NAMIBIAS
URBAN
FUTURE
RETHINKING HOUSING
AND URBANISATION
Book of Proceedings
27-28 February 2017
Windhoek, Namibia
Guillermo Delgado & Phillip Lühl, eds.
With contributions by Richard Dobson,
Anthea Houston, Bulelwa Makalima-
Ngewana, Nina Maritz, Diana Mitlin,
Rose Molokoane, Sheela Patel, Kwame
Tenadu, Cecile van Schalkwyk and
Members of the Shack D wellers
Federation of Namibia and the Namibia
Housing Action Group
Foreword by Leilani Farha
[ i ]
Table of Contents
Foreword ii
Leilani Farha
Welcoming remarks iv
Tjama Tjivikua
Keynote address vi
Sophia Shaningwa
Editorial introduction x
Guillermo Delgado and Phillip Lühl
Acknowledgments xxi
SESSION 1
Informal urbanisation and peoples processes 1
Rose Molokoane
SESSION 2
Community-based urban strategies and social innovation 13
Sheela Patel and Members of the Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia and
the Namibia Housing Action Group
SESSION 3
Urban livelihoods, the informal, and new roles 33
for professionals and local government
Richard Dobson
SESSION 4
Urban design, public space and local governance: 51
Experiences of the Cape Town Partnership
Bulelwa Makalima-Ngewana
SESSION 5
Social housing and finance 61
Anthea Houston
SESSION 6
Experiences with the right to adequate housing in 77
South Africa: A socio-legal perspective
Cecile van Schalkwyk
SESSION 7
Urban land reform, tenure options and land administration 95
Kwame Tenadu
SESSION 8
Design, construction and sustainable spatial processes 105
Nina Maritz
SESSION 9
Housing strategies in Namibia 133
Diana Mitlin
NAMIBIAS URBAN FUTURE
RETHINKING HOUSING AND URBANISATION
2020 Namibia University of Science and Technology
This volume is dedicated to the memory of Fabio Todeschini.
Editors
Guillermo Delgado
Phillip Lühl
Contributors
Richard Dobson
Anthea Houston
Bulelwa Makalima-Ngewana
Nina Maritz
Diana Mitlin
Rose Molokoane
Sheela Patel
Kwame Tenadu
Cecile van Schalkwyk
Members of the Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia and
the Namibia Housing Action Group
Introductory Remarks
Tjama Tjivikua
Sophia Shaningwa
Foreword
Leilani Farha
Copy Editing
Sandie Fitchat
Design
Arnaud Franx-Roi Arends
ISBN (Print) 978-99916-903-5-3
ISBN (Electronic) 978-99916-903-6-0
All photographs are by the editors unless otherwise noted.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-
Commercial 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
urbanforum.nust.na
[ iii ][ ii ]
Foreword
Leilani Farha
United Nations Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing
I am sorry I am unable to be with you in Namibia, but I am very pleased to be
able to offer you this message. I think the Urban Forum is coming at the right
time and I do hope your deliberations include a full spectrum of the right to
adequate housing and what it means in the urban context in Namibia.
Let me begin by saying Namibia is a party to a number of international human
rights treaties which include the right to adequate housing included in the
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR)1
and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities2. Namibia also
made commitments to the New Urban Agenda3 at Habitat III4 as well as to the
Sustainable Development Goals5. This therefore has a direct impact on how
Namibia moves forward in the area of housing and suggests that the right to
adequate housing has to be taken quite seriously in order to meet Namibias
obligations and commitments.
So, the question is, what does the right to adequate housing mean? Most
people would say it is access to four walls and a roof, and while that is true,
the right to adequate housing also has a much broader definition. It means
the right to live in peace and security and with dignity, and it identifies some
key characteristics that inform what adequate actually means: characteristics
like security of tenure and freedom from forced evictions, and access to basic
services like potable water and electricity. One of the things that those of
us who are close to the issue of adequate housing note is the way in which
housing has tentacles to any other socio-economic rights and many civil and
political rights. Adequate housing is related to the right to health and/or the
right to education as well as, of course, the right to life.
One of the misconceptions about the right to adequate housing that many
government officials have is that, if we embrace the right to adequate housing,
it means that we need to provide a home immediately to everybody. Under
international human rights law, the right to adequate housing is a progressive
right: it can be realised progressively. That means states need to take steps
immediately and continuously through time to ensure that everyone,
particularly vulnerable groups, have access to adequate housing. There are
of course some immediate obligations on states, namely in those situations
where there are violations of rights, for example, and a state is required to
immediately address homelessness or to ensure access to basic services in
informal settlements. One of the things that I have been discussing with states
on an ongoing basis is the need for states to adopt national housing strategies
that are based in human rights and I think now is the right time for states to
start trying to draft those strategies if they do not have them already in place,
because those strategies will be essential to meeting the commitments under
1 A multilateral treaty adopted by
the United Nations (UN) in 1966
and enforced in 1976, it includes
the right to an adequate standard
of living. The Covenant is part of
the International Bill of Human
Rights, a 1948 UN General Assembly
Resolution on human rights.
Available at https://www.ohchr.org/
en/professionalinterest/pages/cescr.
aspx, last accessed 10 August 2019.
2 Available at https://www.un.org/
development/desa/disabilities/
convention-on-the-rights-of-
persons-with-disabilities.html, last
accessed 10 August 2019.
3 Available at http://habitat3.org/
the-new-urban-agenda, last accessed
10 August 2019.
4 The United Nations Conference
on Housing and Sustainable Urban
Development (Habitat III), held in
Quito, Ecuador, on 20 October 2016.
5 Available at https://
sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs,
last accessed 10 August 2019.
the New Urban Agenda and Target 116 of the Sustainable Development Goals,
which deals with adequate housing for all. I think that, in the development
of national strategies, a key component will be ensuring the meaningful
participation of affected communities, particularly communities that are
living in vulnerable situations, those in informal settlements, and those that
might be subject to forced evictions. It would make sense to include these
communities if you want to ensure an effective strategy going forward.
I would also say that, in moving forward in the area of housing, it is important
that all decisions taken with respect to housing are run through the human
rights framework, in other words, ensuring that every decision taken with
respect to the strategy and with respect to financing the strategy are made
in ways that further the right to adequate housing and do not undermine it.
For example, I have been working quite recently on the issue of financing
of housing7 and it appears that, in many developing countries, there is a
new push to have a financialised housing market that involves, for example,
mortgage financing in order to enable sections of the population to buy
housing. In Namibia we need to think carefully if that is actually realistic and
a viable option. I think there are many creative housing solutions that could
be considered, that go beyond just building new housing and that includes
measures like developing forms of security of tenure for tenants and residents.
I would like to say that, as Special Rapporteur, I am available going forward
if you need assistance on more information and knowledge on the right to
adequate housing. I would like to visit Namibia at any time. I wish you all the
success in the next two days and I do hope that the right to adequate housing
remains central in your deliberations.
6 Make cities and human
settlements inclusive, safe,
resilient and sustainable; https://
sustainabledevelopment.un.org/
sdg11, last accessed 10 August 2019.
7 UN/United Nations. 2017. Report
of the Special Rapporteur on
adequate housing as a component
on the right to an adequate standard
of living, and on the right to
non-discrimination in this context
Human Rights Council, Thirty-fourth
Session No. A/HRC/34/51. United
Nations General Assembly. Available
at https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/
doc/UNDOC/GEN/G17/009/56/PDF/
G1700956.pdf?OpenElement, last
accessed 10 August 2019.
[ v ][ iv ]
Welcoming Remarks
Prof. Tjama Tjivikua
Founding Vice-Chancellor, NUST
Ladies and gentlemen1:
It is my great pleasure to welcome you all on behalf of the Namibia University
of Science and Technology to this special high-level event: the Public Forum
on Housing and Urbanisation. The brainchild of architect Leon Barnard,
the Forum was initiated in 2015 as a cross-institutional platform with a
shared interest to explore, analyse and debate urbanisation in Namibia. Mr
Barnard consulted me on this new initiative and I immediately agreed to
our University hosting the Forum. Its success so far goes to show the need
for its existence and the convergence of diverse stakeholders interests. Well
done, Mr Barnard; well done, our Team in ILMI the Integrated Land
Management Institute in the Faculty of Natural Resources and Spatial
Sciences.
The initiative was launched in the presence of Honourable Sophia
Shaningwa, Minister of Urban and Rural Development, who is again with
us here today, and Her Excellency the First Lady of Namibia, Madame
Monica Geingos, with the overall question: How can economic inclusion be
facilitated through the progressive restructuring of cities?
The lively debate that ensued and the relevance of the discussions for the
future development of Namibia led me to pledge that the event should
become an annual multi-stakeholder gathering focused on urban, housing
and land-related issues and to be hosted by NUST.
This year, the Forum under the theme Rethinking Housing and
Urbanisation aims to address the broad spectrum of technical, economic,
social and legal aspects that are relevant to the production of housing
and urbanisation in general, and to prepare the ground for a holistic,
cross-disciplinary review of Namibias housing and urbanisation agenda.
Recently, NUST signed an agreement with the Ministry of Urban and
Rural Development to review the Blueprint and develop a Strategy for the
implementation of the Mass Housing Development Programme. The same
Ministry is also one of the main sponsors of this Forum, as the issues to be
discussed in the coming two days are closely linked to the larger project of
reviewing Governments response to the crises of housing and urban land
use and management.
NUST is happy to involve many of its academics, students and alumni in
this important project for the development of Namibia, and it is particularly
proud to have established a competent team including experts from the
University of Namibia and the private sector.
1 The official welcoming protocol
has been shortened for ease of
reading.
The Forum is conceived as a two-day workshop, with nine parallel sessions
addressing relevant thematic areas related to housing and urbanisation,
led by international and local scholars and experts, professionals and civil
society representatives. Participants are invited to contribute from their wide
spectrum of experience to discuss what is to be done to enable progressive
and innovative strategies to avail adequate housing to the largest part of the
Namibian population.
The closing panel discussion tomorrow evening, which is open to the general
public, will bring together the various aspects that were discussed during
the Forum in order to grasp the complexity of the question of housing and
urbanisation. If we remind ourselves of the countrys history of socio-spatial
inequalities, contemporary urbanisation is to be understood as a challenge
that can only be redirected if the complexity of the production of space is
actively rethought in trans-disciplinary ways.
Such an approach must cut across the social and spatial divisions and include
all spatial disciplines; Government organisations, ministries and agencies;
civil society organisations; the private sector; and inhabitants.
Distinguished audience:
I am heartened by the initiative taken by the Integrated Land Management
Institute (ILMI) here at NUST, which has partnered with the Ministry of
Urban and Rural Development, the Namibia Urban Design Institute, the
Namibia Institute of Architects and the German International Development
Cooperation Agency (GIZ, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale
Zusammenarbeit) to collaborate in convening this event. This is not an
ordinary academic conference, but a platform where you all should get
involved in the formulation of a progressive housing and urban development
agenda to shape Namibias urban future. But such a huge effort requires every
stakeholders participation and contribution. Therefore, without imposing on
and chasing the interested parties away, I would like to request the stakeholders
to make a pledge towards a contribution that will sustain this noble cause.
Kindly engage our team for a lasting partnership.
I have no doubt that the Forum is leading us to a productive and healthy
society. Thank you, and I wish you fruitful deliberations!
[ vii ][ vi ]
Keynote Address
Hon. Sophia Shaningwa
Minister of Urban and Rural Development
It is a great pleasure to be back at the Namibia University of Science and
Technology for the second Public Forum on Housing and Urbanisation.
Last time I was here, two years ago, I was pleased to see this new platform for
critical debate on urbanisation emerge. Urbanisation within a free society is a
very complex process which requires many minds to come together in order
to understand it better and transform it in progressive ways. Today, I see again
a broad variety of stakeholders present to discuss issues of contemporary
urbanisation and, especially, the aspect of adequate housing, which has a
central role within this debate.
Since 2015, the urban land and housing crisis has only become more
pronounced in the public discourse, and as a Government we have made a
pledge to address it head-on, as laid out in the Harambee Prosperity Plan1.
In fact, the Presidents notion of building the Namibian House is a metaphor
for Governments ambitions to address the lasting socio-economic and spatial
inequalities with which Namibia is burdened. However, today it is up to us to
turn these legacies around in ways that confirm the vision of a shared future
in the Namibian House.
I am excited to see invited speakers from neighbouring countries and overseas
who will share with us experiences and useful knowledge from their own
perspective and work with us in the next two days to devise strategies that
will be able to shape the future of housing and urbanisation in inclusive
and equitable ways. Besides that, Namibia has committed itself to various
international resolutions, most recently the New Urban Agenda developed
during the Habitat III conference in Quito, Ecuador, in October 2016. A
Namibian delegation was sent to represent us in this relevant international
event. This means that we are eager to learn from other countries experiences
and see what can be useful for the particular case of Namibia. It is now time to
decide what the new urban agenda for Namibia will be.
Comrade Vice-Chancellor, distinguished participants:
I am thankful for the colleagues at the Integrated Land Management Institute
at NUST who have heeded the call by my Ministry to organise a forum on
housing which will inform the ongoing revision of the Governments Mass
Housing Development Programme a priority project which has been
commissioned to a trans-disciplinary team led by NUST, but also including
experts from the University of Namibia and the private sector. NUST has
also assisted the Ministry by taking part in the committee meetings of the
Massive Urban Land Servicing Programme, which forms an integral part of
the Governments housing strategy.
