No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Housing for the people, housing for the needy: Public housing across continents
Abstract
Response to need, or providing for the requirements of social reproduction, form two apparent causes of public housing action. In both cases, the state intervenes in response to market failure. While these may be underlying truths, it is equally valid and important to look at the ideological context which motivates and powers the process; a context which is bound to reflect in the impact of the housing once constructed. This paper points to several different 20th century contexts for large-scale housing projects in Europe and in Africa. Turning to South Africa, the paper looks at the changing ideological context of public housing and the impact of societal goals going far beyond the provision of worker accommodation and also raises more questions than just the familiar racial separation issues. The paper seeks to integrate findings from different periods and locational spaces, making use of research over many decades.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
The provision of housing plays a decisive role in segregation processes. In a European context increasingly influenced by variegated neo-liberal housing policies, Vienna’s approach is characterised by generous access to social housing. This inclusive strategy aims at actively preventing segregation and the isolation of certain groups. Over the last 30 years, however, reconfigured multi-level arrangements and wider contextual changes have transformed Vienna’s housing governance. This article explores how. In particular, it aims at disentangling the relationship between housing policy reforms at multiple policy levels and the changes of the mechanisms shaping the access to tenure segments and residential segregation in Vienna. Through the use of process tracing, we identify critical junctures of housing governance and relate them to housing segmentation and segregation measures over a period of approximately 30 years. Our findings show that reforms on multiple levels produce an increasingly deregulated private rental market and an increasingly fragmented access to a diversified provision of social housing. From a spatial point of view, persistent patterns of segregation blend with new ones, leading to decreasing segregation characterised by a more even spatial distribution of low and high-status groups. At the same time, both groups show very low, but slightly increased levels of isolation. Tenant profiles in social housing are, however, generally still very mixed. Balancing the trade-off between a social mix and social targeting without excluding residents in need will remain the main challenge for Vienna’s social housing model.
Interwar public housing estates for native citizens in Sub-Sahara African cities, represent hybrids of global and local urban concepts, housing typologies and dwelling habits.
The authors explain such hybrids via exploratory research note as a result of transmutation processes, marked by various (non)human actors. To categorize and compare them, Actor Network Theory (ANT) is applied and tested within an architecture historical framework. Nairobi/Kenya functions as pars pro toto with its Kariakor and Kaloleni estates as exemplary cases. Their different network-outcomes underpin the supposition that actor-oriented research can help to unravel a most essential, though neglected part of international town planning history.
In this article I take Carole Rakodi's general observations on what housing means in processes of urban development as a starting point in reading two novels by the Kenyan writer Meja Mwangi, both published in the 1970s. Even though published four decades ago, these texts are still relevant in the way they tell stories of urban life from below . Listening to what these novels tell about houses in low-income neighbourhoods in the Nairobi of the 1970s and about the space people live I discuss ways in which housing in these novels emerges as a subject of narration. Furthermore, I am interested in how the novelistic representation connects to larger stories of urbanisation and in what ways it contributes to understand and to read processes of urbanisation and urban development. To that aim, Mwangi’s novels will be brought into dialogue with studies and debates from the fields of development studies (Rakodi 2015), developmental journalism (Warah 2002) and urban anthropology (Nelson 1996).
In 2014, the South African National Department of Human Settlements announced that it would phase out its many small public housing projects of a few hundred units, and housing would now exclusively be delivered in large settlements of thousands of units, called catalytic projects. Shortly afterwards, the Gauteng Provincial government announced its own version of the policy, stating that it intended to build dozens of megaprojects around the Province. This article examines this policy moment both at the national level, and in Gauteng Province. We show how this direction was heralded by a series of bold political announcements and that although they were given some policy content over the subsequent months, the policy development process was superseded by project identification lasting several years. This case demonstrates that policy making in South Africa can be a fast-moving process in which headline ideas are announced and then elaborated, adopted, adapted and resisted by different actors. The result, therefore, is not a single policy but rather a diffuse and contradictory policy turn. While the announcements surprised some observers, we offer a framework of the various logics that fed into this policy direction: a history of scaled-up projects since the 1990s; a desire to ramp up the quantity of houses delivered; the appeal of designing entirely new integrated settlements; the pressure to invest in deprived areas; and the expectation that large projects can cut through bureaucratic blockages. Notwithstanding these imperatives, this policy direction has drawn criticisms for presuming to be able to attract economic activity to new settlements, and for potentially exacerbating urban sprawl.
