has extended loans in Soweto, Spruitview, Lenasia, Eldorado Park, Vosloorus, Tembisa, Atteridgeville and Mamelodi (TUHF, 2022). uMaStandi has recently expanded into KwaZulu Natal and the Eastern Cape. To date, uMaStandi has assisted 39 micro-developers funding 44 projects in total and 669 units.14 The uMaStandi programme provides finance to two types of property entrepreneurs15 : • Home-based landlords who wish to supplement their income through providing backyard housing. • Micro-developers who own an investment property in a township or wish to purchase one with the intention of running a rental business.16

7.4.1 The Projects uMaStandi project loans vary in size but are on average ZAR 850,000 (around USD 49,00017 ) and clients are required to contribute 20% in equity. Most applicants have a property that they already own and this is used as equity. TUHF piloted uMaStandi with a focus on the traditional “Mastandi18 ” but take-up in this market has been slow. This has been a consequence of the financial cost of compliance, the regulatory requirements and in some instances, the lack of appetite to get into long term debt (15 year loan period) for a slightly higher rental yield. This market is more accustomed to incrementally building housing. The programme has had to respond to this reality and is now funding a different form of affordable rental housing, not only backyard rental housing, but in some cases developments that radically transform sites. Most township development is backyard upgrading and TUHF funds new self-contained bachelor units that charge the same rent as a traditional backyard dwelling. The uMaStandi programme finances homeowners who want to construct between 4–8 units in their backyards however TUHF have seen the emergence of new initiatives where houses are demolished and between 16–24 units are developed. These units are achieving rentals of between ZAR 3,000 and ZAR 3,500 monthly. The average loan size is less than ZAR 1 million.19

While some funded developments continue in the original backyard housing model, micro entrepreneurs are slowly changing the landscape by demolishing existing houses and building self-contained multi-unit accommodation. These clients look 14

Figures received from TUHF, 9 September 2022. uMaStandi doesn’t require the client to be a resident of the township in which the investment is located. 16 Interview with TUHF employee, 28 January 2021. 17 This is using the exchange rate as of 11 September 2022 of 1 USD to ZAR 17.41. 18 These are small landlords who primarily built 4–8 units in their yard. 19 Interview with financier 28 January 2021. 15

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to increase their portfolio over time with growing numbers of rental units in various locations. The rental range of the housing is ZAR 1000 (around USD 57) to ZAR 4500 (around USD 258) generally contingent upon the area and the size. Rental prices are higher in Cape Town where the uptake is predominantly from young professionals and rentals are in the region of ZAR 4500 (around USD 258) for a self-contained unit with a kitchenette and private facilities of between 20–25 square metres. A onebedroomed unit is let for ZAR 5500–ZAR 6000 (between USD 316 and USD 344).20 In Gauteng, the average monthly rental for a backyard room with shared ablutions is ZAR 900 (around USD 52) while that of a self-contained bachelor unit of 20 square metres is ZAR 2800 (around USD 161). Units which are self-contained are in high demand.21 ,22

7.4.2 The Development Constraints Prospective landlords of backyard rental accommodation are often confronted by an inflexible bureaucracy. Applications weave through a substantial chain of approvals. The costs and time taken for the approvals for the development of backyard rental housing is unaffordable. For example, one developer encountered the following time frames for an application: Building line relaxation 2 months, Site Development Plan approval 1.5 months, Building Plan approval 6 months, parking requirement deviation 6 months. Total = 1 year and 2.5 months and still awaiting approval.23 Municipalities have not prioritised the resolution of these challenges and there is little evidence of cities promoting innovation in their planning processes or unblocking structural challenges. Obstacles might be recognized but engagement with financiers and developers has not taken place to ensure the removal of those barriers. The constraints are largely a consequence of a lack of prioritisation as well as the institutional complexity associated with planning policy and approvals. Municipalities are also bound to national building regulations.24 Given the constraints facing micro-developers, several non-state, not-for-profit actors have stepped into the gap to address obstacles imposed by regulatory frameworks. Examples include the Transaction Support Centre.25 The TSC is set up in Khayelitsha and works with uMaStandi and others in assisting to resolve title deed issues. The TSC is supported by multiple parties including National Treasury and is illustrative of the willingness of some sectors of government to learn, engage and find solutions to critical urban challenges. The Development Action Group is an 20

Interview with project manager, 10 February 2021. Interview with consultant, 2 February 2021. 22 This is using the exchange rate as of 11 September 2022 of 1 USD to ZAR 17.41. 23 Interview with financier 28 January 2021. 24 Interview with City official 11 December 2020. 25 The Transaction Support Centre: Lessons Learned. 14 July 2020. https://housingfinanceafrica. org/documents/the-transaction-support-centre-lessons-learned. 21

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NGO that works with communities and small landlords to connect them to these new financiers as well as provide guidance and support to new emerging entrepreneurs.26

7.4.3 Relationship-Based Lending and uMaStandi’s Roles in Planning and Construction uMaStandi is a character-based investing strategy whereby TUHF determines the passion a potential client has for property management. The lending relationship is initiated through a capacitated local office, which is the first place of interaction between the financier and potential client. Here the potential client discusses the proposed project.27 uMaStandi’s model is relationship-based with support offered to entrepreneurs for the duration of the loan. Aside from the financing of the project, uMaStandi is actively involved in providing support during the development and management of the property itself.28 This assistance includes training and mentorship. The training course teaches the entrepreneur about the principles of investment, homeownership and managing an asset. The final step is gaming simulation training on how to manage the business aspect of the rental business. Historically backyard housing has been built incrementally at a pace aligned to owner liquidity (Di Lollo, 2020). Formal financing provides access to finance to complete the building process. The benefit of the formalization approach is that it allows the asset to be traded in the longer term but it is not the preferred way of financing backyard housing at present. This is because despite the demand for financing, the complexities in the formalization process continues to constrain the doable projects.29 The funding criteria necessitates that the applicant has formal documentation including a credit record, financial history, no municipal arrears and a valid title deed. Aside from personal documentation, clients need to build fully compliant developments. This entails compliance with municipal planning and building control. In some cases, new developers are required to provide up to ZAR 50,000 upfront for development charges. Some, not all, of the clients are unaware of these prerequisites, associated costs and approval timelines. There is little scope for deviation from the regulatory and planning requirements and City officials follow “what is written in black and white30 ”. Levels of engagement are dependent upon the City official and approval times can run into 18 months generating high costs for small developers.

26

Interview with NGO, 9 February 2021. Interview with project manager, 10 February 2021. 28 Interview with consultant, 2 February 2021. 29 BitProp has similarly had to restructure its financing requirements. Talking Transformation, Episode 30. 30 Interview with NGO, 9 February 2021. 27

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uMaStandi plays an important role in taking clients through these processes including building plan approval, building line relaxation, re-zoning, building deviation for parking relaxation and geotechnical reports. Some clients are reliant on uMaStandi’s assistance and at times uMaStandi is required to engage directly with city officials to resolve complexities on the micro-developer’s behalf. It is not only the state approval process that constrains micro-developers, but the construction process is also challenging for many new micro-developers. One of the requirements is for house builders to be registered with the National Home Builders Registration Council (NHBRC). Project management of the site is often the most complex aspect with the building taking longer than expected and builders inexperienced in site management. DAG highlights the importance of building the capacity of local construction companies to undertake this work (Mgwatyu, 2021). uMaStandi offers support to the developers throughout the process and is available for recommendations in procuring structural engineers and architects. uMaStandi is expected to report on jobs created in each project, a requirement of its grant funding from the Jobs Fund, an initiative of National Treasury. This has proven onerous for new developers using a more informal and flexible approach to employing labour. uMaStandi does site checks throughout the construction process to ensure quality is maintained. In the City of Johannesburg, the building inspector does five checks during the process and the occupation certificate is contingent upon the development meeting building standards.31 On completion, units are generally easily rented through “word of mouth” rather than active marketing. As part of the progressive move towards formalisation, increasingly financiers are requiring landlords to have formal rental contracts for their tenants as well as encouraging property managers to manage the rental units. Aside from the relationship with uMaStandi, a network of micro-developers is emerging. They engage and problem solve with each other through WhatsApp groups and on Facebook and share success stories. The uMaStandi programme extends beyond traditional financier–client relations into the urban governance domain as it serves as an intermediary and negotiator between client and municipal planning compliance requirements. It may also mediate the local particularities confronting micro-developers and landlords. On the one hand uMaStandi must ensure that the developments it finances are sufficiently compliant to secure municipal planning approval. On the other, it needs to mitigate against the obstacles that micro-developers encounter in developing their properties in order to secure their financing. This mediating responsibility is partly fulfilled in its programme of mentorship, which is also a novel role for a financier. This is not entirely altruistic. uMaStandi’s agency, leverage and interest in roles such as mentoring are material to how it navigates its expanded role as intermediary and negotiator. Further, ensuring the smooth roll out of developments is important to the viability of loan repayment. But private intervention can only go so far, it cannot address neighbourhood scale development. While uMaStandi’s developments have been well received in 31

Interview with City official, 11 December 2020.

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neighbourhoods to date, municipal administrations need to manage the densification though backyarding in these neighbourhoods and provide necessary infrastructure and public amenities to support the growth. As noted above, there are also obstacles in the development process that cannot be removed without state intervention such as securing access to title and the cost of municipal compliance, all of which undermine efforts to democratize access to finance and promote the rental sector in townships.

7.5 Conclusion This chapter has provided an overview of the negotiation and mentoring role the uMaStandi programme plays in order to demonstrate the implications for urban governance. The mediation, facilitation and mentorship offered to small-scale developers has proven successful in smoothing the complex local bureaucratic processes and constraints that frustrate backyard development. But the state is not sufficiently present in this endeavour. It is in the interest of city governments to engage in the process of regulatory and policy reform to promote this housing. Yet it has not sufficiently mainstreamed backyarding or provided a robust policy framework that provides leadership for the unlocking of this important housing option. A consistent response would free up the terrain, potentially stimulating micro-developers who are already operating in this market. This would be innovative governance. In practice, it falls to non-state players to support this emerging market. Financiers such as TUHF have stepped into the gap to facilitate the market, an indicator of local government’s governance failure but also of the governance space available to private sector intermediaries. But is it possible to change governance practices? Innovative urban governance requires cities to look further: beyond “single organisations to the interplay between multiple actors, drawing on new pools of resources, recognizing the unique forms of authority held by government, changes in notions of value, and evaluation in terms of not only effectiveness and efficiency but also criteria such as social justice” (Patterson & Huitema, 2019, p. 378). As noted earlier, Healey emphasises that new governance practices arise from the gradual adoption and adaption of innovation (Healey, 2004, p. 18). uMaStandi offers empirical lessons for creative urban governance approaches in the arena of incremental regulation reforms: it demonstrates the interplay between actors but it also shows how important it is for government to reorientate its approach to affordable rental housing. The uMaStandi model supports micro-developers in building much needed affordable rental housing but also must be recognized as one part of an emerging practice that could assist in building new forms of governance in the housing space. To date empirical lessons have not filtered into municipalities to ensure longer term systemic change or to stimulate critical conversations. Supporting these practices must take place alongside reviewing the implications of upholding this kind of urban governance model more actively. Currently, there are a limited number

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of individual uMaStandi developments, however at scale, they would have significant implications for neighbourhoods as they start to densify and require additional infrastructural services. There would also be implications for municipal rates in these neighbourhoods. Important questions are raised regarding the ongoing challenges and possibilities of supporting backyard rental housing. Discussions are needed on how best to forge relationships between municipalities, financiers and micro-developers so that the outcomes best serve neighbourhoods. The case of uMastandi does not slip easily into existing urban governance frameworks because it is a private sector entity and financier enabling the development of backyard rental housing and other affordable rental housing in urban townships. The implications for governance relationships of its role in mediating and negotiating between micro developers and the state are not yet clear. Some of those benefitting from the production and supply of the accommodation are the same income groups that government itself targets through its subsidised housing programmes, and the backyard rental accommodation is argued to fulfil a critical need in the spectrum of low-income housing options. The involvement of the private sector in unlocking public value through its interventions (while also benefitting) requires approaches that appropriately consider and support the roles of a multitude of nonstate actors, including financiers (Bevir, 2011). An important innovative governance response would be for municipalities themselves to offer clear support to the sector and this could be facilitated through the small incremental policy changes articulated by Healey (2004). This requires innovation and new thinking, building on the experience already being forged outside of the state.

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Scheba, A., & Turok, I. (2020b). Informal rental housing in the South: Dynamic but neglected. Environment and Urbanisation, 32(1), 109–132. Shapurjee, Y., le Roux, A., & Coetzee, M. (2014). Backyard housing in Gauteng: An analysis of spatial dynamics. SSB/TRP/MDM, 64, 19–30. http://www.ajol.info Shatkin, G. (2007). Global cities of the South: Emerging perspectives on growth and inequality. Cities, 24(1), 1–15. Talking Transformation Podcast. (2020, November 28). Micro-finance and city building: The future for Africa’s housing market? Episode 30. Torfing, J., & Triantafillou, P. (2016). Enhancing public innovation by transforming public governance? In J. Torfing & P. Triantafillou (Eds.), Enhancing public innovation by transforming public governance (pp. 1–32). Cambridge University Press. Tshangana, A. (2014). Local government position on municipal responses to backyarders and backyward dwellings. SALGA. www.pmg.org.za TUHF. (2022). Umastandi. https://tuhf21.co.za/what-we-do/#umastandi. Accessed online on 8 September 2022.

Kirsten Harrison is an urbanist and urban planner specializing in strategic urban development projects. She has extensive experience working on South African cities in the planning and strategy sphere and has a multidisciplinary interest in local government and city planning. Kirsten has moved between policy and practice during her career working as an academic, senior city official and consultant. Since 2010, Kirsten has worked as a consultant and her work has centred on creative institutional approaches for dealing with significant urban development issues. Her research interests include property development, inclusive economies, public art, urban space and urban governance. Kirsten has authored reports, book chapters and articles on numerous topics including social capital, urban safety, spatial transformation, densification and public art. Kirsten is also a Research Associate at the Gauteng City-Region Observatory, a partnership between the University of Johannesburg, the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), the Gauteng Provincial Government and organized local government in Gauteng (SALGA-Gauteng).

Chapter 8

Becoming ‘Unlawful’: Homeownership, Housing Bureaucracy, and the Production of Precarity in Eastridge, Cape Town Geetika Anand , Sophie Oldfield , and Anna Selmeczi

8.1 Introduction Although the South African state has financed and built millions of housing units since the first democratic government took office in 1994, state-funded housing projects often produce uncertainty for ordinary urbanites who aspire to and become homeowners. At the heart of this chapter is the story of what was initially an innovative low-cost housing delivery scheme in Eastridge, Mitchells Plain, Cape Town. Paradoxically, over a twenty-year period of residing in their homes, the governance of this project led to the threat of eviction for its residents, culminating in their labelling as ‘unlawful occupants’ of their own homes. In what follows, we narrate the large and small, the banal and obscure, and the intimate and public ways policy and legal processes intertwined in the governance of this housing project and residents’ decades-long struggle for a dignified home and secure tenure. We analyse how the complex deployment and interplay of state bureaucracy, parastatal agency and market-led management instruments, and legal actors and instruments worked together to dispossess residents of their right to live in their homes. We share the ways these processes generated a growing uncertainty and precarity which characterised residents experience of the process of becoming ‘unlawful.’ The discussion of G. Anand (B) · A. Selmeczi University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] A. Selmeczi e-mail: [email protected] S. Oldfield Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rubin et al. (eds.), Housing in African Cities, Urban Perspectives from the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37408-1_8

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this form of housing governmentality brings into view an ever-complex and opaque mode of housing governance. Through this case, we examine how the entanglement of South African housing bureaucracy with legal and policy processes produced a form of state-led dispossession (Levenson, 2018) that demonstrates the conflicting governmental rationalities that shape access to housing and the increasing forms of precarity evident in the post-apartheid state and city.

8.2 The Contradictions of Housing Governance and Its Lived Affects Contestation, debate, and struggle characterise housing governance in South Africa, dynamics that fundamentally shape modes of access to housing and land and their politics (e.g., Amin & Cirolia, 2018; Huchzermeyer, 2001a). A terrain of “conflicting” or “competing rationalities”, in Vanessa Watson’s (2003) and Sarah Charlton’s (2009) strategic language, for this still relatively new nation, the delivery of mass housing has been a key post-apartheid imperative (Gunter & Manuel, 2020).1 For municipal governments across the country, the provision of housing constitutes a critical space of service delivery, central to city building and its futures (Palmer et al., 2017). For households, access to a home is more often than not a space of struggle, and a site of encounter with the state (Wafer & Oldfield, 2015). As Smit (2018) suggests, housing governance and its persistent contestation is shaped by a wide range of actors involved, with varied vantage points and agendas, adopting different modes, processes, tactics and instruments. In such complex contexts, Pieterse (2018) argues, housing governance is a space of experimentation and policy shifts. Rather than understanding the current state of housing governance simply as an outcome of the move towards neoliberal governmental paradigms, or a product of cost-recovery logics for the roll out of home building (see, for instance, McDonald, 2012; McDonald & Pape, 2002), we adopt a “more intimate reading” to pay attention to governance mechanisms and processes, that are multi-layered, and often unintended and incongruous (Pieterse, 2018, p. 26). Doing so, the “gradations, texture and contradictions” of the terrain that shape state interventions in housing delivery across South Africa come into view (Charlton, 2018, p. 102). 1

Post-apartheid South Africa’s national housing programme has sought to redress racialised injustice and spatial segregation primarily through the provision of state subsidised low-cost housing to previously disadvantaged people. Originally introduced in 1990, the housing subsidy scheme was integrated into the first democratic government’s Reconstruction and Development Plan (RDP) in 1994. Its core mechanism is to release a capital subsidy to private developers who build serviced sites with a basic ‘top structure’, a small freestanding house colloquially referred to as a ‘RDP house.’ These structures are often of low quality and almost always located on peripheral areas without sufficient access to public transport and other urban amenities. Hence, despite its scale and original aims, public housing in the last nearly thirty years has not managed to undo spatial segregation now defined by the intersection of racialized and socio-economic inequality in South African cities (Huchzermeyer, 2001b).

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With that aim, here we track the mix of actors and modes of governance that have shaped the Cape Town Community Housing Company’s Eastridge development. In the search for decent and dignified housing, Eastridge residents encountered the state and its bureaucratic, technological, and socio-material processes. We explore the ways state-led processes have shaped Eastridge residents’ housing experiences over the past two decades. In the project’s “messy actuality” (Wafer & Oldfield, 2015), we examine their attempts to clarify and resolve, to contest and prevent their own evictions (see also Clacherty, 2019), evident in the bills, the contracts, the legal letters, the shifting terrain of policy, and forms of power and control. As Hull (2012, p. 251) suggests, “documents are not simply instruments of bureaucratic organizations, but rather are constitutive of bureaucratic rules, ideologies, knowledge, practices, subjectivities, objectives, outcomes, even the organizations themselves.” In the discussion in the body of this paper, we draw on the Eastridge housing development’s archive of documents to introduce the project and its main junctures and then to analyse how the scheme and its governance became an intractable problem in policy terms and a dire crisis for residents living with ever escalating bills, the threat of eviction, and their declaration as ‘unlawful occupants’ in their own homes.

8.3 Homeownership at Last? Eastridge, Mitchells Plain and the Cape Town Community Housing Company Eastridge was one of the seven initial projects built and run by the Cape Town Community Housing Company (CTCHC or the Company), then an agency working for the City and Province. We conducted a research project focusing on Eastridge in conjunction with the Eastridge Housing Committee and the Western Cape AntiEviction Campaign in 2018, and the findings shared here draw on the mentioned archive of documents generously shared by the Committee members and other residents, as well as policy documents, court judgments, and interviews with residents, activists, city and Company officials, and the Legal Resources Centre.2 Our analysis starts at the point when residents received their homes through the Company. We then explore the governance of the Eastridge housing scheme and its increasing opacity and complexity by interweaving residents’ narratives with the ways in which the CTCHC drew on particular policy tools, and approaches, as well as a wide array of public and private actors. We present our analysis as a chronological account of 2

The Eastridge Community Committee (ACC) approached the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC) to ask for assistance in their struggle for secure housing. In 2018, based on their previous solidarity with AEC and Abahlali baseMjondolo, AEC’s Ashraf Cassiem asked Sophie Oldfield and Anna Selmeczi to contribute to their efforts by conducting research on the history of the Eastridge housing project to strengthen the ECC’s case against the CTCHC by collecting evidence on the Company’s actions that lead to labelling residents as unlawful occupants. The residents interviewed as part of this research were invested in bringing to the fore the shortcomings of the CTCHC as well as the continuous efforts made by the residents to build and stay in their homes. The residents gave consent for their initials and surnames be used in the research outputs.

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what happened in Eastridge over the last two decades, with frequent references, as appropriate, to other Phase I sites that were built at the same time as Eastridge by the CTCHC. The timeline approach allows us to systematically review the processes that resulted in a persistent state of confusion and paralysis. It brings into attention the prolonged struggle for secure access to housing, the constancy of insecurity, what pushed residents and other officials, stakeholders, and policymakers into a mode of muddling through. This articulation of key turning points in Eastridge’s housing governance allows us to track the actors, the drivers and objects, their approaches and instruments which rendered new homeowners unlawful. For ease of understanding, the analysis below is presented as four periods of unequal duration and overlaps. The first period, when families moved into their homes, was characterized by hope, the promise of a better future. The second, its antithesis, was shaped in the shock of broken contracts, increased costs and residents’ attempts to reconcile this reality. The third proved a period of mounting legal threats, increased insecurity, which led to residents fighting back. Finally, in the fourth period, on one hand, the Company and city classified residents as unlawful occupants and charged them monthly for damages; on the other hand, the Company’s actions were themselves declared ‘unlawful’ in the Constitutional Court judgment in 2018.

8.3.1 Period I: Of Ideas, Promises and Hopes (1999–2001) Established in May 1999, the Cape Town Community Housing Company (CTCHC) was initially a joint venture between the City of Cape Town (CoCT) and the National Housing Finance Corporation (NHFC). 3 The company was set up to activate the institutional form of the National Housing Subsidy, in order to “achieve bigger and better quality housing for qualifying beneficiaries”,4 i.e., those who were both eligible for housing subsidy and could also afford a superior house compared to the RDP (Zweig, 2006) by paying for the house partly out of their own pockets.5 The scheme was envisaged as a subsidy-linked, loan-to-own housing product, whereby Instalment Purchase Agreements (IPAs) or Instalment Sale Agreements (ISAs) would be drawn between the CTCHC and the beneficiaries, who were to pay monthly instalments

3

“The Cape Town Community Housing Company (Pty) Ltd (CTCHC) is [now] an affordable housing institution funded and wholly owned by the National Housing Finance Corporation. […] The new mandate of the CTCHC is that the company must provide affordable housing through developments that cover all aspects of integrated and sustainable Human Settlements spectrum within the Province of the Western Cape.” (http://www.ctchc.co.za, last accessed on 02 June 2021). 4 http://www.ctchc.co.za, last accessed on 02 June 2021. 5 To qualify for the National Housing Subsidy through the CTCHC housing, beneficiaries had to be South African citizens; earn a joint income below ZAR 3500; have dependents; live in the Cape Town municipal jurisdiction; be willing to save according to affordability/unit type; be first time home buyers; have never received any form of subsidy before; not work in a company that provide any form of housing subsidy; meet all the criteria at the time of occupation.

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over a period of four to five years, upon completion of which they would receive complete transfer of ownership to their houses. Applicants first had to enter into a monthly savings scheme with Gilt Edged Management Services (GEMS6 ; later merged into Africa Bank) for a minimum period of six months, making deposits ranging between ZAR 50 and ZAR 350 according to affordability and/or unit type, thereby proving their willingness as well as ability to pay. Land for the development was identified and made available by the CoCT, and both the CoCT and NHFC provided with start-up capital, while the institutional subsidies of ZAR 18,400 per household were to come from the Western Cape Provincial Housing Board. By 2001–2002, 2460 housing units were constructed as part of nine Phase I sites of CTCHC (Fig. 8.1), also called legacy projects, across the Cape Flats area in Cape Town, Eastridge being one of them with 347 units (WCDHS, 2020).7 For the City, this meant experimenting with a new mode of governance to expedite housing delivery, via setting up a special purpose delivery vehicle, tapping into institutional subsidies and creating a separate segment of beneficiaries beyond just fully subsidised homeowners. For the potential beneficiaries, this meant fast-tracked housing access and provided an opportunity to bypass the long waiting lists for RDP housing. Indeed, having seen the show units in Woodridge, residents recalled their hopefulness and excitement to receive their homes, and did not mind saving and paying towards that house. Potential homeowners also underwent the ‘Cape Town Community Housing Tenants Education Course’ where they were informed about the housing project and its modalities, including the IPAs. Overall then, this was a period of promise, close engagement and trust between the City, CTCHC and potential residents. Yet, it is perhaps in this first period that neoliberal governmental rationality is most visibly at work. The purpose of the loan-to-own scheme was to fast track low-cost housing access for those who could afford it. In its implementation, the CTCHC focused on training future residents to become responsible debtors as a key to becoming home-owners. This approach certainly carries the trademarks of the governmental paradigm that extends the logic of financial markets deep into the realm of the social (Foucault, 2008). This mode of housing delivery has been widely documented to lead to the indebtedness, dispossession and eviction of masses of people in South Africa and all over the globe (Desmond, 2016; Hart, 2002; Miraftab et al., 2015). As the next section narrates, its rationality was at times reinforced by other institutional logics and political tactics. However, it was also contested and derailed, and should not therefore be considered the sole reason behind Eastridge residents’ condition of precarity.

6

GEMS was a private limited company engaged in finance and credit. Phase I sites of CTCHC included: Heideveld; Luyoville in Gugulethu; Manenberg; Newfields, Railway and Pylon in Hanover Park; Stock Road in Philippi; Woodridge and Eastridge in Mitchell’s Plain (WCDHS, 2020). Interestingly, these sites are not listed on the current CTCHC website.

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Fig. 8.1 Location of phase I sites of CTCHC (Source Zweig [2006])

8.3.2 Period II: Of Shocks, Failures and Attempts at Recovery (2001–2008) The majority of the Eastridge residents moved in in 2001, having signed the IPA. These agreements were for 60 months, one year longer than the minimum four-year required for the institutional subsidy (WCDHS, 2020), and the instalments varied depending on the type of house. It was only at the time of signing the agreement that residents came to know the actual amounts of their monthly instalments, and, to their shock, it was at least double, if not more, than the amount they were saving leading up to the agreement. For instance, for a household that was saving ZAR 350, at an interest rate of 21%, the instalment amount was ZAR 698.14, excluding insurance, administration and community services.8 Contrary to this, residents reported that at the time of the orientation workshops, they were informed that instalments will be only slightly higher than the monthly savings amount.9 Even the IPAs stated that: 8

Instalment Purchase Agreement between The Cape Town Community Housing Company (Pty) Ltd and the Purchaser. 2001. Hofmeyr: Cape Town. Shared with authors by Eastridge residents who had opted for the largest houses. Subsequent statements mentioned the instalment amount as ZAR 795.14, inclusive of everything. 9 In an interview (27 November 2018) with Mr. Werner Jurgens, the then CEO of CTCHC, we were told that the savings amounts were kept lower to account for the accommodation costs of potential beneficiaries at the time of the saving period. It was believed that the savings amount plus the accommodation costs would be roughly equal to the instalment amount. It was also reported that potential beneficiaries were informed about the difference between savings and instalments amounts

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“savings record” means that the purchaser has saved the savings amount over a period of not less than 6 (six) consecutive calendar months in amounts approximately equal to the instalments and has not made any withdrawals from the savings amount.10

This unexpected inconsistency between the savings and the instalment amount was the first major fracture in the previously promising relationship between beneficiaries and the CTCHC; one that certainly does not testify to the company’s professionalism and good conduct. In hindsight, one could of course argue that the applicants should not have signed up for the increased instalments. However, this interpretation would obscure the affective force of residents’ need and anticipation for housing. Unlike the ideal economic subject of the ideally delivered housing finance scheme, signing up at any cost seemed to be the only reasonable decision for residents in that moment in which their homes were finally material and accessible. As one of the residents recounted, We were told we must pay this double triple amount [as instalment]. […] What could we do? You are so desperate and you are so excited that you are going to move into your own house.11

Giving up a house could have meant indefinite waiting for many, so applicants explained that they decided to sign up for houses at unexpected costs. They braced themselves to pay more than most of them could afford towards homeownership. When we went to go see the show houses, they told us ZAR 350 for four years, but then when we came to town they told us ZAR 795.14. We were so shocked because it’s low-cost housing, that’s why we applied for the houses. And then most of the people couldn’t afford it because we signed up for ZAR 350. But then they got this one contract here that we signed that says ZAR 646. The house went for ZAR 44,206. We got a government subsidy of ZAR 18,400. So, I subtract that with that, my own calculations, so we were supposed to pay ZAR 25,806. My receipts that I got calculates to ZAR 30,000 and they still say that I owe them. And I’ve got all my proof.12

After moving in, they all made efforts to pay the instalments, initially the full amount and later on the amount that they used to save before they moved in to the houses.13 In light of mounting debts, an affordability programme was launched by CTCHC in 2004 to get residents back on track with repayment of the instalments. An addendum to the IPA was made—a once-off grant of ZAR 5743 was given to residents, the monthly instalment amount was reduced by extending the repayment period to 110 months (Table 8.1).14 The new interest rate was 12.2%; however, with the levy at the training workshops. The screening of beneficiaries, their savings, and training workshops were carried out and managed by independent agencies appointed by the CTCHC. 10 Clause 1.1.21, Terms and Conditions, Instalment Purchase Agreement; italics added. 11 Interview with R. Manuels, 29 November 2018. 12 Interview with N. Amardien, 12 May 2018. 13 According to residents, there were a number of attempts to organise collectively and fund legal action against the CTCHC. The collective payment boycott, on which the community decided in 2001, preceded the formation of the Eastridge Community Committee and is beyond the scope of this research. 14 Addendum to Instalment Purchase Agreement between the CTCHC and the Purchaser. 2004. Shared with authors by an Eastridge resident.