1 Available at http://www.gov.
na/documents/10181/264466/
HPP+page+70-71.pdf/bc958f46-
8f06-4c48-9307-773f242c9338,
last accessed 10 August 2019.
documents/10181/264466/
HPP+page+70-71.pdf/bc958f46-
8f06-4c48-9307-773f242c9338, last
accessed 10 August 2019.
Land provision, and adequate housing in particular, are issues for which it is
difficult to find easy answers and which are even more difficult to resolve in a
short period of time. Adequate housing concerns not only my Ministry, but
many others; the structure of Government itself does not always encourage
integrated development as responsibilities and budgets are sometimes
fragmented across different ministries and other Government Offices and
Agencies. Yet, the Ministry of Urban and Rural Development is taking
a leading role in trying to achieve more integrated approaches to urban
development, and the proposed National Spatial Development Framework2
will be key to achieving this aim. The Ministry will continue to require the
assistance of other ministries, academic institutions, the private sector and
civil society to drive the future urban agenda.
While legislation and statutory requirements are being revised to decentralise
and make urban development processes more efficient, this alone will not
serve to provide land and adequate housing to Namibians. Given the current
economic outlook of the country, which requires everyone to tighten their
belts, public spending related to land and housing provision needs to be
wisely administered. Although Government will not be able to build a house
for every Namibian household, it can enable the conditions for Namibians to
access the right to adequate housing through various win-win initiatives such
as publicprivate partnerships that the Government fully supports.
Distinguished participants, ladies and gentlemen:
Therefore, one aspect we are looking forward to developing during this forum
is to widen the definition of housing. Instead of understanding housing as
a house that is bought through some form of financing mechanism, we are
interested in a broad array of housing opportunities which can range from
secured land tenure with Government support for incremental housing
investment, housing for special needs, informal settlement upgrading,
densification of existing plots and underutilised inner city lots of land, to
targeted interventions for social and rental housing, amongst others.
The dominant understanding of housing as property, as simply an economic
asset, at times limits our vision of imagining better and more adequate
housing. Proposals that rely solely on property values, financing mechanisms
and formal income will only be adequate for one part of the socio-economic
spectrum we need to empower. Compatriots who earn a living in the informal
economy and low-paid wage economy need housing as much as anybody else
and solutions for them will not be the same as for Government employees,
civil servants or young professionals. The elderly, the unemployed, students
and rural households are other specific groups we need to consider.
Furthermore, Governments commitment to decentralisation requires us
not only to think deeply about the form of rural housing, but also to imagine
economic opportunities that can be developed in more remote areas of the
country. Shelter alone will not empower people: it needs to allow them to have
a base for generating a livelihood in whichever way they can. The large part of
the Namibian population that relies on livelihoods generated from informal
economic activities will need to be enabled to grow economic activities from
2 See Urban and Regional Planning
Act, 2018 (No. 5 of 2018), available
at https://laws.parliament.na/
cms_documents/urban-and-
regional-planning--1b90438147.pdf,
last accessed 20 July 2018.
[ ix ][ viii ]
their homes, equipping them to improve their and their families socio-
economic situation from within.
Housing, thus, has a role to play in the larger economic development and
industrialisation of the country. While we are historically very dependent on
imports, especially from South Africa, housing does not only imply short-
term jobs in the construction industry: people will also need to buy furniture
and household utensils, materials that could be manufactured locally and
local services all of which could have a lasting economic impact. All these
sectors and more could be stimulated with concerted efforts towards adequate
housing provision.
Director of Ceremonies, distinguished participants:
Design and construction of housing should also be varied in relation to
varying climatic zones in Namibia, environmental limitations and resource
availability, sustainable energy production, affordable green-alternative
solutions, and the social and demographic realities of households. Given the
fact that Namibias future is set to be predominantly urban, as in many other
parts of the world, we need to understand that housing cannot be seen only
in terms of individual housing units, but only also as the building blocks of
streets, neighbourhoods and, ultimately, the city. Thus, it is critical to invest
in the public and shared infrastructure in the urban design of well-integrated
neighbourhoods and cities to ensure they are accessible and well-connected
with regard to public transport options, public facilities and collective spaces.
Housing can be an issue that can be divisive, but it can also be an occasion for
joining forces. Lack of access to housing and urban land can be a major factor
leading to social instability, as people realise how urban opportunities become
increasingly uneven. However, if we come together and develop inclusive,
equitable and progressive strategies, housing can become a factor of unity, of
solidarity, and of contributing to the sentiment of One Namibia, One Nation.
Let us therefore welcome our international guests, members of Government,
local authorities, professionals, students, community-based organisations and
members of the media to this Forum that invites us to rethink housing and
urbanisation in Namibia at this crucial time for our country.
I hereby declare this event open and wish you all the best in the worthwhile
tasks ahead.
I thank you.
[ xi ][ x ]
Editorial Introduction
Guillermo Delgado
Land, Livelihoods and Housing Programme Coordinator, ILMI, NUST
and
Phillip Lühl
Lecturer, Department of Architecture and Spatial Planning, NUST
It is not an understatement to say that the gathering that this book documents
marks a key moment in Namibias socio-spatial development. There are several
reasons for this. Firstly, the gathering took place while the largest programme
targeting urban areas, the Mass Housing Development Programme (MHDP)1
was under review. It was a time of reckoning, reflection and reimagination of
what would come next. Secondly, a wide coalition of stakeholders had eagerly
joined together to make the event possible. The Ministry of Urban and Rural
Development, the City of Windhoek, the GIZ, private sector institutions and
professional bodies all responded to a call by a team at the Namibia University
of Science and Technology (NUST), which hosted the event, to address the
issue of socio-spatial development in the country. A third reason was that
it may arguably have been the largest event of its kind, as it gathered more
than two hundred participants from all over the country. These included
local authority officials, councillors, politicians, professionals, youth leaders,
students, grass-roots representatives, academics, businesspeople and trade
unionists, among others. A fourth reason can be derived from the above,
namely that the interest in urbanisation and housing in Namibia had finally
taken centre stage in the public debate arena. There are several other reasons;
these we will try to expand on in the course of this introduction. We will also
provide some background on the founding on the Forum in 2015, describe
the particularities of its 2017 iteration, and summarise the key contributions
to the latter.
Background
The Forum gathered about two hundred participants to engage with eight
international speakers and a Namibian counterpart. All had been invited to
share their experiences and insights on housing and urbanisation. The Forum
grew in scale when it became part of the body selected to review the MHDP,
which holds the potential to shift the way in which housing production takes
place in Namibia.
The MHDP Blueprint review body was led by the two authors of this text and
Charl-Thom Bayer, Head of the Department of Land and Property Sciences
at NUST at the time. When the MHDP Blueprint was launched in 2013, it
was conceptualised as the most ambitious public programme since Namibias
independence in 19902 . However, after only two years of its implementation, it
was suspended by the new Government due to widely published irregularities.
1 The project, entitled Revision of
the Blueprint and development of a
Strategy to guide the implementation
for the National Mass Housing
Development Programme, was
undertaken by a team led by
NUST during 2017. A website
for the project was established to
disseminate the review findings (see
http://newmasshousing.nust.na, last
accessed 20 July 2019).
2 Hailulu, V. 2014. Housing:
An agent of economic growth.
Presentation at the International
Housing Conference, Cape
Town, 2014. Available at
http://www.sahf.org.za/
Images/2014Proceedings/2014_
Presentations/4_HAILULU_
VINCON.pdf, last accessed 10 August
2019.
Clearly, a new approach was required, so a public call was made to revise the
blueprint that had guided the programme. When the NUST teams proposal
was selected to undertake this revision, it seemed pertinent to utilise the
Forum as a public platform for part of the review process.
The Forum is a multi-stakeholder event hosted by NUST every two years
to focus on urbanisation. The first Forum was held 2015. For its second
edition, namely in 2017, it seemed pertinent to give the Forum a broader
reach and stronger focus on housing and related urbanisation dynamics,
and to document the ensuing discussions as a means of informing the work
undertaken by our 32-member team, which are acknowledged along with
many others who made the event and the publication of this book possible
(see Acknowledgements section).
About the 2017 event
Each of the invited speakers made a significant contribution in his/her field
and shared some of their broad experience in key issues related to housing
and urbanisation. We took particular care to ensure that their message was
relevant to Namibia at the time in question. Namibia is one of the least densely
populated countries in the world,3 with a population of only 2.3 million.4 It is
also one of Africas youngest democracies. However, although the economy
is generally considered stable, it is one of the most unequal countries in the
world.5 Furthermore, the urban question has only recently started to hold
sway in public discourse as, historically, the population has largely been rural,6
cities were the monopoly of whites, 7 and the countrys last and still only
national spatial development strategy was implemented in the 1960s to
consolidate the apartheid regime in the then occupied territory of South West
Africa.8 At the same time, Namibia has had a remarkable record on bottom-
up organising around issues of housing and access to land.9
Nonetheless, we rejected the idea of a Namibian exceptionalism10 that often
attempts to dismiss experiences from elsewhere by retreating into a kind
of certainty drawn from the way things were and the way things currently
are.11 This tendency prevents us from understanding how ongoing and long-
standing processes that are unfolding globally such as urbanisation, the
precarisation of labour, climate change, digitalisation and neoliberalisation
also take place in Namibia. The question, therefore, is not whether Namibias
society is changing or not, but how it is doing so. For instance, we have argued
that the future of Namibia is urban,12 and while noting that the process of
urbanisation can provide an opportunity to overcome inequities, it could also
be a way to enhance them. This tension underlay our selection of topics and
participants for the 2017 Forum programme, because we wanted to include
the many conceptions and misconceptions about housing and urbanisation
that we experience daily when lecturing at NUST, debating with colleagues,
holding discussions with members of the private sector, engaging grass-roots
groups and collaborating with the Government. It is from this tension that the
list of speakers and the programme emerged.
3 According to 2018 World Bank
statistics, after Mongolia, Namibia is
the least-densely-populated country
in the world (https://data.worldbank.
org/indicator/EN.POP.DNST, last
accessed 14 August 2019).
4 NSA/Namibia Statistics Agency.
2016. Namibia Inter-censal
Demographic Survey 2016 Report.
Windhoek: NSA. Available at https://
cms.my.na/assets/documents/
NIDS_2016.pdf, last accessed 13
August 2019.
5 According to 2017 World Bank
statistics, South Africa topped the
list of Most Unequal Country in
the World as measured by the Gini
coefficient; Namibia ranked second
(http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/
SI.POV.GINI, last accessed 14 August
2019).
6 Delgado, G & Lühl, P. 2018.
Namibias urban revolution. The
Namibian, 29 June 2018. Available
at http://ilmi.nust.na/sites/default/
files/20180629-Namibias-urban-
revolution-GD-PL.pdf, last accessed
14 August 2019.
7 Several references document
Namibias spatial apartheid of the
past; see e.g. Hishongwa, NS. 1992.
The contract labour system and its
effects on family and social life in
Namibia: A historical perspective.
Windhoek: Gamsberg Macmillan;
Muller-Friedman, F. 2005. Just build
it modern: Post-apartheid spaces on
Namibias urban frontier. In Salm,
S & Falola, T (Eds). African urban
spaces in historical perspective.
Rochester: University of Rochester
Press, pp 4872; Simon, D. 1991.
Windhoek: Desegregation and
change in the capital of South Africas
erstwhile colony. In Lemon, Anthony
(Ed.). Homes apart: South Africas
segregated cities. Cape Town: David
Philip, pp 174190.
8 Delgado, G. 2018. A short socio-
spatial history of Namibia. Integrated
Land Management Institute
Working Paper 9. Windhoek:
Namibia University of Science and
Technology. Available at http://
ilmi.nust.na/sites/default/files/
WP9-DELGADO-A-short-history-of-
Namibia-WEB.pdf, last accessed 10
January 2019.
9 For a historical overview, see:
Keulder, C. 1994. Urban women
and self-help housing in Namibia:
[ xiii ][ xii ]
The programme
The Forum served as a platform for an intergenerational, multi-stakeholder
and multi-country exchange, at the centre of which were urban matters, and
particularly housing. Speakers addressed a broad spectrum of technical,
economic, social and legal issues relating to the production of housing and
urbanisation. The programme was structured as a two-day workshop with
nine parallel sessions addressing relevant thematic areas. Each session had
topic keynote address and a closing panel discussion.
The sessions profited from the experience of speakers from Ghana, India and
South Africa, while others offered insights from their work across the world.
Many sessions shared experiences from South Africa because of the historical
bonds that make it Namibias closest sister country. However, although the
scale of the South African population and its economy is many times that
of Namibias,13 the relative magnitude and nature of challenges concerning
informal settlements can be considered similar.14 It would seem easy, therefore,
for Namibia to emulate South Africas experiences. However, it was sobering
to hear South African presenters speak with scepticism about their situation:
how, despite massive subsidies, housing shortages were on the rise;15 how,
despite acknowledgment that their central government needed to work with
inhabitants in informal settlements, the bureaucratic reality made it extremely
hard to make such alliances work;16 how, despite having a progressive and
strong legal framework enshrining the right to adequate housing, the battle
to give meaning to this right and to be effective on the ground seemed to be
an uphill one.17 Ultimately, focusing overtly on the South African experience
might reinforce the pre-Independence situation that provincialised Namibia
by putting South Africa at the centre. This, then, is one of the lessons that
we have learnt: to reimagine a unique and decolonialised urban future for
Namibia, it may be strategic to draw lessons from contexts beyond those
presented by the former colonial powers.