Residential development in Port Elizabeth during the 19th century is characterized by continual attempts to remove African locations from the centre of town and the proximity of white residential areas. Until 1902 the local authority continued to regulate African settlement through the establishment of additional municipal locations. To accomplish the resettlement of Africans in the new locations, the municipality of Port Elizabeth came to rely on laws for the removal of squatters, slum clearance and treating the overcrowded African locations as a health hazard. The introduction of legislation in 1903 facilitated the municipality's programme of mass evictions and slum clearance. In the same year a change in the administration of locations had also occurred when responsibility for the New Brighton location was transferred to the Cape Colonial government. This responsibility only reverted to the Port Elizabeth municipality in 1923.
Souvent présentée dans les écrits et les discours officiels comme la "perle des lagunes", l'agglomération abidjanaise est certes le modèle d'un urbanisme moderne et occidental apprivoisé par le génie africain. Cependant à trop s'attarder sur le "Petit Manhattan" du Plateau, on finit par occulter une réalité : en 1987 comme en 1963, plus de 7 citadins sur 10 résident dans un habitat usuellement dénommé "cours commune". La permanence, l'étendue et le poids démographique de cette "ville des cours", légale ou illégale, posent une question majeure : pourquoi le projet et le modèle d'habitat social moderne, rapidement mis en place par un Etat ivoirien disposant d'importants moyens, n'ont-ils pas donné les résultats escomptés ? Un quart de siècle après l'indépendance, la ville des cours regroupe toujours la plupart des familles abidjanaises; de plus en dépit d'un remarquable effort financier, elle n'est pas conforme aux normes initialement affichées, malgré de spectaculaires transformations du tissu urbain. Pourtant cet "envers" ne peut être assimilé aux bidonvilles misérables des cités latino-américaines ou asiatiques. Produite par des citadins dans un but essentiellement locatif, la ville des cours est souvent construite en dur et intègre certains éléments du projet initial. "Envers" et "endroit" ne seraient-ils pas organiquement liés ? C'est donc à l'examen des stratégies et des jeux d'alliance qu'il faut s'attacher; blocage du projet, détournement des programmes de logement économique, processus d'exclusion, sont en effet indissociables de la logique des choix effectués et de la question de la rente urbaine.
The late 1940s were formative years in the establishment of Dube township and in demarcating the pattern of urban African administration in South Africa. The African housing crisis in Johannesburg prompted the Council to lead the way in implementing a new housing policy for the small African population who could afford home-owership, and who might be tempted to relocate voluntarily from the Western Areas. In the event, the Dube project attracted very few middle-class Africans, most of whom wanted freehold tenure and regarded the United Party's offer of a 99-year lease with suspicion. Fears for security of tenure were vindicated when the new apartheid Government acted on their position that urban Africans were temporary migrants: leases in Dube were restricted to 30 years duration and were made non-renewable. Although segregationist ideology had never allowed Africans to escape racial zoning entirely, under apartheid the development of a propertied African middle-class was effectively nullified by denying Africans freehold title, or even long leaseholds, in white urban areas. Under the sway of an increasingly repressive ideology, the homogeneity of Soweto's residential landscape was assured.
Joe Slovo Park, a housing development in a white middle-class suburb of Cape Town, was designed to replace the shack settlement of Marconi Beam with an orderly working-class suburb. This article focuses on the vicissitudes of post-apartheid housing development schemes, and raises troubling questions about the failure of planners, policy makers and developers to take into account the complexities of the everyday lives they sought to transform. Had they done so they might have anticipated the ‘re-informalisation’ of the newly formalised suburb. The article explores the disjunctures between the planners' model of ‘suburban bliss’ and the reality. The messy, improvised character of low-income housing development in South Africa is contrasted with their Utopian and technocratic vision. This is not to deny that dreams embodied in blueprints may often be shared by the intended ‘beneficiaries’, only that for a variety of social, economic and cultural reasons poor communities are generally unable to realise such ideal visions of modern urban living.