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Table 8.1 Changes in monthly instalments in CTCHC Phase 1 projects Excerpt from an original IPA (2001)

Excerpt from addendum to the same IPA (2004)

Start Date: 30 April 2004 Contract Term: 110 months

Source Eastridge residents’ personal archives

of ZAR 92, the net interest rate came to almost 21%. Thus, the longer repayment period, even with a once-off grant and reduced monthly instalments, effectively meant that the houses became even costlier for the families.15 On top of that, due to the eroded trust in the CTCHC, not everyone in Eastridge signed up for the affordability programme either.16 The failings of CTCHC were felt not just at the contractual level, but even in the housing they delivered. The structures in no way matched the show units that Eastridge residents had seen in Woodridge.17 In the residents’ words, the houses were “poorly built and raw” and needed a lot of work before they could become habitable.18 The issues mentioned included bare floors, cheap doors and windows, leakages, no fencing, and so on. Thus, it amounted to a lose-lose situation for the residents; they were to pay more money for the houses that were of inferior quality than what was promised. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork in another Phase I site of CTCHC (Stock Road), Schermbrucker and Oldfield (2013) share similar experiences of residents in terms of increased instalments and structurally inadequate houses. In 2006, an audit, carried out by the National Home Builders Registration Council (NHBRC), also reported poor construction quality and multiple faults in the CTCHC housing. Thereafter, the provincial department of Human Settlements funded a rectification programme between 2006 and 2009 costing the department ZAR 89 million (WCDHS, 2020). Financially inefficient, cutting costs proved more expensive for the CTCHC. It also led to extensive investments by Eastridge residents to turn their houses into liveable homes (see, for instance, Fig. 8.2). 15

As can be observed in the table below, in the earlier agreement, the total repayment amount over 60 months would have come to about ZAR 33,000 (excluding levies); in the addendum, it comes to ZAR 39,000 (including levies), and this is after residents had already made repayments for many months. 16 Interview with R. Manuels; Interview with R. Kroneberg, 29 November 2018. 17 Interview with R. Kroneberg, 29 November 2018. 18 Interviews with multiple Eastridge residents in 2018.

8 Becoming ‘Unlawful’: Homeownership, Housing Bureaucracy … 84 Juniper Road Plastered, painted and rewired house · Added a kitchen cupboard · counter tops, tiles · added a boundary wall, a security gate and bars · replaced 2 windows · moved sink 4 Hickory Road Replaced windows · built own carport · connected the wiring correctly · couldn't lose cracks but put in air vents downstairs · put electric pipes in walls · painted the walls, skimmed them downstairs · tiled floors downstairs, still saving for upstairs · boundary wall and gates · replaced kitchen units · tiled bathroom

9 Emory Road painted · plastered · burglar bars · paved outside · tiles in toilet · tiles in kitchen · laminated floors · built in cupboards · window frames · new bath · new kitchen sink · new bathroom sink 107 5th Avenue Plastered and painted walls · applied for and received ceiling · fixed/ replaced doors · put own fence, own burglar bars · installed linoleum sticker tiles upstairs · ceramic tiles downstairs · put concrete in the yard, front and back

IH Plastered the whole house in and out · tiled the lower floor · laminated the upper floor · put up a boundary wall and gates · put up a cupboard in the bedrooms · kitchen units · added carport roof and roof over backyard · Bathroom: moved the toilet and basin, added a shower, tiled the bathroom · repaint often, tiled the bathroom 8 Hickory Road Plugs · plaster · water resistant paint · balcony · walls · gates, burglar bars

151 101 5th Avenue Plastered · installed ceilings · tiled the floors · painted the walls · replaced windows · installed kitchen unit · replaced plastic sink · installed shower · tiled bathroom · carport · boundary wall and gates · erected a wendy house (for subletting)

57 Sycamore Crescent · ceilings · floor tiles · kitchen tiles · cupboards · burglar bars

HOME RENOVATIONS and INVESTMENTS ML, Cycad Street Put floor tiles · painted walls · skimmed walls upstairs · laminated floor on the raw concrete upstairs · put plastic and sticky tape to stop the rain coming in · built kitchen cupboard, moved the sink · installed concrete outside seats · has loose cupboards, wants built-in · replaced front door, must still replace back · boundary wall · installed a gate and carport

JC Vinyl tiles · walls · plaster · skin · wooden window frames · kitchen sink · toilet · shower cupboards · pipes in bathroom · geyser · burglar bars · partitioning · carport · air vents doors · tiles in bathroom · new lounge · moved position of front door

Fig. 8.2 Home renovations in Eastridge (2001–2018)19 (Source Interviews with Eastridge residents, 2018 [where no address is included, we added residents’ initials])

Overall, contractual and construction issues in the legacy projects of the CTCHC could be associated with legal, administrative and management inconsistencies in their project planning and implementation. As Schermbrucker and Oldfield (2013, p. 61) point out, “[t]he focus on fast delivery led to many of the standard checks and balances being ignored or circumvented.” The CTCHC failed to adhere to processes prescribed in the Land Use Planning Ordinance and the National Housing Code. The general plan approval of Eastridge, for instance, lapsed in 2005–2006 without plots being registered at the deeds office. There was no formal land availability agreement between the City and the CTCHC.20 Shockingly, the land availability and pricing agreements were drawn between CoCT and CTCHC retrospectively in 2004 and 2006, which throws into question the validity of the method used when determining the pricing of the different housing units in the first place (Zweig, 2006).

19

The first phase of this research focused on residents’ investments in their home, the work particularly they had completed to solve the many structural problems, which the CTCHC had not addressed, prior to the NHBRC’s ruling. Interviews and documentary work was completed by the Eastridge Community Committee with Evan Escamilla and James Clacherty, student researchers on our project team (see further Clacherty, 2019). 20 Unfortunately, the Development Facilitation Act of 1995, which stipulates the requirement of a Land Availability Agreement before the start of any low-cost housing development, was not adopted in the Western Cape (Zweig, 2006).

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In her report, Zweig (2006) gives a detailed account of how, at the time, none of the households received the transfer of title, even if they had paid off all the required instalments. It was found that land had not been transferred to the CTCHC by the CoCT. Perhaps, implicitly acknowledging their inability to transfer house ownership, the affordability programme was consciously designed by the CTCHC to delay the complete handover of the houses. The re-approval of general plans and other processes took place in 2006 to sort out the issue of land transfer—first from the City to CTCHC, and then to residents who had fully paid their instalments. Arguably, the Company’s failure to follow the rules and procedures stems from its contradictory position as a private company, created by the local authority as a special purpose housing delivery vehicle (Zweig, 2006). This ambivalence was eventually resolved when the CoCT sold its shares and withdrew from CTCHC in 2008, which is now completely controlled by NHFC.21 Nevertheless, it signifies the tumultuous collision of different logics of government; the misfit between the operation and imperatives of a housing agency placed in the administrative context of a local government system at the time still in formation—a misfit that materialises as structural violence inflicted upon an already vulnerable segment of society. An antithesis of Period I, then, the second one was a period of turmoil for residents and the CTCHC.22 On the one hand, residents felt cheated by the CTCHC, and ended up taking charge of addressing their situation, individually and as a community, through investments in home improvements, and through varied responses to increased instalments—from full payment to partial payment as per original understanding to non-payment as collective resistance. On the other hand, the various organs of the state failed separately and as a collective by not adhering to the fundamental processes of housing development. After a period of ambiguity, attempts were made to rectify the situation on various fronts—through land transfer, retrofitting of houses, and contractual arrangements to augment the loan repayment. While the various institutions seem to have eventually come together to address a plethora of issues, the Company never addressed or engaged the residents on a genuine and dialogical basis. Flouting rules and regulations itself, it kept trying to enforce contracts on the residents in an overly legalised and procedural manner. The distances only grew further in the next period, leaving a long paper trail and yet no resolution.

21

This shift was triggered by changes in the regulatory framework with the Municipal Finance Management Act, which barred local authorities to own any share in a private company (Interview with Mr. Werner Jurgens; WCDHS, 2020). 22 While that is beyond the focus of the paper, this period also saw the launch of another subsidylinked housing project by CTCHC in 2004 – Morgans Village in Mitchell’s Plain, consisting of three phases, which were completed by 2010. Werner Jurgens reported that these subsequent phases were not like the legacy projects. In his account, the Company learnt from their experience, and “became better over the years”. The agreements were streamlined—levy was specified right in the beginning, the maturity periods were much longer, the training programmes were strengthened and so on. In turn, repayment rates were reported to be as high as 95% in these subsequent projects (Interview with Mr. Werner Jurgens, 27 November 2018).

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8.3.3 Period III: Of Increased Threats, Insecurities and Fighting Back (2009–2017) While the exact date of the first attorney’s notice to Eastridge residents could not be confirmed, a series of letters from different lawyers started pouring in from 2009.23 Acting on the instruction of their client, the CTCHC, attorneys made reference to the breach of the sale agreement. These letters were meant to serve as a notification, as required by the Alienation of Land Act (ALA), 30 days after which the contracts could be cancelled. Subsequently, the letters started making reference to the Section 129 of the National Credit Act. A letter dated 22 January 2010 stated that the IPA between the residents and the CTCHC was cancelled and that the residents were remaining in the property “unlawfully”, implying residents had no legal right to remain in their homes. A similar letter (on red sheets of paper) arrived again in February 2013, making demands for “outstanding monies in terms of the Agreement, TOGETHER with damages for unlawful occupation.” The long-term residents were, at this point, termed “unlawful occupants.” Sharing his frustration, one of the Eastridge residents explained, They send you these threatening letters. They don’t want to come up with any arrangement. All they want is full amount. They never came to us. This was their first response, on a letter. The company wasn’t interested to come to us. If they come to us, they come with letter, in the form of a letter. And tell us, listen you are out, cancellation, 10 days’ time. After few years it comes back again, cancellation. How many times these houses were cancelled? And then you were unlawful also […].

He emphasized: The unlawful thing is a very bad thing because it’s like you are now skelm [a criminal]. Because how can you be unlawful, which means unlawful guy is a guy who just moves in in a house, just squats somewhere without permission. I applied, go through the channel to get into this house. How can I be unlawful afterwards? Unless you took me to court and the court says I must be evicted, then I am illegal.24

These non-stop threats were not only experienced by the Eastridge residents. In the case of Gugulethu, CTCHC even managed to get eviction orders for the so-called ‘unlawful’ occupants in 2011. However, that order was challenged in the Western Cape High Court (WCHC) and it was through this case that further discrepancies surfaced with regard to the functioning of the CTCHC. As noted in the judgment, the sale agreements were never recorded in the deeds office as per the ALA, which meant that the company was not supposed to receive any payments, the payments for which they were sending all those attorney letters and turning residents to “unlawful” occupants. The eviction order was thus overturned by the Western Cape High Court,25 23

Here we draw from four such letters shared by resident C. Vertuin, which he received from different attorneys between 2009 and 2013. Similar letters were received by other residents as well in Eastridge. 24 Interview with R. Kroneberg, 29 November 2018. 25 Case No. A261-265/2012; Judgment by Western Cape High Court, dated 03 September 2013.

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which ruled that CTCHC is neither State nor an organ of it, and therefore, it is obliged to record the ISAs, in the absence of which it is not entitled to receive considerations, that is, instalment payments. On 7th October 2013, CTCHC released a press statement clarifying their position: The CTCHC advanced the view that, since it is wholly owned by state organs and exercises a public function, it ought to be considered to be part of the State and accordingly exempted from the requirements relating to recordal of the IPAs in terms of s 4 of the [Alienation of Land] Act. This argument was rejected by the Cape High Court, which found that the CTCHC is, at best, an “agent or independent contractor” of the State.

In the same statement, the CTCHC informed residents that they still had to pay for their houses, and money would continue to be collected until the IPAs were recorded. Since the case was won on procedural accounts, the CTCHC went ahead and recorded the ISAs in 2014; however, in 2015 itself, in the case of Woodridge, the Company cancelled the ISAs on account of non-payment and sold 12 houses to the S&N Trust. This move was again challenged in the Western Cape High Court, but this time a judgment was passed in favour of the CTCHC, stating that the Company was within its rights to cancel the agreements and sell the houses to the S&N Trust.26 However, given how the case is intertwined with households’ right to housing, organised residents from the CTCHC Phase 1 schemes, in consultation with the Legal Resource Centre, decided to take this judgment to the Constitutional Court. While on one hand, the CTCHC was aiming to correct its conduct and rectify all its errors; on the other, it also kept functioning on and through paper as usual, making its mode of engagement with residents even more impersonal by bringing in legal actors. Residents kept receiving the letters, notices, statements, and so on—constant reminders of “unlawful occupation” of their own homes, homes that they have built and fixed with their own hands and money. As one of the residents reminded us, This is blood, sweat and tears that you see in these houses. If they [CTCHC] build the houses good in the beginning, people wouldn’t have to dig so deep in their pockets. So, they must come here to tell me that I am an illegal occupant.27

Deeply saddened by the state of affairs, another resident shared, You know, what is the saddest part of everything – when we go to city’s programme, then they see the Eastridge community, and then they don’t want to give us the mic. They say, this is the people that don’t want to pay. But we have paid, when we didn’t even owe the company.28

From April 2017, the monthly statements also directly categorised residents as “unlawful occupants” with an explicit month by month billing for “damages for unlawful occupation”. This particular terminology and its associated costs, catalogued in each monthly statement, made it harder for the residents to ignore the threats and continue living in their homes as if being labelled “unlawful occupants” 26

Case No. 5283/2016; Judgment by Western Cape High Court, dated 23 February 2017. Interview with Z. Davids, 17th May 2018. 28 Interview with R. Manuels, 29 November 2018. 27

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was materially inconsequential. It was in this period that residents intensified mobilisation and sought legal and political help.29 A very trying and tiring period, at the end of which, all eyes and hopes were on the Constitutional Court Case that was filed to challenge the WCHC’s judgment of 2017 in favour of CTCHC.

8.3.4 Period IV: A Devastating Impasse, the Invocation of Constitutional Law (2018 Onwards) In 2018, the Constitutional Court made a ruling in favour of residents. According to the judgment, “[t]he cancellation of the instalment sale agreements by the Cape Town Community Housing Company (Pty) Limited is unlawful [emphasis added] and is set aside”30 Furthermore, the ruling stated, “[t]he cancellation of the recordal of the instalment sale agreements by the Registrar of Deeds is set aside.” Ironically, then, the actions of the Company that threatened and penalised residents for “unlawful occupation”, were themselves “unlawful”. Through the judgment, it was established that the CTCHC could only collect rent and was not permitted to collect capital or interest instalments until the recordal of IPAs, which it only did in 2014. Similarly, the judgment revealed that there were discrepancies around the calculation of arrears and the timing of issuance of notices by the various attorneys and potential actions that could be taken. As of 2019, of the total 2460 houses built in the legacy projects, 64% of accounts had been settled and titles had been transferred, with the remaining referred to as ‘distress’ cases by the CTCHC. With 203 settled accounts, Eastridge stood at 58.5%. The two other sites that had even lower settlement rates were Luyoloville in Gugulethu (29.3%) and Stock Road in Philippi (35.4%) (WCDHS, 2020). Our interview with CTCHC took place just a day before the judgment; however, as discussed in WCDHS (2020), CTCHC faced difficulty in interpreting the Constitutional Court judgment and its findings. In essence, the Company had to recalculate how much individual households owed, which would range from residents owing money, to fully paid-up residents, to residents who would have to be reimbursed by the CTCHC (WCDHS, 2020). In Eastridge, towards the end of 2019, residents started receiving letters from CTCHC with revised calculations of amounts owed to the Company, which were significantly lower than what was being asked for before the judgment.31 A recent conversation with a resident at Eastridge revealed that they

29

Please see footnotes 1 and 10 on the latter. Amardien and Others v Registrar of Deeds and Others [2018] ZACC 47. Case No. CCT 212/17. Judgment by Constitutional Court dated 28 November 2018. 31 CTCHC letter dated 22 October 2019, shared by R. Kroneberg with authors via email. Another resident, C. Vertuin (WhatsApp communication, 13 June 2021) informed us that he has managed to settle this lower amount (after contesting CTCHS’s first recalculated amount). He has now been cleared by the CoCT and is currently waiting to receive his title deed. 30

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Fig. 8.3 Timeline of CTCHC phase 1 Projects, with particular reference to Eastridge (Source Authors’ analysis of project documents available in the public domain [top], and in the Eastridge residents’ personal archives [bottom])

have not received the full transfer of their house yet.32 It appears that CTCHC is now asking residents to pay for the lawyers’ fees in addition to the amounts owed by them towards interest and levies, for the transfer of ownership to take place. Thus, even though the judgment brought a ray of hope, given that the case was won on procedural grounds, the struggle to get full ownership and the experience of precarity in its absence continues. The CTCHC itself received a major blow with the Constitutional Court judgment. The writing was on the wall earlier however. Before the judgment, a decision was taken to phase the Company out.33 It was no longer considered financially viable and, according to an CTCHC interviewee, government and the national Department of Housing acknowledged that its legal strategy could not resolve the conflicts in its projects. As a consequence, the Company staff was reduced, and its mandate repurposed to focus solely on concluding its ongoing projects (Fig. 8.3).

8.4 Housing Governance and the Production of Precarity: Concluding Reflections Throughout the project’s history, Eastridge residents were caught up in a cycle of contestation, and were devastated materially and emotionally. As such, the Eastridge case materialised as a worst-case scenario for housing governance. A failed experiment—one admitted to by the City and the CTCHC itself, the long-term loss of trust 32

Telephonic exchange with R. Kroneberg, 13 June 2021. R. Kroneberg knew a person in another legacy site (Newfields) who has recently received his title deed. 33 Interview with W. Jurgens, 27 November 2018.

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and the lived reality of two-decades of ever-increasing anxiety and precarity cannot be undone. State-citizen interactions were reduced to contracts, and their revisions, to notices and lawyers letters, and court cases built around an unlawful company, procedure and overall process. In the learning in and failures of experimentation in urban governance, the stakes were highest, of course, for residents. Even after they became new homeowners, they were forced to live in limbo, facing possible eviction, a perverse twist in a politics of waiting (Oldfield & Greyling, 2015). Through attending to the intricacies of the construction of this condition, we got insight into the production of differentiated citizenship as it happens through processes of housing provision (Bhan, 2016). Residents navigated hope, panic, inertia, and heightened suspense (Jeffrey, 2008) across their layered and intensified encounters with the company and the state (Wafer & Oldfield, 2015). Slowly and incrementally rendered unlawful, they lived with and resisted this precarity, the temporality and materiality of this form of housing provision—a form of ‘permanent temporariness’ (Yiftachel, 2009). The painful and problematic errors and contingencies in this case clearly demonstrate how housing precarity can be produced in the ‘messy actuality’ of urban housing governance (Wafer & Oldfield, 2015), made up of legal and illegal tactics, bureaucratic processes and their corresponding archives (Gupta, 2012; Hull, 2012), as well as social mobilisation, and the affective and material aspects of homemaking. Although the scheme was a product of an initially positive process which gave the City an opportunity to experiment with a new mode of governance to expedite housing delivery, two decades later, the state was forced to acknowledge the problems it had produced in this public-private partnership and its mode of governance. Despite its commitment to housing policy and the recognition that acquiring a dignified home in post-apartheid South Africa is a political and material imperative, it failed to disrupt the endless spiral of bureaucracy and litigation that characterized the scheme. In the narrow logic of service delivery and its entangling in a web of institutional failure, this mode of housing governance ultimately reduced residents to ‘unlawful occupants’ of their own homes. There is much to engage in this case and the complexity of its impasses for the South African housing policy and research community, and the state itself. It shows the neoliberal rationality that shaped the loan-to-own scheme and its intended implementation and enforcement as one of multiple governmental logics at play in the forcefield that shaped the precarity of Eastridge homeowners over this scheme’s history. It thus reveals the problematics of and tensions in private companies acting as organs of the state in the governance of state-provided housing projects. Yet, exceeding a critique of the neoliberal rationality of this form of financing of low-cost housing (see Parnell & Robinson, 2012), this case also demonstrates the erosion of governance, and the relationships, trust and transparency central to the contested production of unsustainable and uncertain forms of housing in South Africa through detailing the illegality and unlawfulness of the CTCHC’s own operations. The Eastridge case lays bare the ways in which the governance of state-built housing produced a mode of “dispossession through delivery” (Levenson, 2018, p. 3220). Ultimately, the long-awaited receipt of state housing was made precarious through its very mode of governance.

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References Amin, A., & Cirolia, L. R. (2018). Politics/matter: Governing Cape Town’s informal settlements. Urban Studies, 55(2), 274–295. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098017694133 Bhan, G. (2016). In the public’s interest: Evictions, citizenship, and inequality in contemporary Delhi (Vol. 30). University of Georgia Press. Charlton, S. (2009). Housing for the nation, the city and the household: Competing rationalities as a constraint to reform? Development Southern Africa, 26(2), 301–315. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 03768350902899637 Charlton, S. (2018). Spanning the spectrum: Infrastructural experiences in South Africa’s state housing programme. International Development Planning Review, 40(2), 97–120. https://doi. org/10.3828/idpr.2018.6 Clacherty, J. (2019). Imagined homes, concrete houses and bureaucratic subjects: Citizen-state encounters in Eastridge, Cape Town (Unpublished thesis). University of Basel. Desmond, M. (2016). Evicted: Poverty and profit in the American City. Crown. Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79 (G. Burchell, Trans.). Picador. Gunter, A., & Manuel, K. (2020). Urban housing in South Africa: The role of housing in development and transformation. In R. Massey & A. Gunter (Ed.), Urban geography in South Africa: Perspectives and theory (pp. 209–223). GeoJournal Library. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25369-1_13 Gupta, A. (2012). Red tape: Bureaucracy, structural violence, and poverty in India. Duke University Press. Hart, G. (2002). Disabling globalization: Places of power in post-apartheid South Africa. University of California Press. Huchzermeyer, M. (2001a). Housing for the poor? Negotiated housing policy in South Africa. Habitat International, 25(3), 303–331. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0197-3975(00)00037-0 Huchzermeyer, M. (2001b, 26–28 July). Housing subsidies and urban segregation: A reflection on the case of South Africa. Paper presented at the International Seminar on Segregation in the City at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Cambridge, MA, USA. https://www.jstor.org/stable/res rep18490 Hull, M. S. (2012). Government of paper: The materiality of bureaucracy in urban Pakistan. University of California Press. Jeffrey, C. (2008). Waiting. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 26(6), 954–958. https://doi.org/10.1068/d2606ed Levenson, Z. (2018). The road to TRAs is paved with good intentions: Dispossession through delivery in post-apartheid Cape Town. Urban Studies, 55(14), 3218–3233. https://doi.org/10. 1177/0042098017735244 McDonald, D. A. (2012). World city syndrome: Neoliberalism and inequality in Cape Town. Routledge. McDonald, D. A., & Pape, J. (2002). Cost recovery and the crisis of service delivery in South Africa. Bloomsbury Academic. Miraftab, F., Wilson, D., & Salo, K. (2015). Cities and inequalities in a global and neoliberal world. Routledge. Oldfield, S., & Greyling, S. (2015). Waiting for the state: A politics of housing in South Africa. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 47(5), 1100–1112. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0308518X15592309 Palmer, I., Moodley, N., & Parnell, S. (2017). Building a capable state: Service delivery in postapartheid South Africa. Bloomsbury Academic. Parnell, S., & Robinson, J. (2012). (Re)theorizing cities from the Global South: Looking beyond neoliberalism. Urban Geography, 33(4), 593–617. https://doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.33.4.593

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Pieterse, E. (2018). The politics of governing African urban spaces-book. In C. Ammann & T. Förster (Eds.), African cities and the development conundrum. International Development Policy 10. Brill and Nijhoff. https://uct.primo.exlibrisgroup.com Schermbrucker, N., & Oldfield, S. (2013). Conflicting rationalities and the politics of housing: The Cape Town Community Housing Company and the Stock Road Philippi, Housing Project. Human Settlements Review, 2, 55–74. Smit, W. (2018, October). Urban governance in Africa: An overview. International Development Policy | Revue Internationale de Politique de Développement, 10, 55–77. https://doi.org/10. 4000/poldev.2637 Wafer, A., & Oldfield, S. (2015). Contesting the participatory sphere: Encountering the state in Johannesburg and Cape Town. In C. Benit-Gbaffou (Ed.), The politics of community participation in South African cities (pp. 232–244). Human Sciences Research Council Press. Watson, V. (2003). Conflicting rationalities: Implications for planning theory and ethics. Planning Theory & Practice, 4(4), 395–407. https://doi.org/10.1080/1464935032000146318 WCDHS, Policy and Research Directorate, Western Cape Department of Human Settlements. (2020). Research report on deferred ownership: Exploring possibilities for ownership opportunities in the gap market utilising early subsidies for properties sold by instalment sales or lease option. https://www.westerncape.gov.za/sites/www.westerncape.gov.za/files/deferred_ ownership_report_-_acknowledgements_added.pdf Yiftachel, O. (2009). Theoretical notes on ‘Gray cities’: The coming of urban apartheid? Planning Theory, 8(1), 88–100. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095208099300 Zweig, P. (2006). The Cape Town community housing company: The registration of land process in their first eight housing developments and implications for the transfer of ownership to beneficiaries. Department of Environmental and Geographical Science, University of Cape Town.

Websites http://www.ctchc.co.za

Interviews Interview with Mr. Werner Jurgens, 27 November 2018. Interview with R. Manuels; Interview with R. Kroneberg, 29 November 2018. Telephonic exchange with R. Kroneberg, 13 June 2021.

Letters Letters shared by resident C. Vertuin, which he received from different attorneys between 2009 and 2013.

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Whatsapp C. Vertuin (WhatsApp communication, 13 June 2021).

Geetika Anand is a doctoral researcher at the University of Cape Town (UCT), focusing on practice biographies of urban development practitioners in South Africa. Working with the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) since 2010, she recently was a researcher on the Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality (KNOW) programme, looking at planning education in Asia and Africa. Trained in urban planning, Geetika has over 15 years of experience spanning the sectors of spatial planning, housing, water and sanitation. She has a special interest in field-based learning and has been part of studio teaching teams at the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi, the IIHS, and the UCT. Sophie Oldfield is the Chair of and a Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University and affiliated with the Department of Environmental and Geographical Science at the University of Cape Town. Sophie is internationally recognized for research on southern urbanism through her theoretical and empirical research. To substantiate political practice and everyday urban geographies, she has a track record of excellence in collaborative research practice, challenging how academics work in and between ‘university’ and ‘community’. Commitment to this collaborative approach lies at the heart of her research, teaching, and writing on cities of the Global South. Anna Selmeczi’s urban studies research is grounded in social and political theory, and focuses on the connections between orders of urban space and knowledge production, and how various forms of popular politics contest and change these orders. Extending these themes through the lens of her teaching practice over the last few years, she’s also been thinking about the transformative and even emancipatory possibilities of pedagogical and research methods that emerge through creative experimentation. Anna is based at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, where she is a senior lecturer and the convener of the Southern Urbanism master’s programme and the pedagogical lead of the Urbanisms from the South track of the University of Basel’s Critical Urbanisms MA.