This volume
This publication of the second Forums proceedings presents transcripts
of the contributions by invited speakers during the various sessions and
the ensuing debate. Apart from one or two presenters, none spoke English
as a mother tongue/first language. Editorially, we decided to respect
the nuances of language use in the text to account more authentically
for the different voices within the debate. Where necessary, transcripts
were amended by our editorial team in respect of repetition or in the
interests of brevity. Some of the contributions were reviewed by the
speaker themselves, while others added new references for the readers
benefit. Source materials are referred to briefly in footnotes and in full
in a list at the end of this volume. The publication is distributed free of
charge and is available online through NUSTs repository to ensure broad
dissemination.
A summary of key contributions
Leilani Farha, the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on Adequate
Housing, is part of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner
for Human Rights. In this capacity, Ms Farha monitors how governments
across the world not only ensure that inhabitants enjoy the right to adequate
housing, but also prevent the violation of this right. Unfortunately, Ms Farha
was not able to join us in Windhoek and instead delivered a video address for
the opening session in which she confirmed that Namibia was a signatory to
the UN Conventions that recognise the right to adequate housing. Therefore,
it seemed natural to invite the Special Rapporteur to what would have been
her first country visit to Namibia in respect of her mandate.18 In her address,
presented as the Foreword herein, she reminds us how housing has many
tentacles that have implications of national interest, including how the notion
of housing affects public health and education and how spending public funds
on housing is a social investment. She notes that housing offers better places
for young people to do their homework, and provides healthier conditions
for families which in turn allows them to contribute to the countrys
development.19 The Special Rapporteur warned how some approaches that
seemed logical might not necessarily be the most adequate or realistic; in
this regard, she singled out housing finance approaches or turnkey housing
solutions. Most importantly, she offered assistance via her Office to ensure the
right to adequate housing through public interventions in Namibia could be
realised.
Rose Molokoane Chair of the World Urban Campaign and National
Chairperson of Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI), brought to
the fore the lived experience in informal settlements and how collective
efforts gained low-income inhabitants a foothold to urban life. Her candid
approach won empathy among a room full of professionals, local authority
representatives and high-ranking government officials. Her presence along
with that of members of the Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia (SDFN)
and unions representing domestic workers created a situation that Sheela
Patel (Director of the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers
SPARC in Mumbai, India) noted was crucial in these kinds of debates:
one where poor people were in the room as partners reimagining Namibias
urban future. Ms Molokoanes key message was that low-income groups had
demonstrated the capacity to undertake their own development, and that
governments employed their resources better when engaging and partnering
with such groups and co-produced a kind of development where parties
met each other halfway. Since her voice was one of experience, she did not
sugar-coat the complex realities of such processes; she admitted that, every
day, she and her organisation were involved in trying to solve one problem
after the next. These challenges included conflicts within groups, bureaucratic
hurdles, corruption, and the nature of authorities that are often reshuffled (i.e.
changing portfolio or office frequently). Therefore, she did not offer a panacea,
but rather an alternative to state- and contractor-led strategies such as mass
A case-study of Saamstaan Housing
Cooperative. Namibian Economic
Policy Research Unit Working Paper
42. Windhoek: NEPRU; MRLGH/
Ministry of Regional and Local
Government and Housing & Ibis.
1996. Upgrading of shanty areas
in Oshakati, Namibia. OHSIP Best
Practice Report. Windhoek: MRLGH
& Ibis. For a contemporary account
of recent processes, see: Mitlin,
D & Muller, A. 2004. Windhoek,
Namibia: Towards progressive urban
land policies in Southern Africa.
International Development Planning
Review, 26(2):167186.
10 During the session with Nina
Maritz (see chapter entitled Design,
construction and sustainable spatial
processes in this volume), Gabriel
Marín Castro, Special Advisor on
Mass Housing to the Minister of
Urban and Rural Development at
that time, noted the tendency among
Namibians to regard their situation
as unique.
11 Examples of which were We
Namibians want to own our house.
We dont want to live on top of
each other (referring to living in
structures of two or more storeys)
and We dont want to live in town;
we just come here for work.
12 Lühl & Delgado (2018).
13 According to 2018 World Bank
statistics, South Africas population is
more than 22 times that of Namibias
(https://data.worldbank.org/
indicator/SP.POP.TOTL, last accessed
14 August 2019) and its economy,
measured by gross domestic product,
is 26 times larger (https://data.
worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.
MKTP.CD, last accessed 14 August
2019).
14 To compare, see recent figures for
Namibia: Weber, B & Mendelsohn,
J. 2017. Informal settlements in
Namibia: Their nature and growth.
Exploring ways to make Namibian
urban development more socially
just and inclusive. Occasional
Paper 1. Windhoek: Development
Workshop Namibia. Available at
http://dw-namibia.org/wp-content/
uploads/2017/11/Informal-
settlements-in-Namibia-their-
nature-and-growth-DWN-2017.pdf,
last accessed 14 August 2019; and
for South Africa in: HDA/Housing
Development Agency. 2012. South
Africa: Informal settlements status.
Johannesburg: HDA. Available
at http://upgradingsupport.org/
uploads/resource_documents/
HDA_Informal_settlements_status_
South_Africa.pdf, last accessed 14
August 2019.
15 See Session 9 hererin.
16 See Session 1 hererin.
17 See Session 6 hererin.
18 See https://www.ohchr.org/EN/
Issues/Housing/Pages/CountryVisits.
aspx, last accessed 14 August 2019.
19 How improved living conditions
contribute to the national
economy was a point also raised
in the discussions following the
session keynote address entitled
Community-based urban strategies
and social innovation by Sheela
Patel.
[ xv ][ xiv ]
housing, where inhabitants would be engaged as partners in a process that had
proven to yield equity and other positive results. During the discussion, Ms
Molokoane also shared that she had become the Chair of the World Urban
Campaign to make it clear that professionals, as well as local and central
governments, had a lot to learn from inhabitants of informal settlements.
She ended her session with an invitation to join hands to find solutions to
Namibias urban housing problems.
In the session led by Sheela Patel, she proposed that instead of dwelling only
on the experiences from India, the session should be focused on the processes
that the SDI supported, with a specific focus on the Namibian achievements
in the field of urban housing. Ms Patel, who also serves as a member of the SDI
Board, explained the origins of her organisation and SDI in India. They soon
realised that the state was not the only one that had the wisdom to produce
policy. This realisation was not sudden, but part of a process of organising
women in informal settlements (known in India as slums), and engaging
professionals, government and the private sector in the upgrading of living
conditions.
Otilie Nailulu and Inga Boye, two members of the SDFN, introduced
the Federation and presented some of their successes. They clarified that
they were only able to afford smaller plots than those of a minimum size
that the Namibian Government promoted, and that this allowed them to
accommodate more members on the land they were allocated by Local
Authorities. Ms Patel reminded the audience that both India and Namibia
had imported colonial administration procedures ... that just [didnt] work
for poor people and called it a mockery to speak of standards when two
thirds of a community lived in abject poverty. The call for overcoming the
apartheid and colonial city found resonance throughout the Forum.
Richard Dobson, who represented a South African non-governmental
organisation (NGO) known as Asiye eTafuleni (AeT), shared experiences and
reflections on his work on the case of the Warwick Junction, a transport node
in Durban that has become a key example of multi-stakeholder intervention
to support livelihoods through informal trade. This work, he argued, was
particularly relevant in view of South Africas exclusionary past, which had laid
the foundations for a segregated reality with parallel worlds where neither
party learned from the other. In a very down-to-earth manner, he spoke about
informal trade as simply peoples reaction to joblessness. At the same time,
he cautioned that the scale of this kind of economy in South Africa, as well as
in Namibia,20 could no longer be regarded as marginal because it represented
the livelihood of the largest portion of South Africas population. Mr Dobson
also outlined how so-called informal livelihoods provided a new entrance to
the city for many coming from smaller towns or rural areas, and that while
such newcomers were initially not urban-literate, they eventually acquired a
significant urban intelligence that was different to that of municipal officials
and professionals in urban development fields. He suggested that the process
of engaging with informal processes in urban areas allowed one to create
unique spaces beyond the one-dimensional, modernist-apartheid vision
that continued to characterise many urban areas. Key to his contribution was
that local Government had transitioned from being scared of informality
associating it with crime, the black market and tax avoidance, for example
to engaging with it through innovative modalities such as area-based urban
management.
Bulelwa Makalima-Ngewana, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the
Cape Town Partnership (CTP),21 a publicprivate partnership (PPP) to
improve the City of Cape Towns central business district (CBD), spoke about
urban transformation and how publicprivate efforts have tried to create
partnerships to adapt to these changes. She explained how, since South Africas
democratisation in 1994, the city centre gradually entered a phase of decline.
The newly created City of Cape Town Metropolitan Area was not particularly
interested in dealing with the main city-centre CBD since it had various other
CBDs to attend to in the Cape Town area. As a result, property owners entered
into an agreement with the City in what became known as the Cape Town
Partnership. This entity was set up to provide certain supplementary services
which they believed the city needed, such as security and additional trash
collection. One of the key points Ms Makalima-Ngewana raised was how,
through investment, the CBD indeed started to develop, but that this kind of
development was not necessarily inclusive as much of it involved speculative
investment. She noted how property prices in the CBD had since become
unattainable for most Capetonians, and that this had contributed to rather
than subverted the housing situation: affordable housing remained at the city
periphery, while work opportunities remained in more central areas, resulting
in vast and expensive commuting by those least able to afford it. She observed
that where high land values become problematic, they can only be mitigated
by the municipality to ensure affordability. However, she also presented
successful examples of activating the city centre through art festivals, support
to informal trade and sports activities. She stressed how it was not only that
such activities took place, but also that they did so in public spaces: I do
not think we will be able to reverse the apartheid city design without paying
particular attention to public spaces, she stated.
Anthea Houston, CEO of Communicare, one of the largest social housing
companies in South Africa, shared her organisations experience with social
housing in her country. As Namibia currently does not have a social housing
sector, her presentation included recommendations for establishing such a
sector within the array of housing options. Crucially, she explained not only the
mechanisms of the social housing system in South Africa, but also its inherent
contradictions and how such obstacles could be overcome. In South Africa,
social housing was defined as rental housing for a specific, legislated income
group, and was provided by accredited and tightly regulated social housing
institutions such as Communicare. She highlighted that the provision of social
housing was not merely a matter of administration and finances: crucially,
20 The latest Namibia Labour Force
Survey shows that two-thirds of
the population that is considered
to be employed can be considered
informal. See: NSA. (2019). Namibia
Labour Force Survey 2018. Retrieved
from Namibia Statistics Agency
website: https://d3rp5jatom3eyn.
cloudfront.net/cms/assets/
documents/Namibia_Labour_Force_
Survey_Reports_2018_pdf.pdf
21 Shortly after this Forum, funding
for the CTP ceased. The body is now
defunct.
[ xvii ][ xvi ]
it was about the way you engage with people. She gave some examples of
how various challenges had been overcome, such as negotiating for a social
housing development to be built within a middle-income neighbourhood or
familiarising new tenants with the ways of collective living. In her experience,
there is a social price to pay down the line when people are disengaged.
Cecile van Schalkwyk of the Legal Resources Centre (LRC) in South Africa
presented the experiences that that country had undergone with regard to the
right to adequate housing. Although this right was enshrined in the South
African Constitution of 1996, it was not until the 2000s that its full implications
were made transparent through the Grootboom case22 litigated by the LRC.
She explained how the case was only the beginning of a sequence of struggles
to advance the right to adequate housing. She shared key insights with regard
to the lessons learnt through these struggles, namely how property titles had
proven to be a problematic way of addressing security of tenure for the very
poor; how individualised or Westernised forms of ownership disregarded
already existing social arrangements; how women were at a disadvantage,
particularly because of customary marriages; how housing waiting lists had
caused confusion and corruption instead of equity; how South Africas various
mechanisms to fight corruption in local government were not adequately
enforced; how efforts to limit the resale of subsidised housing had instead
created an informal market for such properties; and how political parties
used housing allocations as a way to influence elections in certain areas.
Despite being a legal practitioner herself, Ms Van Schalkwyk admitted that
legal recourse had its limits, and gave as an example how only 1% of housing
evictions took place in accordance with the law.23 Although much had been
learnt, in Ms Van Schalkwyks opinion, it still seemed that the right to adequate
housing as a constitutionally entrenched prerogative had not solved the
housing question in South Africa; indeed, it had instead created a different set
of conditions in terms of which the struggle for housing was unfolding.