The Austrian capital of Vienna is widely acknowledged as one of the most livable cities, featuring a unique model of council housing that accounts for roughly 25% of all residential dwellings. This paper studies whether the broad provision of council housing is linked with a higher social mix in the neighbourhood. The analysis is based on administrative wage tax data at a small-scale raster grid of 500 × 500 meter with neighbourhood income inequality as an indicator for the social mix. While council housing is widely spread across the city, we find distinct spatial clusters of high and low income and inequality. Spatial econometric models show that council housing in Vienna is associated with lower income areas but slightly correlates with higher neighbourhood income inequality. These findings suggest that well-designed public housing policies may contribute to a higher social mix in a city.
This article analyses the politics of shelter provision in three African cities, focusing on the needs of, and provision for, the low- and middle-income residents. The significance of housing to citizen well-being means that governments influence multiple facets of land and shelter, affecting the shelter options realizable for urban residents. The framework of political settlements is increasingly used to understand national political outcomes. In this paper it is used to analyse shelter outcomes at the city scale. In all three cities, national political elites have influenced housing outcomes. In the two capital cities, elites use clientelism (backed up by violence) to advantage themselves and influential local groups. Approaches to housing are used to gain political legitimacy (both through the ideas that the built environment can encapsulate and through improved access to housing). In all three cities, territorial controls are used to influence electoral outcomes (with consequences for housing outcomes). The findings reinforce the importance of understanding the political context within which shelter outcomes emerge. They also highlight that more needs to be understood about the relation of sub-national politics to national-level political settlements.
A century ago, South Africa’s first national scheme for financing public housing passed into law. The Housing Act, number 35 of 1920, created a fund administered by a Central Housing Board, from which municipalities could borrow to support construction of houses at a lower interest rate than available elsewhere. The Act came in the aftermath of the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918–1919; the Parliament passed the law on 13 August 1920 and it came into effect a few days later. In the circumstances of 2020, millions of publicly subsidized houses later, and in the midst of a global pandemic, this article reflects on a century of public, or state, housing finance, through housing laws and practices that commenced 100 years ago. The article reviews the circumstances of health, housing, economy and politics in the 1918–1920 period. Themes emerge of public health, social control, racism and segregation, but also social democratic and anti-statist ideas. The article then briefly draws such themes through the twentieth century and beyond, leading to a consideration of the circumstances that prevail in the field in 2020, once more in contested conditions of pandemic, scarcity and poverty. The sources of the article include official reports and similar documents, secondary literature and some archival material. The method is historical and discursive.
Kenneth Gardens is Durban's largest low-income municipal housing estate. Initially built for `poor whites', Kenneth Gardens today is arguably one of the most socially diverse living spaces in the city. While the estate is significant in terms of its size, history and social make-up, very little has been written about it. This book provides a history of Kenneth Gardens through the oral history stories of its residents. It is a rich tapestry of narratives as told by people who resided in Kenneth Gardens during apartheid, those that moved into the estate when the Group Areas Act began to be defunct, as well as stories from residents who have more recently moved into the estate. Although this book is about Kenneth Gardens itself, it is also about the history of social housing, identity formation and change, urban planning, and state regulation. Many of the story tellers reveal intimate moments of struggle in their lives. But what emerges more strongly than vulnerability and hardship is embedded resilience and adaptability. Through the narratives we come to understand how a subsidised rental apartment becomes home, and how relative strangers can form a neighbourhood based on shared circumstances, proximity and an urban planning design that fosters familiarity and belonging. The narratives are accompanied by a unique photo essay created by acclaimed photographer Cedric Nunn. The authors invite readers to dwell in the everyday lives and memories of the people of Kenneth Gardens, and in so doing unravel the complexities of social housing, local government, regulation, urban identity politics and human agency.