Chapter 9

Governing Low-Income Housing Delivery in Mangaung Malefetsane Mokoena, Lochner Marais , Nepo Masithela, and Anita Venter

9.1 Introduction Co-operative government, a concept established in the South African Constitution, requires the various levels of government to foster friendly relations, mutual support, information-sharing, coordination and procedural processes and not engage in legal action within government structures (Du Plessis, 2008; Nealer & Naude, 2011). However, these ideals are difficult to attain. In many cases we see duplication, unfunded mandates, insufficient integration of services at the community level, and a general inability to forge collaborative partnerships or find common ground for joint action (Du Plessis, 2008; Edwards, 2008; Pieterse, 2019; Tau, 2015). The Constitution’s emphasis on co-operative government guides the relations between the three spheres of government: national, provincial and local. Marks (1993, p. 392) describes co-operative government as “a system of continuous negotiation among nested governments at several territorial tiers”. Co-operative government is intended to be a partnership, but each sphere has a distinctive role and is independent (Malan, 2005). Pieterse (2019, p. 58) says South African municipalities “therefore, enjoy a degree of institutional stability and security which provides some insulation against political flux”. But in practice the national and provincial governments have encroached on local government functions. Pieterse (2019, p. 58) says the courts will not tolerate “undue provincial or national interference in [local governments’] administration”. However, this means local governments have to go to court to get clarity, relief or redress, and to halt interference into their designated responsibilities which can be difficult in cases where the same political party dominates all three spheres. M. Mokoena · L. Marais (B) · A. Venter University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] N. Masithela Mangaung Municipality, Bloemfontein, South Africa © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rubin et al. (eds.), Housing in African Cities, Urban Perspectives from the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37408-1_9

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The South African constitution states that housing is a national and provincial government function. However, housing requires collaboration between all three spheres. This reality has unintended consequences. Huchzermeyer (2001a, 2001b), for example, showed two decades ago how national policies have affected housing delivery at the local level. The housing policy and subsidy programmes that focus on a capital subsidy and homeownership have the unintended effects of locating housing on the periphery of cities, largely due to land costs, reinforcing the apartheid spatial planning framework and discouraging the upgrading of informal settlements. The national housing policy allows for a range of housing subsidy programmes. These programmes have changed since the policy’s inception in 1994 but have retained the element of a capital subsidy (Huchzermeyer, 2001a). A capital subsidy for an asset like housing usually takes the form of a fixed amount, paid upfront. Huchzermeyer (2001a) explains how decisions in the 1980s contributed to the emphasis on homeownership and the capital subsidy in South Africa’s housing policy. However, her research was from a national policy perspective and did not deal with local governance in the context of co-operative government. More recent research expands the evidence but largely confirms earlier findings (Pieterse, 2020; Ubisi et al., 2019; Zulu, 2014). Zulu (2014, p. 4) says that “how other spheres of government relate to local government” creates systemic problems. For example, national and provincial governments have delegated housing functions to local governments without appropriate budgets. Decisions are often taken without appropriate local government participation (Ubisi et al., 2019). Pieterse (2020) proposes rethinking the legislative environment to ensure better housing and urban management. In this chapter we use evolutionary governance theory (see Sect. 9.2 for a more detailed discussion) to examine the dependency between spheres of government in implementing the project-linked housing subsidy programme in Mangaung between 1994 and 2020. Although this programme has enabled Mangaung to provide some of the largest subsidised houses in South Africa, several concerns have developed. By 2020 most houses were located on the periphery, infrastructure access was poor, Mangaung’s housing development fund had been depleted, and there were unresolved historical spatial problems (Marais, 2003; Marais & Krige, 2000; Marais & Wessels, 2005). These problems resulted from provincial government guidelines setting a minimum house size. We argue that predetermined housing standards at the provincial level are examples of dependencies that affect local governments negatively, and that this sphere is often unable to contest for contextual and political reasons. The chapter is based on housing delivery statistics, housing and planning documents from Mangaung, and 30 interviews with key informants in the national, provincial, local and private sectors.1

1

The first author has been an employee in Mangaung’s housing department since 2003.

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9.2 Evolutionary Governance Theory Evolutionary governance theory provides a framework for understanding governance changes over time. For this chapter, we understand governance as the process of making collectively binding decisions in a community and implementing those decisions (Van Assche et al., 2015). Evolutionary governance theory offers a framework for analysing and explaining governance by focusing on dependencies and the way these evolve, and understanding the relationship between markets and the state. The theory draws on many sources, such as biological evolutionary theory, social systems theory, post-structuralism, institutional economics and actor-network theory (Van Assche et al., 2014). Its concept of a governance path shows how history and context can explain rigidity in collective decision-making (Van Assche et al., 2015). Most importantly, for our purposes, it helps us to understand strategy and planning by governments and communities. “Path dependency” is the term used to explain how decisions in the past influence governance in the present (Van Assche et al., 2014). Social scientists earlier referred to this as “historical institutionalism” (Krasner, 1984). North (1990, 2005) mainstreamed the idea into new institutional economics. The concept of path dependency alerts planners to the long-term implications of historical decisions. Five points are important for understanding this concept (Van Assche et al., 2014): • An institutional path begins at a critical juncture—a point in time—where a choice must be made between at least two possible paths. At any given juncture, events could follow any one of many paths leading to different outcomes. • Path dependency recognises that discernible structures act as “carriers of history”, affording different sets of opportunities and constraints in determining the direction and pace of change (North, 1990). • Although path dependency can explain how historical legacies shape current realities, the concept does not aim to predict the future by analysing the past. • The concept of autopoiesis (a system’s ability to reproduce and maintain itself by creating its parts and eventually other components) may be useful in analysing path dependency. • Path dependency provides a framework to compare alternatives and understand the complexities associated with causation. The concept of path dependency has not escaped criticism (Kay, 2005). The statement that “history matters” is often made as though this were obvious and without explaining how decision-making has changed over time. The concept can overemphasise stability at the expense of understanding change and can fail to consider normative principles. The term “goal dependency” refers to how shared visions or goals affect decisionmaking (Van Assche et al., 2014). A good example is how governments have become dependent on the Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals. Shared visions or goals manifesting in plans, policies and traditions can create

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dependence when applied inflexibly. For example, actors can develop a strategy which helps to coordinate decisions in the present but in the long run becomes an obstacle to progress (Van Assche et al., 2015). “Interdependencies” result from path dependency and can be negative or positive. Current actors, institutions and their relationships are the product of the past and their previous interactions (Greif, 2006). These interactions could create rigidity in the governance path as the interdependency might prevent change. Interdependency can also have positive outcomes. Relationships with certain actors or groups of actors may prevent obstruction or facilitate access to resources, expertise or labour (Van Assche et al., 2015). Actors and institutions can evolve along with one another and become interdependent. For example, lawyers and laws are part of the same institutional innovation process, as each depends on the other. Interdependency can result from specialisation, and the distribution of resources, knowledge and power. It can use formal and informal rules and it can emerge organically. Generally, interdependencies require cooperation and the display of responsibility and trust. They can result in cooperation or power play, trust or conflict. Understanding interdependencies makes it possible to assess the power play between different spheres of government. We use evolutionary governance theory as a framework to examine dependency. By revealing the dependencies associated with the application of housing policy in Mangaung, the theory broadens our understanding of housing governance in Mangaung. We use it for the following reasons: it focuses on slow change (evolution) and thus paves the way for understanding change over time; it shows how historical governance decisions have long-term implications; it points out the unintended consequences of policy decisions in the long term (framed as goal dependencies); and it emphasises the power relationships between role players in governance and decision-making. A further reason is that the South African planning system depends largely on steering (objective setting and delinking plan-making and implementation processes), in line with the new public management paradigm (Harrison, 2001). Evolutionary governance theory provides a useful framework for investigating steering in intergovernmental relations and planning.

9.3 Mangaung’s Governance Background Governance in Mangaung evolved from the city’s historical development. Apartheid planning developed the original city of Bloemfontein on an axis of 65 km. Krige (1991, p. 104) described the historical development of the Mangaung Metropolitan Municipality region as a “microcosm of apartheid planning” as it had elements of grand apartheid (ethnic homelands), meso-apartheid (significant racial segregation of suburbs) and petty apartheid (segregation of amenities). Writing 30 years after Krige, Marais (2021, p. 126) concludes that “the post-apartheid government has reinforced some of the fragmentation created under apartheid” (see Fig. 9.1). In 1968, the apartheid state stopped the expansion of the Mangaung black township near Bloemfontein. Black urbanisation was redirected to Thaba Nchu over 60kms

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Fig. 9.1 The extent of Mangaung Metropolitan Municipality and its location in the Free State and in South Africa

away. A subsidised bus provided access to Bloemfontein for work, and from 1981 subsidised industrial development points in Thaba Nchu and Botshabelo provided local jobs. In 1979, Bophuthatswana became an “independent state” for the Tswanaspeaking population and Thaba Nchu became one of the scattered enclaves making up this new “state”. The Sesotho-speaking population had to be relocated. Botshabelo became the new locus of the apartheid state’s redirection of black urbanisation. Influx control was lifted in the mid-1980s but replaced by the policy of orderly urbanisation. This policy was nullified in the early 1990s when thousands of people started to occupy open spaces. Since then, urbanisation has normalised and Bloemfontein and Mangaung’s townships have become its focus. There is evidence of Botshabelo and Thaba Nchu residents relocating to Bloemfontein (or Mangaung township areas) (Marais & Ntema, 2013). Today Botshabelo is home to 180,000 people and Thaba Nchu 80,000. Since the political transition in 1994, a core question has been how to invest in these two towns (Tomlinson & Krige, 1997). Although there were initial attempts to access large amounts of money to upgrade infrastructure, the money did not materialise until 2001. The unification of Bloemfontein, Botshabelo and Thaba Nchu in 2001, under the auspices of the Mangaung Local Municipality, spearheaded infrastructure investments by the Mangaung Council in both Botshabelo and Thaba Nchu (Marais et al., 2016). Between 1994 and 2001, Bloemfontein, Botshabelo and Thaba Nchu had their own urban councils. The rural areas around Bloemfontein and Thaba Nchu had rural councils. The Municipal Demarcation Board established the Mangaung Local Municipality in 2001, combining these three urban areas (and their rural areas) into

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one local municipality. In 2011, after extensive lobbying and municipal restructuring, Mangaung became a Category A or metropolitan municipality allowing it to source national funds directly from the National Treasury (Subramanyam & Marais, 2022). There have also been various territory expansions, including the area of Naledi (comprising Dewetsdorp, Van Stadensrus and Wepener) to the south of the metro in 2016 (see Fig. 9.1). In mid-2018, with Mangaung Metro’s finances in a poor state, the Mangaung Metropolitan Municipal Council accepted a financial recovery plan from the National Treasury. At the end of 2019, as the plan had not been implemented, Mangaung was placed under provincial administration, although the Council was not dissolved (Sicetsha, 2019). In January 2020, Moody’s downgraded Mangaung’s investment rating because of Mangaung’s inability to service debt repayments (Moody’s Investor Services, 2020). In 2022, the national government intervened and Mangaung was now placed under national administration (Felix, 2022). Again, this process left the Council in place. Figure 9.2 shows how support for the ruling ANC has declined since 2000, when this party received 70% of the vote. Voter turnout during the 2021 local elections was at an all-time low. Just over 43% of registered voters cast their votes. The ANC received only 50.6% of the votes and kept its majority by only one seat in the Council of 101 members. Two further problems have affected governance in Mangaung. Firstly, the city’s relationship with the provincial government has been unstable. From 2011 to 2016 the mayor of Mangaung, Thabo Manyoni, and the premier of the Free State Province, Ace Magashule, were in two different ANC camps. This conflict affected the relationships between the spheres of government (Myburgh, 2019). In 2016 Olly Mlamleli, 80.0 70.0 60.0

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who supported Magashule, became the new mayor. Myburgh (2019) notes that many housing tenders became centralised under the Free State premier and many housing programmes became scams. This centralisation meant that decisions taken in the provincial government sphere had to be implemented. Despite Mlamleli becoming the mayor, infighting in the ANC in the Free State has often spilt over into the Council. For example, in August 2020, the Council, with the help of some ANC councillors, unseated Mlamleli (Subramanyam & Marais, 2022). Secondly, the dominance of councillors from Botshabelo and Thaba Nchu in the Council has led to large-scale infrastructure investments in these two towns since 2001. To some degree this has reinforced apartheid spatial planning (Marais, 2021). Although the ANC has lost seats in Mangaung since 2000, the party has retained the 18 wards in Botshabelo and Thaba Nchu. ANC councillors from these two wards make up 45% of the ANC ward councillors and 35% of the ANC seats. In addition to the political instability and dominance of the provincial government, political unrest related to service delivery problems has become common in Mangaung. For example, the Mangaung shutdown movement managed to keep workers from going to work in May 2021 (Mitchley, 2021). Against this clash of local politics and provincial power play, we turn to the matter of housing delivery. In 1994 the Free State provincial government instituted a minimum house size of 40 m2 . Tomlinson (1998) says there was no consensus among the South African provincial governments about the original housing policy. The Free State was one of the provinces that deviated from national policy. It developed its own Draft Provincial Housing White Paper (Free State Department of Local Government and Housing, 1995). This draft document said a 40 m2 house would be a “real” home, a place to raise children and have a decent standard of living. Mr Vax Mayekiso, the first MEC (Member of the Executive Council) for housing in the province, said: “Units built in the Free State must be durable and provide protection from the elements, afford the inhabitants with reasonable living space and privacy, have full sanitation facilities, access to clean water and energy, have adequate stormwater drainage, and have security of tenure” (Mayekiso, 1995, p. 5). He was adamant that the 40 m2 policy would eliminate shacks in the Free State (Mayekiso, 1994). Mr Job Pretorius, the first chairperson of the Free State Housing Board, expressed the same sentiments (Pretorius, 1994, p. 8). During the term of Premier Magashule, the requirements for housing size under “Operation Hlasela” even increased to between 54 and 62 m2 (The Weekly, 2012). The minimum house size was instituted to counter the national government’s starter home policy which delivered very small, basic structures in the 1990s. Once in place, this Free State requirement was difficult for any new MEC or provincial executive to overturn because it was labelled a product that outperformed the rest of the country and benefited the poor. The minimum housing size is still in place more than 25 years later and has even increased over the past 13 years (to 52 m2 ). The remainder of our chapter evaluates the consequences of this policy.

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9.4 Housing Governance in Mangaung, 1994–2020 The amalgamation of the three main urban areas, Bloemfontein, Botshabelo and Thaba Nchu, was an attempt at urban restructuring. Although it did create one planning base for the area, many resource-allocation problems remained. We distinguish between three phases of housing delivery policy: 1994–2003, 2004–2013 and 2014– 2020. The first phase was guided by the original White Paper on Housing (Department of Housing, 1994). The second phase represents the first ten years after the government accepted the policy amendment known as Breaking New Ground (Department of Housing, 2004). Although Breaking New Ground was not a new policy, it did introduce some changes by focusing on sustainability, developing human settlements instead of just houses, and seeing housing as an asset for wealth creation and empowerment (Tomlinson, 2006). The emphasis was on using the integrated residential development programme (IRDP) to achieve integrated human settlements and spatial restructuring (Singh, 2019). The third phase focused on reinforcing the policies of phase 2 that were originally drafted in Breaking New Ground (but which hardly found any application in Mangaung). This meant phasing out project-linked subsidies and replacing them with the IRDP. This change in the housing policy shows how the government wanted to shift the emphasis from housing to sustainable human settlements (Tomlinson, 2006). It also laid the foundation for mega housing projects (Ballard & Rubin, 2017).

9.4.1 Subsidy Allocation and Housing Delivery Figures The national government allocates housing subsidies to provinces through the Division of Revenue Act.2 In turn, the provincial governments make allocations to municipalities. In 2020 values, the various housing subsidy programmes invested nearly ZAR 6 bn in Mangaung from 1994 to 2020. During this period Mangaung Municipality contributed an estimated ZAR 1.3 bn in 2020 values to this amount through infrastructure investments. Project-linked subsidies dominated delivery in Mangaung. Project-linked programmes constituted 55% of this value in 2020 (NDHS-HSS, 2020). Although the IRDP replaced the project-linked subsidies in 2004, Mangaung did not use it before 2011, thus deviating from Breaking New Ground’s focus on sustainable human settlements rather than just housing (NDHSHSS, 2020). Among the reasons why Mangaung did not use the IRDP was the difficulty of changing from the project-linked system, the scale, complexity and market demands of the IRDP projects, and the unsuitability of the IRDP for smaller infill projects in existing urban areas. Table 9.1 provides an overview of housing delivery using the project-linked subsidies. The table shows that there is a decline in delivery in Mangaung and a more even spread between the main urban areas during phase 2. 2

An annual Act which sets the distribution of national government funds to provinces and municipalities.

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993

25 608

70.5

13.5

12.0

3.9

100.0

73.4

14.1

12.5

n.a.

100

11 454

8 080

5187

2 475

27 196

42.1

29.7

19.1

9.1

100.0

46.3

32.7

21.0

n.a.

100

360

0

0

219

579

62.2

0

0

37.8

100

0

0

n.a.

100

29 880

11 548

8 268

3 687

53 383

56.0

21.6

15.5

6.9

100.0

59.8

23.4

16.8

n.a.

100

Mangaung as % of Free State allocation

3 081

Mangaung total

3 468

Free State allocation

Dewetsdorp/ Soutpan/ Van Stadensrus/ Wepener

18 066

Thaba Nchu

Botshabelo

Phase 1: 1994–2003 1994–2003 % (2016 boundaries) 1994–2003 % (2001 boundaries) Phase 2: 2004-2013 2004–2013 % (2016 boundaries) 2004–2013 % (2001 boundaries) Phase 3: 2014–2020 2014–2020 % (2016 boundaries) 2014–2020 % (2001 boundaries) Total Total % (2016 boundaries) Total % (2001 boundaries)

Bloemfontein

Year

Table 9.1 Number of project-linked subsidised houses in Mangaung: 1994–2020

28.7 89 135 27.6

26.1 104 009 23.8

5.4 10701 3.4

26.2 203 845 24.4

Source NDHS-HSS (2020)

Mangaung delivered over 53,000 houses (26% of the project-linked subsidised houses in the Free State) between 1994 and 2020. The percentage of households in informal housing dropped from 23 to 14%. However, Mangaung’s share of the provincial allocation declined over the three phases: from 28.7% to 26.1% to 5.4%. The dominance of project-linked subsidies and the slow phasing-in of the IRDP was the result of being obliged to conform to the minimum house size. The declining share of Mangaung’s allocation is partly because Mangaung ran out of stands for housing delivery. We discuss these trends in more detail below.

9.4.2 House Size and Infrastructure Standards Tomlinson (1998) views the original Housing White Paper (1994) decision favouring a small amount per household for the housing subsidy as a victory for breadth over

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depth.3 The small subsidy size was intended to enable the government to reach more people (breadth) rather than provide larger houses for fewer people (depth). However, the initial consensus was short-lived, as newly elected provincial governments challenged the decision (Charlton & Kihato, 2006). The Free State deviated from the national guidelines: in 1994 it stipulated a minimum house size of 40 m2 (Marais & Krige, 2000), thus favouring depth over breadth.4 Two decades ago, Marais and Krige (2000) described the adverse effects on the Free State. Although the houses were larger, they had lower levels of infrastructure and had to be built where services were available in the Mangaung township, which further reinforced the spatial fragmentation of the city that had begun under apartheid. Informal settlement upgrading received little attention in the Free State. The minimum house size initially went unchallenged by Mangaung Local Municipality’s predecessors (1994–2000). Developers used the subsidy mainly for constructing houses, not infrastructure, as serviced stands were available in the former black township of Mangaung.5 Nationally, the subsidy was used for infrastructure as well as the houses. With the Mangaung Local Municipality’s establishment in 2001, the municipality’s housing department realised it had a problem. The minimum house size and the requirement to co-fund the infrastructure without receiving a return would make it difficult to develop new serviced stands. Mangaung had to recover some costs. After negotiations with the Free State provincial government, in 2003 the Council approved a plan to recoup ZAR 4 per square metre from provincial government for serviced stands. Amounting to ZAR 1600 for a stand of 400 m2 , this represented only about 10% of the cost of a serviced stand in 2003. In contrast, the national guideline at the time was ZAR 13,000 per stand. But if the municipality did not recover its investments in serviced stands, it would eventually run out of serviced stands and be unable to fund them from municipal finances. The situation worsened in 2007 when the Free State provincial government enforced a flat rate of ZAR 1500 per stand (as a recovery cost) without the consent of the Mangaung municipality. The introduction of Operation Hlasela6 by the Free State provincial government in 2009 meant that Mangaung did not receive any funding for serviced stands. The increasing difficulty of delivering serviced stands with municipal finance had five main consequences in Mangaung. Firstly, housing delivery was concentrated in areas where stands were available even if they had no services (see Table 9.2). The lack of services to these stands resulted from overstretched bulk services and insufficient funds. Overall, the levels of infrastructure access were low. A comparison of the projects for phases 1 and 2 shows that the situation has deteriorated: in phase 1, 12% of the projects had houses with no water available on the stand; in phase 2, 3

This decision was taken at the National Housing Forum (1992–1994), which developed a postapartheid housing policy. 4 The national government approved a minimum house size of 30 m2 only in 1999. 5 The Bloemfontein TLC (Transitional Local Council) made large-scale sites available from 1994 by trying to plan for urbanisation. A revolving fund helped to finance these developments. 6 Directly translated, it means attack. The provincial government introduced the programme to improve basic service delivery in the province.

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Table 9.2 Infrastructure access of projects in Mangaung, 1994–2013 Infrastructure levels Electricity available

Phase 1 (1994–2003)

Phase 2 (2004–2013)

N

N

%

%

84

92.3

105

7

7.7

16

Electricity total

91

100.0

121

Water: Full (on stand)

36

39.6

43

35.5

Water: Basic (community tap within 200 m)

44

48.4

42

34.7

Water: None or community tap further than 200 m

11

12.1

36

29.8

Water total

91

100.0

121

100.0

Sanitation: Full (waterborne)

27

29.7

41

33.9

Sanitation: Basic (pit latrine)

22

24.2

22

18.2

Sanitation: None

42

46.2

58

Sanitation total

91

100.0

121

1

1.1

5

4.1

Streets: Basic

90

98.9

116

95.9

Streets: None

0

0.0

0

0.0

Streets total

91

100.0

121

100.0

Infill / Buffer developments

27

29.7

31

25.6

Periphery

64

70.3

90

74.4

Total

91

100.0

121

100.0

Electricity not available

Streets: Full

86.8 13.2 100

47.9 100

Source NDHS-HSS (2020)

this had increased to nearly 30%. Projects without electricity increased from 8 to 15% and projects with no sanitation increased from 46 to 48%. There was a slight improvement in the number of streets with full services from phase 1 to phase 2. Secondly, to get the largest possible amount that the project-linked subsidy programme could offer, developers focused on the lowest income households, which received a higher subsidy (Mokoena & Marais, 2008) and ensured that their applications made provision for an additional 15% for geotechnical problems.7 This addition of the geotechnical allowance was the only way to make developments feasible. Approving the 15% geotechnical variance for the Free State followed political pressure and geotechnical assessments that found areas with unstable soils where houses would need stronger foundations. Project-linked subsidies increased from ZAR 15,000 in 1994 to over ZAR 16,000 in 1996 and 1997 because developers secured this 15% allowance. The most significant increases took place since 2004 and these increases were higher than inflation (see Fig. 9.3). 7

The initial intention of the geotechnical allowance was to pay for servicing stands in uneven areas like the coastal cities. It was not supposed to be used in Mangaung.

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M. Mokoena et al. 140000 120000 100000 80000

ZAR 60000 40000 20000 0 1994 1995 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2006 2007 2008 2010 2011 2012 2013

Fig. 9.3 Average amount of the project-linked subsidies used in Mangaung, 1994–2013. Note Some years are missing because there were no subsidy allocations to Mangaung for those years (Source NDHS-HSS [2020])

Thirdly, this policy decision led to double subsidisation, as the construction of a 40 m2 house depends on the availability of top-up finance or a second subsidy where stands are not serviced (GTZ/UUDP, 2001). Despite a warning in the official White Paper on Housing that double subsidisation distorts horizontal equity, the Free State Province consolidated the capital housing subsidy with the Consolidated Municipal Infrastructure Programme (CMIP) and the 15% geotechnical variance in housing projects to sustain the 40 m2 requirements in Mangaung. As serviced stands began to run out in Mangaung in 2004, there was a rapid increase in the amount allocated for project-linked subsidies to counter the problem of making stands available. By 2004, the inflation of project-linked subsidies for housing had become higher than national inflation and was increasing much faster. This was a national trend, but it was a way to obtain more money to help develop stands. But the growth of the subsidy beyond national inflation would not be viable in the longer term. Fourthly, the focus on house size in 1994 ultimately increased the number of projects on the periphery. Huchzermeyer (2001a) saw this trend as primarily an outcome of the inflexible capital subsidy entrenched in the project-linked subsidy programme. However, we think the emphasis on house size played a role. We categorised the spatial characteristics of each housing project into three groups: infill (for example, projects challenging the planning ideas of the Group Areas Act or located in former buffer strips), peripheral (located on the urban periphery), or outside the urban edge (going beyond the urban boundaries set in the official planning documents). We found that nearly 30% of Bloemfontein-based projects from 1994 to 2003 were infill projects, whereas from 2004 to 2013 this decreased to 26%. The minimum house

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size was a deliberate decision to increase the amount of money available per house and did not consider locational aspects. Finally, housing delivery declined during phase 3, both in houses allocated to Mangaung and in Mangaung’s share of the provincial allocation. We think this is partly because of the minimum house size policy. Finding serviced and planned stands had become difficult because of the insistence on the minimum house size and because the initial additional infrastructure subsidy required from Mangaung has not been sustainable in the long run. The provincial financial power and synchronisation of the housing subsidy with CMIP funding as part of the Free State Housing Strategy gave the provincial government the upper hand. The implication is that the second subsidy is accepted as policy to ensure that the 40 m2 size requirement is maintained (Marais & Wessels, 2005). These five consequences show how the Free State provincial government decision has forced Mangaung to make specific local decisions that have long-term implications.

9.4.3 Regional Investment Decisions Once the Free State provincial government had allocated subsidies to Mangaung, the Council had to make allocations within the municipality.8 The Mangaung Housing Sector Plan (2003) proposed a 60:20:20 allocation between Bloemfontein, Botshabelo and Thaba Nchu (Mangaung Local Municipality, 2003).9 This allocation did not please the councillors from Botshabelo and Thaba Nchu. Consequently, the municipality’s IDP (Integrated Development Plan) for the following year (2004) adjusted these allocations to 50:25:25 (Mangaung Local Municipality, 2004). The policy change benefited Botshabelo and Thaba Nchu during phase 2 (2001 Mangaung boundaries) when their subsidies stood at 33% and 21% of the allocation (see Table 9.1). To some degree, the increased importance of Botshabelo and Thaba Nchu during phase 2 reinforced the spatial fragmentation and separation created under apartheid. There were no allocations for Botshabelo and Thaba Nchu during phase 3, which can be attributed to the IRDP’s focus on mixed-income developments, as the market-driven housing component was not feasible in these areas. In addition to this political striving for resources, two other factors played a role in the regional allocation of project-linked subsidies: the minimum house size and the continuation of project-linked subsidies instead of the IRDP. As already mentioned, the minimum house size encouraged development in areas where services were unavailable, as the subsidy was sufficient only for the house, not for infrastructure. This happened largely in Botshabelo and Thaba Nchu. Mangaung was slow to take up the IRDP and project-linked subsidies continued. This allowed for smaller 8

Before 2001 these allocations were made to the various TLCs (Transitional Local Councils) that the National Demarcation Board amalgamated into Mangaung in 2001. 9 The Mangaung Housing Sector Plan is part of the municipality’s Integrated Development Plan (IDP).

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projects favouring Botshabelo and Thaba Nchu. However, it did not comply with the revised policy under Breaking New Ground, which was intended to create sustainable human settlements and mixed-income developments.

9.4.4 The Housing Target The target of building one million houses in the first five years of post-apartheid rule was a central feature of housing policy. Although the target has not been reached (about 700,000 houses have been built by 1999), it has dominated the implementation strategy. Provincial and local governments and developers have been under pressure to meet the target. Although the target gets blamed for shoddy construction practices, there are other implications. The Financial and Fiscal Commission (FFC, 2012) found that municipalities followed a “one size fits all” approach despite substantial policy flexibility. In their drive to meet the target, implementers have taken the most straightforward route. In Mangaung, new housing was developed wherever stands were available, in part to avoid the time-consuming process of township development. This had two main consequences: (1) in some areas, infrastructure levels were low historically and were not improved as there were no funds because it was used for the house; (2) in other areas, new infrastructure was delivered where new stands were created. In addition, the city’s land development fund was depleted because it was used to subsidise the infrastructure. And the minimum house size policy, combined with the housing target, contributed to poor infrastructure standards.