Kwame Tenadu, Chair of the International Federation of Surveyors (FIG)
Commission on Spatial Planning and Development, presented experiences
from China, Ghana and Rwanda in respect of land reform. Speaking from a
land administration perspective, and specifically referring to the process of
land reform, he highlighted the questions of whether land reform happened
through due process and whether it was equitable. He explained how China
adopted a system in which the State retained land ownership, only selling
rights of use to non-State parties. Turning to Rwanda, Mr Tenadu shared how
its land policy and law created a clear distinction between urban and rural
land, providing strong institutional systems and decentralised procedures
that enabled systematic land registration nationwide. Ghana, the speakers
own country of origin, was unique in that most of its land (80%) was owned
by community chiefs. He explained how the country did not have a unitary
system of land registration, but had different systems regulating different tenure
modalities, similar to those which obtained in Namibia.24 He concluded by
proposing a hybrid model that created neither easy and abundant wealth for
some, nor abject poverty and dispossession for others, but rather encouraged
the retention of a middle path where everyone got a relatively fair share.
Local architect Nina Maritz launched her presentation by offering an overview
of the housing situation in Namibia, followed by the rest of her contribution
in four sections. In the first section she defined housing typologies, and
then outlined the various typologies that she had observed in the Namibian
context. She discussed the latter in terms of cost, cultural adequacy, usefulness
for different social groups, materials, social arrangements, and other aspects
of housing adequacy. The second section of her presentation, which dealt
with construction and housing delivery, highlighted the need to experiment
with and to test housing strategies that recognised and responded to the
reality on the ground. The third section dealt with issues of sustainability.
Ms Maritz clarified that, in referring to environmental sustainability, she
sought interventions that were sustainable in terms of, among other things,
affordability, materials, environment, technology and design. In this regard,
she emphasised the specific benefits of compact and dense cities. The last
section of the presentation dealt with urban living. In this part, Ms Maritz
explained how cities were places of multiplicity, where the criteria of what
one group thought as pretty, useful or necessary might be contested by
others; how cities were places where new ways of living could emerge; and
how informal strategies were part-and-parcel of urban life, all around the
world. Her presentation was rich in visual input by way of maps, photographs,
diagrams and floorplans, and offered scenarios from many different parts of
the world.
The concluding panel discussion brought together all Forum participants25
and opened with a session address by Prof. Diana Mitlin from the
University of Manchester and the International Institute for Environment
and Development. In her work, Prof. Mitlin has focused on Namibia since the
1990s, but also profits from experiences of the SDI and the Asian Coalition for
Housing Rights. A pre-eminent thinker on matters of the built environment
across the world, she brought a synthetic set of insights that were relevant for
Namibia to consider at this crucial time. She argued that housing was not
simply a matter of shelter: it was also about engendering a sense of belonging,
strengthening incomes and economic opportunities, reducing individual and
social vulnerabilities, and contributing to the overall objective of promoting
democracy through neighbourhoods where social groups interact and deal
with each other. She also reminded participants that the urban present in
Africa was informal, and that housing strategies recognising this may be more
adequate if they reduced costs of living, promoted densification and shaped
situations that brought different social groups together. She also pointed to
the vast body of evidence showing that displacing low-income groups, even
if part of a well-intended upgrading strategy, made the displaced even more
vulnerable by disrupting support networks and often relocating inhabitants
to more marginalised areas. She also stressed the need to go to scale,26 and
how this could best be done by collaborating with the residents of informal
22 Grootboom and Others v
Government of the Republic of South
Africa and Others - Constitutional
Court Order (CCT38/00) [2000]
ZACC 14 (21 September 2000).
24 LAC. (2005). A place we want to
call our own: A study on land tenure
policy and securing housing rights
in Namibia. Legal Assistance Centre.
http://www.lac.org.na/projects/lead/
Pdf/aplacewewanttocallourown.pdf
25 Anthea Houston, the CEO of
Communicare, had to return to
South Africa and could not join the
final panel discussion.
26 This point was also raised by Patel
in her session discussions, where she
mentioned that the need to produce
full evidence for each town that poor
people can do something as being
one of the key barriers to going to
scale. See chapter in this volume
entitled Community-based urban
strategies and social innovation with
Sheela Patel.
23 The limits of legal recourse
coincide with Patels assertion herein
(see chapter entitled Community-
based urban strategies and social
innovation in this volume) that
poor people institutions feel that
they get further impoverished if they
take anything to court, and how the
SDI only resorted to this recourse
when it was strategic to do so.
[ xix ][ xviii ]
settlements. In her last point she stressed the need to understand housing
provision as a learning process: What makes the difference is learning from
experience, convening people to understand what is going on and what has
been tried on the ground, and looking at the evidence together. She noted
the success of bottom-up processes such as those undertaken by the NHAG,
SDFN and the Build Together Programme. At the same time, she admitted
that communities cannot do it alone, and that multi-stakeholder alliances
and co-learning would be required to go to scale. The ensuing panel discussion
provided some synthesis of the event.
Concluding remarks
When the closing panel was opened up for contributions from the floor, a
NUST student argued that the costs incurred in holding the Forum would
have been enough to build one or two houses. Sheela Patel replied that, in
her long experience, she had heard similar criticism to events aiming only to
create a platform for discussion. She said that she had learned, through her
engagements with other women activists, that building one or two houses was
merely Band-Aid:
We do not want Band-Aid. We want to be part of a multi-generational
process in which we make sure that we, the young people, do not make
all the mistakes that you have made.
This was the spirit of the Urban Forum: to collectively convene a process
to disrupt some of the ongoing and long-standing patterns that produce
uneven socio-spatial development. It is still too soon to measure the effect
that the Forum had, but one of the concrete outcomes was that a group of
lecturers from NUST and the University of Namibia as well as members of
NHAG got together to draft a concept note on how to scale up participatory
informal settlement upgrading,27 which is currently receiving some attention
from Government. The debate on urban land reform and related matters in
Namibia has continued to gain traction, and is to be one of the key thematic
areas discussed at Namibias Second National Land Conference slated for
2018.28 Now that the platforms for multi-generational and multi-stakeholder
engagement have been created, that bottom-up processes are recognised
as valuable and impactful, that lessons have been learned from previous
approaches, and that political will seems to have been kindled, Namibias
urban future is entering an interesting phase.
27 National Alliance for Informal
Settlement Upgrading. 2017.
Conept Note. Available at http://
nationalalliance.nust.na, last
accessed 10 August 2019.
28 The thematic areas were
Commercial land reform
programmes and related matters,
Communal land reform programmes
and related matters, Land tax and
valuation systems and related
matters, Ancestral land rights and
restitution, and Urban land reform
and related matters. For the official
Government website, see http://
www.mlr.gov.na/land-conference1.
NUST opened a mirror website at
http://dna.nust.na/landconference/
landconference.html to have the
documentation of the Conference
available online.
Photograph by Martin Namupala
[ xxi ][ xx ]
Acknowledgments
We wish to express our deepest gratitude to
" All who attended and contributed to making this a momentous event, re-
energising the debate on housing and urbanisation
" All the speakers, particularly those who travelled long distances to join us
in Windhoek for the event
" Geraldine van Rooi, Jennifer Botha, and Charl-Thom Bayer for
competently moderating various sessions
" The Ministry of Urban and Rural Development (MURD) for partnering
with NUST to make the event possible, and all the partners who joined the
MURDNUST alliance
" The NUST community, particularly NUSTs Hotel School, for all their
positive contributions during the event
" The SDI for making it possible for Rose and Sheela to travel to Namibia to
attend the Forum
" All the institutions that supported this event, in particular the City of
Windhoek, the GIZ, Windhoek Consulting Engineers and the Namibia
Institute of Architects
" Lydia Muadinohamba and Tangeni Shindondola for their coordination of
aspects of the event
" Muna Anguwo, Jacqueline Tjozongoro and Elizabeth Shigwedha for
taking care of the administration
" Those who assisted in the review of the MHDP Blueprint, namely
Gerhardus Beukes, Rosine Biraheka, Kaleb Dumeni, Pandeni Gama,
Samantha Hailombe, Diina Hamuteta, Luise Iipumbu, Simao Lobo,
Rymoth Mbeha, Memory Mudabeti, Queen Muluta, Martin Namupala,
Herman Paulinus and Charisma Shipena
" Sara Nakalila, Nangula Shilongo and Esther Shipuata for taking charge of
the exhibition on housing alternatives at the event
" The German Development Bank KfW , the National Housing Enterprise,
the international design studio Graft, and the Namibian companies Bob
Mould Architects, Nina Maritz Architects and Winfried Holze Architects
for exhibiting their work for this event
" The insitutions that made the Forum possible; such as the German
Cooperation Agency GIZ, Windhoek Consulting Engineers, the City of
Windhoek, and the Namibia Institute of Architects
" Sandie Fitchat for language editing the final version of the publication
" Arnaud Franx-Roi Arends for its design and layout
" Nashilongweshipe Mushaandja for sharing ideas on the way the publication
could be a more generative device than merely a static archive.
The Editors
§
[ 1 ][ xxii ]
SESSION 1
Informal Urbanisation
and Peoples Processes
Rose Molokoane
Chair, World Urban Campaign
National Chairperson, Shack/Slum Dwellers International
A veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle and recognised as one of the most
internationally known grass-roots activists involved in land tenure and housing
issues, Rose Molokoane is the National Chairperson of the 80,000-member South
African Homeless Peoples Federation, their national savings coordinator, a Board
Member of Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI) and a Board Member of
the Federation of the Urban and Rural Poor (FEDUP). Based in South Africa,
she is a resident of the Oukasie a settlement outside Pretoria and a member of
its savings scheme. Ms Molokoane has initiated federations of savings schemes
throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. To acknowledge her achievements in
bringing land and homes to the poor, she was awarded the United Nations Human
Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) Scroll of Honour in 2005. In the same
year, she was appointed to the Council of South Africas Social Housing Regulatory
Authority (SHRA) by that countrys Minister of Human Settlements. In 2016, Ms
Molokoane was elected to chair the World Urban Campaign Steering Committee
for the coming two years for the next two-year period.1
The session was moderated by Geraldine van Rooi, Lecturer, Department of
Architecture and Spatial Planning, NUST.
1 https://www.worldurbancampaign.
org/civil-society-takes-over-
leadership-world-urban-campaign,
last accessed 26 July 2019; http://
habitat3.org/the-conference/
programme/speakers/rose-
molokoane/, last accessed 26 July
2019; http://www.sasdialliance.org.
za/minister-sisulu-appoints-fedups-
rose-molokoane-to-council-of-social-
housing-regulatory-authority/, last
accessed 26 July 2019.
Photograph by Taleni Iiyambo
[ 3 ][ 2 ]
I am fed-up. I become strategically fed-up, because I do not go on the street to
fight my government: I invite my government to come and sit around a table
and then we engage, deliberate, argue, and compromise and end up agreeing
amongst each other.
My organisation is called the Federation of the Urban and Rural Poor. In short,
it is called FEDUP. I am a coordinator there, and I am also part of a saving[s]
group called Oukasie Savings Scheme, which is part of the Federation.
FEDUP is a South African organisation led by women using their savings as
a tool to mobilise and organise. It has given birth to many other countries
federations, like the Federation in Namibia. Why am I just bringing this
picture to you? To understand that poor people can be homeless and landless,
but they are not hopeless. They can build themselves up to achieve what they
want in their lives.
Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI) is an organisation of 33 countries
around the world, especially in Latin America, in India and many in Africa.
We are really sick and tired of becoming subjects of discussion from the side
of the formal world. We come from the informal world, and we are really sick
and tired of becoming beneficiaries of the decisions that are taken by other
people without involving us. But we didnt give up; we just said. Lets organise
ourselves so that our voices can be heard.
In 1987, the Catholic Church organised civil society, brought them together
and told them: Stand up and do it for yourself, because government cannot
do it for everyone. 1991 they came to South Africa. I was interested to listen
to the discussions. The Indians were leading the discussions then. They said to
us, We have voted for our government for 40 years and we waited for honey
and milk. The Indians said, We have voted for our Indian Prime Minister
expecting honey and milk to flow on the street, but at the end of the day we
received a queue of 800 people sharing one toilet. As poor people, if you vote
for your own president, like I did with Nelson Mandela, I thought everything
will be alright.
How can 800 people share one toilet? I wanted to see the queue! I was then
invited to India. In 1992 we went there to experience the queue, but you will
never see people in the queue. If you really want to see the queue, you will
go where the people are and you will find people squatting on the pavement
relieving themselves because there are no toilets.
Coming back to southern Africa, you will find that those people who are very
poor, who the government is neglecting, started organising themselves and
they said: It is never too late. Lets come together. Poor people do not know
how to read and write, but they are strong in savings. These women came
together and said, These are our lives. These are our families lives. We are the
only ones that can change the way we live, and if we change it, we will show our
government that we can do it.
I am telling you, today, the very same women are still there from 1991. Now,
when the Government of India wants to do something in the informal
settlements, they go to these women and say, Can you help us to do it? That is
the power of organising, and that is the power of putting women at the centre
of the organisation.
In 1991, the Indians challenged us in South Africa: We are hearing you
say, Mandela! Mandela! Release Mandela!. What are you going to do when
Mandela comes out from prison? Are you going to wait for him to build
more houses? To build more schools? To build more toilets? To give you more
water? And then we said, Yes. He will be our president. After going to India,
I realised I had to prepare myself for rainy times.