In Kenya, the direct provision of housing by the state is limited to slum upgrading and housing for state employees. In Nairobi, the Kenya Slum Upgrading Programme (KENSUP) aims to reconstruct Kibera, one of the city’s largest slums, with multi-story housing. The stated goal is to rehouse the current dwellers of Kibera. However, Kibera is a melting pot of vested interests of central and local state-actors, urban dwellers and quasi-legal landlords. Its iron and mud shacks are representative of the drastic socio-spatial fragmentations of Nairobi. KENSUP brings elemental changes to Kibera’s built space, economic possibilities and social relations. It expresses some of the vested interests of actors and puts others at play – thus it reflects broader African urban governance issues. This makes it an insightful platform for the examination of state-society interactions in an African city. Given the struggles around land ownership as well as broader housing market dynamics, gentrification is an apparently inevitable outcome of the project. This article addresses the struggle for access to, and the living conditions in the ‘decanting site’, until 2016 the only inhabited housing estate of the project. It highlights people’s potential to shape events within the KENSUP project, to make use of the permanent uncertainty the project brings about, and to expand the minimal room for manoeuvre that it leaves for those living in, or refusing to move to, the housing estate.
Abstract
Top-down or state-driven low-cost housing supply in most African cities occurs in contexts of rapid urbanisation and great socio-spatial disparity, where the majority of low-income populations reside in areas without adequate living and housing conditions. This article critically examines this kind of intervention, focusing on bottom-up responses to it, expressed in appropriation processes at different levels, and the spatial consequences, exploring how they contribute to potentially reducing these disparities. Taking as its case study the Mozambican capital, Maputo, in the current neoliberal context, the article argues that the results of these top-down or state-driven interventions are contradictory and do not always translate into the reduction of socio-spatial disparities. Results depend on factors such as the motives behind each intervention, their process of implementation, characteristics and phase of development. It concludes that low-cost housing supply in Maputo functions firstly as a way of minimising the hardships of the displacement processes that usually lie behind its provision. Although the subsequent upgrading of these areas, and of the surrounding areas consequently occupied, may contribute to the reduction of social-spatial disparities, it also tends to promote gentrification processes and exclude the urban poor.
Abstract
This dissertation explores the relationships between apartheid and modernism, arguing that the South African apartheid state???s oil-from-coal project, SASOL, and the company town Sasolburg were key sites for the elaboration of the ???apartheid modern???, the particular form which industrial modernity took under apartheid. Moving across a number of domains, the dissertation shows how nationalist discourses celebrated SASOL???s technological prowess and the ???pioneering??? toil of South African scientists, but the viability of oil-from-coal depended on the cheap cost of black labor in the early apartheid period. SASOL???s managers and Sasolburg???s burghers envisioned the project transforming rural Afrikaners into respectable industrial citizens. The architect employed by SASOL to design Sasolburg, Max Kirchhofer, valorized congeniality in residential
neighborhoods and leisure as antidotes to the alienating aspects of industrial modernity. Kirchhofer???s belief that ???lower-income??? whites in Sasolburg could be reformed by good planning dissipated because of their reluctance to make themselves in the image of a culture linking respectability with particular aesthetic practices. African women???s domestic labor was critical to the making of respectable white families, but the black subculture which emerged around these women in Sasolburg made this dependence subversive of white respectability. The intensity of a co-produced ???paternalistic??? culture in the SASOL compound in nearby Zamdela township until the mid-1960s saw the compound manager facilitating migrants??? attempts at encapsulating themselves from the corruptions of industrial modernity. Zamdela???s aspirant middle class similarly enrolled white officials in their attempts at constituting a respectable local community. Increasingly pervasive capitalist commodity culture, the emergence of assertive forms of black politics and workforce ???South Africanization??? in the 1970s undermined ???paternalism??? at SASOL. The company belatedly extended home-ownership schemes to Africans, but in the 1980s, in the context of unprecedented labor militancy it renounced ???paternalism???, undertook retrenchments and subcontracting increased. With the end of apartheid both ???paternalism??? and the jobs which defined this company town and the ???apartheid modern???, have disappeared. In the apparent ruins of the ???apartheid modern???, young African residents of Zamdela are demanding for their township the civic infrastructure which the ???apartheid modern??? produced in Sasolburg.