9.4.5 Failure of Cooperative Government Despite the principle of cooperative government, Mangaung had to deal with the consequences of decisions taken unilaterally at the national and provincial levels. Both national and provincial key informants said they thought the reason was that “local government is still viewed as a lower sphere of government”, implying that the provincial government refused to see that the spheres should be interdependent, in other words cooperative; that it should not be a matter of hierarchy. There was conflict about the accreditation of municipalities, a process introduced by Breaking New Ground to give local governments greater autonomy. Accreditation has three levels, obtained incrementally. In 2013 Mangaung was accredited up to level 2 and developed an accreditation implementation plan. This plan depended on an MEC’s final approval and delegation of level 2 functions to Mangaung. However, no MEC has yet approved the accreditation and delegation of housing functions to Mangaung. Consequently, Mangaung has been unable to spend the ZAR 5 million allocated for accreditation-linked activities because the process has stalled. The withholding of the delegated functions has caused tension between the municipality

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and the provincial and national governments because of repeated underspending on budgets. Our key informants expressed a variety of views. Some said the stalled accreditation was the result of power play, as the province will lose its functional role in housing delivery if it hands over more responsibilities to Mangaung. Others blamed it on personality clashes. One said that part of the problem was the lack of legislation that could force an MEC to approve the accreditation. There have been other conflicts. One common problem has been decisions taken at the provincial level without consultation with Mangaung. Some of these decisions were in contradiction of local plans. For example, Operation Hlasela planned to demolish the old houses in Batho. Mangaung wanted to restore these houses but had to accept the Free State provincial government’s plan to build new houses or stand to lose the allocation. In another example from Operation Hlasela, the provincial Department of the Premier in the Free State hired a contractor to demolish Councilowned houses in Heidedal. The demolition went ahead without Council approval and a demolition certificate from Mangaung. The municipality had to provide the demolition certificates retrospectively—and find accommodation for the people who had been evicted. The Free State provincial government’s appointment of developers and contractors also created conflict. The provincial government appointed small contractors in the 2008/2009 financial year. One of the consequences was shoddy construction practices. Mangaung has had to deal with the complaints.

9.5 Conclusion This chapter analysed the governance of housing delivery in Mangaung from 1994 to 2020, taking into account the Constitutional requirement for co-operative government. We used evolutionary governance theory and its concept of three dependencies to analyse housing delivery under the project-linked housing programme. Below we reflect on these dependencies in more detail. Our assessment revealed the path dependencies of the South African housing policy. Research often finds that this policy has followed the paths of the capital subsidy and its links to macro-economic policy guidelines, the neoliberal policy guidelines from the World Bank, and the business-like policies developed in the mid1980s. Our case study shows how the approach in this particular part of the country has stuck to the path of the minimum house size requirement, determined by another sphere of government. This path has led Mangaung in the wrong direction. Embarking on this minimum size housing policy has had long-term negative implications for Mangaung: the cost of it has meant infrastructure standards declined, some houses were built where no township had been established, the housing subsidy inflation increased rapidly, more housing was built in peripheral locations, and ultimately the number of houses delivered annually in Mangaung decreased. Complying with this policy required investment from Mangaung that the municipality could not recoup, it depleted its housing development fund. The long-term risk is that housing delivery

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might move away from supporting low-income households as it is unaffordable for the municipality. Furthermore, Mangaung has not had the power to change this provincial policy. The minimum housing size policy started as something to benefit the poor. Mangaung’s inability to change the terms of this means that in the long term the policy has affected poor households disproportionately: infrastructure levels declined, housing delivery stalled, and the poor were increasingly located on the periphery. Although the rigid application of the house size requirement produced larger houses, the requirement became so entrenched in the Free State that it was even increased under the premiership of Magashule. Houses became bigger, but far fewer houses were delivered. To a large extent, the Free State has ignored the policy of breadth over depth and it will be difficult to reverse this. It would seem that this was at least in part motivated by the loss of ANC support in the province and the desire to recoup grassroots support. However, this strategy seems to have backfired, as the depletion in resources and the decline in housing delivery has hampered attempts to regain previous political losses. Besides being an example of path dependency, the minimum house size requirement, like the one million houses target, also reveals goal dependency. The national and provincial governments have become fixated on that one million goal and do not consider whether there might be other or better goals. This goal is entrenched as it is seen as a key aspect of ensuring voter support during elections and so politicians are reluctant to give it up. These two dependencies have led to rigidity, making it difficult for Mangaung to sustain the delivery of houses on serviced stands in the long term. There have been several adverse effects. Mangaung has recovered only 10% of its infrastructure investments and its housing development fund has been depleted. The minimum house size and the capital subsidy’s inflexibility, entrenched in the project-linked subsidy programme, have reinforced the spatial patterns of apartheid. Developers have favoured cheap peripheral land over well-located and serviced land. Finally, the interdependencies between the different government spheres have led to power plays, with Mangaung unable to stand its ground. We have highlighted various examples where the Free State provincial government overturned decisions (cost recovery on services to stands, accreditation, rebuilding houses in Batho, and demolishing Council houses in Heidedal) or were simply unwilling to accept the proposals from Mangaung’s Council. This is due to the fact that Mangaung is so dependent on accessing the funds from the national government that it has had to compromise. But these compromises have held up housing delivery, increasing the dependency on the provincial government. On the other hand, Magashule, was a powerful figure in the ANC and in local political networks and his plans could not be easily diverted by less powerful figures at the local level. This situation does not bode well for co-operative government. We found that the provincial sphere shows little regard for the consequences of the decisions it takes for Mangaung and has no intention of developing a strong local government system. This way, the province manages to keep its presence in the municipality. The narrative surrounding the minimum size of state-subsidised units also surfaces the impact that party politics have on local housing delivery and shows the pressure that is then put on to local resources to achieve political gains. It also demonstrates

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how dangerous such short term thinking (the planning approach adopted by the Free State Provincial Government) can be as it depletes budgets and energy and in the end damages the ability of the local authority to deliver to the poorest households and communities.

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Marais, L. (2021). Bloemfontein: Three decades of urban change. In T. Lemon, G. Visser, & R. Donaldson (Eds.), South African Urban change three decades after apartheid (pp. 117–127). Springer. Marais, L., & Krige, S. (2000). Who received what where in the Free State, 1994–1998: An assessment of post-apartheid housing policy and delivery. Development Southern Africa, 17(4), 603–619. Marais, L., & Ntema, J. (2013). The upgrading of an informal settlement in South Africa: Two decades onwards. Habitat International, 39, 85–95. Marais, L., Ntema, L., Rani, K., Lenka, M., & Cloete, J. (2016). Reinforcing housing assets in the wrong location? The case of Botshabelo, South Africa. Urban Forum, 27(3), 347–362. Marais, L., & Wessels, J. (2005). Housing standards and housing rights: The case of Welkom in the Free State Province. Urban Forum, 16(1), 17–34. Marks, G. (1993). Structural policy and multi-level governance in the EC. In A. Cafruny & G. Rosenthal (Eds.), The state of the European Community: The Maastricht debates and beyond (pp. 391–410). Lynne Rienner. Mayekiso, V. (1994, September 6–7). There will be no more shacks in my province by 2010. Housing in Southern Africa. Mayekiso, V. (1995, March 9). Our mission is to deliver as soon as humanly possible. Housing in Southern Africa. Mitchley, A. (2021, May 19). Mangaung protests: SALGA calls for calm and restraint amid violent protests. News24. https://www.news24.com/news24/southafrica/news/mangaung-pro tests-salga-calls-for-calm-and-restraint-amid-violent-protests-20210519 Mokoena, M., & Marais, L. (2008). An evaluation of post-apartheid housing delivery in Mangaung: A view from local government. In L. Marais & G. Visser (Eds.), Spatialities of urban change: Selected themes from bloemfontein at the beginning of the 21st century. Sun Press. Moody’s Investor Services. (2020). Moody’s downgrades the ratings of Mangaung Metropolitan Municipality to Caa1 and places the ratings under review, direction was uncertain. https://www.moodys.com/research/Moodys-downgrades-the-ratings-of-MangaungMetropolitan-Municipality-to-Caa1--PR_417616 Myburgh, L. (2019). Gangster State: Unravelling Ace Magashule’s web of capture. Penguin. NDHS-HSS (National Department of Human Settlements—Housing Subsidy System) online. (2020, September 15). Free State Project delivery details report. Nealer, E., & Naude, M. (2011). Integrated co-operative governance in the context of sustainable development. The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa, 7(1), 105–118. North, D. (1990). Institutions, institutional change and economic performance. Cambridge University Press. North, D. C. (2005). Understanding the process of economic change. Princeton University Press. Pieterse, M. (2019). A year of living dangerously? Urban assertiveness, cooperative governance and the first year of three coalition-led metropolitan municipalities in South Africa. Politikon, 46(1), 51–70. Pieterse, M. (2020). Shifting paradigms from between the lines? Legal internalisations of the right to adequate housing in South Africa. In N. Davidson & G. Tewari (Eds.), Law and the new urban agenda. Routledge. Pretorius, J. (1994, September 8–9). At last—Actions that speak louder than words. Housing in Southern Africa. Sicetsha, A. (2019, December 20). Mangaung: Provincial government places metro under administration. The South African. https://www.thesouthafrican.com/news/mangaung-provincial-gov ernment-places-metro-under-administration/ Singh, S. (2019). An evaluation of the Integrated Residential Development Programme (IRDP) as a strategy of spatial integration of low-income housing project: A study of Cornubia, Durban, South Africa (Unpublished Master’s Degree). University of KwaZulu-Natal.

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Subramanyam, N., & Marais, L. (2022). Making Mangaung Metro: The politics of metropolitan reform in a South African secondary city. Urban Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/004209802 11065895 Tau, M. (2015). Intergovernmental relations and cooperative governance in South Africa: Challenges and prospects. Journal of Public Administration, 50(4), 801–823. The Weekly. (2012, May 18). Hlasela uplifts farm community. The Weekly. http://www.premier.fs. gov.za/files/media-articles/Hlasela%20Uplifts%20Farm%20Community,%20May%202012. pdf Tomlinson, M. (1998). South Africa’s new housing policy: An assessment of the first two years, 1994–1996. International Journal for Urban and Regional Research, 22(1), 137–146. Tomlinson, M. (2006). From ‘quantity’ to ‘quality’: Restructuring South Africa’s housing policy ten years after. International Development Planning, 28(1), 85–104. Tomlinson, R., & Krige, S. (1997). Botshabelo: Coping with the consequences of urban apartheid. International Journal for Urban and Regional Research, 21(4), 691V705. Ubisi, S., Khumalo, P., & Nealer, E. (2019). Provision of adequate housing through cooperative government and intergovernmental relations in the Bushbuckridge Local Municipality. Gender and Behaviour, 17(2), 13355–13369. Van Assche, K., Beunen, R., & Duineveld, M. (2014). Evolutionary governance theory: An introduction. Springer. Van Assche, K., Beunen, R., & Duineveld, M. (2015). An overview of EGT’s main concepts. In R. Beunen, K. Van Assche, & M. Duineveld (Eds.), Evolutionary governance theory: Theory and applications. Springer. Zulu, T. (2014). Cooperative governance in South Africa: A case study of intergovernmental relations in the provision of housing (Unpublished Master’s Dissertation). University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Malefetsane Mokoena has been a Development Practitioner at the local government for over 20 years. He attained a postgraduate Diploma in Planning and Management of Urban Development at the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (Netherlands) in 1997 and a Master’s degree in Development Studies at the University of the Free State (UFS) in 2005. His career as development practitioner began in 1995, rising through the ranks to become the General Manager in Human Settlements Sector for Mangaung and a part-time lecturer at the UFS. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2022. Lochner Marais is a Professor of Development Studies at the Centre for Development Support at the University of the Free State (UFS). He is also an honorary professor at the Sustainable Minerals Institute (University of Queensland, Australia). He serves on the editorial board of Habitat International. His latest monograph, ‘The social impacts of mine closure in South Africa. Housing policy and place attachment’, published with Routledge, focuses on the implications of mine closure for housing policy. Nepo Masithela is a local government practitioner in South Africa with professional experience gained in both the academic field and public service as a General Manager responsible for Intergovernmental and International Relations, senior lecturer, researcher and University administrator. In recent years, he lectured Public Management to Post Graduate students and supervised masters students in this field. South African universities have invited him to be an external examiner for their postgraduate students. Anita Venter is a researcher at the University of the Free State (South Africa). Her study areas focus on climate change, settlement transformation, earth building and regenerative development. Her skills are highly transdisciplinary, with academic qualifications in fine arts, philosophy and

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sociology, gender, and development studies. Anita also received training in appropriate building technologies during an internship hosted by the Earthship Biotecture Academy in Guatemala. She co-authored 16 peer-reviewed articles and co-created four design outputs for the built environment. Anita aspires to address the gap between academic theories, research and policy through change-engaged practices applied in projects that respond to a climate crisis world.

Chapter 10

Oversights, Omissions and Ownership Visions: State-funded Walk-up Housing in Johannesburg Sarah Charlton , Neil Klug , and Margot Rubin

In response to criticisms of its low-income housing provision and driven by the desire for greater urban compaction, the South African state has turned to a new typology of housing for very poor households.1 The new model comprises three or four storey walk-up blocks of flats, in which state subsidised beneficiary households own a unit through a sectional title or condominium ownership scheme. This differs from earlier free housing in two key dimensions: first, rather than detached houses, the new units are both vertically and horizontally attached, with shared walls, roofs, corridors and stairwells. Second, individual ownership of a portion of the complex comes with the requirement for joint management of the common areas. These built form, tenure and management demands all influence the successful functioning of this state-funded walk-up housing. Our work shows the significant shortfalls in the conceptualisation and implementation of the model in Johannesburg, which has profound consequences for both residents and the state. The housing is part of the national Integrated Residential Development Programme (IRDP) which creates new neighbourhoods for low- and middle- income households. Developed through public private partnerships (PPPs) between different 1 Those who qualify for the maximum government housing subsidy, ie monthly household incomes USD 215 or less.

S. Charlton · N. Klug School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand, Braamfontein, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] N. Klug e-mail: [email protected] M. Rubin (B) School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff, Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rubin et al. (eds.), Housing in African Cities, Urban Perspectives from the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37408-1_10

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levels of the state and private sector developers these neighbourhoods require sustained interaction and coordination, but with multiple objectives, funding streams and actors, there is considerable complexity in this arrangement. The difficulties and demands in managing this approach, and the gaps in responsibility that have developed, account for the problems we find in these state-funded walk-up housing. By examining the circumstances and practices that led to the shortfalls in the conceptualisation and implementation of the model we can reflect on the governance approaches adopted and how they are implicated. We focus on a case study in the highly urbanised Gauteng province, where by 2021 between 10,000 and 13,000 units of this state-funded walk-up housing had been delivered. We discuss two levels of governance: the actions and relationships that produced the housing, and the activities and strategies required to live in the buildings. We draw on six in-depth interviews by the authors with individuals or groups of officials in key sections of provincial and local government (Gauteng Province and City of Johannesburg), as well as on 13 interviews with residents of the housing, 12 of these conducted by a contracted researcher who lives in the case study site of Fleurhof and one by the authors. Using this material, we argue that both the different spheres of government and the partnership that established this housing have overlooked or underplayed the specific demands of the model, and that in particular, responsibility for embedding post-occupancy management has fallen into an institutional vacuum. Partners have also responded sluggishly to what has become a crisis for those living in the housing. Indications are that the state-private partnership (which also lacked end user involvement) had divergent objectives, as well as limited capacity to manage a complex new model involving multi-scalar governance and the ‘urban governance tool’ of PPPs (Fombad, 2015). We begin with an overview of the governance approach to delivering low-income housing in South Africa. We summarise known experiences with multi-storey accommodation, illustrating that parties could have predicted the consequences of this typology for residents. After examining the motivations for the new approach, we explore its intended functioning before presenting experiences of households now living in these units. Their day-to-day realities highlight some of the failures of the project. In the reaction to the subsequent problems, we discuss how too little was done, too late, and why this happened. The chapter concludes that shortcomings in the multi-actor approach to the housing has resulted in the need for long-term remedial action and unplanned financial commitment from the state. We argue that the structure and governance of multi-scalar and multi-actor partnerships in housing delivery needs careful review to mitigate against this kind of project-level failure and its knock-on consequences.

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10.1 Housing Delivery: Governance Across Scales and Actors Producing state-funded housing in South Africa involves complex assemblages of actors including different spheres of government as well as private entities. The provincial level of government has a key role as funding conduit, policy player and at times direct implementer of projects, whilst large municipalities are involved in many aspects of planning and delivery, which may include land availability, infrastructure arrangements and beneficiary allocations. In Johannesburg, the objectives of provincial and local spheres have not always aligned, yet there is a degree of mutual dependency in the relationship, with both parties needed to make delivery happen. Along with the national state these relationships are part of the ‘continuous negotiation amongst nested governments’ known as ‘multi-level governance’ (Ansell & Torfing, 2022, p. 2). At the same time, private sector involvement has been a key feature of the South African human settlements programme over the last 20 years and is also central to the IRDP introduced in 2009. Recognising the limits of government structures, this governance approach aims to make best use of diverse ‘ideas, resources and competences that are required for the production of desirable outcomes’ (Ansell & Torfing, 2022, p. 4). In the case of the IRDP, these outcomes include a mix of incomes amongst resident groups, and thus the inclusion of market-oriented housing alongside fully funded housing. Finance of the development is through a mixture of state subsidies and private equity, along with a variety of land packaging arrangements involving either privately owned or state land (Harris & Rubin, 2018). This PPP delivery model has largely been that known as “turnkey”, which involves two parts. First is ‘building’ (by the contracted private sector party, using state funds and acting as developer), and second is ‘transferring ownership’ (of housing to the qualifying beneficiary and infrastructure to local government). In general, it is argued that this transfers much of risk and responsibility for implementation to the non-state actor (Tissington, 2010, p. 82), and responsibility for subsequent housing maintenance to the recipients. These recipients have usually had no role in the implementation of the projects in which they are beneficiaries (Miraftab, 2004) (Fig. 10.1). PPPs can be highly controversial as funding and development instruments, largely due to concerns that public return on investment is lower than returns for the private funder and that they can be used as “Trojan horses” by the private sector to get access to state development funding (Miraftab, 2004). PPPs are also seen to be closely related to concepts such as privatization and the contracting out of government services (Hodge & Greve, 2007; Miraftab, 2004). The lack of a shared understanding of what a PPP is and the secrecy surrounding their financial details makes it complex to evaluate whether PPPs have been successful (Hodge & Greve, 2016). Fombad (2015) contends that there has been insufficient attention on the governance aspects of PPPs. She points to a slew of dimensions needing consideration, including questioning PPPs ‘participatory and consensus orientation’, their ‘accountability’ ‘inclusiveness’, ‘clarity of purpose’ and clarity of roles and responsibilities (Fombad, 2015, p. 1203).

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Fig. 10.1 An integrated residential development with different typologies (Source CalgroM3 website)

These internal governance features may be lacking or inadequate in part because of the way that reporting structures and accountability are configured in both the private and public sectors. Accountability in this sense refers to how ‘individuals perceive themselves as responsible for reporting, justifying or explaining their actions to others and being liable to sanctions in the event of errors and shortcomings’ (Fombad, 2015,

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p. 1207). Private sector actors are often seen to be accountable to their shareholders and boards: as long as businesses are profitable, satisfy in terms of performance and obey the larger strictures of good governance they are seen to have been adequately accountable. In the case of the state, the common-sense belief is that it (and its component parts) hold multiple forms of accountability to the public, around justifiable expenditure, transparency as well as due process. However, individual departments and units within the state are accountable in relation to their key performance indicators, usually measured in number of units delivered or budgets spent: so long as they deliver on these, officials are seen to be accomplishing what is needed and their time, work and expenditure is accounted for. This is also known as administrative accountability (Christensen & Lægreid, 2015; Tissington, 2010). The Johannesburg Housing Department’s 2021/2022 Business Plan demonstrates this, where the corporate scorecard lists numbers of housing typologies to be constructed or repaired, without any references to longer term management components, for example (CoJ, 2020). In addition, amongst the different parties within and across spheres of government involved in a joint endeavour, a concern with their individual objectives may result in aspects of an overall development being overlooked, assumed to be the responsibility of another party, or compromised during negotiations (Robbins, 2015). Even within the parameters of a defined project underway in a specific jurisdiction, responsibilities can be fluid, as ‘de facto authority in various governance arrangements is continuously being re-arranged across a number of actors operating at different scales’ (Robbins, 2015, p. 203). The focus on numerical and physical- targets forms the foundation for PPP relationships around state housing delivery in South Africa, with success measured by hand-over of completed products to individual home recipients, government departments (in the case of land and infrastructure), and occasionally, institutions (in the case of rental housing). To a large degree state and private sector housing responsibility in this form of PPP ends once transfer has taken place and the onus of management and maintenance is passed on to the beneficiary. It is this dimension that is key in the case study we discuss here.

10.2 Experiences with Multi-storey Low-income Housing in SA South Africa’s low-income housing delivery in the post-apartheid era is well-known for the detached houses for ownership that have been delivered at scale across the country. However, there is also a history of multi-storey, higher density housing, including that subsidised by the state. Although the contemporary multi-storey units we discuss in this chapter are individually owned, buildings with either rental or ownership require significant management and historical experiences to date, illustrate the wide variety of management issues that needed to be addressed.

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Under the apartheid government walk-up or multi-storey state housing included the notoriously poor-quality single sex dormitory-style hostels for black urban residents, and family accommodation for coloured, Indian, and some white people in racially segregated neighbourhoods. All of this comprised rental accommodation and was generally run by local authorities, or in the case of some hostels, by mining houses or other corporates (Erwin, 2017; Mabin, 1991). Over the years many of these buildings were neglected and unmanaged or became the sites of overt political conflict such as rent boycotts or internecine clashes, resulting in very poor living environments. Problems included an absence of rent and utility payments, overcrowding, poor maintenance, criminality and alternative forms of localised power and control (Xulu, 2014). Partly in response to this difficult history, a large-scale rental programme was not a significant pillar of the post-apartheid housing programme (Charlton & Kihato, 2006). Housing policy veered towards capital subsidies for its main component—a so-called ‘once-off’ house sponsorship by the state, creating home ownership on individual plots. Post-apartheid the state has been able to boast of providing over two and half million new housing opportunities (Stats SA, 2018), most of which have been in the provision of free-standing give away or ‘RDP’2 units. In line with this, government pursued a policy of selling off much of its historic multi-storey rental stock to the “sitting tenants” or people living in these units and disposing of its responsibility to manage and maintain these housing forms (Matsha et al., 2019). Where local authorities continued to manage and maintain old state rental housing (but in the post-apartheid era opened them to all races), there are notorious examples of government having lost complete control of the buildings with local ‘strongmen/ women’ high-jacking allocations and occupations of individual units (Hosken, 2021). Despite these fraught experiences with rental stock the post-apartheid government did not entirely abandon the multi-storey built form and amongst the National Department of Human Settlements’ 16 housing programs is the development of higher density housing, delivered in relatively small numbers to date. This includes ‘social housing’: rental for slightly higher income groups than the fully state-subsidised units and run by not-for-profit institutions deliberately located outside of the state in order to minimise politicised relationships. Another programme, the community residential units (CRUs), converts old apartheid single-sex hostels into family rental accommodation. This latter program has been beset with problems, including that male hostel dwellers resist converting the hostels into family units and paying costs associated with the new dwellings (Makena, 2021; Xulu-Gama, 2017). Outside of government-housing, it is significant to note that major problems have also arisen in private sectional title buildings with individually owned apartments now occupied by residents poorer than the original target market, where management, control and payment collections have effectively failed (RebelGroup, 2016), buildings are crumbling from neglect, and municipalities have struggled to recoup

2

‘RDP’ housing is slang for state-funded housing for the poorest of the poor, its introduction associated with the first post-apartheid government’s Reconstruction and Development Programme.

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huge rate and utility payments owed to them. In many cases, these have become colloquially known as “bad buildings” (Rubin, 2014). The state’s relationship with multi-storey low-income accommodation in South Africa has thus often been a troubled one, whether as a landlord in rental complexes or a municipal debt-collector in failed ownership schemes. Most successful have been the social housing projects, but enormous money and effort goes into sustaining independent, stable management. In addition to these local experiences, in other parts of the world there are known difficulties presented by multi-storey accommodation for very poor people (see for example Towers 2000 for the UK and Kamath, 2012 for India). It thus comes as a surprise to many academics and practitioners that this built form now appears in schemes for the poorest households in SA. Our case study attests to the complexities of the model.

10.3 Introducing Fleurhof Fleurhof is south of the Johannesburg CBD but close to a number of main roads giving the area good access to urban opportunities. It was developed as an integrated housing development by a PPP between various spheres of the state (with the City of Johannesburg as central player) and a private developer (Harris & Rubin, 2018). For the developer this integrated development is their ‘most famous and our most successful one’ (developer interview). On the back of ‘a massive capital injection’ from an international housing financier the developer was able to approach the City with a proposal to develop a large piece of former mining and agricultural land they had bought cheaply (developer interview). A successful negotiation with the City of Johannesburg (CoJ) and provincial government ensued, and the development now comprises a mixed-use, mixed-income development with over 15,000 units that include market-related houses, partially subsidised housing for purchase, some rental units, and state-give aways or RDP units—in this case, in multi-storey blocks of flats. The private developer’s interest in the scheme was in the for-profit ‘affordable market’.3 As they noted, ‘there’s not a lot of margins in the fully subsidised RDP work’, but the attraction of building this component (about a third of all the accommodation in the development), and a further third as partially subsidised units (which limits sale prices and thus profit), was that in terms of the PPP agreement, the City of Johannesburg and the Gauteng province paid for the infrastructure across the development. With these terms the remaining open-market housing, though only about a third of the total yield, was still highly profitable for the developer (developer interview). 3

The affordable housing market in South Africa refers to the market that is not generally catered for by the conventional private mortgage market of the banks and is not eligible for most of the state subsidies (Butcher, 2016). It is also called the gap market and has been defined either by income, as people earning ZAR 10,000 to ZAR 16,000 a month, about USD 600-USD 1000, or houses that cost below ZAR 600 000 or USD 36,000.

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10.4 The Emergence of the State-funded Walk-up Housing Model It was interesting to note what prompted the fully-subsidised housing units to include the multi-storey walk-up typology: “it’s to do with space… basically when one does walk-ups one can do three times the original yield” (Senior CoJ official 1). Provincial and local authorities agreed, adding that there is pressure to densify the City in accordance with spatial planning objectives and the perceived high urbanisation rates that officials anticipate—and therefore there is a need for more intense use of land (Senior CoJ official 2). Provincial officials said that the Gauteng provincial department of human settlements initiated the walk-ups, out of a concern with in-migration into the province and lack of available land for housing (provincial interview). When pressed on the specific origins of this particular built form, some officials seem to think it was an initiative of national government (Senior CoJ official 1) and point to what they see as similar examples in other provinces and metros in South Africa: “they are also being built elsewhere: Western Cape has them, Ekhurhuleni, Tshwane” (Senior official 1). The implication was that there was a national impetus towards this built form and that Johannesburg was a relative late comer to a policy direction sweeping the country. Other respondents speculated that the walk-up housing might have emerged from a developer-City-Province discussion, in an environment under the previous mayor where the CoJ was willing to explore new ideas and solutions: “…there was a lot of work that had been done by the developer to actually show the benefit for the City to come into play, to come into partnership with them” (Senior CoJ official 2). Given that delivery has also declined over the last few years and the demand for housing has significantly increased some of the officials argued that for them “the attraction was the numbers” and that the proposals from private sector developers offered a solution that was extremely appealing: ..remember most of them [state-funded walk-up housing] in Joburg were proposed by private developers. So, when a developer comes up with an already packaged kind of scheme and they tell you in this piece of land if we go high, this is the number of units you are going to get. If you don’t, you will lose this number… that would have been an attraction for government, to say we can allocate 2,000 people in just one project. (Senior CoJ official 2)

As far as Senior CoJ official 3 knows the typology was first introduced with the Fleurhof development, proposed at the same time the City was introducing its notion of development corridors which included Main Reef Road running alongside Fleurhof. He implies that the corridor concept linked to City densification ideas helped push the notion of maximising the housing units the land could yield. The developer notes that the walk-up model has become synonymous with their company as they were probably “the first developer to roll it out in that volume over such a short period of time”, but that although they played a big role, they didn’t think the typology originated from them (developer interview). However, significant to recall is the developer’s primary focus on for-profit housing: they note they have built

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the state-funded give-away units to the same construction specification as their forsale units, and if needed—for example if government ever defaulted on its payment to them—they would “at the drop of a hat just increase the commissions and sell it to the open market” (developer interview). Across all their projects this developer now only constructs this vertical form of walk-up housing, both for state-funded units and for-profit units: for them, the typology enhances “the whole look and feel of the development”, including through discouraging backyard dwellings which negatively affect the house sales in a neighbourhood. In effect, for the private developer the need to protect and sustain their for-profit housing appears to be a strong driver for the state-funded walk-up housing typology, rather than whether the model works well for very poor households.