We started our savings scheme in 1992, but we didnt just say Save!. We had
to come up with an agenda that could bring us together as poor people. The
agenda belonged to us: it was driven by no one else but us, to take decisions
on our own behalf. The agenda was about saving, putting women at the centre,
data collection through information-gathering, profiling and enumeration,
mapping, shack counting and all that. Then we said, What are we going to
do with it? Then we also said, Create partnerships with our councillors,
our municipalities, with our provincial government, and with our national
government. But the one that we targeted mostly was the housing department
[Department of Human Settlements], because we know that housing is one
of the biggest problems in communities and if we do not target the housing
department, the policies will be drafted by the people who do not understand
the life of the people in informal settlements.
In 1994, when South Africa got democracy, I was part of it. We went there
and said, How are we going to do [it], so that this government sees our
process? We do not want to be like the Indians and get there very late. The first
Minister of Housing was Joe Slovo.2 At that time, we had a small NGO that was
supporting us to formalise our informal language. Our language was just like
a street language; we had to go to somebody who was educated to change our
language for it to be understood by the formal world. During this Ministers
first hundred days in office, we knocked at his door. Our organisation was
already four years old. He opened the door. Then we said, We are here. We do
not want to be late. Listen to us. We need your support. We want to build our
own houses. He said, Give me the model. We gave him the model, and he
used that model to open a conference in the Free State.3 In that conference, he
brought all the people to come and make a pledge: businesspeople, academics,
local government. We were the only poor peoples organisation that attended,
and we were so afraid. I remember, I was part of that; and I remember the
guys from the unions telling me, What do you want here? Then I said, The
Minister invited us. He told us to come and attend this. Fortunately, my NGO
wrote a statement for me. I can read, but at that time I could not speak English
fluently. I was the only young and thin one among the huge, white and black
men with ties and suits. I started reading our pledges and organisation.
We pledged that we would continue to organise and mobilise poor people
2 Anti-apartheid activist, member of
the South African Communist Party,
and Minister of Housing from 1994
until his death in 1995 (http://www.
sahistory.org.za/people/joe-slovo).
3 One of the Provinces in South
Africa.
[ 5 ][ 4 ]
around savings, putting women at the centre, making sure that we continue
to drive our own development through self-reliance. It was the only speech
that the minister took seriously, because the others wanted profit. We did
not want profit, we just wanted to build houses. We signed the pledge and
from that day, the Department of Human Settlement knew that, when we
talk, we do what we say. We do not just talk what we write, but we talk what
we do. Then the Minister called us for another meeting on our own, without
any other people. Then he said, I am pledging R10 million to you to start
your own housing development. That is how we started to build our own
houses. At that time, we were able to build 70 m² and 80 m² houses. We
shared the money amongst ourselves, using it as a revolving fund, lending
to each other. At that time a house cost N$10,000. To date, all the people
we have built houses for through this organisation are still occupying their
houses; they are continuing to improve them through the savings that we
are making: plastering, putting in a new kitchen and extending their houses.
The savings did not stop: every week people come together to share their
experiences of life. Our savings are not just to put money together: we use
savings to bring people together, to share their challenges and their daily
problems, and to come up with solutions to address these daily problems.
In 1995 Joe Slovo died, and they brought in the new Minister, Sanki Mahanyele.
At that time, the N$10 million was not yet in the bank. Then we went to her and
said, You know, in our black culture, the word of the dead person should be
respected. The minister promised us N$10 million. Can you bring it? She was
frightened by the words of the dead person, and she agreed and said that we
should sign an agreement. We then had the uTshani Fund Agreement. uTshani
means it is us. On top of that, she established the National Housing Board. On
this Board she invited experts: the architects, the urban planners, the financiers,
the lawyers, everyone. And again, I was the only one there from the community,
without any degree. During that time, I became an unprofessional professional,
because while they were talking, for the first three meetings, I sat listening to
them. Every time before the meeting, they would give you a very big bible that
you had to go and read.4 I cant read: I just need money to build a house. Finish en
klaar.5 In the third meeting I told them, Guys, I am not here to come and read
this bible. I am sent here by the poor people from a grass-roots community to
come and tell you to give us money. We want to build houses. How you can give
it to us? I can explain it you. So, they gave me a chance to make a presentation. It
was the first time I did a presentation to the formal world.
We are the people who can drive the Peoples Housing Process (PHP)
Programme.6 We can do our own plans, we can do our own costing, we can
identify our own builders, we can manage our own finance only if you give
us our own subsidies upfront. They gave us money on top of the N$10 million
that we have been revolving.
So, we continued. They saw we were building bigger and better houses. But
they said they would continue with their way of building houses. They called
4 Most likely documents commonly
distributed to those participating
in institutional boards, such as the
minutes of the previous meeting,
the agenda and other supporting
materials.
5 A common expression in South
Africa and Namibia, which literally
translates as finished and finished
and idiomatically as thats the end
of it, thats final. In the Afrikaans
language, klaar means finished and
en is and.
6 The Peoples Housing Process
(PHP) Programme was adopted
in 1998; in 2008. it became the
Enhanced Peoples Housing Process
(ePHP); see Tissington (2011).
them Reconstruction and Development Programme houses, we call them
RDP;7 but in our different languages we call them ovezinyawo. You know what
ovezinyawo is? When you are sleeping in that house, your feet are outside.
So, we used to call them that because they were so small. When government
saw that people were now building bigger houses and [that there were] other
people who were lazing around, being too dependent on government, they
said, [How can] they build bigger houses with the same money we use to
build smaller houses? They realised it was a divide-and-rule situation, and
they said, No, let us review this PHP policy. They tried to review it. Then they
called developers, and the developers ran to banks and got loans and identified
the beneficiaries on their behalf. The beneficiaries contributed that money
and it failed because they could not build the way we build. For us, when the
subsidy comes, we do not need profit. All the money goes into the houses.
That is where the problem is in South Africa. To date, maybe 45% of the houses
that they built for the people do not belong to the people that were supposed
to be benefitting. They came and saw it was Rose Molokoanes house; then she
sold it to Anna Muller and moved out to the shacks again. Its a continuous
problem. The very same people that were told, We are building it for you,
have moved out. They have now again started other informal settlements. So,
doing it for the people is good, but you should do it with them.
Anna Muller told me when we were at the SDI meetings [that] mass housing
was coming to Namibia. I thought, Oh my God, Namibian Government, you
are going to throw a lot of money into the sea. Because our governments are
spoiling us by saying, We are doing it for you. I will never enjoy something
that you are providing for me; but if my sweat is there, I will preserve it because
it will become a treasure to me.
When we [FEDUP] came here to Namibia, it was in 1991, we came to a
conference to start the Federation in Namibia. Then, in 2000, when I came to
Namibia for the first time, we met with Minister Nicky Iyambo.8 We started
the first enumeration project in Okahandja Park. Then we made the model
house to show the Minister that we could build this house. We built the model
house with conventional construction materials and the Minister came and
inaugurated [it]. After that, we said, Now, what do you pledge, Minister?
We do not just want you to cut a ribbon without a pledge. Then the Minister
pledged N$1 million to our Federation of Namibia. That is how we started to
build bigger houses, bigger than the South African ones. From then on, Namibia
[the Namibian Government] gave us N$1 million every year because they built
trust in us. If the people can do it, [its] better; if we do it for them, it becomes a
disaster. It forces you to change the policy, because if you let government do it by
themselves, they will just come with the mass housing copied from South Africa.
Then your policy will be a very beautiful policy like a beautiful lady who is
waiting for somebody to propose love, but nobody comes to her and says, I
love you. Government can join us today in doing it together, to build bigger and
better houses for everyone. I am not criticising, we are calling for joining hands.
8 Minister of Regional and Local
Government and Housing from 1996
to 2002.
7 The RDP is a socio-economic
programme in South Africa launched
in 1994 to address past imbalances,
particularly in the provision of
basic services (RSA 1994). Housing
represented one of the key aspects
of this programme. By 2016, about
4.3 million housing opportunities
were reported to have been delivered
since 1994 (http://www.dhs.gov.za/
content/media-statements/minister-
sisulu-calls-south-africans-celebrate-
43-million-houses-and). See: RSA/
Republic of South Africa. 1994.
White Paper on Reconstruction and
Development. Government Gazette
No. 16085, Notice No. 1954 of
1994. Cape Town: Parliament of the
Republic of South Africa. Available at
https://www.gov.za/sites/www.gov.za/
files/governmentgazetteid16085.pdf,
last accessed 14 August 2019.
[ 7 ][ 6 ]
officials who demanded to be allocated a portion of the funds for a Federation
project before authorising the money to be transferred. She made it clear that
she was not trying to gossip about or badmouth anyone but wanted to paint
a clear picture of the nature of the challenges that community-led processes
faced.
Ms Molokoane also shared her experience in respect of the State-owned
enterprise known as the Independent Development Trust,12 which had
developed infrastructure in peripheral areas for communities relocated there
from central areas. She mentioned that, in such cases, communities usually
refused to be relocated because of the resultant increase such a move would
mean for transport costs. She also spoke of instances where the houses
had been developed by the RDP, but the toilets had been installed by the
Independent Development Trust. However, since low-income beneficiaries
were then required to pay monthly rates for municipal services, some of them
were forced to move back to informal settlements. Furthermore, she noted that
some of the houses developed by the Federation were built to higher standards
than those employed by the commissioned private developers. She informed
the Forum that, for every project that the Federation developed, they liaised
with the National Home Builders Registration Council.13 She referred to
municipal and provincial inspectors as well in this regard, stating that, without
engaging and satisfying the requirements of such entities, they would not be
able to get subsidies. However, she also admitted that it became challenging
when three different assessments were given, which created confusion. She
also acknowledged that some inspectors expected something in return for
a positive assessment, which was another problem. She explained that the
Federations strength came from the information that they had gathered about
their membership over the years. She pointed out that, although they had
few means, the Federation was rich in information. Regarding plot sizes, she
mentioned that the ones in the Western Cape Province measured about 180
m2, but in the Gauteng, North West and Free State Provinces, it was 250 m2.
She described how Federation processes created some form of organisation
and discipline among low-income groups, offering as an example how they
avoided illegal electricity connections. She also pointed to some resistance
from councillors who feared that Federation leaders could take over their
positions.
Nghidinua Daniel, Executive Director of MURD, stated that, in
Namibian policies, there was room for everyone. He noted that, in the
MHDP Blueprint, there were seven sub-programmes catering for the needs
of all groups.14 He believed the perception that mass housing was only about
credit-linked houses was because they were the only ones developed for a
pilot phase. He mentioned that, even as the current Urban Forum was taking
place, officials were inaugurating houses in Tsandi that had been developed in
partnership with the SDFN and the private sector.15 He added that the MURD
had commissioned NUST to review the MHDP Blueprint, and pointed to
the Flexible Land Tenure System16 as a Government effort to secure tenure
9 For a thorough explanation of
social housing in South Africa, refer
to the contribution in this volume by
Anthea Houston in Session 5.
10 See footnote 6.
12 The Independent Development
Trust is responsible for delivering
social infrastructure and social
development programme
management services on behalf of
the South African Government, e.g.
public schools, clinics, community
centres and government offices,
predominantly in rural communities
(http://www.idt.org.za/, last accessed
27 July 2018).
13 This regulatory body in the
home-building industry assists and
protects housing consumers who
have been exposed to contractors
who deliver housing units of
substandard design, workmanship or
material (https://www.nhbrc.org.za/,
last accessed 31 July 2019).
14 These programmes are (1) Land
use planning, design and service
infrastructure; (2) Construction and
delivery of credit-linked housing; (3)
Informal settlements upgrading; (4)
Social housing; (5) People housing
processes; (6) Rural housing and
sanitation; and (7) Strengthening
the legislative, regulatory and policy
environment, and capacity building
(Republic of Namibia 2013).
15 Ohorongo Cement, FNB
Namibia Holdings Foundation Trust,
Pupkewitz Foundation, and Shack
Dwellers Federation of Namibia.
(2017). Combined press release.
Changing lives for the better: Official
opening of Tsandi houses in fight
against poverty. Retrieved from
http://www.ohorongo-cement.com/
cms_documents/changing-lives-
for-the-better:-official-opening-of-
tsandi-houses-in-the-fight-against-
poverty-e7a3594fbd.pdf
16 The object of the Flexible Land
Tenure System is to provide a more
accessible titling process in terms of
land ownership costs and procedures
for persons who live in informal
settlements or who are provided with
low-income housing (Ed.s note: this
is what the Act states in section 2(b)).
The idea was first mooted in the mid-
1990s, but the relevant legislation,
the Flexible Land Tenure Act, 2012
(No. 4 of 2012) and its associated
Regulations, would only become
operational on 31 May 2018 (Ed.s
note: checked the GG 6607 online).
Discussion
Rita Khiba, an urban planner, asked whether they had any experience with
building on plots of land smaller than 300 m2.
Guillermo Delgado of NUST asked what their relations were like with
the different government levels and other parties, like professionals or other
movements.
Barry Watson, an urban planner, mentioned that government funding
should be placed in servicing land as a form of subsidy to mitigate housing
costs.
Mike Ipinge, an official from the Swakopmund Municipality, asked
about how the South African Federation participated in the construction of
houses and how it dealt with the issue of building standards.
