Bongani Majola
The recent land occupation in Bredell, near Kempton Park, dramatically highlighted the extent of South Africa’s housing problem. More than 5,5-million South Africans live in self-constructed, informal dwellings. Many of these people have insecure tenure and live in appalling conditions in squatter settlements. As of May the number of houses completed or under construction was 1,2-million, with the country’s housing backlog estimated at 2,8-million.
Wits University’s new postgraduate programme in housing could hardly be more timely. It responds to the need for more people with “the professional skills and expertise to shape our cities in humane and sustainable ways in the face of issues such as burgeoning informal settlements, degenerating inner-city suburbs, proliferating gated, high-income gated communities [and] displaced populations”, says programme coordinator Dr Marie Huchzermeyer,
Introduced this year, the coursework master’s programme takes as a core theme “informal settlements and/or illegal housing”. The programme is “very interdisciplinary”, says Huchzermeyer, whose speciality is the political economy of housing: her PhD focused on informal settlements in South Africa and Brazil.
The programme aims to equip students “with the practical, managerial, analytical and spatial skills, as well as social and cultural sensitivities, to meet [the country’s] diverse housing challenges”, she says.
At the programme’s launch on May 3, Menty Narsoo, Deputy Director General in the Department of Housing, told staff and students his department welcomes the fact that people will now enter the housing field with specialised skills, instead of the department having to send employees to housing capacity development training programmes.
Over and above the compulsory core courses, there is a variety of electives offered by social science, civil engineering, sociology, geography, political science and the School of Public and Development Management, among others.
The programme started in earnest in February. The faculty of engineering and the built environment, which offers the programme, targets government housing officials, NGO housing practitioners, consultants for housing projects, builders, quantity surveyors, town planners and architects.
To be considered for admission to the programme students need an honours degree from any faculty. Students will graduate with a master’s degree in architecture or an MSc in town planning or quantity surveying.