10.5 The Vertical Walk-up Model: Visions and Realities In Fleurhof, fully state-funded units include those in vertical three or four storey walk-ups set around an open space. In these, the model of ownership is a sectional title scheme or what is known elsewhere as condominium ownership, where each owner owns their unit and then contributes a levy to a general fund that is overseen by a body corporate or an oversight committee. Crucially, the body corporate is then responsible for taking care of communal spaces and issues such as shared gardens, lifts, corridors, and roofs. In Fleurhof, some buildings contain twenty flats in total (five per floor across four floors), others are smaller with nine flats per block. While the developers built the units, the City of Johannesburg and the provincial Department of Human Settlements assigned the units to the beneficiaries. With respect to responsibilities, Senior CoJ official 1 notes that “it’s the developer that sets up the body corporate, the sectional title scheme” with some interaction with city officials. However, despite flats having been occupied for several years now in Fleurhof, according to one official “no body corporates have been set up yet in any of the buildings: I would be lying if I say any has been set up, it hasn’t” (Senior CoJ official 2), a point the private developer agrees on. One explanation from this official is that in general, across the housing projects, there are concerns and differing views amongst residents about taking ownership. Ownership has a dual meaning: as becoming the legal owner; and taking responsibility for the unit. The hesitations are because of the implications for maintenance and management: you have some part of the residents who are refusing to take ownership because they feel if they don’t take ownership through title deed, the government will still be responsible to maintain the properties… we have residents who want to transfer and some who don’t want to transfer [ownership to the tenants] and with that you can’t actually form a body corporate. (Senior CoJ official 2)

At the same time, it appears Provincial government assumed that the local sphere would take responsibility for management:

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I think the [provincial] department’s thought was the municipality as the collector of rates and taxes would be the manager of these common space, even though the municipality did not do that. (provincial interview)

From our interviews the impression was of very little prior consideration amongst the development partners of how to manage these units post-occupancy: I think what has happened was National [department] was encouraging the creativity around the development, but I think they didn’t do proper monitoring and evaluation and even thinking in terms of how this will be owned going forward… you can’t really have a flat that is not maintained by anyone running properly… So, it’s really a risky situation to have. So, I think when these came about… the component of maintenance or management was not considered until after the fact of development. (Senior CoJ official 2)

Furthermore, one of the CoJ officials expressed the concern that developers pushed ahead with development at a very fast pace, knowing that certain things hadn’t been resolved (Senior CoJ official 3). Other state officials argue that to be successful the state-funded walk-up housing needed some kind of modified sectional title model, in which instead of the sectional titles that we all know about…, beneficiaries can come together and contribute a small amount either in cash or also in kind for the upkeep of their common spaces. (provincial interview)

This approach similarly puts the onus of levies and collective organisation firmly on the shoulders of the residents, a communal responsibility that simply does not arise with the conventional form of give-away housing. Despite the fact that body corporates were not established in Fleurhof, is the developer claimed that “…the community themselves then started coming up and instead of using the body corporate facilities they just created their own informal communities to do it” (developer interview). In reality what has happened is that each building has elected a block committee (sometimes just one or two people) or a block leader who are responsible for helping deal with issues affecting residents. Some residents also contribute financially, often very small amounts, to specific problems as they arise. In some cases, this system seems relatively functional: “If it’s something that needs to be bought we start by getting a quotation and see how much it costs. And we’ll show all the residents, and each unit contributes towards the amount. And go buy that item” (Resident respondent 10). But often there are difficulties, such as limited finances, as Respondent 13 notes: “we contribute money for those guys [that] are cleaning the dustbins… So that is a challenge, because a lot of the people are unemployed and can’t even afford to pay ZAR 20 [USD 1.50] in a month for someone to clean the dustbins…” (Respondent 13). It also seems that there is generally someone who is nominated or volunteers as a caretaker, often from the committee, who takes care of basic maintenance and tries to help when residents face an issue. The reliance on these individuals is palpable, with residents saying things like: “It’s A, who takes care of this place. If it wasn’t for him, I don’t know how this place was going to look like” (Respondent 3). Or, from

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respondent 12 “J, he’s the one who deals mostly with the problems of this building” (Respondent 12). There remains however massive confusion amongst residents as who should be taking care of any repairs that need to be made to the individual flats or the communal areas: some respondents acknowledged that they are the owners and need to be responsible for maintenance, indignant at the idea that the state should intervene: I think it’s a bad idea [if] the government officials suggests that people should call their office when something is broken. It doesn’t make sense that you’re given a house with your name and expect them to fix broken windows. It means that the windows can stay the entire year without being fixed… Because you will be waiting for the government to fix it. I should be the one fixing it myself. Because it’s my house. (Respondent 3)

By contrast others mentioned that the state or the developer was responsible for maintaining the units: Government, municipality they are the ones who must fix these issues. Err. I don’t understand this question. I’m confused… It’s the government who must hire people to take care of the building. Since they are the ones who gave us these houses. If there’s a problem, they should have people who will take care of the maintenance of this place. (Respondent 4) I was told that if something is broken there’s a company called [the original developers] who are building this area. I can go there and report it. They’re the only people who can come and fix the problem. (Respondent 2)

Similarly, there was a range of views about whom the unit and the building belonged to, with many resident respondents claiming that they owned their unit, but that the building and thus responsibility for the building belonged to either the city (or one of its entities) or to the developers.

10.6 Lived Experiences of the Model The unevenness or absence of management and maintenance and the confusion over responsibility has had many consequences for people living in these units, both with respect to the physical maintenance and upkeep of the buildings, and with how the building and surrounds were being used. There are maintenance problems related directly to the inability to pay for levies, as many people are not working and there is uncertainty as to how residents were meant to ensure upkeep of the flats and the buildings: …[W]e had a problem with the rubbish bins and there’s a blockage of a sewerage. And when I complain, they say I should find someone to fix it. I then said how do I find someone to fix it? (Respondent 1)

Across our respondents were tales of poverty and unemployment, people living off meagre state social grants or finding ways to bring in some sort of income through casual work, such as Respondent 4: “I would go to the robots [traffic lights] seeking for jobs. I try to hustle so that I can have electricity”.

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Under these circumstances it is hard to see how even a small regular monthly levy would be feasible—and hard to see how a resident-run governing body within a building would manage households who defaulted or would ever raise a special levy for a large expense such as roof maintenance. Yet some officials were sceptical that residents really were poor, claiming there were signs of higher incomes (Senior CoJ official 3). Some residents noted that problems they faced included construction quality defects, citing specific issues around the way that the units and infrastructure were built: Things here are not good… Water pipes are always leaking. There would be water all over the house. Do you see how the doors look like? I must buy doors now. No. They didn’t build these flats properly. There’s a crack behind the curtains. They just robbed us with uncomplicated houses. They just wanted us to move here. My windows, they don’t close properly. The wind always go through the windows. (Respondent 6)

Some officials agreed that there are construction problems: “in projects such as Fleurhof we have received complaints. I’ve been to site using my naked eye. I could see that there’s a problem in terms of some structures. Obviously the main one being poor workmanship” (Senior CoJ official 3). Residents also complained about the place being dirty, and of their neighbours being inconsiderate: “Behind my flat, dustbins are stolen, and all the rubbish …has been thrown everywhere. You can see how all this rubbish is flying all over this place. And when I talk about it the people from around, they said it’s not my place” (Respondent 1). Respondent 13 complains of the neighbours above him discarding their dirt down to him to dispose of: “…when they sweep from their houses they will sweep onto the stairs and sweep it down here because I am on the ground floor”. These difficulties speak to an inability to exercise control over the environment, as Respondent 11 expresses: “We do try to take care of this place and sometimes we volunteer to clean. But the people around depress us because after cleaning they’ll bring their cars and spill the oil all the place. Now no one wants to volunteer their time to clean” (Respondent 11). There were also social issues that arose from people living close together without clear ways of managing and enforcing behavioural norms. Many of our respondents complained about noise. The thing that I don’t like about this place is noise. I mean there’s noise even during the week. I don’t dispute that people want to have fun on a weekend. But it’s very tiring and disturbing during the week. During the week we need peace and quiet. So that we can study and rest. (Respondent 2)

Further, despite the state’s claim about the built form preventing the subsequent construction of self-built shacks, common in the yards of detached give-away housing, residents noted that open space was often taken advantage of with unauthorised uses: “In these open spaces there’s a lot of things that are happening. People sell drugs and build shacks around these open spaces” (Respondent 3). Others had problems with electricity supply:

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Fig. 10.2 Fleurhof state-funded walk-up housing and public space conflicts (Source Sarah Charlton, 2017) I was affected by the electricity. Sometimes I would plug in a kettle, and it would drop off the main switch. It looked as if there’s not enough power coming through. It’s one thing that frustrates me and even now there’s no legit electricity power. We had to connect illegally. Some of my plugs got burned. (Respondent 10)

Residents also had mixed responses to the various forms of home-based income generation that were occurring, which state officials acknowledged they had not planned for. In a context of massive unemployment4 where the target group for these units are almost by definition not in formal work, it is striking that neither the state nor private developer considered how income generation would articulate with residential use. Some people are running a creche or a small supply store from within a unit or are making and selling food to other residents. Others are brewing traditional beer and selling it, which although bringing in income, has implications for their neighbours (see Fig. 10.2): … they’re selling alcohol upstairs and when you talk to the person about it they’ll tell me to get off their way of making a living. And they will piss on my flowers next to my door. And when I talk to them about it, they end up fighting me. The person selling the alcohol when I talk to him about it, he’ll say that he will deal with it. He’s supposed to have at least two toilets for the people who are buying his alcohol. (Respondent 9)

The confusion over management and governance in this housing typology has everyday consequences for the lives of residents and has resulted in an organic and spontaneous form of governance in order to try and manage the densities and lack of formal intervention, with varying degrees of effectiveness. 4

The official unemployment rate in SA is 34.5% with the expanded unemployment i.e. people able to work but not actively looking for a job is at 45.5% (SANews, 2022).

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10.7 Responses to Problems Arising from the Model As demonstrated by the comments of residents and officials and as earlier experience shows, this model requires concerted management. Whilst some problems would be found in almost any dense form of settlement, such as noise complaints and conflicts over how public space is used, others are particular to this specific built form. Although some officials speculate that provincial government may have assumed a long-term role for local government in the scheme, at this point the state and the private sector assert that the residents are responsible for the upkeep of the buildings and maintenance of the shared spaces. The key questions of where ownership and thus responsibility lie is very obscure from the residents’ perspective, and for most there is no connection between owning a unit and being part of a wider sectional title scheme. Government articulates its full measure of responsibility as educating residents around sectional title: “we need to teach them to have responsibility to pay” (Senior CoJ official 1). The private sector intended to establish a body corporate and then leave the buildings in the hands of the residents, but this crucial step did not happen in Fleurhof. A management dimension fundamental to the typology fell into a vacuum. The provincial authority did, however, attempt to address the issue though in a back to front manner. In September 2020 the policy review committee of the Gauteng Department of Human settlements approved a policy entitled the Management of Common Spaces in the BNG Walk Up Units Policy. Somewhat confusingly, this was followed in December 2020, by a research report from the same department’s policy and research unit, called Evaluating the Sustainability of BNG walk-ups, which raised many of problems related to common spaces that were meant to be addressed in the above policy. The reactive nature of this response was acknowledged: “The structures were erected, and the policy came after. We know it should have been the other way round, but that is just what happened” (provincial interview). The Management of Common Spaces policy of September 2020 does not acknowledge that it would have to be applied retrospectively, given that thousands of units had already been occupied by the time the policy was adopted. Furthermore, there is no indication how the policy would be applied in light of the occupants varied understanding of their circumstances described earlier. The policy only sets out the responsibilities of the Province, municipality, block committees and individual households. The responsibilities on the block committees and individual households are particularly onerous and unrealistic given the affordability levels of the residence. The research report on the other hand tries to tackle concerns around affordability and it argues for capacity within the provincial department to assist resident committee members when they are unable to afford maintenance, as well as respond to general concerns around living in a denser urban form. There was also an acknowledgement that government needs to address safety in the units. As mentioned above the new policy considers the relationship between the state, the private sector and the beneficiaries, and promotes a clearer set of responsibilities which seems to acknowledge the

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need for government involvement in building management. In oral communication the provincial department also envisaged some involvement from the developer: the department is negotiating with the developer about taking care of [a] five-year plan so that he can manage this thing. …After that it will be passed to the municipalities…. we are still working on it making sure that it’s going to be fine. (Provincial Official)

However by mid-2023 a resolution had still not been found, and the City of Johannesburg was convening multi-stakeholder deliberations to help find a solution. While still far from being solved at the time of writing, the intention seems to be that the residents won’t be left to try and manage these units all by themselves in future. However solutions are likely to come with cost and other resource implications for the state, particularly local government. Within the municipalities, there is already concern that a deterioration in the blocks of flats will mean the local authority will eventually become the custodian of the problem, a scenario that was carefully avoided in the design of the post-apartheid housing programmes. Beyond addressing the current practical problems with the scheme one official also noted concerns about equity in the housing programme as a whole: indigent beneficiaries allocated ‘conventional’ BNG/RDP individual houses and plots are not required to pay monthly levies while those allocated units in the multi-storey blocks are expected to, creating uneven costs and obligations.

10.8 Conclusions State-funded walk-up housing initially appeared to meet a range of needs: large amounts of relatively, well-located housing could be built in higher density environments and address concerns about the availability of land and the need to abide by densification policies. They could be included in new mixed-income mixed-use developments delivered through PPPs, with the state earning credit for better located, more diverse housing projects with high yields. For officials whose performance is measured in budgets spent or units delivered (CoJ, 2020), KPIs could be satisfied. For the private sector this model could substantially increase the number of units delivered on the land and was expected to also protect the image of the for-profit units (from the threat of having informal house extensions and shacks nearby). Furthermore, developers could factor in open market appeal in the typology in case it needed to be privately sold, and they could ensure the financial viability of the remainder of the development through state infrastructure contributions. The PPP arrangement also meant that all parties could maintain their established roles and build, develop and transfer with little involvement once transfer had taken place. But in Fleurhof it is clear that little consideration was given to what would happen once the units had been transferred to occupants or what previous experience in low-income rental and sectional title schemes had shown about maintenance and management issues. Some in the development partnership assumed that povertystricken residents would be “educated” by the state, becoming disciplined citizens

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who would pay and dutifully take on their roles as members of sectional title schemes. However, body corporates were not established, though there has been little consequence for the party that was supposed to do this. In any event, people were not able to pay the levies anticipated: many of them simply did not earn enough. The result has been a series of problems with the upkeep of these environments, conflicts between residents and ad hoc arrangements by residents to make their buildings liveable. These outcomes of a development project can be seen as a paradoxical form of governance within a multi-level governance context, using a PPP approach: at one level, the state and the private sector have got what they needed out of the process: delivery of housing and profits. But a dysfunctional urban environment has emerged. This is partly the result of foregrounding housing delivery and leaving to beneficiaries the ongoing costs and responsibilities post-occupancy, an inappropriate approach for this housing model. More fundamentally problems result from excluding the beneficiaries, their needs and their voices from the delivery collaboration. But crucially, the failures result from insufficient attention to and oversight of the distribution of responsibilities within the partnership approach. This gap in institutional design and accountability extends also to the lack of evaluation and assessment of the model and the partnership that produced it prior to replicating it elsewhere. The case study highlights the need for accountability in the structure, including for the various state policy implementers to be more informed about the potential implications of new project initiatives for end users, and to be better prepared to negotiate with powerful and resourced private sector partners in the use of PPP instruments. Second is the need for ‘inclusivity’, including of the end users into the PPP from the conceptual phase of a project. In this chapter a lens of multi-scalar and multi-actor governance5 has drawn attention to these arrangements or their shortfalls not only in the upfront delivery of housing, but also in the ongoing functioning of the building typology in peoples’ lives. Acknowledgements Our thanks to Anthony Mafela for research assistance, and to reviewers for their helpful comments.

References Ansell, C., & Torfing, J. (2022). Introduction: Theories of governance. In C. Ansell & J. Torfing (Eds.), Handbook on theories of governance (2nd ed.). Edward Elgar Publishing. Bevir, M. (Ed.). (2011). The Sage handbook of governance. Sage. Butcher, S. (2016). Infrastructures of property and debt: Making affordable housing, race and place in Johannesburg (Unpublished PhD Dissertation), University of Minnesota, USA. Charlton, S., & Kihato, C. (2006). Reaching the poor? An analysis of the influences on the evolution of South Africa’s housing programme. In U. Pillay, R. Tomlinson, & J. du Toit (Eds.), Democracy and delivery: Urban policy in South Africa. HSRC Press.

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Also referred to as policy network theory (Enroth in Bevir, 2011).

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Christensen, T., & Lægreid, P. (2015). Performance and accountability—A theoretical discussion and an empirical assessment. Public Organization Review, 15, 207–225. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11115-013-0267-2 City of Johannesburg (CoJ) Housing Department 2020/21 Business Plan. Erwin, K. (2017). ‘You make a home out if it, you make a place of it’: Some unexpected narratives from a social housing estate in Durban. Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, 93(1), 68–90. Fombad, M. C. (2015). Governance in public–private partnerships in South Africa: Some lessons from the Gautrain. Journal of Southern African Studies, 41(6), 1199–1217. Harris, R., & Rubin, M. (2018). An effective public partnership for suburban land development: Fleurhof, Johannesburg, in suburban land question: A global survey. Toronto Press. https://doi. org/10.3138/9781442620629-015 Hodge, G. A., & Greve, C. (2007). Public–private partnerships: An international performance review. Public Administration Review, 67(3), 545–558. Hodge, G. A., & Greve, C. (2016). On public-private partnership performance: A contemporary review. Public Works Management & Policy, 22(1), 55–78. Hosken, G. (2021, May 3). Bellavista building wars: Crowbars, fire threats in battle for a home. Timeslive. https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times/news/2021-05-02-bellavista-bui lding-wars-crowbars-fire-threats-in-battle-for-a-home/%23 Kamath, L. (2012). New policy paradigms and actual practices in slum housing: The case of housing projects in Bengaluru. Economic and Political Weekly, pp. 76–86. Mabin, A. (1991). The dynamics of urbanisation since 1960. In M. Swilling, R. Humphries, & K. Shubane (Eds.), Apartheid city in transition (pp. 33–47). Oxford University Press. Makena, P. (2021). JOSHCO’s political entanglements: The case of the Dube and Mzimhlophe women’s hostel upgrade initiative—Overpowered by political provocations? Honours research project. University of the Witwatersrand. Matsha, R., Mayet, R., & Mungwe, T. (2019). Reimagining Flamingo court: The price of ownership. Report produced for the narratives of home and neighbourhood series; Urban Futures Centre. https://narrativesofhome.org.za/resources/. Accessed 10 April 2022. Miraftab, F. (2004). Public-private partnerships: The Trojan horse of neoliberal development? Journal of Planning Education and Research, 24, 89–101. RebelGroup. (2016). Johannesburg inner city housing implementation plan 2014–2021. Produced for the Johannesburg Development Agency/City of Johannesburg Department of Housing. Robbins, G. (2015). The dube tradeport-king Shaka international airport mega-project: Exploring impacts in the context of multi-scalar governance processes. Habitat International, 45, 196–204. Rubin, A. (2014). Johannesburg’s bad buildings programme: The world class city hegemony at work? In C. Haferburg & M. Huchzermeyer (Eds.), Post-apartheid cities: Modes of engagement in South Africa’s metropolis. Borntraeger Science Publishers. SA News (South African Government News Agency). (2022, May 31). Unemployment rate drops to 34.5% in first quarter of 2022. SA News. https://www.sanews.gov.za/south-africa/unemploym ent-rate-drops-345-first-quarter-2022. Accessed 2 August 2022. STATSSA. (2018). Statistical release, P031, General Household Survey 2018. Tissington, K. (2010). A review of housing policy and development in South Africa since 1994. Paper prepared for the Studies in Poverty and Inequality Institute (SPII) by Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI). Towers, G. (2000). Politics, economics and housing form. In Shelter is not enough. Transforming Multi-Storey Housing (pp. 43–64). Policy Press. Xulu, N. (2014). From hostels to CRUs: Spaces of perpetual perplexity. South African Review of Sociology, 45(1), 140–154. Xulu-Gama, N. (2017). Hostels in South Africa: Spaces of perplexity. University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

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Sarah Charlton is an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her experience in municipal government, the non-profit sector and consultancy included informal settlement upgrading and low-income housing policy and practice. Her research explores the interfaces between urban infrastructure and people’s practices, state development initiatives and urban governance. It has included work on urban peripheries and collaborative research in Ethiopia and Mozambique. She has a doctorate from the University of Sheffield and is a Research Associate of the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies. She serves on the boards of African Studies, International Development Planning Review, and the International Journal on Homelessness. Neil Klug is a Senior Lecturer and Planner, School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He has also run an urban planning consultancy since 1999. As a practitioner he has covered a wide range of projects from plan preparations, policy formulation and evaluations, to project implementation and training mainly related to low-income housing. His current research focuses are on urban governance, specifically around low-income housing policy instruments and implementation. Margot Rubin is a Lecturer in Spatial Planning, School of Geography and Planning, University of Cardiff and is a visiting lecturer at the School of Architecture and Planning, Wits University, Johannesburg, where she was formerly an Associate Professor, South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning. She is also a Research Associate -Gauteng CityRegion Observatory, a partnership between the University of Johannesburg, the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Gauteng Provincial Government and organised local government in Gauteng, Johannesburg, South Africa. She is an editor for the journal African Studies and sits on the board for Third World Quarterly Review. Currently, she is engaged in research on urban governance in African cities, issues of housing and elite engagement with space in the Global South.

Chapter 11

Why Housing Is Not Affordable in Kigali: A Fieldwork Analysis on How Urban Governance Inhibits Housing Affordability in Rwanda’s Capital Charlotte Niedenhoff

11.1 Introduction Current Affordable Housing policies in Rwanda’s capital Kigali are failing to make housing affordable. Rwandan policymakers, planners, developers, and researchers find themselves striving to deliver affordable housing. With pressures of urbanization, Affordable Housing1 is acutely on the map of Rwanda’s governance efforts but this chapter suggests that the current path taken may be a dead end for true housing affordability in Kigali. The chapter explores how national and local policymakers, who play the biggest part in shaping urban policies in Rwanda, understand and implement Affordable Housing in Kigali. The analysis juxtaposes the Rwandan urban governance structure and its influence on Affordable Housing policy and planning with the imaginaries of a growing and prosperous Kigali. It presents how the housing discourse has been rendered technical (Li, 2007) and in which ways this stands in the way of delivering truly affordable housing.

1 Affordable Housing is capitalized here to underline that is a political concept which can be changed. Following Arturo Escobar (1992), this draws attention to the “historical, ‘invented’ nature of […] discourse” (ibid., p. 434).

C. Niedenhoff (B) Initiative Offene Gesellschaft, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rubin et al. (eds.), Housing in African Cities, Urban Perspectives from the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37408-1_11

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This chapter describes the Affordable Housing policies in Rwanda and demonstrates that they largely lack the ability to provide affordable housing for the lowest income groups in the country. This is due to an inappropriate policy response as well as the actions and practices of state and non-state actors. This chapter begins with a description of the policy and its intentions before discussing the challenges that it faces. It also argues that while many of the visions and narratives are shaped by a strong central state, the role of individual government officials in planning and executing visions should not be underestimated. The interviews show how urban experts navigate the complex and often contradictory landscape of putting the Rwandan Affordable Housing Program into practice. Unfortunately, the trajectory of these visions and consequent practices suggests shortfalls in urban service delivery for anyone but high-income earners in Rwanda’s capital. Ideas of Kigali developing along a clear and linear trajectory are ill-fitting to the context on the ground, as is the “modern” aesthetic that is the supposed end point of the trajectory pictured by the Rwandan government. Two housing projects illustrate the chapter’s argument. Batsinda II and Rugarama Park Estate were the first two Affordable Housing projects under construction with government and World Bank subsidies at the time of research in 2020 (Figs. 11.1 and 11.2). Both projects are about a 15-min car drive from the Central Business District of Kigali. They offer a variety of points for analysis, including their pricing, their design, and their floor layouts. The analysis is based on 31 semi-structured interviews conducted in Kigali between January and March 2020. The focus of the research was on government officials (policymakers and Kigali city planners) and their visions and practices that are shaping Affordable Housing Governance. The data was triangulated through interviews with developers, researchers, and architects active in Kigali’s urban development, as well as with policy and planning documents. A research internship at

Fig. 11.1 Batsinda II construction site (photo taken by author, 2020)

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Fig. 11.2 Rugarama Park Estate construction site with onlookers. Author’s photo 2020

the City of Kigali Department for Urban Planning and Construction, furthermore, allowed access to key documents and insights into everyday planning practices.

11.2 Affordable Housing Policy in Rwanda “Affordable housing” has been a major political term in Rwanda since 2015 (Respondent 24; The New Times, 2015), determining that Affordable Housing policies are intended to play a major part in providing formalized housing in the country. The term Affordable Housing in this chapter portrays a housing program designed by the Rwandan government, which is in most cases neither affordable in terms of financing to much of the population, nor culturally fitting when considering Rwandans’ wishes for housing design. To overcome financial hurdles of individuals and investment worries of developers seeking to make a profit, the World Bank established the Affordable Housing Fund jointly with the Rwandan government, pledging 150 million USD to the Program between 2019 and 2023 (World Bank, 2020). The Rwandan government’s budget on urban development and affordable housing in Kigali and secondary cities for the fiscal year 2020/2021 was almost 5 million USD (Kagire, 2020). Accordingly, the World Bank Fund for Affordable Housing equates to six times the government’s budget for both urban and housing development per year or 30 million USD for each year of the Fund’s five-year period. In comparison, the Fund also equates to 10% of the Rwandan government’s national budget (2018/2019 revised) (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2020). World Bank funding has been criticized for pushing development that is out of touch with realities on the ground and it may be possible that Rwanda’s dependency on monetary aid may affect how and why Affordable Housing is planned and built (Alexander, 2012, p. 60).

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The overarching policy on Affordable Housing in Rwanda is encapsulated in the “Prime Minister’s Instructions […] on Obtaining Government Support for Affordable and High Density Housing Projects”, enacted in 2017 (Republic of Rwanda, 2017). The Instructions promote high-density construction of 1- to 3-room apartments of no more than 95 sqm; the use of local construction materials; and the use and capacity building of the local labor force (Abdel Aziz, 2018, p. 12; Republic of Rwanda, 2017, p. 190). The government subsidies allocated by the Instructions are aimed at private developers, who mostly come from abroad (Republic of Rwanda, 2017, p. 71). The Instructions target beneficiaries who are citizens or permanent residents of the city that the Affordable Housing units are built in and household incomes should range between 200 and 1200 EUR—targeting “low and medium income households” (Rwanda Housing Authority, 2020). There is also a restriction placed on beneficiaries so that they are not allowed to own any other real estate in an urban area for a future period of 10 years (ibid.). The Affordable Housing Fund has no direct influence on monthly rents. Instead, with the World Bank’s funding, the government subsidizes the development of basic infrastructure with a share of 30% of the total costs and gives tax breaks on importing materials for developers (Respondent 2; Respondent 4; Respondent 5; Respondent 24). Additionally, it offers reduced prices on mortgage loans for end users from current market rates of 18% (maximum 8–10 years payback) to subsidized rates of 11% and an above average amortization period of 15 years (Respondent 17). How these rates relate to low- and medium-incomes is discussed in the next section.