Ms Molokoane responded that they generally employed builders and that
they bought materials such as windows and doorframes from suppliers that
sourced products of good standard. She clarified that they sometimes went
as a group and tried to negotiate with suppliers and builders for better deals.
She also said that it was sometimes necessary to build incrementally, as the
funds were not always enough to build the house one needed from the start.
She clarified that, in South Africa, a variety of subsidy mechanisms existed,
including institutional, individual, RDP and social housing subsidies.9
She also mentioned that the PHP Programme10 created some support for
community-led housing initiatives. Nevertheless, she noted that PHPs were
not only about the house per se, but also entailed the education, health
and livelihoods of housing beneficiaries. She added that the South African
Government had learned that building houses for low-income groups
through developers sometimes led to corruption. She named examples
where builders would be appointed and work would commence, but later the
project was left unfinished and the developer disappeared. She mentioned
that they had a good relationship with all the levels of government and had
signed memoranda of understanding with various parties. She also noted that
money was sourced from the national government but was administered at
provincial level, so they had to fight for their projects to be allocated funds.
She also stated they had a very good relationship with the Minister of Human
Settlements11 and her officials. However, although they knew each other by
name, the difficulties would start when it was time to implement partnerships,
she noted. She added that, sometimes, even when a Minister gave an order,
when the Federation had to follow it up with Ministry officials, they would be
told that the order could not be implemented as agreed because of a potential
conflict with certain policies. She also stated that a relationship would be built
with specific officials, but when such individuals were promoted or demoted,
their substitutes might not necessarily understand how to work with low-
income groups. In addition, she related that they had faced some corrupt
11 At the time of the event, the post
was held by Hon. Lindiwe Sisulu.
[ 9 ][ 8 ]
of the process of developing the MHDP Blueprint, but then they had been left
out of the pilot project.
Naomi Simion, Director of MURDs Habitat Division, asked how
FEDUP dealt with the issue of security of tenure.
Taro Ashipala, from the City of Windhoeks Community Development
Division, asked Ms Molokoane what happened when a ploy of land took
long to be serviced by the South African local authorities. He also enquired
about FEDUPs experiences with groups that were uncooperative and about
conflicts among group members. A third question from this participant
related to whether FEDUP groups eventually dissolved after attaining security
of tenure or whether they maintained their status.
An unidentified participant from the University of Namibia asked
about FEDUPs projects in the rural areas.
Ms Molokoane responded that they had a rural subsidy programme and
that they negotiated with traditional authorities who owned communal land
where FEDUP intended undertaking a project. She noted that they needed
a certificate allowing them to obtain ownership of the land, so they required
a letter from the relevant traditional authority confirming ownership and
then applied for permission to occupy the area in question. Once they had
that permission, FEDUP could apply for the rural subsidy from government.
She recounted that this system operated well in the provinces of the Eastern
Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo and Mpumalanga, where FEDUP had
several projects in rural areas thanks to the traditional authorities receptivity
to them. However, in another case, the Federation had bought a piece of land
from a private owner with their members savings, but had not been eligible
for a subsidy because the land was privately owned in an urban area. FEDUP
therefore gave over the ownership to the Municipality concerned and were
then able to access the subsidy. She did mention that groups do dissolve.
In other example, Ms Molokoane described how they had entered into a
partnership agreement with a Municipality and were able to access land, but
a new councillor had later opposed the partnership and the Federation had
to take the matter to court. She noted that, 20 years later, the case had still not
been resolved, entailing that the beneficiaries had still not been able to obtain
their title deeds. She acknowledged that some only approached the Federation
to get a house: they had no interest in saving or the collective processes. Others
signed up but then disappeared. However, once it looked likely that they could
access land, they suddenly reappeared, claiming they had been registered all
along. Ms Molokoane reported that they mitigated such issues through regular
meetings and exchange programmes20, and acknowledged that FEDUP was
an entity that continuously needed to solve problems.
The Moderator asked the speaker what message she had for central and local
government.
17 Habitat III refers to the United
Nations Conference on Housing and
Sustainable Urban Development
in Quito, Ecuador, from 17 to 20
October 2016 (http://habitat3.org/
the-conference/about-habitat-3/, last
accessed 28 July 2019).
18 UNGA/United Nations General
Assembly. 2016. Pretoria Declaration
of the Habitat III Thematic Meeting
on Informal Settlements (A/
CONF.226/PC.3/12). Available at
http://habitat3.org/wp-content/
uploads/Pretoria-Declaration-E.pdf,
last accessed 19 August 2018.
19 A building society is a financial
institution owned by its members
usually specialising in lending for
the purpose of housing. In Namibia,
these are legislated by the Building
Societies Act, 1986 (No. 2 of 1986),
but they are currently largely in
disuse.
20 Learning exchanges between
federation groups nationally and
internationally are key practices
of SDI members; see: SDI. (2016).
About Us. Retrieved September 18,
2019, from Know Your CitySDI
website: http://knowyourcity.info/
who-is-sdi/about-us/
for lower-income groups. He acknowledged the need to mainstream people-
centred development and that having people organised helped Government
efforts. In closing, he asked Ms Molokoane to share some of the challenges the
Federation had faced with regard to its internal dynamics and to expand on its
work in the rural areas.
Ms Molokoane related that it was challenging to develop projects in
partnership with the government. For example, she stated that, when money
was allocated to their projects, they were required to produce a business plan.
However, it took government about six months to respond to that plan. The
Federation were then required to produce an implementation plan. This
was followed by another waiting period. They might then sometimes need
to produce a geotechnical investigation on the plot they were intending
to develop. They had to ask the provincial engineers to undertake the
investigation, which again took time. Once everything was in place, the
Minister or an official needed to co-sign the contract to launch the project,
but the Minister might be abroad and the official in question might be at a
workshop. Once the Minister or official had returned, s/he might need to
address a backlog of work and the proposed projects might not be prioritised.
Moreover, once the contract was finally signed, the Federation was given a
short timeframe to undertake and finalise the project or risk termination of
the contract. She also mentioned that some processes now required online
applications and she, for example, had no computer skills. Nonetheless, she
acknowledged receiving assistance from their support NGOs in this regard.
When it came to councillors, Ms Molokoane related that when some of them
felt their authority was being threatened by organised groups, the Federation
engaged them to ease some of those fears. Councillors would sometimes be
invited to inaugurate some of the houses, and they would be provided with
facts about the project; these engagements could then be counted among a
councillors achievements during their tenure. Ms Molokoane noted that,
during the Habitat III17 process, much had been said about institutional
partnerships. In this respect, she mentioned the Pretoria Declaration in
particular.18 She also encouraged professionals, particularly urban planners,
to understand the language of informality. She called on governments to draft
policies that worked with the people and to develop awareness campaigns
about urban rights so that as many people as possible knew what was available
and understood what was at stake. She stressed that they the Federation and
people living in informal settlements wanted to be part of mass housing.
In her conclusion, Ms Molokoane stated that the Federation wanted to be
partners in rather mere end users of government processes, and wanted to
be involved not only in project planning, but also in project implementation.
Heinrich Schroeder, owner of Kavango Block Brick, pointed out that,
before Namibias independence, building societies19 existed to assist lower-
income groups. He felt these institutions needed to be brought back.
Ottilie Nailulu, an SDFN member, clarified that the SDFN had been part
[ 11 ][ 10 ]
worked through what were known as planning studios, some of which
had taken place in Namibia as well.22 She encouraged students and young
professionals to approach FEDUP and see how they could contribute. She
also thanked the MURD Executive Director for listening to her and invited
him to take action.
Mr Daniel thanked the audience and NUST and encouraged participants in
the session to become involved.
21 The Programme was an effort
by the Swedish Government
between 1965 and 1974 to build
one million affordable housing
units (https://en.wikipedia.
org/w/index.php?title=Million_
Programme&oldid=876391963, last
accessed 28 July 2019).
22 With support from the
Association of African Planning
Schools as well as Cities Alliance,
two planning studios took place
in Gobabis through a partnership
between the Gobabis Municipality,
the SDFN, the Namibia Housing
Action Group and NUST (SDFN &
NHAG 2014).
Ms Molokoane replied that the former UN-Habitat Director, Dr Joan Clos,
admitted to her that urban planners were not doing a good job because they
thought they were convinced they knew what people wanted. This was the
background for launching the World Urban Campaign and naming her as the
chair: it meant a grass-roots member would lead and compel urban planners
and architects to work with inhabitants. She related that the conventional
way of working with aerial photographs and designing without meeting the
inhabitants of the spaces in question needed to change.
Gabriel Marín Castro, the Minister of Urban and Rural Developments
Special Advisor on Mass Housing, described himself as an architect by
profession. He related that mass housing had been attempted in many parts
of the world. He mentioned the Million Homes Programme in Sweden,21
but clarified that Swedish society was very different from its Namibian
counterpart. Instead, he encouraged looking for lessons in Asia and Latin
America for the similarities they shared with the African context. He noted
that experience had shown that mass housing programmes only benefited
the middle classes, not the very poor. He stated that this was exactly what had
happened in Namibia. He recommended that Namibia issue a set of guidelines
on the PHP Programme, and that it was important to help groups to organise
and empower those in direst need.
Ms Molokoane explained that, in Uganda, FEDUP had partnered with
the cities of Kampala and Jinja to create a forum for bringing together the
various community-based organisations as well as other stakeholders such as
residents and local authorities. The forum had since been institutionalised. She
mentioned noted that some without interest eventually fall out the process,
but that some remain. She reckoned that this has been a way to bring together
inhabitants and local government. She observed that social processes could
be messy; this created tension with government, who were more interested in
developing housing units than in the necessary time-consuming discussions.
She nevertheless encouraged exploring the idea of a forum and suggested
governments ringfence funds in their budget to support such gatherings and
to create mechanisms to institutionalise cooperation through them.
The Moderator asked the speaker what message she had for students and
young professionals.
Ms Molokoane mentioned that when professionals came to work with
FEDUP, what the Federation wanted from them was not so much their
certificates as their willingness to get their hands dirty. She clarified that this
was not because FEDUP did not respect degrees, but because they wanted to
encourage professionals approaching them to use their education strategically,
e.g. to mediate between them and local government. She described FEDUP
as the informal university, although it nurtured relationships with various
universities as well, including the University of Cape Town, the University
of Johannesburg and the University of the Witwatersrand. Such partnerships
[ 13 ][ 12 ]
SESSION 2
Community-based
Urban Strategies and
Social Innovation
Sheela Patel
Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers, Mumbai, India
Members of the Namibian Housing Action Group
Members of the Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia
Sheela Patel is the Founding Director of the Society for the Promotion of Area
Resource Centers in India. Since 1984, this NGO has been supporting community
organisations set up by the urban poor in their efforts to access secure housing
and basic amenities and claim their right to the city. She is recognised nationally
and internationally for her work in seeking and getting urgent attention from
governments, bilateral and multilateral international agencies, foundations
and other organisations in respect of the issues of urban poverty, housing and
infrastructure. She is a co-founder of Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI),
a transnational social movement of the urban poor, whose Board she currently
chairs. She has also authored many articles on the work that the Alliance formed
by the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), Mahila
Milan and the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF) does. She participates
in local national and international events on their behalf, occasionally serving on
committees for policies on issues impacting the urban poor. In 2000, she received
the UN-Habitat Scroll of Honour Award. In 2006 she received an Outstanding
Contribution towards Mumbai Vision 2015 by the Observer Research Foundation
in New Delhi. In 2009 she received the David Rockefeller Bridging Leadership
Award from the Synergos Institute in recognition of her efforts to ameliorate urban
poverty, and the Padmashree a national award from the Indian Government for
her work on urban poverty issues in 2011.1
The Namibia Housing Action Group is a Namibian service organisation that
aims to support and add value to the activities and processes of the Shack Dwellers
Federation of Namibia in achieving their mission. The NHAG strives to facilitate
change in the livelihoods of the urban and rural poor through pioneering pro-poor
development approaches. To achieve these aims, the NHAG collaborates with
local, national and international partners and networks.
1 https://www.rockefellerfoundation.
org/profile/sheela-patel/ and https://
www.sparcindia.org/, last accessed
28 July 2019.
[ 15 ][ 14 ]
The Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia is a network of housing saving
schemes. It aims to improve the living conditions of low-income people living in
shacks and rented rooms as well as those without accommodation. It specifically
promotes participation by women. The SDFN is affiliated to the SDI.2
Dr Anna Muller has been the National Coordinator of the NHAG since
1993. After registering as an architect in 1984, she pursued Housing Studies at
postgraduate level and was awarded a Masters in Philosophy (1988) and her
Doctorate in Philosophy (1995) from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne
(UK). Her working career in housing started in 1988 as a researcher with the
National Housing Enterprise in Namibia, the Government agency responsible
for developing low-income housing in the country. Her interest in working with
communities resulted in her voluntary assistance to low-income women housing
groups which contributed to the establishment of NHAG as an association of
housing groups in Namibia in 1992 and their support service in 1993. She co-
facilitated the transformation of NHAG in 1998 into a national network of
housing savings groups, the SDFN. In this national network, NHAG remains as a
technical support service.
