Marie Huchzermeyer

University of the Witwatersrand | wits · School of Architecture and Planning

Housing is one of the most prominent themes around which statutory urban policy intersects with human rights. Stuart Wilson’s Human rights and the transformation of property examines this intersection through the tension that exists between the hierarchical common-law framing of property rights and the transformative reading of the right to access...

Informal settlements intersect with spatial planning when they are placed on a trajectory towards permanent upgrading. In South Africa, the law requires this intersection to be as non-disruptive as possible. However, this is difficult to secure, as the Slovo Park informal settlement case in Johannesburg exemplifies. This article demonstrates the co...

Urban and reform is a relatively under-researched and -considered element of the broader land-reform debate in South Africa. This article reviews some of the key positions that have been explicated in the current urban land-reform debate, and seeks to extend existing contributions, fine-tune them and push the debate further. It does so by distingui...

STRUGGLING FOR HOME IN SOUTH AFRICA - Making Freedom: Apartheid, Squatter Politics, and the Struggle for Home. By Anne-Maria Makhulu. London/Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Pp 228, $23.95, paperback (ISBN 978-0-8223-5966-1). - Volume 59 Issue 3 - MARIE HUCHZERMEYER

There is a growing consideration globally of a right to the city in urban policies, strategies and legislation. The mention of this concept in the UN’s New Urban Agenda vision statement, in relation to human rights, both acknowledges and encourages this trend. It is also a result of lobbying and contestation. In the Anglo-American scholarly literat...

On the occasion of the United Nations Habitat III Conference on cities, to take place in Quito (Ecuador) in October 2016, this research publication proposes an innovative reflection on precar­ ious neighborhoods-whose populations are set to double over the next twenty years. Building on extensive field research across all continents, the different...

Globally, and particularly in the global south, the majority of urban housing stock occupied by economically weak households has not been built through state programmes or formal market delivery, but by households themselves. While global policies like the new UN Sustainable Development Goals are beginning to recognise the importance of ‘inclusive,...

In South Africa, the shack dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo in Durban invokes a Lefebvrian notion of the right to the city while embarking on rights-based action as one of several approaches it employs. In a recent City article, Shannon Walsh frames the use of the right to the city by social movements in South Africa as having liberalizing...

In urban South Africa today, there is evidence of deep-rooted exclusions, signalling the ongoing need to realise city rights. While the socio-economic rights framework is a liberal one, the ‘right to the city’ as coined by the French sociologist/philosopher Henri Lefebvre in the late 1960s stems from a Marxist humanism. The literature that consider...

Informality is a ubiquitous characteristic of urban life in Africa and elsewhere. Although the phenomenon of informality is loosely understood as the strategies and institutions that develop beyond the regulatory framework of the state (Abdoul 2005), a rigid distinction between formal and informal sectors precludes the possibility that informal sec...

The modest Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target on improving the lives of a small proportion of the globe's slum dwellers occupies a complex and in some ways contradictory terrain. This chapter reviews the usage of the term ‘slum’ and its adoption into the UN Millennium Project. The slogan ‘Cities Without Slums’, which has accompanied the targe...

This article traces the evolution of the South African target to eradicate informal settlements by 2014 within the political position of the Ministry of Housing. It shows an interaction as well as a disjuncture with the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and with South African policy and legislation. In so doing, the article differ...

Community-based slum enumeration was carried out in Kisumu from 2005 to 2008 as part of a city-wide slum-upgrading initiative. This paper analyses this enumeration exercise particularly in relation to land management and tenure security. The paper draws on a peer evaluation that included interviews with slum-upgrading stakeholders as well as commun...

The Department of Housing released a new Informal Settlement Upgrading Programme in 2004 that makes in situ upgrading of informal settlements possible with minimal disruption to residents' lives. To date, the new programme is not necessarily the municipalities' choice when intervening in an informal settlement. This paper reflects on the treatment...

Department of Housing released a new Informal Settlement Upgrading Programme in 2004, which makes in situ upgrading of informal settlements possible with minimal disruption to residents' lives. To date, the new programme is not necessarily the municipalities' choice when intervening in an informal settlement. This paper presents the case of three i...

This article addresses the high level of commercialization of shelter and basic services in Nairobi, and its implication for slum upgrading in Kenya. The article is based on a review of published and grey literature, and on qualitative interviews with slum residents as well as with landlords, tenants and stakeholders in Nairobi's multi-storey tenem...

Large-scale private landlordism dominates low-income housing provision in Nairobi, with extreme residential densities in districts where rooming tenements reach seven floors above ground. This trend differs from the small-scale private landlordism, predominantly with owner occupation, which has been documented for the developing world. Nairobi's la...

Marie Huchzermeyer is an academic who has researched and published extensively on informal settlements and evictions in South Africa, Brazil and Kenya over the past ten years. She has contributed to housing rights work of the organisation COHRE (Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions), particularly its work in relation to informal settlement/slum e...

Informal settlements are a visible manifestation of legal, economic and often social exclusion from the formally recognised urban environment. Across sub-Saharan Africa, 72% of the urban population lives under such marginalised conditions, with the formal/recognised 'western' urban environment comprising merely an island in terms of population numb...

Sociopolitical exclusion in South Africa for most of the twentieth century was distinguished by its racial segregation and the rigorous means by which it was legislated and controlled by the state. The legal framework encompassed racial restrictions on political activity, employment, commercial and investment opportunities, social relations, and sp...

Informal urban land occupation in South Africa is treated in a technocratic manner, consistent with the policy of orderly urbanisation introduced in the 1980s. This approach focusses on the contravention of laws governing property and land use, and accordingly results in most cases in evictions and relocations. A new mandate of the national Departm...

Control over the urbanization process in South Africa was redefined after the mid 1980s, when the policy of 'orderly urbanization' replaced that of racially based 'influx control'. In the early 1990s, under the inspiration of the private sector-funded policy think tank, the Urban Foundation, a standardized capital subsidy was introduced as a means...

This paper reviews the current state of literature on peri-urban research in sub-Saharan Africa. This research has been led by multi-lateral and bilateral development agencies that have sought to find a role in urban development. The review finds that the donor-driven research has remained largely descriptive. It has neither emphasized nor theorize...

The informal settlements or favelas characterizing the cities of Brazil are visible evidence that the political-economic system does not adequately serve the urban population. How has society responded to this constant reminder in urban spatial form? How are these responses translated into intervention policies, and how have these in turn allowed t...

Official discussion and negotiation on housing policy in South Africa was closed in 1994 with the launch of the new Housing White Paper. Contradictions in this policy between housing procedure and delivery target have limited its relevance to the poorest sector in society. The paper shows how these tensions between product and process are an outcom...