11.3 Why Affordable Housing in Kigali Is Not Affordable The Affordable Housing Program has failed to make housing “affordable” and thus does not reach low-income groups (Nduwayezu et al., 2021, p. 1). The main reasons for this are the assumptions on household incomes and spending capacities that the policy is based on, which have little to do with actual incomes of most of the target group. Consequently, the Rwandan Affordable Housing Program creates an affordability mismatch, which is explored below. In countries of the Global North, the ability to afford housing is generally defined as a maximum of 30% of household income per month on rent or mortgage payoff (World Bank, 2015, p. 12). Rwanda followed this definition for its own policy (World Bank, 2015, p. 12; Respondent 24). However more than 60% of Rwandan households earned less than 200 EUR per month in 2018 (Bower et al., 2019, p. 59). In Rwanda’s urban areas, households spend 40% on food and 10% on transportation (CAHF, 2021, p. 10). Accordingly, next to other expenses such as school fees, urban households only have an average of 15% of their incomes to spend on housing (ibid.). In 2018, 60% of Kigali’s residents earned less than 200 EUR a month (Bower et al., 2019, p. 59). If 15% of their 200 EUR monthly income is spent on housing, this amounts to only 30 EUR/month. These numbers stand in stark contrast to both the policy’s presumed 30% spending capacity on housing and the loan instalments of current

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Affordable Housing projects. For comparison, Rugarama apartments cost between 10,000–30,000 EUR, Batsinda II apartments 35,000 EUR or more. With a 15-year mortgage and 11% interest rate, this would be between ca. 270 and 800 EUR/month for an apartment in Rugarama and 930 EUR/month or more for an apartment in Batstinda II. Contradictorily, the Affordable Housing policy quantifies the monthly household income bracket targeted through the Affordable Housing Program as a range between 200 and 1200 EUR, saying that the state’s capacities are too limited to provide housing subsidies for all citizens (Rwanda Housing Authority, 2020; Respondent 4). Notably, in interviews, government officials spoke of an income range for the target group between 200 and 700 EUR (Respondent 4). And even though this is 500 EUR less that what the official government website suggests, officials still questioned affordability for lower-income groups (Respondent 9; Respondent 15; Respondent 19; Respondent 20). Especially because Affordable Housing prices fail to drop below 12,000 EUR at an 11% mortgage amortization rate (CAHF, 2021, p. 10). Considering an amortization rate that matches a maximum of 30% of the monthly income, only 13.6% of urban households can afford housing through the current scheme (ibid.). Relationally, lower income groups have less money to spare for either rent or a mortgage payoff, as a larger amount of their total household incomes are spent on food and other expenses. Mortgage financing furthermore presupposes a job in the formal economy, as well as the ability to save up money for a down-payment, which lower-income citizens are less likely to have. The policy’s absolute threshold for Affordable Housing beneficiaries’ incomes thus ignores the relational aspect of low-income households’ spending capacities. It seemed that the Affordable Housing policy is based on the belief that incomes would rise and create a middle-class, which is “yet to come” (Simone, 2004). However, Rwandan incomes are projected to increase only marginally for the lower three income quintiles until 2032, with a 1,3% annual real income growth (Bower et al., 2019, p. 59). An urban planner negates this belief of a future middle-class that could afford the homes built in the Affordable Housing scheme and notes that, “[s]alaries will […] never rise to meet whatever you plan.” (Respondent 8). Multiple interviewees (among them government officials) concede that the pricing of Affordable Housing units in the government’s plans do not relate to the actual incomes of most Rwandans, even considering income growth. The acknowledgement that the cost of housing currently built “does not match the purchasing power of the majority” (Ministry of Infrastructure, 2020), has not translated into policy changes. The analysis suggests that the underlying visions may be part of the explanation, along with government’s professed affordability constraints. These visions, enacted through political narratives, are discussed in the following sections.

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11.4 Affordable Housing Under the Rule by Aesthetics High-ranking government officials and urban planners envision Kigali as a “modern” city. This vision is pursued with very costly efforts of rebuilding the city center (Behuria & Goodfellow, 2019, p. 595; Goodfellow & Smith, 2013, p. 2; Watson, 2014, p. 217). Being considered a safe, stable, and non-corrupt country has become one of Rwanda’s main currencies to attract foreign investment (Purdeková, 2011 & 2012, as in Mann & Berry, 2016, p. 205; Grant, 2014, p. 310). Emerging from this vision is a prosperous and orderly capital city that makes “Kigali unique, because its different than other African cities, also in terms of greenery and cleanliness” (Respondent 13 with similar sentiments by Respondent 1; Respondent 11). With such visions, the limited state budget is intentionally spent on redeveloping the city center. As such, Kigali can be seen as a city where symbolic and political power are exerted through the “rule by aesthetics” (Ghertner 2011, as in Bhan, 2013, p. 235). This aesthetic rule translates futuristic visions into images of progressive, clean urban spaces with “modern” architecture (Respondent 9; Watson, 2014, p. 215). Through “world-class city” (Ghertner, 2015) visions, which are “inter-referencing to Dubai, Shanghai and Singapore” (Bhan, 2013, p. 233), indigenous or local design and materials become negatively connoted (Grant, 2014, p. 326). Unplanned housing, shops, and other urban amenities that serve most citizens are given inferior status, though these provide space for affordable urban livelihoods (De Boeck 2011, p. 272, as in Grant, 2014, p. 323; Watson, 2014, p. 215). Among other growing African cities, Kigali is thus slowly changed to fit into a “[…] ‘grid of norms’ – standardized aesthetic norms that determine legality as well as status – [and] a ‘rule by aesthetics’ emerges” (Ghertner 2011, as in Bhan, 2013, p. 235). Thus, as many new projects are planned and executed by the state and private developers, most low-income urbanites are replaced and driven towards the city’s edges (Respondent 5; Respondent 10; Respondent 17). Next to the reports of informal housing expropriation, examples of this are the re-development projects of public services (Goodfellow, 2017). Kimironko market in Kigali, which is currently a site for private sellers and makers, is envisioned to be replaced by a new market space that reminds one of international shopping malls (see Fig. 11.3). Another example is Kigali’s newly planned Nyabugogo bus station, which under the new aesthetic vision is re-imagined as a national transport hub (see Fig. 11.3). The future middle-class is envisioned to fill and use these spaces. At the same time, these new aesthetic norms are given prerogative in urban development by the Rwandan government. With many imported and thus costly materials and design templates, this seems hugely out of touch with most citizens’ financial capacities. Both Rugarama and Batsinda are apartment housing complexes, designed to use a smaller amount of space than detached single family houses. Both also offer a variety of different apartment floor plans. Many of them are smaller than most Rwandans aspire to. The floor plans also offer less private space, meaning space physically and visually shielded from visitors. Rugarama adheres more closely to

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Fig. 11.3 Upper left Kigali Masterplan 2020 rendering of new Kimironko market (Kimironko DU Report 2013, as in Moriello et al., 2019, p. 67), upper right Kimironko market today, interior view (author’s photo 2020), lower left Kigali Masterplan 2020 rendering Nybugogo transport hub, city center in the background (Nyarugenge DU Report 2019, as in Moriello et al., 2019, p. 65), lower right Nyabugogo bus station today, unplanned settlement in the background (author’s photo 2020)

Rwanda’s traditional compounds than Batsinda in terms of building height, number of units per building, and semi-private spaces in the backyards, and is aesthetically further off from world-class visions. While privacy is not given the same prerogative as in traditional housing, it was considered more in Rugarama’s design. Overall, Batsinda seems to be more demand-driven, considering new socio-cultural wishes, as it offers bigger spaces and often two-story apartments which offer more privacy. Batsinda’s layouts and use of materials, however, make the project more expensive than Rugarama. Nonetheless, both projects are out of reach of the state’s target audience, as they were predicted to exceed the government’s threshold of total cost per house (Respondent 12) (Figs. 11.4, 11.5, 11.6, and 11.7).

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Fig. 11.4 Batsinda II construction site (photo taken by author, 2020)

Fig. 11.5 Planned facade view of Batsinda II. Light Earth Design (2015, p. 114)

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Fig. 11.6 Rugarama model townhouse (photo taken by author, 2020)

The desire for privacy and for the ownership of private property were a central argument by respondents against current Affordable Housing developments, even though they are available for purchase. The wishes for different forms of truly affordable housing are connected to the fear of dispossession many Rwandans still have, resulting from unresolved social tensions after the genocide of 1992 and prior conflicts. Current condominium laws are weak and do not protect the rights of the owners (or renters) as the laws of direct land tenure do, making owning a condominium an unviable option (Bajpai & Myers, 2020, p. 158; Respondent 6). Furthermore, one interviewee suggested that Affordable Housing apartments can never be fully owned by its occupants, even after paying off their mortgage, as the government perceives any subsidized housing as legally partly theirs (Respondent 4). If this is true, apartment owners would not be able to use their acquired condominium as an investment. Instead, it would be similar to a rental option, but with less flexibility, as one must take up a bank loan to enter the contract. Additionally, this interviewee suggested that if one fails to meet monthly mortgage rates, e.g. due to job loss, the Rwandan state may seize the property as legally theirs (Respondent 4). As such, the target groups remain skeptical of the government’s vision on Affordable Housing in densified apartment buildings. A foreign researcher explains: Listen, the dream, if you live in a country where, you know, the history is not so long ago, where things were maybe a little bit insecure …. that’s why the land was given in 2007, …

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Fig. 11.7 Planned facade view of Rugarama Park Estate. De Zwarte Hond (2019, p. 89)

so that people OWNED SOMETHING. It doesn’t matter what happens in the country, you have a piece of land, you build your house on it, you lose your job, something happens, you still are able to shelter your family. Going into apartments removes [that], it just means that you’re not doing that important process of being anchored and of protecting your family. (Respondent 6)

Interviewees underline this ill-adaptation of current Affordable Housing to users’ needs. “If you bring a house that culturally does not fit into my system, regardless of how cheap it is, I only take it out of desperation and […] change it when the need arises.” (Respondent 8). The preconceived government vision of a world-class Kigali with apartment housing was considered out of touch with the wishes of many citizens, not only the targeted growing middle-class (Respondent 3; Respondent 6). One of the Affordable Housing projects’ construction managers underlines this as they note that, “I cannot move here. […] I love my privacy”, pointing out that if Kigalians have the choice of living in a detached home, most will. Ironically, many government officials describe that the government needs to “change mindsets” (Respondent 2; Respondent 5; Respondent 11) of (future) beneficiaries and “educate people” (Respondent 11; Respondent 19). Instead of changing the policy which makes housing culturally unacceptable for future residents, the government sets out to sway their target group towards apartment housing design. Some interviewed officials spoke of such mindset changes through “awareness”

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campaigns in the state media, others imagined this change to happen automatically with the generational turn of younger people getting used to different forms of living (Respondent 2; Respondent 5; Respondent 15; Respondent 22). Nongovernmental interviewees questioned whether a shift in mindsets of supposed beneficiaries would come into play (Respondent 3; Respondent 6, Respondent 8). The Affordable Housing Program so far is hugely out of touch with the needs on the ground, and relies on flexibility of societal norms, rather than policy. The rule by aesthetics and the notion of a middle-class yet to come shape the way Affordable Housing is designed in Rwanda. As a consequence, current projects fail to be “affordable” in price and desirable in design of floorplans and private space for their target group. Kigali citizens rather live in detached single-family homes, more often now on the city’s periphery for lack of affordable options in the center. At the time of research, officials were not yet ready to change their visions and, for example, allocate Affordable Housing funding to in-situ upgrading of citizen’s existing housing. The gap between Affordable Housing production and on-the-ground demand is growing as a result.

11.5 The Rendering Technical of Affordable Housing Considering that even government officials and urban planners of Kigali admit that Affordable Housing is so far not affordable by government standards, it is necessary to understand why policy and planning are not changed. The current policy approach is one that is largely shaped by specific political narratives, which supposedly allow for faster service delivery (i.e. no in-depth public participation). With a growing gap between supply and demand in Affordable Housing, Rwanda’s government officials find themselves torn between their current approach to service delivery in the housing market and the vision of a better future for all. In the following section, the process of rendering technical the government’s approach to deliver Affordable Housing is explored. It becomes apparent how the practice of rendering technical employs political narratives which then have detrimental effects on housing affordability. Political narratives shape the way problems and solutions are perceived in societal discourse. The government’s practice of controlling the discourse on urban and housing development is what has elsewhere been termed “rendering technical”. Li (2007, p. 240) analyzed that to “rendered technical” a governance strategy is to “parsed into its components” what should be a holistic approach. By rendering technical, in this Rawandan context the government’s policy approaches are portrayed without alternative. The simplification of complex societal problems allows the government and other actors to manage “appropriate” solutions and negates the necessity for public debate, while stabilizing power centrally with the donors, the government, and its ruling elites (Doner et al., 2005, p. 328). Rendering technical happens through what is written down in policy and planning documents, as well as how things are discussed by government officials and urban planners. Rendering technical shapes the political and multi-actor discourse into a top-down vision by

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political and economic leaders. The research clearly showed that while interviewed officials concede that housing affordability has not been reached through current policy and planning, policy and planning practice remains unchanged in accordance with Rwanda’s Affordable Housing vision.. Rendering technical also becomes apparent in terminology, when looking at the state-defined groups for subsidized housing. Government officials explained that citizens in need of housing subsidies are split threefold. (1) Affordable Housing beneficiaries are termed “low-income earners” (Respondent 12; Respondent 15) or “low- and middle-income” earners (Respondent 4; Respondent 13; Respondent 17). They receive in-part subsidies, which do not allow financial access to the Affordable Housing projects to most of the target group. (2) Fully subsidized Social Housing beneficiaries are often termed “vulnerable” to natural disasters in their current homes or have the official status of genocide survivors (Respondent 2). (3) The third group consists of low-income citizens, who do not receive any housing subsidies so far (Respondent 2). Considering that the government’s website opens a wide range of possible beneficiaries (low- to middle-income households of 200 to 1200 EUR/ month), there seems to be little agreement on who is targeted with the Affordable Housing policy. A government official remarks: The chances of achieving affordability for all citizens are slim, because “[…] lifting people from poverty […] has more to do with increasing their income. So affordable [housing] is looking at people who have income […].” (Respondent 13). Consequently, with respect to group three above a gap of low-cost housing exists that officials are currently not aiming to fill, whereby “even the government is not willing to provide low-cost [housing]” (Respondent 2) (Respondent 14; Respondent 23). Rendering technical consequently differentiates in the allocation of government subsidies between different segments. Thus, low-income citizens, which make up over half of the city’s population are denied access to financial and bureaucratic resources within the Affordable Housing Fund, as they fall into the unserved lowcost housing segment (Respondent 2). At the same time, rendering technical through strict regulations for urban re-development has displaced lower-income citizens from their homes through expropriation, as the urban development regulations have not left flexibility for in-situ upgrading (ibid.). It seems that lower-income citizens do not fit into the world-class aesthetic the government has envisioned. In contrast, subsidized Affordable Housing apartments potentially lie idle, as low-income citizens cannot afford them and most middle-income citizens can afford single-family homes. Especially in the everyday practice of Kigali’s city planners, political narratives find their way into planning documents and construction projects. The rendering technical of complex urban development issues seems to obstruct creative and affordable options for Kigali’s residents. A foreign researcher explains the tensions between the strict governance approach on national state level with the lack of capacity on the local level: I think also, there are an extreme amount of, there is a lot of regulation here… which means, you know, if you go on the website, you can see a beautiful policy for this, a beautiful policy for that, that’s incredibly unique. Now, is that a constraint? In some ways, I think, yes, incredibly. It does its great job of bringing in foreign investment, people who want to

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contribute in Rwanda’s development, which I think is fantastic. But those policies are also incredibly onerous, and so Kigali finds itself with the responsibility of having to build a certain vision. But that vision might, a vision that meets all those certain policies, […] on the ground, need some adaptation, let’s say, for it to meet the reality. (Respondent 6)

Adaptation, however, seems hindered by the current visions of Kigali. A policymaker admits the City of Kigali made a “mistake”, strictly regulating areas for redevelopment and thus dislocating low-income citizens from their homes and their jobs in the city center (Respondent 2). In the built environment, rendering technical has huge effects in Kigali through urban development tools (e.g., land reforms and masterplans). It has been shown that such a technical approach to urban development allow foreign and domestic elites to reshape the (urban) environment unquestioned and to their own benefit (Nikuze et al., 2019). Such tools, as part of the legal equipment of any state, make it harder or even impossible for citizens to change the government’s course of action. Kigali is envisioned to become a modern, “world-class” city. Rwanda’s government suggests that overcoming the “chaos” (Bhan, 2013, p. 233) of (informal) infrastructure will aid all Kigali residents to gain a better life. Government interviewees present this “rapid growth” (Respondent 2; Respondent 7) against the backdrop of limited available land, saying that “the number of Rwandans is increasing every day but the area is not increasing” (Respondent 11, with similar points made by Respondent 22). Consequently, the government’s approach to building apartmentstyle Affordable Housing is presented as a path without alternative routes. This narrative ensures that the government retains full control over the visions and plans for Kigali’s development, while furthering the exclusion of lower-income groups (Klaufus et al., 2017, p. 1). Sure enough, Rwanda has the densest population in mainland Africa (World Bank, 2022). 95% of land in Rwanda is privately owned and often splintered into small plots (Respondent 17). While it is true that the Rwandan population is growing, the urgency with which this development was portrayed may be a political narrative. Kigali has seen an open land decrease of 14% between 1999 and 2018 (Nduwayezu et al., 2021, p. 1). At the same time, urban land use of Kigali more than doubled between 1999 and 2014 from 6,562 hectares to 13,880 hectares (Atlas of Urban Expansion, 2016). However, this development remains comparable to other urban built-up growth rates in the East-African region (ibid.). A recent analysis of the Affordable Housing scheme in Kigali finds that “[…] current [affordable] housing development projects are rather responsive to the housing needs of middle- and high-income households whose incomes are relatively aligned with the prices of their houses” (Nduwayezu et al., 2021, p. 1). The Rwandan state’s focus seems to lie on “developing the real estate sector […] [with] a strong focus on the ‘high-end’” (Behuria & Goodfellow, 2019, p. 594), even if limited state resources would be well-spent on lower-income urbanites (Nduwayezu et al., 2021, p. 1). The Rwandan state negates any questions on more inclusive housing

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projects and thus citizens’ participation in planning Affordable Housing, by highlighting the supposed “shortage” of resources, i.e., capital, land, materials, and expertise (Respondent 4; Respondent 5; Respondent 7; Respondent 10; Respondent 18). Instead of looking for alternatives, the status quo is thus continued. Notably, most of Kigali’s low-income citizens face hurdles to build or upgrade formally, because they are heavily regulated by the strict (i.e., rendered technical) policy and planning, and less likely to gain access to government support for lack of political clout and financial capacities. For example, compliance costs are hiked through the need for a “professional construction signoff” due to the strict construction regulations, noted in the Construction Code and the masterplans, and the costs of this are combined with “limited professional capacity […] within the City of Kigali to do this” (Gardner et al., 2019, p. 34). In comparison, compliance costs are thus “over 200 percent higher in Rwanda than in Johannesburg” (ibid.). Additionally, the high share of taxes on the total cost of a housing unit exacerbates hurdles for individuals to meet their housing needs on the formal market. When comparing the costs of building a standard housing unit in East-African capitals, heeding to all regulations, Kigali notably has the highest construction costs relationally to the total price (CAHF, 2016). World-class city making negates a societal debate on public resource use, even though these investments can mostly not be retracted later, such as infrastructure development. The unbalanced distribution of limited resources is already becoming a matter of distributional justice in Kigali. While some interviewed officials underlined how former policies had had exclusionary effects on lower-income citizens, they seemed unaware of or incapable to tackle future exclusionary effects of the current Affordable housing policy (Respondent 1; Respondent 2). Mostly foreign interviewees brought up a different notion to the current dilemma. They said that incrementality in upgrading and construction is a good way to achieve both housing affordability and urban service delivery (Respondent 1; Respondent 9). To accommodate lower financial capacities and cultural design wishes, incremental upgrading and urban development in small steps may be a better way forward to achieve housing affordability in Kigali (Respondent 1). Despite the acknowledgement of government officials that “incrementality is very key” (Respondent 5), institutional ideas on how and where to follow through, seemed to be lacking (Respondent 4; Respondent 7; Respondent 8; Respondent 10). While incremental upgrading is part of the new Masterplan, officials mentioned it seldom as directly connected to the efforts for Affordable Housing (Moriello et al., 2019, p. XV). One City planner mentioned that their department had been trying to “convince[…]” (Respondent 5) the “ministerial and government level” that relocations of informal settlement residents are no longer necessary (ibid.). The implementation of incremental planning for real housing affordability seems to be inhibited by higher-up government officials. It may be that the aesthetic rule of world-class city visions adhering to international norms obstructs the path to incrementality in urban development. By way of rendering technical and a rule by aesthetics, the Rwandan government creates a silo approach to providing Affordable Housing. This is counterproductive to real housing affordability and threatens to exclude many lower-income urbanites.

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11.6 Affordable Housing Is More Than a “Beautiful Policy” Affordable Housing in Kigali is not affordable for most of its intended target group (i.e., lower-income earners). Kigali’s policy and planning on this subject have so far not evolved from the notion of a “beautiful policy” (Respondent 6). The policy goals and regulations aim at middle-income earners who, upon further inspection, are choosing other housing options instead. Affordable Housing Governance is targeted at an elusive middle-class and creates spatially concentrated housing projects that are unresponsive to user needs. With larger visions of a world-class Rwandan capital, local aesthetics play little role in designing Affordable Housing. The result is that the target group of the Affordable Housing Program rather builds their own homes, leaving the new, visionary estates occupied below capacity. And so, disconnected from knowledge and wishes of potential inhabitants, current governmental practices by officials are narrated along a linear, developmental trajectory by rendering “solutions” technical and thus negating contestation. The limited resources available are poured into these state-mandated projects. In turn, this denies lower-income urbanites a share of state resources for incremental construction and upgrading. Lower-income citizens thus become spatially excluded through urban development regulations to which they cannot adhere; socioeconomically excluded from reproduction through labor in the city and ownership of their homes; socio-culturally excluded through an aesthetic rule to which they cannot conform. Affordable Housing Governance in Rwanda severely reduces the extent to which local services are provided; costs are shared, and citizens’ needs are met. To sum up, an interviewee explains, Basically, you can create very specific conditions that allow us to develop one fantastically affordable housing project. But… those conditions will not be replicable or sustainable by a system. And therefore, the quest to develop affordable housing as completely detached projects from the overall governing system of the country cannot be effective and cannot go to scale. (Respondent 9)

11.7 Conclusion This chapter offers a nuanced perspective on Rwandan government visions and practices. Based largely on interviews with government officials, built environment professionals and documentation, the resulting analysis gives hope. Many of the individuals working for the government (and outside of it) counter exclusionary tendencies on a small scale with their everyday ideas, conversations, and practices. More than one interviewed professional in Kigali acknowledged that the Affordable Housing “[…] vision might […] need some adaptation […] for it to meet the reality.” (Respondent 6). This is a definite shift from what current literature suggests. Hints of structural changes, are underway. Such acknowledgement goes along with the understanding that housing affordability, as much as other urban visions and services, should be more than a “beautiful policy”. It is the consistent balancing

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between what citizens need and envision and what the responding policy and planning practice may affect on the ground. Such negotiation happens on the streets, shops, and homes, besides the desks of ministries, planning bureaus, and construction sites—and would acknowledge real housing affordability as an integral part of inclusive urban development.

Bibliography Abdel Aziz, T. (2018). Project information document-integrated safeguards data sheet—Rwanda housing finance project—P165649 (English). World Bank Group. Alexander, A. (2012). ‘A disciplining method for holding standards down’: How the World Bank planned Africa’s slums. Review of African Political Economy, 39(134), 590–613. Atlas of Urban Expansion. (2016). Kigali: Urban extent. http://www.atlasofurbanexpansion.org/ cities/view/Kigali#:~:text=A%20total%20of%204%2C335%20hectares,extent%20between% 201987%20and%201999. Accessed 2 September 2022. Bajpai, R., & Myers, C. B. (2020). Enhancing government effectiveness and transparency: The fight against corruption. World Bank Group. http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/235 541600116631094/Enhancing-Government-Effectiveness-and-Transparency-The-Fight-Aga inst-Corruption. Accessed 18 November 2022. Behuria, P., & Goodfellow, T. (2019). Correction to: Leapfrogging manufacturing? Rwanda’s attempt to build a services-led ‘developmental state.’ European Journal of Development Research, 31(3), 581–603. Bhan, G. (2013). The real lives of urban fantasies. Environment and Urbanization, 26(1), 232–235. Bower, J., Murray, S., Buckley, R., & Wainer, L. (2019). Housing need in Kigali. International Growth Centre, London, ref. nr. C-38406-RWA-1. CAHF. (2016). CAHF works with the World Bank Group to catalyse Rwanda’s economy through growth of the housing sector. Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa. http://housin gfinanceafrica.org/documents/benchmarking-housing-construction-costs-africa/. Accessed 19 December 2022. CAHF. (2021). 2021 yearbook: Housing finance in Africa. Johannesburg, South Africa. http://hou singfinanceafrica.org. Accessed 19 November 2022. Doner, R. F., Ritchie, B. K., & Slater, D. (2005). Systemic vulnerability and the origins of developmental states: Northeast and Southeast Asia in comparative perspective. International Organization, 59(2), 327–361. Escobar, A. (1992). Reflections on ‘development.’ Futures, 24(5), 411–436. Gardner, D., Lockwood, K., & Piennar, J. (2019). Assessing Rwanda’s affordable housing sector. Centre for Affordable Housing Finance (CAHF). Ghertner, D. A. (2015). Rule by aesthetics: World-class city making in Delhi. Oxford University Press. Goodfellow, T. (2017). Taxing property in a neo-developmental state: The politics of urban land value capture in Rwanda and Ethiopia. African Affairs, 116(465), 549–572. Goodfellow, T., & Smith, A. (2013). From urban catastrophe to ‘model’ city? Politics, security and development in post-conflict Kigali. Urban Studies, 50(15), 3185–3202. Grant, R. (2014). Africa: Geographies of change. Oxford University Press. Kagire, E. (2020). National budget 2020/21: Where will Rwanda spend the money? KT Press. https://www.ktpress.rw/2020/06/national-budget-2020-21-where-will-rwanda-spend-themoney/. Accessed 19 November 2022. Klaufus, C., van Lindert, P., van Noorloos, F., & Steel, G. (2017). All-Inclusiveness versus exclusion: Urban project development in Latin America and Africa. Sustainability, 9(11), 2038.

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Image references De Zwarte Hond. (2019). Patio apartments medium 62m2 . In: Rugarama Park estate masterplan final design, 89. (unpublished) Light Earth Design (2015). TYPE B1.a—Front elevation. In: Batsinda II—A low carbon sustainable community, pioneering low cost “home grown” building solutions, 114, (unpublished).

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Charlotte Niedenhoff has spent her academic and professional years amplifying less heard voices in public debates. This has included researching how housing is envisioned and governed at the construction and urban planning One Stop Centre of the City of Kigali. She holds a B.Sc. degree in Urbanism from the Bauhaus-University in Weimar, Germany and a M.Sc. degree in International Development Studies from the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Charlotte currently works on making public participation more citizen-centered in German municipalities. At the Berlin-based NGO “Initiative Offene Gesellschaft”, she and her team advocate for more engaging democratic debates between citizens, public administration, and politics. In her free time, she campaigns for People on the Move in Europe.