Inga Taatsu Boye has been a member of the SDFN in Windhoek since 2004
and has participated in CLIP as a National Facilitator since 2009. She facilitates
CLIP activities such as the enumeration of households in informal settlements, the
profiling of informal settlements, data analysis, the presentation of survey results
to communities, and data capture into the national CLIP database. Her work
has also entailed numbering structures, mapping structures and amenities, and
mapping settlement boundaries. She has trained other CLIP team members at
local and national levels; as well as presented international visitors regarding all
these activities.
Ottilie Nailulu, a mother of two, joined SDFN in 2000 to acquire an affordable
house. She currently resides in Otjomuise, Windhoek, where she is an SDFN
Network Leader. In addition, she serves as an SDFN Regional Facilitator for
Savings. Besides being a Member of the Rent Control Board in the Khomas Region,
representing the SDFN, she is also a fourth-year Bachelor of Marketing student at
NUST and is employed at Timothy Real Estate in Windhoek as an Agent.
The session was moderated by Guillermo Delgado, Land, Livelihoods and
Housing Programme Coordinator, ILMI, NUST
Editorial note This session was originally conceived as being led by Sheela Patel,
but together with the Namibia Housing Action Group (NHAG) and Shack Dwellers
Federation of Namibia (SDFN) teams, Ms Patel decided to speak about the SDI in
general, with a specific focus on the work undertaken in Namibia. Furthermore, the
combined presenters proposed having the entire session as a discussion, with only
some initial input by the speakers, coupled with the screening of a video. The discussion
in this session is not presented as a report but is cited verbatim.
[Sheela Patel] I was supposed to be the main speaker, but as usual in SDI we
turn things on their head, so we decided on a little change of strategy. I will
start off by talking about SDI, what we do, how we do it and why we do these
things. And we will use the experience of the Namibian Federation to look at
how those principles are turned into practice based on a country-level context.
The purpose of this particular session for us is to sharpen and to improve our
own articulation of how we invite people to go into partnerships with us, why
we do that, what the challenges we face are, and why we still persist on working
with municipalities and governments even when they give us a lot of grief.
Rose, if everyone is feeling sleepy, shall we wake them up with a song?
[Song sung]
[Rose Molokoane] The song says we dont need lazy people in our
organisation. If you are lazy, dont join us, please. Because we mix mortar and
cement, we lay our own bricks, we get into our own houses, because we are
doing it on our own. So, if you think you dont want to dirty your hands, please
dont join us. That is the meaning of the song.
[Ms Patel] Very briefly, the history of SDI started in Mumbai with a bunch
of people, like me, who are professionals that went into partnership with a
much older grass-root[s] movement of slum leaders fighting evictions. What
we realised is that the State was not the only one that had the wisdom to
produce policy, and that the litmus test of how poor people survived despite
the State was an important starting point to find solutions for an expanding
number of very poor people who were living in cities in informality, working
in informality, and generally [being] invisible to the State, to the middle class
and [to] the professionals working for the city and even to the NGOs.
If you take me as an example, I was radicalised by the evictions. Before that,
I dished out welfare. Women from the communities were my beneficiaries. I
was telling them what to do without understanding that they didnt have the
resource structure to do what I was asking them to do. I brought together the
slum dwellers, my colleagues and I, as professionals, to produce a partnership
in which we set ourselves some principles. First thing was that, in informal
settlements, women as collectives had to be at the centre of transformation
because they were the managers of the informal settlements with no
acknowledgment for what they were doing, always stepping back when the
government came in. We said that our work would focus on the bottom 30%
in informal settlements because we know development likes low-hanging
fruit: it believes that everything will trickle down and that everybody that said
they wanted to work with the poor were doing it to solve their sense of guilt.
They werent interested in scale, they werent interested in change. We agreed
that our commitment would be to work with womens collectives; we would
work with informal settlements; we would aggregate to a critical mass; we
would not be ignored by the city or the State; we would transform ourselves
to produce knowledge, data, strategies, and experimentation that work for
2 https://namibia-shackdwellers.
blogspot.com/
[ 17 ][ 16 ]
us; and that we would explore new relationships between poor people and
government, professionals, [the] private sector, educational institutions and
the like, because they all treated poor people like they had no brain. In Hindi,
we have an expression referring to how poor people are like empty vessels:
they rattle a lot because they have nothing inside them. People got angry with
this sort of attitude, and it is important for all professionals to examine their
own values, to see how much of that stands in our way.
In 1991, many of us came to South Africa for the first time. We helped many
of the community networks form there. Rose was one of the first people that
came from South Africa to India. She now heads many of our committees.
We began this process in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and today we have
33 countries and Namibia is one of them. The Namibian Federation is one
of the oldest.
What we are trying to do is to create federations of the urban poor, led by
women that examine ways by which they can demand accountability from
the State, but also contribute to finding solutions. We know that poverty-
linked solutions can never come out like a perfectly boiled egg: [they keep]
breaking down. The idea is to treat transformation as an ongoing process and
keep trying to improve and refine.
[Dr Anna Muller] Thank you, Sheela. I think the reality is that we know
that that majority, the larger portion of the population, cannot afford any
conventional [housing] process. What we are offering is one way we can go,
but we cannot do it alone. How can we move from this self-help group into
something that will impact the majority of the people? If we are talking about
reaching 185,000 houses [the number of units that the MHDP Blueprint
aimed to produce] with the available resources in this country, we might just
repeat the same kind of mistakes that have happened elsewhere.
Firstly, we will do a presentation about the Federation and then we will screen
a short video illustrating the process in Gobabis, which we believe has the
potential to be scaled up.
[Ottilie Nailulu] As you can see here, there is a network of 724 saving schemes
in Namibia, that is, countrywide. I belong to a group named Humble Valley
it is somewhere in Otjomuise [Windhoek]. Because we are not literate, we
dont do technical things; we have an NGO that is supporting us with anything
that is strategic [like] how to speak English to you. If it was not for SDFN, I
wouldnt be able to speak to you. Meme Anna, thank you very much.
The first group was started in 1987. People mobilised and came together.
People that live in shacks or in your backyard, those are the people that we
mobilised. We decided: lets get together and maybe we can own houses; or
maybe not for you, but maybe for your kids. Thats how it worked and those
are our target groups. Maybe you identify ten people and get together. The
group should not be more than 30 people this is just for management issues.
In 1992, the first block of land was bought, near Club Thriller, and the houses
located there belong to the Federation.
The purpose of grouping ourselves is to buy affordable land. We dont do things
individually: we do things collectively as a group. If something affects one of
the group members, then we cannot move forward. We all have to overcome
that challenge, regardless of what it is. Then we solve it together. Most of these
groups are in urban areas. These days, everyone wants to come to urban areas
and its becoming a challenge to have land. We find it difficult to acquire land
from the City of Windhoek, but since we are organised and we can group
ourselves and approach the City of Windhoek or the Government, this is the
only way we can get land.
As poor people, we cannot afford a big plot of land that is already serviced by
the Municipality. We identify a piece of land and say how many people will be
able to stay there. The Municipality gives it to us unserviced, in order to cut
costs. We get services only up to the boundary. So, the people on the ground,
with approval from the City of Windhoek, will service the land ourselves. The
City will help us because we have to maintain the standards.
Community intervention programmes are also there to help with the
affordability issue, but my friend will add more on how that is happening.
[Inga Boyes] CLIP is a Community Land Information Programme that
maps the informal settlements, then quantifies them to see how big the
settlement is. If the Town Council or the Municipality want to upgrade the
informal settlement, at least they must know how big the informal settlement
is, and how many people it can accommodate and therefore plan properly.
Enumeration involves collecting data by going door to door to establish
whether or not people can afford the land or the house, if it were to be built.
CLIP allows us to meet with various Town Councils and Regional Councils, as
they possess more knowledge on how to better plan for informal settlements.
Phase 1 was launched in 2008, where 235 informal settlements were profiled.
More than 134,000 households live in informal structures; 541,000 do not
have secure tenure. About 75% of people living in informal settlements make
use of the bush as a toilet.
We did not know how to use a computer; but, working with CLIP, I now know
how to do so. I also know how to analyse data, thanks to CLIP. Seventy per cent
earn below N$1,500 per month, while 6% earn above N$6,000. By December
2016, members had saved N$25 million; 24,000 members, 724 groups;
countrywide, 6,500 have access to secure tenure; and 4,700 constructed a
house.
[Dr Muller] How can we scale up this contribution where people already
proved that they are willing and capable of getting security of tenure, getting
[ 19 ][ 18 ]
their basic services and building houses? What we learnt from the existing
practice is that you cannot work in isolation. We cannot work without the
support of the local authority, without the support of our Government,
without the support of other stakeholders like this university that has come
on board and helps us demonstrate that communities can actually plan from
the bottom up. Cities find themselves fighting with numerous developers,
other little [community] groups, and all the other individuals who are very
powerful. We dont get the attention. The other aspect is that we centralise.
Because everything is in Windhoek, we try to control things from the top here.
However, the ownership of the process and the programmes should be on the
ground.
What we propose is to work in a partnership that will enable us to scale up
the provision of basic services, security of tenure, and the building of houses
within the spirit of our Presidents Harambee [Prosperity] Plan. We do not
only work with savings groups, but we also encourage communities in the
informal settlements to participate in this process. We learn from practical
implementation. We join resources: communities bring something on board,
Government brings something, local authorities bring something. At the
moment, we are involved in Gobabis in a pilot project, where the community
got involved when the local authority took on the challenge of bottom-up
planning.
3 The SDI hosts the Know Your
City website, where all the data
collected by various Federation
members is put up. Partners and
stakeholders such as municipalities
and government then also
have access to the data (https://
knowyourcity.info/, last accessed 29
July 2019).
Screen shots of Bottom-up Planning: Freedom Square video, screened during the session.
Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1Xy_LSq7Js
[Ms Patel] I want to go over the features that were presented there and explain
the logic and the history of it. The first thing we realised in India, which is
universal everywhere else, is that there is no accurate data about poor people
in any country. Municipalities, whether they would acknowledge it or not,
have usually two thirds of the settlements [data] of any given city; that is even
something almost rare in many countries. In India, on average, the city register
only contains one third of the informal settlements in the city, and most of
those settlements are those [which] are old, which have fought, and which
have resisted evictions. The new ones that emerge are ignored until they get
consolidated; and when they get consolidated, they get too dense. So they cant
be enumerated properly, you cant put in services, and all kinds of problems.
The first thing that the Federation members do is that they count themselves.
Earlier on, everything was manual; as you can see, it is getting digital and
more efficient.3 Unless you have accurate information about informality, you
cant do anything about it and hold yourself accountable to make an impact.
We produce that data for everybody in the city: not everybody we count is a
member of the Federation.
The other very important critical issue in all our work [is] to keep tweaking
norms and standards. We all know that our country is in the Global South.
We have imported colonial administrative procedures, we have minimum
plot standards, we have all kinds of regulatory frameworks and development
control rules that just dont work for poor people. And the reality is that our
cities are going to get more informal before they get formal. We are going to
3 The SDI hosts the Know Your
City website, where all the data
collected by various Federation
members is put up. Partners and
stakeholders such as municipalities
and government then also
have access to the data (https://
knowyourcity.info/, last accessed 29
July 2019).
[ 21 ][ 20 ]
are every different, but we do believe that cities produce a space for strange
bedfellows to interact and negotiate with each other. So, just like the womens
groups who negotiate with the slumlords and the invisible house owners, we
use the same approaches. The thing that works the best are strong womens
networks that come in very large numbers to negotiations. When we go to talk
to Government, it isnt just me, Anna or Rose, but we go as five women to talk
to the Minister. It makes a difference.
Discussion
Guillermo Delgado You are talking about negotiating not only with
the State, but also with the slumlords or other parties; do you have some
practical strategies? I ask this because different tactics work differently in
different countries and I dont know whether in Namibia, where social
protests or demonstrations are not particularly appreciated, appearing in
large numbers at the Ministers door would have an impact. Can you speak
about experiences when you are negotiating with your counterparts?
Ms Patel I will give you an example of [the] city of Mumbai. The island of
Mumbai is like Manhattan. It is long, with two railway lines that go up and
down, and they represent the basis of 85% of the citys journeys. The line
was breaking down often, but one of the crises we had was that there were
120,000 households living very near the railway tracks. Now these people
were part of our Federation in India. When the railway line was set [up], it
was given land by the government on both sides; but it is unclear who has
to ensure that no one encroaches [on] it. In the case of India, it was the State
government and the railway doing that.
There was a general feeling that those living there couldnt be moved. The
community women felt that they could move away, because many of the
households had some sort of accident on the track. They werent allowed
to get water or sanitation, so they said, We just want to get out of here.
You design some relocation for us. We tried to do that, but no one would
listen to us. But we did a detailed survey of people according to the different
distances from the tracks and [we] marked every house. No other group
could have done it but [the] community itself: it numbered the houses
and registered them. Five years we fought, and nothing happened. Then
the government brought in the World Bank and they said they wanted to
relocate, but they would not be able to do it because a third of the houses
were rented. So, how do you decide to whom do you give the new unit for
relocation? If you dont give it to the owner, the owner can take you to court.
