Ever more often the courts are instructing government authorities to evict squatters from private land. The state was recently told to come up with a plan to relocate 40 000 people from the farm Modderklip, outside Benoni, by the end of this month.
The authorities usually argue that relocating squatters only encourages more illegal occupations, because those being relocated receive housing before others who have waited patiently for state help.
The bad news is that more illegal occupation of land is in store, since this has nothing to do with the pace of housing delivery but is a consequence of urbanisation and industrialisation. But city planning and forethought can help pre-empt the inevitable.
South Africa has not yet confronted informal settlement as a distinct area for policymaking, but has only dealt with the issue obliquely as a justification for the government’s housing policy. Continuing in that vein will have devastating long-term societal consequences.
The housing policy parcels all people needing shelter into nuclear families so that they may be supplied with Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) houses. The result is a kind of forced disintegration of the extensive social, and very African, support networks that exist in informal areas and elsewhere, which leaves individuals desperate. That is a root cause of violence.
Why is there no policy on informal settlements, though every town and city has areas that are not officially subdivided and lack formal municipal services where shacks are the primary form of shelter?
Informal settlements present a paradox. They offer residents an inexpensive home in an urban setting. That makes them valuable and therefore one increasingly hears calls for these areas to be upgraded.
Progressive planners have even been calling on authorities to create space in their urban plans to provide for more informal settlements. But the living conditions in informal areas are pitiful. That makes them a problem, which translates into calls for their eradication or for building more RDP houses.
This tension between informal settlements being viewed as both an opportunity and a problem explains why contradictory attitudes prevail, even within the government, and why no progress is being made towards a single policy position.
Our understanding of informal settlements and our response to them rest on vague assumptions because we have not focused on the issue.
For instance, current housing policy implicitly accepts that informal areas will in time resemble suburban residential neighborhoods, either in their current locations or in new areas.
In such an ideal neighborhood each family has title to a formally demarcated piece of land with which it can gain equity in a functioning property market. Each plot has water-borne sewerage, running water and electricity supplied directly and individually to it, for which residents will be charged. And being owners, occupants will maintain their homes.
Most important in this vision is ‘individuationâ€, which denotes two ideas: that the state assists each nuclear family and that each family lives and provides for itself independently after having received its state support.
How realistic is this in the light of the state’s limited resources, or in terms of effective legal and municipal administration, accelerating urbanisation, or the income of the poor? How can this vision be supported along with preventing urban sprawl or promoting environmental sustainability? How wise is the unbundling of social support networks?
The fact is informal settlements are not simply undeveloped suburbia. They are spaces the poor find to survive in the formal fabric of the city.
There is an alternative, which is based on communities rather than individual families.
Instead of delivering thousands of houses into private hands, connected by a network of often inferior sewerage, electricity and water reticulation , the state must provide public facilities. This would involve building high-quality municipal service centres, each delivering to groups of 50 or 60 shacks access to water, sewerage and laundry facilities within walking distance. Even slaughtering and refuse facilities could be provided.
This would mitigate the worst aspects of totally unaided informal settlement and build on the positive elements. Municipalities would thereby be spared the onerous and costly task of trying to bill thousands of families for rates and services, bills they are highly unlikely to collect. Instead they could move to charging a basic, even subsidised, user tariff.
The surveyor general and the Ministry of Housing would no longer concern themselves with the impossible task of monitoring informal sales of property. Communities would no longer compete, often violently, over places on a housing project’s beneficiary list. Social cohesion and cooperation could contribute positively to another pillar of our housing policy, the people’s housing process.
Indeed, as residents found their way into the formal parts of town, they would make way in the existing settlements for the next generation of urbanisers — which would be the surest way of avoiding the illegal occupation of land and of protecting property rights.
Jens Kuhn is vice-president of the South African Planning Institute