Chapter 12

Stuck in Time: The Halted Lives of Housing Co-ops Ibrahim Abdou

12.1 Introduction: Halted Lives Across Cairo, many co-operative housing projects once stood or still stand perpetually empty. In such projects, construction halts, and for stretches of their lifetime, they remain uninhabited. This fact may escape everyday observation; co-operative (co-op) projects are not easily recognizable in the urban landscape, especially amidst abundant ongoing construction. But the sector, once a significant (but now dwindling) provider of large-scale affordable housing, comprising over 3200 co-operatives, has provided almost 280,000 units between 1982 and 2005 across Egypt; some concentrated in Suez-canal-cities (as a central component of post-war reconstruction); others making up 12.5% of housing in 18 new state-sanctioned desert cities; and many existing across Cairo (Sims & Fattah, 2016). And though meagerly supported and latent at present, the sector still provides potential for alternative affordable housing. This chapter investigates prevalent instances of long-term vacancy in co-op housing projects to conceptualize a condition of buildings ‘stuck in time’. In a paralyzing condition, buildings remain physically unusable, failing to act as inexpensive houses, and communities are anxiously trapped in inescapable arrangements, as their lifetimes and those of their buildings pass them by. Literature on co-ops typically hails them as alternative affordable housing solution within increasingly exclusive capitalist markets, both in the Global South and North (Adeboyejo, 2013; Ganapti, 2010; Lang & Roessl, 2013; Sukumar, 2001; Vidal, 2019). In the context of capitalist competition and state austerity, however, co-ops can also often struggle to operate. Accordingly, scholars assess the necessary conditions and mechanisms for their potential flourishing or reasons behind their failure within different contexts. These works, however, almost exclusively use the lenses of I. Abdou (B) Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rubin et al. (eds.), Housing in African Cities, Urban Perspectives from the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37408-1_12

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governance and political economy. In other words, they dissect their internal politics (Adeboyejo, 2013; Brandsen & Helderman, 2011), sector-wide cooperation (Vidal, 2019), institutional setups and their relationship to the state (Ganapti, 2010; Minora et al., 2013; Sazama, 2000; Sukumar, 2001). Sukumar, for instance, analyzes how their internal organizational features and their external institutional context bear on their success in three Indian cities. Ganapti (2010) looks at the U.S., Sweden, and India to compare the optimum degree of embeddedness within or autonomy from the state. Relatedly, some diverge to economic questions of funding challenging coops—including access to finance, cheap land, and state subsidy (Adeboyejo, 2013; El Kafrawy, 2012). Similarly, limited work on co-ops in Egypt (AbdelAal, 2008; El Kafrawy, 2012) review the sector’s relationship to the state and its access to funding mechanisms to reflect on its operation. In a capitalist environment, co-ops are prone to faltering because market structures and state institutions can be unsympathetic to them, a lack of institutional setups impede their success, and inefficient internal politics further derail them. But beyond recognizing their ideological, organizational and structural incompatibility with capitalist housing markets, how else can we scrutinize facets of co-op governance, and their resulting contradictions, as they nonetheless continue to operate in and become entangled within those markets? As Vidal (2019) describes, for instance, co-ops are not simply incompatible with, but at times inevitably intertwined in the geographic and social segregation attributed capitalist economies. He shows that co-op developments may indirectly gentrify their neighbours, or internally exclude socio-economic groups without access to financial or cultural capital, making them complicit in or vulnerable to broader capitalist forces. More specifically, this chapter asks how a temporal lens can help us better understand the specific contradictions that not only hinder co-op operation within capitalist markets but result in their complete standstill and extended vacancy. Not only are coops’ political process and structures of governance at odds with capitalist markets, but so is the temporality with which they operate. As Harvey (1982), Jessop (2006) and Smith (1984, 1996) show, temporality is central in the analysis of capitalist development. Yet, few of the works on co-ops go on to specifically examine the temporality of co-ops against the markets they operate in as a key mechanism of exclusion. I draw on a growing number of social scientists who take time seriously as a theoretical lens to nuance our understanding of urban transformations (Besedovsky et al., 2019; Hassan, 2010). For instance, Arican (2020) argues that time manipulations and delays, not just spatial transformations, are key sites of negotiating economic and political power. Likewise, anthropologists highlight the rich temporal experience of emptiness (Dzenovska, 2011, 2019; Stoler 2013) as a conjunction of violent events, life paths, memories and potential futurities. Evidently, temporal delays and speed-ups can be inflicted, resisted or negotiated to various effects. Using the case of the co-op sector in Egypt, I show that the 1970–1980s offered an optimum timeframe to explore the conflicting temporality of autonomous collective governance against that of capitalist markets. This phase provides an extreme case of temporal mismatch. As a relic of a socialist regime, surviving capitalist and later neoliberal political economies, co-ops carried the slow-moving regulatory legacy of

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the former but operated by the fast-moving rules of the latter. Even more, in the 1970–1980s, the co-op sector was still in its heyday, strongly supported by the state as a post-war housing solution, yet coinciding with a newly-unleashed open market operating by capitalist rules. I highlight how a focus on the temporality of co-ops exposes the mechanism by which conflicts occurred, leading to unintended standstills and leaving behind many vacant projects. Co-ops, I argue, are caught between two harsh and conflicting temporalities: speedy construction markets and slow-moving settings of collective governance. Coops falter as a result of setups of self-governance causing delay, and forcing them to fall behind in a temporally fast-moving market. When co-ops, already financially strained, are delayed by internal power imbalances, corrupt or inefficient management boards, and an external framework of obsolete laws and bureaucratic oversight institutions, they cannot pay construction costs on time. Initial conflict turns into vicious cycles of additional costs and further delays which escalate into long-term legal standstills. The result, I further argue, is a distinct category of vacant buildings, trapped in a temporal paralysis. Unlike comfortable assets of investment (Atkinson, 2018; Harvey, 2013; Minton, 2017) or neglected landscapes of disinvestment (Desmond, 2016; Dzenovska, 2011; Florida, 2018), these homes are not intentionally vacant, yet remain oppressively inaccessible to their helpless owners. A temporal lens allows us to conceptualize vacant co-op projects differently, adding nuance to both the literatures on co-op governance and on housing vacancy. Building on the notion of “time as infrastructure” (Besedovsky et al., 2019), this piece’s theoretical contribution is in thinking about housing construction, its governance and its vacancy through “temporal infrastructures” and the “underlying power structures” driving them. First, as Besedovsky and colleagues argue, this means understanding the oppressive temporal regimes restricting urban life. By applying a temporal analysis of internal co-op governance juxtaposed across an external trajectory of shifting state-market relations, I focus on co-op governance with the specific purpose of analyzing not only the politics, but the temporality of their operation. Faltering journeys of co-ops reveal overlapping structures of temporal constraints and the underlying power structures behind them. Second, this chapter contributes to a more layered and multi-disciplinary understanding of a physical phenomenon. Following anthropologists of time and ruins (Arıcan, 2020; Dzenovska, 2019; Stoler, 2013), this also means theorizing a pattern of vacancy through its temporality, by understanding the subsequent temporal experience of spatially vacant landscapes, where members suffer cruel waiting for homes they are yet to inhabit as their expectations of the future are unsettled. This research relies on 6 months of qualitative fieldwork conducted in 2020 and 2021, focused on a constellation of co-op projects in Cairo, with a particular focus on Saqr Qureish and the commerce syndicate co-ops, as two extreme and therefore insightful examples of projects that were halted in the 1980s. It primarily draws on 12 interviews with current and past members and managers of coops, and administrators in the two oversight authorities regulating them, about their former experiences. It

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also draws on archival articles from the Ahram Newspaper1 in the 1970–1990s and various legal documents including co-op laws. Finally, this is complemented by ethnographic insights, through attending and observing meetings and negotiations of the commerce co-op as it currently operated during the research timeframe. The first section of this chapter explains how financial disputes with contractors start and eventually cause legal standstills that manifest as vacant housing projects. Then, it spotlights the resulting condition of emptiness, portraying its physicality and the stagnating atmosphere of uncertainty these landscapes cause for members. It underlines how this vacancy pattern is unique: it is oppressive because completed homes remain unattainable, yet unintended because no party wishes for or directly benefits from their vacancy. Instead, vacancy simply results from a temporal mismatch. The second section focuses on the governance setup repeatedly prompting and intensifying delay and consequently sparking these financial disputes. Internally, delay is caused by powerful management boards which are self-serving or incompetent and either way unchallenged by members unable or unmotivated to participate democratically. Externally, co-ops are further impeded by frameworks of bureaucratic, centralized public institutions meant to oversee and support their activity.

12.2 Background: Egyptian Co-op Movement The Egyptian co-op movement grew after the 1952-revolution ending British occupation, under the support of president Nasser’s new regime. Adopting pan-Arab socialism and backed by soviet influence, the regime supported worker empowerment, syndicalism and redistributive land reforms, creating, in Nasser’s words, “a democratic socialist basis of cooperation” (El-Borai, 2019, p. 8). In 1956, a cooperation law was issued and in 1961 a co-op authority established. In a largely homogenous society, individual housing co-ops formed on the shared bases of membership in a syndicate, employment in public institution or residence in a geographic area. Although co-ops are technically autonomous and self-governed groups of members, they are perceived as semi-public entities because of state patronage, and are described as “parastatal” instruments, both encouraged and controlled by a paternalistic state (AbdelAal, 2008). Generally, they were heavily supported (e.g. through cheap land), and their activity controlled by a central public authority. Besides, some co-ops were directly initiated by powerful state officials (AbdelAal, 2008). Others, as interviews revealed, were created for employees of a certain public institution such as the state’s public Electricity company, and directly mirrored its hierarchical structure with key officials also assuming management positions in the co-op.

1

Al-Ahram is the leading national Newspaper in Egypt. It has been traditionally aligned with subsequent regimes and often represents the official state’s views.

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Two decades later, in 1976, a different political economy distanced co-ops from their socialist principles when then-president Sadat implemented an “open-door” policy towards private investment. In a new relationship, the state stepped back and opened the market for private actors, foreign aid and expertise (Mitchell, 2002). However, incapacitated by the 1973-Israel-war and facing a housing crisis, the state still strongly depended on co-ops for housing provision, supporting them through subsidized loans and discounted lands. Besides support, domination of the sector continued with state agents having powerful management positions (AbdelAal, 2008; El Kafrawy, 2012). Co-ops became major providers of large-scale housing. Overall, the sector saw its biggest expansion in the 1970s and 1980s. Co-ops witnessed another drastic shift in the early 1990s, when president Mubarak instated further neoliberal reforms, structural adjustments and privatization waves initiated by World Bank programs and IMF-loans (Mitchell, 2002). Now intensely commodifying housing and prioritizing profit generation, the state neglected co-ops. Without access to subsidized land or loans, co-ops had to stretch their resources to pay for land and construction in an increasingly expensive market. More importantly, since the sector is no longer viewed as a priority, crucial legal reforms including a much-discussed new co-op law have not been passed in the absence of political support. In practice, this state neglect meant that despite withholding the substantial forms of support and subsidy they once gave, the same state agencies can still control and suffocate co-op activity under the same old legal and institutional structures. Thus, juxtaposed in subsequent political economies, I investigate co-ops as surviving remnants of a long-gone socialist regime. They foreground the temporal tensions of governing socially-motivated parastatal entities conceived in Nasser’s 1950s but operating in a galloping speculative housing market instigated in the 1970s and still growing today. The socialist legacy of co-ops’ sponsorship may be completely dismantled, but the obsolete paternalistic bureaucracy controlling co-ops still stands. More importantly, for an increasingly disenfranchised class of bureaucrats and whitecollar workers with moderate incomes, the social expectations of state support and collective provision of affordable housing centered around co-operation, professional syndicates and public institutions remain alive. The two main cases informing this piece emerged in the 1970–1980s. These two examples, though not a generalization of co-op affairs in Cairo, represent a smaller sample of extreme standstills which are particularly illustrative of the recurring reasons behind conflict and vacancy.2 The chapter uses these historic cases emerging in the 1970–1980s, to more generally reflect on a pattern of conflict and delay. Their stories exemplify a pattern that was common in the past but which still continues to happen today.3 They also conveniently embody the focus of this essay: a condition of heightened temporal mismatch between co-op governance (still heavily supported or 2

Co-op conflict, caused by the same variables, may vary in duration—typically lasting several years and only occasionally extending to several decades. 3 And although the number of new housing co-op projects have significantly dropped since then, a similar mismatch still hinders the recently constructed projects, resulting in similar instances of vacancy.

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controlled by the state) and liberated construction markets (newly unleashed by the state) (see Fig. 12.1). This mismatch resulted in many vacant housing projects—a few rare and extreme cases of which occurred then and still remain vacant till the present day, standing as a visible and lingering manifestations of a historic mismatch. Leaving behind uninhabited, unmaintained, and abandoned blocks in the urban fabric, they still negatively affect the city today. Saqr Qureish, the first case, named after an area in southern Cairo, was founded in 1978, directed by a member of parliament, and has over 39,000 members (each commonly representing a separate household) who signed up very quickly attesting to the grave need for housing at the time. This well exceeds typical co-op membership ranging from only a few hundred to a few thousand members. As an extreme case, Saqr Qureish is infamously visible on a central Cairo highway, almost 50 of its buildings remain vacant until today. The other case is the commerce syndicate coop, with over 6000 members and whose 260-villa-project in Mukattam, initiated in 1982, was another remarkable case of 17-year delay and vacancy.

Fig. 12.1 Timeline of co-op movement and Egyptian political economy since 1952, showing degree of state support of coops, growth of capitalist markets, and “afterlives” of co-op projects (Source Produced by the author)

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The scope of this chapter is restricted to this formal Egyptian co-op sector, still legally governed by a Law (14/1981) passed in the movement’s heyday. Any coops first need to acquire scarce land (ideally discounted through state subsidies). Upon acquiring a land plot, projects start when enough members (entitled to one unit each) sign up (on a first-come-first-serve basis) and commit beforehand to taking units and paying a down payment before construction starts. Internally, co-op operational affairs are managed by a board comprised of several members re-elected every five years. However, boards remain accountable to democratic voting of members’ general assemblies which hold power over major decisions. Boards, responsible for managing construction and hiring contractors, set a project timeline and a rigid payment schedule. Benefiting members pay instalments from savings (or organic family and friends credit networks) to fund ongoing construction work, and expectedly receive completed units within a few years. Notably, co-ops are non-profit and produce units at-cost. Besides, units have “lifetimes”: in the initial 10 years following assignment to members, resale and rental are illegal thereby curbing speculative intent. After that, restrictions are lifted. Externally, co-op operations are subject to oversight by a state co-op authority and a central co-op federation, both responsible for different forms of oversight and support.

12.3 Vacant Projects Stuck in Time A pattern exists. New co-op projects, sometimes almost habitable, are repeatedly abandoned by their contractors. Construction work stops, occasionally after excavations or foundation erection, but commonly after completing concrete structures and before installing fixtures and concluding finishes needed for occupation. Afterwards, in the case of the Mukattam project, for 17 years financially strained publicbank employees and accountants seeking housing through the commerce-syndicateco-op were unable to complete or access their semi-constructed units. In this, and many similar cases, construction stops due to financial disputes: co-ops cannot pay what project contractors ask, on time. Co-ops are delayed by governance difficulties—including deliberate board corruption or lengthy consensus-building and legal procedures. As a result, contractors, sometimes maliciously, request an increase over agreed construction prices, justified by an increase in material or service costs. Additional requested payments are rejected by co-op members already financially overloaded and keen to avoid further payments, especially potentially contestable ones. Later, financial disputes develop into legal feuds and could, as was the case with the Mukattam project, escalate to long-winded court cases. In a vicious cycle, the longer delays persist, the more prices increase, the costlier the remaining work becomes, and the harder resolution becomes. But until co-ops resolve standstills, construction does not continue, and members have no legal standing to finish remaining works, register units, provide them with utilities or occupy them. Delays of slow co-op processes and operation spark conflict with hasty contractors. In an industry glorifying speed, time is valuable. Delays jeopardize contractors’

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profitability, risk the rise of material costs, and incur opportunity costs. In his seminal “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”, Thompson (1967) shows the imposition of a new disciplined perception of time as money. In late capitalism, temporal norms of finance continue to shape construction industries. “Profit-driven time horizons of investors” (Bond, 2019, as cited in Besodovsky et al., 2019, p. 6) and the logic of financial calculus dictate timescales of projects (Grafe & Hilbrandt, 2019). Because financialized property markets and construction industries seek quick profits (Ryan-Collins, 2019), they necessitate and reward quick action. Besodovsky et al. (2019) understand such temporalities as infrastructures enabling or constraining urban life. In this context, the temporality of speedy construction markets sabotages the social purpose of housing co-ops, thereby harming members seeking non-profit units. In the 1980s, Sadat’s regime supported co-ops through co-operative loans and discounted lands, but simultaneously unleashed capitalist markets. Consequently, co-ops, trying to construct homes for members, slow-moving by virtue of their malfunctioning governance, clashed with a rising class of profit-hungry contractors exemplifying market ethos: racing time, hurriedly moving from project to the next, competing against other contractors and inflation to hedge their bets in a fast-moving market. Thus, co-ops, slow to act, slip out of the system and fall behind. I conceptualize this as a mismatch between timescales of markets infatuated with rapid growth and groups with limited financial capacity unable to keep in pace, and thus facing dire consequences. In practice, this mismatch results in incomplete vacant structures which physically exist in space and gradually deteriorate, but their productive lifecycles never begin. For their supposed residents, the uncertain fate of vacant structures creates a daunting and temporally disorienting experience. Anthropologist Dace Dzenovska (2019) describes a “timespace of emptiness” where an abandoned Latvian village edging towards an ending lifecycle and potential capitalist redevelopment faces an uncertain future. Portraying scattered remaining residents inhabiting an empty landscape with few signs of life, trapped between memories of a vibrant past and a harshly different future, she depicts an end-of-the-world orientation. Co-op members, who spend years in public service or administrative office jobs saving up, experience a comparably unsettling timespace. These eager owners may not have memories attached to the space yet, but the uncertain futures of their vacant structures intertwine with suspended aspirations of improved conditions, marriage possibilities and new lives. Members spend entire lives in frustrating ambiguity. Now in his seventies, a once-member of Saqr Qureish, who worked secretarial jobs between Egypt and Saudi Arabia, reflects on a 135 m2 co-op apartment entangled with his desire to get married as a young man in the 1970s and later again with his efforts to secure his son’s marriage in the 2000s. The same apartment failed them both. In Mukattam, an original owner of a unit had passed away, and it was his son, now an active member of the co-op, who eventually inherited and accessed it. In contrast to the Latvian village, co-ops experience unexpected standstills at the beginning of their lifecycles, making the disorienting in-betweenness even more disruptive.

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Stuck in time, vacant co-op houses resemble a pattern of vacancy distinct in two ways. First, they are oppressive, in the sense Madden and Marcuse describe oppressive modes of housing (2016). In contrast to vacant condos in metropolitan centers of London (Minton, 2017) or New York (Atkinson, 2018) bought as speculative investments and left empty by absent owners, vacant co-op projects are unattainable to their earnest, attending owners. Though similarly vacant, these landscapes entail two emphatically divergent temporal experiences. The former experience time positively. Their empowering vacant homes fixate and amplify investments over the years. The latter experience time negatively. Their stagnating vacant homes frustrate their sociocultural ambitions. Financially burdened, they endlessly chase elusive construction costs they cannot afford. Second, their vacancy is not intentional. Elsewhere, vacant units are either deliberately secured as investment or deliberately abandoned—as in post-soviet Latvian (Dzenovska, 2011) or American landscapes connotating decay and disinvestment (Florida, 2018; Herstad, 2017). In these, stakeholders intentionally decide on and uphold vacancy through the interests of potential investors, motives of a city council or the subsequent decisions of inhabitants. Conversely, co-op projects are not deliberately vacant but simply did not make it and are instead caught up in conflict. They remain vacant in direct opposition to desires of owners, contractors and state authorities. For extended periods, they represent a condition of waste, remaining out of use, but not because anyone intentionally intends for that outcome or directly benefits from it (Fig. 12.2).

12.4 Governing Co-ops and Falling Out of Time Having demonstrated how delays instigate standstills, in this section I argue that, to begin with, co-ops are susceptible to delay due to a malfunctioning setup of collective governance inducive of conflict. In a context where construction speed is critical, I describe three governance malfunctions slowing co-ops down: internal power imbalances between boards and members, inexperienced and indecisive management, and rigid bureaucratic institutional frameworks of oversight. The ensuing delays and conflict are worsened by both the strained financial capacity of members and the slow legal routes of conflict resolution. In a highly antagonistic dynamic, many problematic co-ops practically operate as two groups, often in discord: elected management boards and the remainder of members. When boards, the powerful group in control, opaquely mismanage co-op affairs, they slow co-ops down, especially when oversight agencies are ineffective and members do not or cannot exercise their power to influence and monitor decisions. Underlying the deadlock standstill in Saqr Qureish, one of the biggest statesanctioned co-ops—and much like many cases around Cairo exposed in national newspapers over the years or related by interviewees—are boards which reputedly engage in outright misconduct. In such cases, acting quickly is simply not their

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Fig. 12.2 Stuck in time: photo of vacant buildings in Saqr Qureish today (photo taken by author)

priority. The board chairman of Saqr Quriesh, Wahdan, was an empowered politician and business leader in Sadat’s state-market nexus; he was a parliament member and presided over the chamber of printing industry. Like other management boards at the time, Wahdan suddenly found himself in charge of tens of millions of pounds after nearly 40,000 hopeful citizens signed up to the co-op, following announcements of its three projects. With authority to influence which land to buy, which contractor to hire, or when a contractor is paid, boards hold leverage to cut backdoor deals and earn kickback commissions. When disconnected from the majority’s interests, they opportunistically utilize their control over collective finances and operational decision-making for ulterior motives, thereby sabotaging primary payments to contractors. Naturally, a bitter elderly member explains to me, Wahdan “slacked off” his duties, instead of stream-lining the co-op affairs entrusted to him. A few years later, starting in 1984 and concluded in 1990, an investigation by the co-op oversight agency found him guilty of financial mismanagement and removed him. His misconduct caused a delay, which the few-years-long investigation exacerbated, causing the co-op to fault on its loans and contractor payments, instigating a standstill that—for some buildings—remains ongoing. Cases of mismanagement like this expose an internal governance setup Olson (1965) would describe as a group too large to succeed, especially when thousands of members only deal with boards individually, let alone monitor or collectively congregate. The relationship between extremely powerful boards and members shifts

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to one of patronage, more similar to crowds applying to and depending on state social housing, rather than being active members in setups of collective governance. The level of disconnect in Saqr Qureish was such that a national television talk show hosted Wahdan in 1982 to offer members a platform to raise complaints and have him reply.4 In an interview, an expert, who has worked in both oversight agencies over his career advising tens of co-ops and chairing one himself, mirrored Manion’s (2004) insights on Chinese bureaucracy that such corruption is often fundamentally caused by incentive structures and oversight mechanisms that do not work. He explains that an unrealistic incentive structure legitimizes board misconduct to begin with. Boards assume positions of power, and are overloaded with stressful work, in supposedly voluntary occupations, for which they are not paid. Unsurprisingly, they prioritize possible means of personal profit over upholding a larger group’s collective benefit. Boards’ exploitative individualism can also be plausibly understood in the backdrop of sociocultural shifts within an open market: a breakdown of socialist ideals, the rise of newly enriched classes and widespread moral corruption attributed to the accelerated social mobility instigated by the “open door” policy (Amin, 2001; Asad, 2015). Paradoxically, co-ops, a mode of collective social provision growing in the thousands with member savings pouring in, became a ripe context for financial mismanagement and problematic internal governance, especially as under-resourced bureaucratic oversight agencies were often unable to prevent wrongdoing. Several articles in Al-Ahram newspaper drew direct parallels between co-ops and scamming investment funds that also rose in the 1980s, which gathered large sums of money, mismanaged them and defaulted.5 As he related his former misfortunes with the co-op in an interview, a member jokingly compared Saqr Quriesh to the similarly vacant buildings of Al-Rayan, a notorious scammer idolizing the moral corruption of that period, which were put under administrative seizure. On the flipside, boards also blamed contractors, accusing them of being opportunistic, greedy and equally corrupt. In another interview, the secretary of the commerce syndicate, who has served on the board since the eventual occupation of the Mukattam project in 1999, characterized their contractor as greedy; requesting undue payments and, upon their refusal, intentionally decelerating work. He implied the board’s innocence by citing the eventual court ruling against the contractor. Misconduct, though, is not the only source of conflict and delay. Well-meaning but incompetent boards also slow co-ops down. They can be inept in critical financial matters or indecisive in highly technical issues. The aforementioned co-op expert who served on both oversight agencies sarcastically described a pattern where inexperienced boards eager to succeed adopt a “low-price sale” mentality. To jump-start projects, they initially underestimate the overall price of construction. When actual 4

This airing of this talk show on national television was advertised in Al-Ahram Newspaper on December 20, 1982. 5 For instance, see Al-Ahram article “Housing Coops laundering money” on August 23, 1999, “Ownership apartments.. furnished with hardship” on June 18, 1985, and “The 70 fedan project..gone with the wind” on November 7, 1999.

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costs are higher, unprepared members, already stretching their means, fail to pay on time. Elsewhere, boards lacking the financial, legal or engineering expertise, dodge responsibility and delegate urgent decision-making to oversight agencies’ advisory panels. Finally, when conflict inevitably arises, inexperienced boards delay co-ops once more by relying on weak contractual arrangements and may revert to sluggish legal courts instead of using efficient private arbitration. The power of boards is not supposed to go unchecked, though. In a context of democratic self-governance, voting members hold the highest source of power. In annual general assembly meetings, their votes determine all major decisions and approve operations and financial balance sheets. Yet, passive and ineffective, they fail to exercise their power to end misconduct, delay and long-term conflict. This paradox invokes a long-standing inquiry in group theory (Olson, 1965; Ostrom, 1990): why and how groups successfully uphold collective governance settings. Ostrom’s framework of analysis (2011) continues to guide work in housing research (Malik & Tariq, 2021), especially affordable experiments (Ram, 2015; Wang et al., 2022) and urban transformations in collectively governed villages (Kan, 2016). Applying Ostrom’s (1990) guidelines of institutional analysis to faltering Egyptian co-ops—an endeavor beyond the limited space of this chapter—exposes many potential internal obstructions for active members including the lack of physical spaces to frequently meet, members not knowing each other or the laws governing co-ops and ineffective punishment structures for boards. More importantly, though, burdened by the combined effect of various internal hindrances and amidst strong resistance by boards, exasperated members feel a sense of powerlessness from their inability to reverse paralyzing standstills. Asked about why he and others did not resist Saqr Qureish’s board, the resigned elderly member explained in our interview, “..[we] are weak, and the weak have no voice”. Comparably, August (2016) describes how dominant sub-groups undermine opposition within mixed-income housing project through limiting interaction and co-opting critical voices, resulting in an “internalized sense of powerlessness”. This immobilizing and draining atmosphere of charged internal conflict is perhaps best encapsulated in the author’s experience of attending the co-op’s general assembly in 2020,6 a fraught setting, where the practice of collective governance is far from civil. In a re-election year, the general assembly meeting of the commerce syndicate coops presented a rare setting to attempt to topple the board’s control that had extended for years. Active members, especially upcoming board nominees, were lobbying others. Efforts to organize, monitor or campaign are physically demanding, albeit ultimately not very effective. One particularly passionate member—who drove from Alexandria for the meeting—stood with her back to the stage, facing a room of seated members, her face reddened from yelling about how financial accounts have not been released for 20 years, the community has been “robbed” and how members need to 6

The author was invited by a member of the commerce syndicate co-op, following an interview and several conversations, to attend the General Assembly meeting as a bystander to witness the environment and processes which takes place. Although the current issues discussed in the meeting were different to those which lead to the former standstill between 1982 and 1999, the dynamics of collective governance in the meeting mirrored a pattern described by many interviewees.

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come together and show up. Others video recorded this and other speeches, posting them on social media for absent members. Behind her, an official handwrote the routine meeting report, as a few doubtful members were standing on stage watching up-close over what he wrote. For helpless members, tangible meetings are an outlet for frustrations, though often fruitless. Internal dynamics aside, co-ops are further delayed by the lack of an external facilitative regulatory environment (Ostrom, 1990, p. 101). Ganapti (2010) describes various levels of autonomy between co-ops and the state. On his spectrum, Egyptian co-ops are over-embedded in a rigid framework of centralized, bureaucratic and inefficient state institutions, obsolete laws and procedural red tape, creating a tense relationship where oversight agencies which hold power to monitor, audit, dissolve or block co-op activity (AbdelAal, 2008) and, by law, must approve every operational step from buying land, authorizing designs, to overseeing construction. Paradoxically, despite their close involvement, inefficient oversight agencies neither inhibit corruption nor provide crucial support. When conflict arises, they can aggravate or complicate its resolution and are equally eyed with mistrust in many of the members accounts during interviews. In overview, upholding Nasser’s legacy, co-ops in the 1980s still operated as appendages controlled by a paternalistic albeit gradually and increasingly less supportive state. Their governance deviated into a setup inducive of conflict and delay, and crippled by imbalanced power dynamics, corrupt boards and a suffocating regulatory framework. As they plunged into speedy and fluid markets, they could not keep up, clashing with and delaying profit-hungry contractors and starting long-term standstills. The result is a distinct pattern of vacant landscapes falling into a state of temporal paralysis. Buildings become stuck in time; and so do the people. Members feel trapped in unescapable arrangements: they cannot leave without losing savings and forgoing aspirations of new homes, nor can they resolve conflicts and access their units. Members are constrained both by their own inability to resolve a failed construction process, and by the unforgiving demands of construction markets. In an interview, a member who had chased after his right for too long became exhausted by what he perceived as deceptive boards and ineffective oversight agencies acting in a harsh market. As the standstill dragged on, he conceived of his very membership as a trap; an asset useful to a small subgroup—“They lure you in, and then suck you dry”. He and myriad co-op members are trapped between two equally oppressive temporalities they cannot overpower.