Among West European cities, Vienna stands out as a case that has developed a particularly large decommodified housing stock over the twentieth century. The city’s housing model has also shown greater stability against wider recommodification trends since the 1980s. This paper centres on two policy changes since the mid-1990s: first, the local government has ceased to provide council housing and is now entirely relying on non-profit associations for the provision of social rental housing. Second, the national government has liberalized rent regulation in the private rental market. The first part of the paper introduces these changes, discusses how they represent steps towards greater market influence and how they put pressure on decommodified housing, particularly since the mid-2000s. The second part argues that the reforms have initiated a dualization trend among low-income households, forging a division between market insiders and outsiders. The third part reflects whether the policy changes mean that Vienna is also increasingly incorporated into broader recommodification trends. We argue that substantial decommodification policies have remained in place, although they have been severely weakened by recommodification attempts. Representations of Vienna as an exceptional case without significant recommodification, however, should be questioned.
Cet article aborde l’analyse de la question du logement en Algérie sur la longue durée, de l’indépendance du pays à nos jours. Il montre à travers la convocation de nombreux travaux de recherche de terrain inédits comment s’est mis en place et a été entretenu par les divers pouvoirs politiques en place, le « pacte patrimonial » de la décolonisation. Ce dernier nourrit et alimente encore aujourd’hui à la fois les stratégies des différentes catégories de populations bénéficiaires de ses retombées en terme d’accès aux rentes urbaines et les nouvelles pratiques de gestion du front social par la distribution gratuite des biens résidentiels cristallisant la rente pétrolière de la part des autorités publiques.
C’est en 1971 que les derniers bidonvilles de Nanterre ont été détruits. Bien qu’il s’agisse de l’un des plus importants lieux de mémoire de l’immigration maghrébine en région parisienne, les circonstances dans lesquelles ils ont disparu sont encore mal connues. Si leur destruction a été médiatisée, les protestations des habitants face aux conditions de relogement qu’on leur a imposées, n’ont, elles, laissé que peu de traces.
The paper examines recent shifts towards recommodifying state housing in South Africa. The reasons for these changes are discussed. The consequences for those who are presently state housing tenants are explored, and various approaches to the political significance of home ownership re-examined. The paper concludes by sketching the new terrain of struggle over the housing question in South African cities.
Application of the Slums Act of 1934 is shown to have significantly eroded residential opportunities of black people in Johannesburg. Three case studies of suburbs where extensive removals were implemented highlight the diverse mechanisms of urban segregation under slum provisions. The pre-apartheid importance of the Slums Act in securing commercial expansion, controlling the location of coloured and Indian housing and entrenching separate residential areas for poor whites is identified. Finally, the crucial role of the local state in implementing land use changes in the city is uncovered.
Direct provision of affordable rented housing by local authorities is fast disappearing in Britain with the transfer of homes to quasi-private landlords. This article describes the process as it has unfolded since the late 1980s, and suggests that it imposes greater long-term risks on former council tenants and town hall staff, while also generating considerable costs for the taxpayer. The process also excludes the many tenants who either reject transfer or are not given the choice, and therefore exacerbates inequalities. There are immediate and substantial benefits for transferred tenants, but this has to be weighed against the loss of a municipal public service.
The Government is beaten, because even the Government of England could not stop the people from squatting. The Government was like a man who has a cornfield which is invaded by birds. He chases the birds from one part of the field and hey alight in another part of the field … We squatters are the birds. The Government sends its policemen to chase us away and we move off and occupy another spot. We shall see whether it is the farmer or the birds who get tired first.
Women trained in a system of housing management developed by Octavia Hill in Victorian England were employed in South Africa's Coloured and European townships from the mid-1930s. They were also involved in training South African women in this tradition which emphasized the mutual responsibilities of landlords and tenants and rested upon the formation of trusting relationships or friendships between women housing managers and the tenants. Octavia Hill's followers worked hard to make a place for women in the field of housing management and claimed that their femininity gave them special expertise in this area, especially in terms of training housewives in domestic skills and in building up the relations of trust required by Octavia Hill's system. This paper describes the implementation of this system of management in South Africa and considers the implications of the role of women in housing management for our thinking about the gendered character of the state. My main argument is that rather than being a precedent for the value of incorporating femininity and women into the state, Octavia Hill's management tradition had already incorporated both historically masculine and historically feminine practices. In so far as she and her followers (and perhaps other female reformers) played a role in shaping the nature of the state, then it could be argued the state reflected a mediation of masculinity and femininity rather than a dominant masculinity and a subordinated or segregated femininity.
Since the re-instatement of a multi-party system in Zambia in 1991, approaches to finding solutions to housing shortages have changed significantly. Local government staff sees their new role primarily as facilitators of the improvement process. This role is promoted by the country’s new National Housing Policy, the draft National Housing Development Programme and the draft National Decentralisation Policy. In view of these recent policy initiatives, a retrospective review of Zambian housing policy is presented, focussing on efforts to provide serviced land, private home ownership, overcoming tenure constraints and organising community participation and the support of non-governmental organisations. Case study evidence from George compound is used to illustrate the paper.
The ways in which marriages in urban African communities in South Africa were made and unmade are many and varied. Yet one of the most startling must surely have been The Hats, a parodic match-making ritual enacted in parts of the Witwatersrand during the 1950s and 1960s. According to my informants, African men and women in search of state housing would assemble at the office of a Native Commissioner. While the women waited outside, the men were instructed to remove their hats, and leave the room. The hats were lined up on a table, and the women filed in. Each one selected a hat, and was married, there and then, to its owner. There are a number of women I know who got married through this system of marriage ... Say, you want a house; you were not going to get a house unless you are married. It amounted to choosing a hat, because the man wants a house as well as you want a house, so you only get married because you both want a house. 1 It did not matter whether he or she was beautiful, handsome or ugly. You just had to marry that person. 2
The constitution charges the government with the progressive realisation of the right of impoverished citizens to income security. In practice, this means that the government must have a reasonable defence of the current size and shape of its social assistance and social insurance programmes. Legal challenges have forced the state into providing such a defence of its social assistance programmes. In summary, the state justifies the current size and shape of this system primarily on the grounds that the state is targeting its scarce resources on the most ‘disadvantaged’ groups, where disadvantage is defined in terms of past opportunity not of current need. In this view, the social assistance system should help those groups of people who had fewest opportunities to provide for themselves. This argument entails a new version of the distinction between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. The state’s application of this argument in recent court papers is flawed empirically, but in making the argument the state has provided a basis for constructive debate on the shape of the welfare state.
The imposition of modern urban regulations and standards in rapidly industrializing cities outside the imperial heartland challenged the simplistic colonial planning regime of administrative and trade centres. In Johannesburg in South Africa the adoption of racial segregation provided the state with the ideological basis to restrict investment by providing unequal living conditions within the city, while securing a stable supply of urban labour. The paper documents this strategy through a detailed exploration of the application of the 1923 Natives (Urban Areas) Act. The process of imposing segregation met with resistance not only from black residents but also from landlords and the manufacturing classes who wanted Africans to live closer to work. Opposition from these unexpected quarters stalled the segregationist project and undermined the draconian power of the racist legislation.
Ethno-linguistic zoning was imposed in the 1950s to preempt tribal conflict, ease township administration, promote mother- tongue education, and forge palatable black nationalism. The policy was critized as impractical, politically divisive, and inflammatory. Population distribution and house allocation patterns in Soweto indicate imperfections in ethnic zoning. Administrative devolution and public housing sales may impair its continued application.- Author
Apartheid City in Transition
- Ann Bernstein
Bernstein, Ann. 1991. "The Challenge of the Cities" in Mark Swilling, Richard Humphries and Khehla
Shubane, eds., Apartheid City in Transition. Cape Town: 322-33. Cape Town: Oxford University
Press.