12.5 Surprise Afterlives Years later, if and when deadlocks resolve, co-ops are sometimes granted surprise afterlives. That happens when lengthy legal feuds run their course, and more importantly, when any outstanding payments are settled. Co-ops, nonetheless, do not

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resume their imagined lives, but the delayed resolve in a different political economy and altered personal conditions, entails a shift in both members and buildings. Over 40 years later, many buildings in Saqr Qureish still stand infamously vacant. After oversight agencies ousted Wahdan’s board, the bureaucracy remains unable to resolve the standstill for all building. As official reports, newspaper articles, and member and administrators interviews show, multiple interim management committees were assigned by oversight agencies, and several senior officials have vowed to resolve Saqr Quriesh’s affair, but some of the concrete structures remain bare. At several points, state agencies have offered members a bargain: they could pay a sizable lump-sum amount, accounting at that point for increased construction costs and mounting interest, to fund remaining works. Some members could not afford it. Some accepted, though; these are their buildings which were granted afterlives. Such members were unusually prosperous, like one who described himself as “lucky” enough to have worked several years in the Gulf. Others had to let go of their dreams: they sold their unit allocations to someone with better financial standing to take the deal in their place. The commerce syndicate’s Mukattam project was a more straightforward financial conflict between co-op and contractor that escalated to a legal feud. 17 years later, a civil law court finally passed a binding ruling, acquitting the co-op and expelling the contractor. In a context demanding speed, the co-op, pressured by a contractor, and seeking conflict resolution was once more impeded by sluggish legal courts, yet another slow-moving public institution in a draconian framework of co-op operation. After the ruling, the general assembly, keen to avoid any further encounter with contractors, voted that each member settle outstanding payments and receive their partially competed unit as is, and finish the remaining works individually. The Mukattam project sprang back to life in 1999 but was accessed by residents whose socioeconomic capacity differs to the original theoretical community. A few original owners had passed away and it was their children who eventually accessed the units. At this point, the 10-year ban on sale and rental had long passed. Current residents range from original owners who finally occupy their units, those who may not need them anymore, and new owners who bought them anew from original owners. As they occupy the modular vacant villas, a diverse patchwork of architectural adaptations and modes of occupation appear. Some remain abandoned with an occasional ‘for sale’ sign, their deteriorated state highlighting the grave effect of their long-term vacancy. Some villas are modestly refurbished and occupied. Others, with affluent and dedicated owners, get lavish makeovers, new facades, fences and interiors. Few, especially if well-located on main streets, get permits for commercial use (technically violating the original zoning regulations) and are rented out, effectively raising their value fivefold, and highlighting fraught municipal urban management in rising in neoliberal times, which the re-awakened co-operative projects ironically plug into (Nefissa, 2009). For the commerce syndicate co-op, the remaining semblance to a co-op model in the present-day boils down to the ongoing management of small day-to-day aspects such as negotiating nuisance in public spaces or resolving clashes with shops operating in converted villas on the edges, along with the decision-making

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process of how to best capitalize on the value of the central common plot zoned for commercial use and collectively choosing which buyer to sell it to.

12.6 Conclusion This chapter uses the story of Cairene co-ops to demonstrate two mere cases of how differentiated patterns of vacancy can unfold and the necessity for their variegated understanding. This adds more nuance to the imagination of a very diverse phenomenon of housing vacancy that may be easily reduced to discourses of fixated investment capital (De Graaf, 2015; Neate, 2014) thus obscuring numerous unusual mechanisms of occurrence and underlying power structures. Vacancy, as it occurs in co-op projects, is an unfortunate but unintended consequence of temporal delay. Actors attempting to affordably provide their own housing simply falter, unable to keep in pace. In a context of rampant construction activity, buildings (occupied and vacant) fulfill a multitude of sociocultural, economic and political functions. These projects, however, for elongated and potentially irresolvable standstills, perform no function. Neither the owners funding them, the contractors building them, the co-op managers overseeing them nor any external institutions, intend for, speculate on or otherwise benefit from their extended periods of vacancy. More importantly, this chapter has revealed how housing governance can be reframed through addressing time. These case studies demonstrate the value of a temporal lens in diagnosing and assessing conflicts within housing governance. The temporality of vacant co-ops sits at the intersection of social theory on collective governance, market economics and anthropology of aspiration and emptiness. In other words, the mismatch between speed of markets, pace of co-ops and aspirations of members which do not align, elucidate the production and experience of those vacant houses. These insights speak to the pace of housing providers prone to faulting in speedy markets in other contexts, the collective governance of other instances of self-provision, and the understanding of vacant landscapes elsewhere.

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Nefissa, S. B. (2009). Cairo’s city government: The crisis of local administration and the refusal of urban citizenship. In D. Singerman (Ed.), Cairo contested: Governance, urban space, and global modernity (pp. 177–98). American University in Cairo Press. Olson, M. (1965). The logic of collective action: Public goods and the theory of groups. Harvard University Press. Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press. Ostrom, E. (2011). Background on the institutional analysis and development framework. Policy Studies Journal, 39(1), 7–27. Ram, P. (2015). Promoting an affordable housing market: An institutional analysis. University of Cambridge. Ryan-Collins, J. (2019). Why can’t you afford a home? Polity Press. Sazama, G. W. (2000). Lessons from the history of affordable housing cooperatives in the United States: A case study in American affordable housing policy. The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 59(4), 573–608. Sims, D., & Fattah, H. A.-E. (2016). Egypt housing profile. Smith, N. (1984). Uneven development: Nature, capital, and the production of space. Blackwell. Smith, N. (1996). The new urban frontier: Gentrification and the revanchist city. Routledge. Stoler, A. L. (2013). Imperial debris: On ruins and ruination. Duke University Press. Sukumar, G. (2001). Institutional potential of housing cooperatives for low-income households: The case of India. Habitat International, 25(2), 147–174. Thompson, E. P. (1967). Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism. Past and Present Society. Vidal, L. (2019). Cooperative Islands in capitalist waters: Limited-equity housing cooperatives, urban renewal and gentrification. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 43(1), 157–178. Wang, H. K., Ling, G. H. T., & Shi, X. (2022). Collective action components of low-cost housing: An empirical analysis using Ostrom’s SES framework. Property Management, 40(3), 388–408.

Ibrahim Abdou is a Ph.D. candidate at the Architecture Department in the University of Cambridge and a Gates Scholar. He is an architect and urban researcher interested in questions of housing provision, perception and use within the Global South and specifically in Cairo. Ibrahim is the co-editor of the special issue in Architecture and Culture entitled Spectres of Time in Space: Tracing Phantom Temporalities with Architectural Methodologies. He supervised and taught undergraduate students at the University of Cambridge and was previously a teaching assistant at the German University in Cairo. Professionally, Ibrahim worked in architectural offices in Munich and Stuttgart, and urban initiatives in Cairo. He holds an MPhil (Distinction) in Architecture and Urban Studies as a former Cambridge Trust Scholar.

Index

A Accommodation, 2, 9, 12, 18, 37, 72, 97, 125–130, 132, 134, 135, 139, 175, 182, 186, 187 Aesthetics, 11, 213 rule by, 204, 209, 212 Amenities, 29, 34, 55, 66, 91, 110, 133, 138, 164, 204. See also Infrastructure Apartheid group areas act, 172 influx control, 48, 165 post-apartheid, 30, 37, 66, 68, 69, 75, 127, 144, 157, 174, 185, 186, 195 Autoconstruction. See Informal settlements

B Backyard rental housing, 126–129, 131–135, 139 state responses to, 127, 130 trajectory of, 128 Big Men politics, 6 Breaking New Ground, South Africa, 168, 174 Building mainstream way of, 3 self. See Self-building Bureaucrats, 7, 16, 221 documents, 20, 47 Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), 111, 114 By-laws, 13, 76 By-pass urbanism. See Urbanism, by-pass

C Cairo housing co-operatives in, 15, 20 Mukattam, 222–224, 227, 230 Saqr Qureish, 219, 222, 224, 225, 228, 230 Cape Town Blue Downs, 134 Cape Town Community Housing Company (CTCHC), 145, 146, 155 city of (CoCT), 32, 33, 36, 128, 130, 133, 146 Delft, 134 Delft South, 134 Draft Integrated Human Settlements Sector Plan, 38 Eastridge, 143, 145–147, 150, 151 Eerste River, 134 Gugulethu, 134, 153, 155 Harbour Arch development, 35 Khayelitsha, 133, 135 Langa, 134 Mandalay, 133 Mayor, 34 Mitchells Plan, 134 Montclair, 134 Municipal Planning By-law, 31 municipal planning tribunal, 16, 67, 79 Philippi, 155 Woodridge, 147, 150, 154 Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa (CAHF), 65, 203, 212 Citizenship Chatterjee, 6 civil society, 6 differentiated, 13, 14, 157

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rubin et al. (eds.), Housing in African Cities, Urban Perspectives from the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37408-1

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236 political society, 6 City(ies) African, 1–12, 14, 15, 19–21, 66, 80, 85, 86, 105, 120, 204 boundaries, 45, 51, 52, 54, 57, 59, 60 building, 9, 10, 16, 18, 21, 40, 77, 112, 137, 144, 182, 187, 189, 191 configuration, 2, 7, 19, 69 expansion, 5, 11, 52, 54, 59, 60, 111 fantasy, 53 life, 4, 9, 85, 86 making, 3, 7, 21, 99, 212, 217 new, 11, 15, 69, 147, 157, 174, 217 right to the, 9, 13, 17, 20, 85–88, 91, 97, 99 scape, 2, 17 struggles, 85–88 unequal, 28, 31, 50 world class, 7, 9, 20 Civil society, 3, 6, 28, 29, 32, 35, 37–39, 41, 86, 88. See also Social movements Collaboration, 2, 7–9, 13, 14, 19, 93, 162, 196 Communities, 11, 15, 28, 31, 39, 51, 57, 79, 85–94, 97, 98, 108, 136, 163, 177, 190, 217 deprived, 17, 85, 86, 88, 89, 92, 93, 95, 98, 99 marginalised, 17, 85, 87–89, 91, 92, 95, 98, 99 Community land trusts, 81 Condominiums. See Sectional title Contestation, 2, 7, 12–17, 20, 21, 67, 81, 88, 99, 100, 144, 156, 213 Co-operatives. See Housing, co-operatives Corruption, 49, 79, 223, 227, 229 Court, 3, 14–17, 19, 31, 94, 145, 153, 157, 161, 223, 227, 228, 230 Court cases, 14, 157, 223

D Dar es Salaam Chamazi, 106, 109, 111, 114, 120 Jenga-Uza housing developments, 112 Kariakoo, 110, 114 Kiduvini, 112, 115, 118 Kurasini, 111, 113 local homeowners in, 19 Magomeni, 114 Manzese, 114 networks in, 13, 19 Swahili House, 112, 118

Index Temeke, 106, 109, 111 Decentralization, 109 Demolition, 87, 91, 94, 96, 113, 175 Development Action Group, 32, 135 Displacement. See Eviction Dispossession. See Eviction E Egypt, 1, 217, 218, 224 co-operatives, 217 Ekurhuleni, South Africa, 69, 75 Tembisa, 134 Vosloorus, 134 Elected officials councillors, 79, 80, 167, 173 Mayor, 34, 37, 38, 79 Engineering services. See Infrastructure Every day practices land use, 29, 38, 39, 67 red tape, 75, 76, 229 Eviction forced, 14, 17, 85, 87, 89, 91, 93–96, 98, 113, 119, 120, 157 in Badia East, Lagos, Nigeria, 89, 91, 93, 97 in Kurasini, Tanzania, 113, 114, 119, 120 in Otodo Gbame, Lagos, Nigeria, 89, 93, 94 in Tarkwa Bay, Lagos, Nigeria, 93 mobilisation against, 95. See also Social movements state-led, 145 threats, 14, 85, 87, 96, 143, 145, 153 F Finance banks, 72, 78 cross-subsidisation, 75 housing, 10, 13, 18, 40, 45, 57, 58, 69, 70, 93, 105, 108, 115, 125, 126, 133, 136, 143, 149, 170, 183, 224 IMF-loans, 221 mortgage, 70, 203 private, 10, 54, 57, 70, 113, 139, 183 state, 10, 69, 70, 108, 133, 138, 143, 166, 183, 218 Forced removal. See Eviction Free State, South Africa Botshabelo, 165, 167, 173 Department of Local Government and Housing, 167

Index Draft Provincial Housing White Paper, 167 “Operation Hlasela”, 167, 170, 175 Thaba Nchu, 164, 165, 167, 173

G Gauteng province, South Africa, 182, 187 housing production in, 19, 67 Human settlements department, 194 Governance adaptive urban governance, 131 As a verb, 4 contract state, 68 debates, 144 definitions, 86, 185 evolutionary governance theory, 162–164, 175 hybrid, 5 multi-level, 5, 19, 183, 196 network, 5, 17, 69, 72, 88, 98, 120, 130 post-colonial, 106 real estate state, 70 relational, 68 state capacity, 68 traditional leaders, 8 Government officials. See Bureaucrats Grassroots movements. See Social movements Greenfield development, 72, 81

H Homeowner associations, 60 Homeownership, 48, 52, 117–119, 136, 149, 162 in Eastridge & Mitchells Plain, Cape Town, 143, 145 Home(s) affordable, 28–30, 36, 39, 114, 203, 209 buyers, 70, 72, 114, 146 formal, 10, 28, 193 informal, 10, 28 renovations, 151 Housing access to, 9, 12, 17, 28, 30, 31, 34, 38, 39, 50, 89, 95–98, 100, 111, 136, 144, 146, 187, 210, 221 adequate, 12, 14, 30, 85–89, 95–100, 107, 167 affordable, 13, 18, 19, 29–35, 37, 39, 40, 46, 54–58, 65–67, 70, 72, 73, 75, 78, 80, 81, 106, 108, 114, 125–130,

237 133, 134, 138, 139, 146, 187, 199–203, 207–213, 217, 221, 228 alternative, 81, 97, 126–128, 209, 211, 212, 217 and cooperative governance, 17 and social movements, 12, 13, 85–88, 91 backyard, 125–136, 139, 189, 205. See also Backyard rental housing bureaucracy, 68, 132, 135, 143, 144, 157, 221 challenges, 80, 81, 86, 87, 89, 96, 98, 100, 126, 139, 200 complexes, 20, 187, 204 contestation, 2, 12, 13, 15, 20, 21, 67, 81, 144, 156, 213 co-operatives, 15, 18, 20, 217 delivery, 2, 8–10, 13, 14, 28, 30, 32, 48–50, 56, 58, 67, 80, 108, 114, 127, 143, 144, 147, 152, 157, 162, 167–170, 173, 175, 176, 182, 185, 196, 200, 209, 212 developer-driven, 2, 70 development(s), 4, 7, 9–11, 15, 18, 28–31, 33–35, 37–41, 45–48, 51, 52, 55–60, 65–70, 72, 73, 75, 77, 79–81, 86, 87, 89, 96–100, 108, 115, 126, 129, 132–135, 139, 145, 151, 152, 162, 173–176, 183, 185–190, 195, 196, 201, 207, 209, 211–214, 218 estates, 11, 15, 28, 45–48, 51, 57, 59, 60 finance, 10, 13, 58, 69, 70, 93, 105, 108, 115, 125, 133, 136, 149, 170, 172, 183, 224 formal, 10, 11, 28, 37, 57, 65, 67, 89, 105, 126, 128, 129, 136, 151, 203, 212 free hold, 65 governance, 1–4, 6, 8, 17, 55, 56, 58, 60, 67, 69, 73, 86, 96, 100, 120, 144, 146, 156, 157, 164, 175, 182, 193, 213, 219, 231 greenfield, 19, 66, 67, 72 in African cities, 9, 21 inclusionary. See Inclusionary housing informal, 3, 7–9, 12, 20, 47, 50, 58, 68, 89, 106, 108, 109, 114, 120, 125, 127–129, 162, 169, 204, 211, 212 initiatives, 2, 7, 32, 49 innovative, 13, 81, 143 interest groups, 15 interventions, 2, 14, 20, 59, 60, 144 ladder, 65

238 large-scale, 10, 45, 52, 58, 59, 186, 217, 221. See also Housing, development(s) low-income, 9, 11, 14, 29, 31, 55, 106, 133, 139, 181, 182, 210, 212 management, 58, 67, 69, 80, 106, 109, 181, 182, 185, 187, 193, 220 market-driven housing development, 69 mass production, 66 mobilisation, 58, 157 models, 66, 117 multi-storey, 182, 185–188 ownership, 108, 113, 181, 185–187, 189, 207, 213 policy, 13, 15, 31–33, 37, 38, 46, 127, 157, 162, 164, 167, 168, 174, 175, 186, 199, 203, 210, 212 private estates, 51, 53 production, 2, 3, 11, 19, 46, 48, 49, 60, 67, 120, 209 projects, 7, 14, 49, 91, 143, 157, 168, 172, 189, 195, 200, 208, 210, 212, 213, 217, 220, 222 RDP, 146, 147, 195 rental, 48, 113, 125–134, 138, 139, 185, 186 residential, 31, 67 right to, 30, 85–87, 89, 98–100 self-built, 108, 109. See also Self-building shortage, 45, 48, 50, 212 single family, 47, 60, 204 single stand, 66 situation, 9, 11, 20 standards, 162, 175, 209 state-funded, 11, 143, 181–183, 188, 189, 193, 195 submarkets, 65 subsidies, 147, 168, 172, 173, 186, 203, 210 terrain, 8, 21 types, 11, 20, 31 walk-up, 181, 182, 186, 188–190, 193, 195 Housing development fund Housing Sector Plan, 173 Mangaung Council, 165 Mangaung Local Municipality, 165, 170, 173 Mayor, 39 Naledi, 166 Thaba Nchu, 165, 168, 173

Index I Inclusionary housing constitutional & statutory basis, 29 in South Africa, 29, 32 objection, 29, 32 origins & objectives, 29 policy, 29, 31–33, 37, 38 Informal settlements enforced informality, 132 formalization, 111 illegal, 106, 120, 157, 223, 230 legal, 7, 9 Makoko/Iwaya community, Lagos, 90 transversal logic, 115 Infrastructure, 5–8, 21, 52, 56, 57, 77, 86, 89, 105, 108, 118, 131, 132, 162, 168, 170, 173–175, 183, 187, 195, 202, 211, 224 Instalment purchase/sale agreements, 146, 148

J Johannesburg, South Africa Bramfischerville, 133 city of, 32, 69, 70, 129, 133, 137, 182, 187, 189, 195 coalition government, 70 Eldorado Park, 134 Fleurhof, 182, 187–190, 192, 194, 195 Housing Department’s, 185 Lenasia, 134 municipal planning tribunal, 16, 67, 79 revenue, 69, 70 Soweto, 133, 134 Spruitview, 134

K Kigali, Rwanda Batsinda II, 200, 203 Kigali Masterplan 2020, 205 Kimironko market, 204, 205 Nyabugogo bus station, 204, 205 Rugarama Park Estate, 200, 201

L Lagos, Nigeria Badia East, 89, 91, 97 Badia West, 89 Eko Atlantic City, 96 Ibeju Lekki axis, 89 Ilubinrin, 89

Index Lekki Free Trade Zone, 89, 96 Makoko/Iwaya community, 90 Otodogbame, 93 state government, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95–97 Tarkwa Bay, 93 Land access to, 12, 31, 109, 144 acquisition, 9, 20 agricultural, 50, 51, 54, 66, 187 assembly, 66, 72 development, 15, 48, 67, 72, 80, 81, 174 redistribution, 220 reform, 32, 54, 211 rights, 66 scarcity, 45, 49–51 speculation, 13, 45, 50 tenure, 207 titling, 111 use. See Land use Landlord, 13, 129, 130, 135–137, 187. See also Housing, rental Landscape, 2, 12, 14, 17, 18, 128, 134, 200, 219, 224, 229, 231 Land use application, 28, 31, 34, 41, 73 instruments, 68 law, 68 legislation, 67 management, 15, 31, 67–69, 132 policy, 15 Legal, 14, 16, 17, 20, 31, 35, 41, 68, 73, 76, 80, 86, 87, 92, 106, 120, 143. See also Court; Court cases Legal Resources Centre, 145 Legislation Agricultural (Commercial) Land Reform Act, Namibia, 54 Alienation of Land Act (ALA), South Africa, 153 Arusha Declaration, Tanzania, 108, 110 Black Communities Development Act, South Africa, 77 Division of Revenue Act, South Africa, 168 Land Act of 1999, Tanzania, 108 Land Use Planning Ordinance, South Africa, 151 National Credit Act, South Africa, 153 Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act, (SPLUMA) South Africa, 30–32, 69, 73, 75, 76, 79–81 Tanzania Land Policy of 1997, 108 Tanzanian Urban Planning Act, 112

239 Urban and Rural Planning Act (URPA), Namibia, 50 Lending, 50, 136. See also Finance relationship-based, 136 Litigation. See Court Local government, 5, 7, 14, 18, 20, 32, 46, 47, 55, 57, 59, 60, 67, 69, 109, 126, 127, 129–132, 138, 152, 161, 162, 167, 174, 183, 194, 195 M Mangaung, South Africa Bloemfontein, 164, 165, 168, 172, 173 Botshabelo, 165, 167 Marginal communities, 17, 85, 88, 89, 91, 92, 95, 98, 99 exclusion, 87 Marginality, 105 Mayor. See Elected officials Messy cities, 2, 21 Middle class, 6, 11, 40, 47, 54, 65, 69, 70 Mobilisation. See Social movements Modern modernisation, 5 modernity, 93 professionalisation, 50 MPT, 34–35 Municipal, 29, 33, 53–56, 73, 75–79, 109, 126–129, 132, 136–139, 144, 146, 166, 170, 187, 230 boundaries, 45, 51, 52, 54, 59, 109 planning tribunals, 16, 39, 67, 79, 80 Municipality. See Local government N Namibia Khomas Regional Council, 50, 51, 54 Mass Housing Development Programme, 46, 49 Ministry of Urban and Rural Development, 50, 52 National Housing Enterprise, 48–50 Navigation, 17, 18 Ndifuna Ukwazi (NU), 28, 35, 36, 39. See also Inclusionary housing, objection Neighbourhoods, 13, 15, 18, 31, 38, 39, 46, 58, 60, 66, 81, 137–139, 181, 182, 186, 189 sustainable, 81 Neoliberal, 40, 47, 144, 147, 157, 175, 218, 221, 230 Nigeria. See also Lagos

240 Justice and Empowerment Initiatives, 91 Ministries of Physical Planning and Urban Development and Housing, 93 Nigerian Slum/Informal Settlement Federation, 85, 86, 90 Rural and Urban Development Initiative, 91 Urban Renewal Agency, 93 Not-In-My-Back-Yard (NIMBY), 38

O Osona village, 45, 47, 55

P Path dependency, 163, 164, 176 Periphery, 10, 45, 57, 105, 125, 127, 162, 172, 176, 209. See also Marginality Popular urbanisation. See Informal settlements Precarity, 14, 87, 89, 143, 144, 147, 156, 157 production of, 156 Private-public partnerships (PPPs), 5, 7, 157, 181–183, 195 Privatisation, 68, 70 Property development. See Property development entrepreneurs, 125, 126, 133, 134, 136 financiers. See Property financiers management, 47, 57, 73, 118, 136 management companies, 57, 58, 60 market, 28, 50, 54, 59, 125, 126, 129, 133 models, 81 rental, 125, 134, 136, 137, 207 right to, 30, 85 value, 38, 50, 65, 66, 118, 126 Property development enterprise, 129 micro, 125, 126, 129, 134 private, 7, 10, 30, 50, 54 speculation, 50 Property financiers BitProp, South Africa, 125, 129, 136 iBuild, South Africa, 125, 129 isiDuli, South Africa, 125 TUHF, South Africa, 125–127, 129, 133, 134, 136, 138

Q Quiet encroachment, 10, 13

Index R Real estate, 10, 28, 59, 69, 70, 131, 202, 211 Relocation. See Eviction Rendering technical, 209–212 Resident-driven housing initiatives, 2. See also Informal settlements Residential construction, 65 development, 9, 18, 31, 34, 45, 47, 51, 52, 69, 184 Right to the city, 9, 13, 17, 20, 85–88, 91, 97, 99 rights of participation, 87 Rwanda Affordable Housing Fund, 201, 210 Affordable Housing policy, 199, 201, 203, 210 Rwandan Affordable Housing Program, 11, 200, 202

S Scale, 3, 6, 7, 10, 13, 18, 19, 34, 45, 46, 54, 57–60, 69, 81, 85, 111, 126, 127, 129, 137–139, 144, 167, 168, 185, 213, 221 multi-scalar, 182, 196 production of, 2, 46, 47, 59, 66, 72 Sectional title, 56, 65, 181, 186, 190 body corporate, 57, 58, 189, 194, 196 Self-building build-to-sell, 112 cooperative-based, 112–114, 117, 120 modes of practice, 115 neighbourhood, 13, 18 traditional, 112, 114, 115, 117, 120 Shack dwellers, 87, 113. See also Informal settlements Slums. See Informal settlements Social housing, 93, 186, 187, 210, 227 Cape Town Community Housing Company (CTCHC), 145, 146, 148, 155 Social movements Abahlali baseMjondolo, 87, 88, 145 actions, 85, 87 Centre for Community Initiatives, 113 Eastridge Housing Committee, 145 Lagos Marginalized Community Forum (LAMCOFO), 91 mobilisation, 58, 95 Nigerian Slum/Informal Settlement Federation, 85, 86, 90

Index Reclaim the City, 32, 35 Shack/Slum Dwellers International, 87, 91, 113 Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia (SDFN), 49, 51 Social and Economic Rights Action Centre (SERAC), 91 social media, 95, 99, 229 street protests, 15, 93 tactics, 14, 39, 41, 86, 88, 92, 95, 98–100, 144, 147, 157. See also Spaces of participation Tanzanian Federation of the Urban Poor (TFUP), 113 Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC), 145 South Africa African National Congress (ANC), 167, 176 Breaking New Ground, 168, 174 Consolidated Municipal Infrastructure Programme (CMIP), 172, 173 Constitution, 30, 32, 161, 162 Housing White Paper, 167, 169 integrated residential development programme (IRDP), 168, 169, 173, 181, 183 National Department of Housing, 156 National Department of Human Settlements’, 186 National Home Builders Registration Council (NHBRC), 137, 150, 151 National Housing Code, 151 National Housing Finance Corporation (NHFC), 146, 147, 152 National Housing Subsidy, 146 National Treasury, 133, 135, 137, 166 Operation Hlasela, 167, 170, 175 South African Local Government Association, 128 uMaStandi, 13, 125–127, 131, 133–139 Spaces of participation. See also Social movements invented, 15, 88, 92, 99 invited, 15, 88, 92, 99 rights of participation, 87 Spatial change, 21, 39 displacement, 17, 85, 90, 91, 98 justice, 14, 28, 31–33, 39, 40, 69, 75 legacy, 28 planning, 12, 28, 30, 31, 35, 38, 68, 69, 75, 79, 167, 188

241 plans, post-apartheid, 66–69 production, 46, 60 transformation, 2, 12, 15, 30–32, 37, 38, 46 Spatial Development Framework, 31, 68 Struggles, 87, 88, 95, 96, 98–100. See also Contestation; Courts; Social movements social, 86, 88 urban, 12, 85–87, 89, 97 T Tanzania Ministry of Lands, Housing and Human Settlements, 113 MKURABITA, 108, 109, 111, 118 National Housing Corporation (NHC), 107, 108 Tanzanian Federation of the Urban Poor (TFUP), 113 Ujamaa, 108 Temporality, 17, 77, 78, 106, 115, 117, 157, 218, 219, 224, 229, 231 Tenant, 108, 113, 114, 117, 120, 128, 129, 137, 186, 189. See also Housing, rental Tenure security, 87, 93, 108, 117 Township(s) establishment, 66, 67, 69, 73–78, 80, 81 extension, 51 middle class, 70 projects, 69, 133 rental practices in, 126 Transformative change, 37 Tshwane, South Africa, 69, 188 Atteridgeville, 134 Mamelodi, 134 TUHF, 126, 127, 129, 133, 134, 136, 138. See also Property financiers Transaction Support Centre, 135 U Urban activism, 88 actors, 2, 3, 5, 7, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 130 communities, 86–88, 91, 92, 97 conditions, 2, 3, 49, 96, 97, 131 contestation, 88 development, 7–9, 14, 18, 45, 47, 49, 51, 52, 54, 55, 57, 60, 80, 85–91, 93, 96–100, 107, 109, 130, 133, 200, 201, 204, 209–214

242 fabric, 18, 45, 51, 57–60, 222 form, 11, 13, 20, 58, 127, 194 governance, 2, 3–8, 12, 19–21, 29, 37, 41, 56, 58, 80, 85, 86, 88, 89, 92, 99, 125, 127, 130–132, 137–139, 157, 182, 199, 219. See also Governance housing sector, 19, 131 intervention, 2, 21, 60, 130 land governance, 20, 29, 41 land scarcity, 45, 50, 51 periphery, 8, 10, 11, 172 poor communities, 15, 85–87, 97 population, 48, 89, 105, 125 real estate, 10, 28, 59, 131, 202 residents, 7, 9–11, 13, 14, 17, 18, 21, 46, 50, 53, 109, 119, 120, 127, 131, 157, 186 struggles, 12, 85–87, 89, 97 transformation processes, 2 Urbanisation, 4, 6, 9, 10, 14, 46, 59, 60, 66, 67, 70, 105–107, 119, 164, 165, 170, 188, 199 patterns of, 65 Urbanism African, 2, 3, 21 by-pass, 10 plotting, 107, 119 popular, 107 privatised, 58

Index Southern, 21, 130 splintering, 11

W Waiting, 28, 78, 147, 149, 155, 157, 191, 219 Western Cape Property Developers Forum, 37 Western Cape Provincial Government, 31, 33, 36 Windhoek, Namibia city of (municipality), 47, 50–52, 59 Elisenheim Lifestyle Village Estate, 52 Finkenstein Estate, 51 Monte Christo housing development, 45, 55 Omeya Golf Estate, 52 Ongos Valley Development Project, 45, 47, 54, 55 Women-headed households, 117 World Bank, 4, 46, 86, 175, 200–202, 211, 221 World Bank Fund for Affordable Housing, 201

Z Zoning, 29, 68, 75, 77, 132