But we did the study and we found that absentee owners lived somewhere
else and the people who lived here [had done] so for some 20 years. So, we
said, Even if you calculate the value of that horrible structure, the owner[s]
have made five times the money already. On the day of the survey, which
was five years ago, we asked the government to make a policy to say, You
get more and more people [coming] from rural areas who have very poor
education, who are short on the type of skills that can give them wages, yet
the city has to accommodate them. A very important part of our internal
commitment is to try and find a balance between existing norms and
standards and what the poor can afford. Many people, when they look at our
small houses, will say, Oh! This is unfair. They should get the same size houses
as the minimum standard. Well, two thirds of your city lives in even smaller
houses without any services, so which is better? We are trying to look at ways
by which there can be some incremental development of norms, because
when you have two thirds of your community living in abject poverty and
your standards dont work for them, it makes a mockery of what should work
for everybody.
One of the reasons why we have structures that span from local to global
is because we know that action can only be taken locally, but that it is often
influenced by global discussions. Many of us know that international
organisations come and negotiate for things that dont work for us, and our
voices are not there. So, when Rose tells you very proudly that she is a convener
[at the World Urban Campaign], its after 20 years of working on these issues:
there is acceptance that it is not only professionally educated people who have
the skills to contribute to these discussions.
The structure is also useful just to give you a broader understanding. We learn
a lot from each other. We only have three countries in our entire group where
the State has formal subsidies available for slum dwellers. These are India,
South Africa and Brazil, and they do so in huge volumes. An interesting fact is
that these three countries dont even utilise two thirds of these [subsidies]: [they
remain] unutilised because the design of delivery does not accept the reality
on the ground. And part of what we do in our negotiations is to say, How
do you change procedures? How do you give easier access to communities to
hold the city and the various construction companies accountable [for] what
is happening? Most of the countries that were working in are poor countries
with very poor people, where there are no subsidies from the government;
they really represent a very different form of challenge. Namibia, Thailand
and South Africa initially were the only three countries that actually put aside
money to allow communities to do experiments towards a solution. Very
interestingly, many countries, including my own, have billions of unutilised
resources, but they will not put [them] aside to allow for experimentation.
Finally, what we find in our work is that we start with imperfect solutions
which is better than no solutions and we seek to learn from those mistakes
and improve on them. We persist in working with government. We have
many activist groups that dont like that, but we believe that you have to learn
to engage the State to make it accountable to you because its much easier for
the State to say, We cant do anything, and give it to the private sector. That
solution never works for poor people. Our latest attempt is to actually have
a conversation with the private sector. We struggle, because our paradigms
[ 23 ][ 22 ]
give it to whoever is living there. Households were given an identity card
by the Federation, and they got the house. So, all the absentee owners, who
were mostly local politicians, felt threatened. In most of the countries we
have worked, absentee landlords are politicians, judges, policemen and
some of them are private businesspeople. The Federation was strong, and we
had publicly announced how we were doing things. We said to the absentee
landlords: You can get one house, but you have 40 houses [for] rent! If you
want your house, come and get an identity card. And nobody came. It wasnt
done with fighting and conflict.
Even when we went to meet the Minister, we dont go there toyi-toying4 or
fighting. We simply say, Look, we are women from this area, and we want
this. Are you going to help us? And I promise you, it makes a difference. If
I go there and 35 community women go there with a clear plan of what to
do, proudly explaining their plans, it works because this is not expected. It is
always expected that Anna or I will go there, give nice speeches or report. We
never do that. We say, We will design the programme with you. So, I think
that makes a difference. Then, when we go internationally, by the time we have
started attending all these international meetings, it is very interesting to see
what happens. When there is the presence of five to ten slum dwellers in a
discussion with the professionals, you can no longer call slum dwellers them.
You cannot! Rose would say, Talk to me! Im a slum dweller! So, you cannot
objectify poor people and say, This is good for you. It changes the conversation
in the room. So, the purpose of all this is to see how representation[s] change,
how community leaders represent themselves and participate in a governance
structure that is accountable to them.
John Nakuta, Law lecturer at the University of Namibia Ive got two
questions: one for SDI, and one for SDFN and NHAG. For SDI, based on your
international experience, as you have mentioned, Namibia has this budget
set aside for assisting the SDFN. This amount of money that the Federation
is receiving from Government has not yet been contractually agreed: it is
like Government decides every year how much will [be] put aside for SDFN
as part of the budget. My problem with that, especially now that the country
is going through an economic slump, is that funding could be cut. As part
of your international experience, how should the Government contribution
be secured?
To Anna and SDFN: when will you, as SDFN and NHAG, start using our laws
to your advantage? When will you invoke the right to adequate housing? The
reason why I am asking is that last month we had a demonstration in Walvis
Bay, and a representative complained about how they have saved money to
buy unserviced land from the Municipality but its not possible because of
the bureaucracy. It seems that, because we dont want to rock the boat, we
would rather not use some of these legal avenues that are available. So, when
will the movement start? When will we be raising our voices in the most
tangible manner, by going to court?
Ms Molokoane The challenge is that Government and the City think that
they are always fixing things for us. We dont want to be pitied, because we
are not beggars. You can keep your money. We will continue to organise and
mobilise ourselves because, at the end of the day, we are the people where you
are going to implement your policies. Yes, it is difficult. Like I explained in the
other session,5 in South Africa, we start to vigorously talk to our government to
give us our subsidies directly. The first batch of the subsidies was up front, and
we [built] bigger houses. But, because our government was building smaller
houses, they felt intimidated and they went back to the office to review the
policy to a developer-driven PHP, meaning that private developers would
come and build the PHP houses. But private developers need profit and we
dont, so that is where the difference came about. That is what blocked us from
getting our subsidies. Although private developers were trying to build, the
houses that they were building were not of a good standard.
Because it will be a decision from national government, the allocation of money
will go to the Provincial department, and the Provincial department will call
the shots. If they dont like what the people are doing, they will not ring-fence
[money for PHP]. [Then the decision] goes down to the municipality and the
municipality will say they are working through a waiting list [...]. But our people
are organised: we are not interested in waiting lists because waiting lists make
people fold their arms and say, I am waiting for my turn. And when the waiting
list is implemented, the official will come [onto] the waiting list; he will bring all
[his] relatives and all of them will replace the waiting list. They will come from
the rural areas and occupy the houses. When we ask about it, they will say, It is
the procedure, it is the policy. That is why I am saying the policies are so beautiful
but like a beautiful girl that does not have a boyfriend to propose love to.
The money is there. The South Africans can verify what Im saying here. Every
year, many of the Provinces dont spend the money. They give certain millions
to build houses in the new financial year, which ends on 31 March. Then it
turns out they underspent R600 million in my Province. They [have owed]
my organisation R8 million [for] two years, yet R600 million was not spent. It
is because they do not have trust in poor people. They dont believe they can
manage finances. Although we [show] them through our savings that we are
doing it, there is no trust. They think that poor people are not educated, and it
is the lack of trust in us that [explains] why we are failing.
Ms Patel You may have a lot of faith in the legal system, but poor people dont.
Poor-people institutions feel that they get further impoverished if they take
anything to the court. In many of our countries, the judges are as polarised
against the poor as many of the upper-income groups are. The legal recourse
is the last thing unless we feel it is an important, solid case. In South Africa,
there have been so many very important judgements that have come through,
but the result hasnt been scalable and workable solutions. They do give
judgements that can give you higher moral ground, but they do not necessarily
give poor people immediate relief.
4 Toyi-toyi is a dance typically used
in public demonstrations in South
Africa and Zimbabwe, where it
became synonymous with protest
and struggle.
5 See Session 1 herein.
[ 25 ][ 24 ]
The second things is, and maybe in the case of Namibia it is different, but in all
of our cases when we are working more than one town, we end up having to
produce full evidence for each town that poor people can do something. Every
town says, Show me, in my city, a solution that works for us. That is one of the
reasons why real scaling doesnt happen. At the same time, the bureaucracy
also changes in the process, and this also slows down everything. There is the
need to train our new commissioners, mayors, engineers, architects; everyone
gets rotated every three years in most of our countries, so you have to start
again and again. It is a very slow process; its not moving as fast as it should.
Lucy Edwards-Jauch, Sociology lecturer at the University of Namibia I
would like to ask if you have a particular policy around political engagement,
because obviously you have quite a force. Such a massive amount of people
is a force for demanding those entitlements, because if legal process doesnt
work, and if Government appears to be disdainful of realising rights and
entitlements, do you have any particular policy to assert those demands?
And my second question is, when I was listening to Anna, you were talking
about upscaling, and I read that mobilisations seem to be a challenge. And
my question is what you have now and the members can answer are you
satisfied? Does it meet your standards, in terms of the needs of your families,
in terms of sanitation, in terms of all the other expectations that you have for
housing? That which you are able to build on your own terms is admirable, but
is it enough, and does it meet your needs?
Ms Nailulu I am one of the beneficiaries when it comes to a piece of land. I
can speak only on behalf of my colleague who is a beneficiary. She managed to
build her house on a piece of land that was allocated to her, which is 150 m2.
On this piece of land that she bought, she constructed a three-bedroom house
with two bathrooms, and she has some space left to allow for extensions. Me,
as a poor person, I dont think that I would like to have more than [what] I
can afford, because the more you demand, the more money you have to give.
If you give me 150 m2 I will be more happy than living in a backyard shack on
someone elses yard. So, I think it meets my standards and needs.
Ms Boyes I am also a beneficiary. My plot is 126 m2 [like] my neighbours. I
am still waiting for my house plan to be approved by the City of Windhoek
in order for me to start constructing my house. The house plan allows for a
two-bedroom house with a bathroom. I am proud to have it, because at least
I have something.
Ms Molokoane I think when it comes to the policy, what we do, we do by
doing. We create programmes and projects on the ground that give impact
to the policy of Government. I am going to give you an example of what
happened in Cape Town. Weve got 32 communities. Every now and then
there will be a fire outbreak and then the Municipality wants to relocate or
evict the people. Then we went to the meetings and told them, Lets re-plan
this community. The community is [made up] of at least 400 families. How
can we re-plan it? We got a programme called re-blocking, because the shacks
were so congested that even the ambulance cant come in. We then sat down
as a Federation and decided to get all the information about the community:
how many people do we think are living there, how many women, how many
children all that information that was relevant for us to identify.
The result of the information collection was the re-blocking exercise. Re-
blocking means that we come together and draw up a new plan for the
community while the people remain there. So, what we are going to do
now [is] we are going to [make space] where the ambulance can get into the
community. We have to create a space, so when the fire outbreak starts, it
cannot spread and burn down the entire community. We did it on our own
and it was successful. We then invited the Mayor to come and see what we
have done, so that people can see that, once people are given the chance, they
can change their own place. This influenced the Mayor of Cape Town to say
that, instead of relocating, lets bring in the infrastructure. Every family has a
flush toilet and electricity, but before that they were doing it [getting services]
illegally.
With the change of the plan, they also changed the policy to use the Federation
to profile all the settlements around Cape Town. But they put it out on tender!
The challenge is that they want us to dance to their tune, [but] we are the ones
that started the tune! They changed the music and now they want to say to
us, You go and profile in so[-and-so] many communities. They will tell us
to do profiling in 300 communities while we know we can only do 200. They
take our ideas, but then they start to dictate to us how to do it! So, we make an
impact in different communities. In some areas, Government has open ears
and [they] listen, and in others they dont.
Ms Patel But I think the evidence makes the difference.
Naomi Simion, Deputy Director: Habitat, Ministry of Urban and
Rural Development I want to react to the issue of the SDFN and the
gentlemens agreement [with Government]. It is true: when we started off
working with the SDFN, it all started off as a relationship. There is a difference
between a relationship and a partnership. But I will not say that when it comes
to the SDFN, their funding is nowhere in the programmes or projects of
Government. All of us are here to learn. I know from the community-based
organisations there are challenges challenges from Government, challenges
from the private sector. We need to bring all those issues up in order for us to
learn and see how we can strengthen our relationships. It seems like central
and local Government are attacked, but we also would like to see from the
community-based organisations and the NGOs what challenges they are
facing and how the Government can best assist in that regard. As for the
SDFN, if you go to the National Housing Policy of Namibia of 2009 Anna,
you were also part of that process the SDFN is there as the key stakeholder
of the Namibian Government. The PHP is also part of that. Even when we
[ 27 ][ 26 ]
started with the National Housing Policy process, we were not talking about
PPPs, we were talking about four Ps, that is, people PPPs, meaning [that it]
includes the PHP.
If you go to the [Governments] Medium-term Expenditure Framework,6 you
will see a project called Twahangana Fund, which is specifically for the SDFN.
When the Fund started off with the previous Minister, Dr Nicky Iyambo, it
started with N$1 million, but it is now N$7 million. For every financial year,
we sign a service level agreement with the SDFN, showing how many houses
are to be constructed and what they can bring on board. It is a learning process.
I wouldnt say that there is no way for PHPs in Government programmes
or projects; all I can say is that I hope our partnership with the SDFN and
other community-based organisations will strengthen more so that they can
contribute to reduce the housing backlog of Namibia.
Dr Muller If we want to scale up, we need to scale up resources. I think that,
in this context, one of the things we need to look at as a country is where we
are going to put our resources in the future. We have found out that we cannot
build houses for N$300,000 each and then subsidise half of it and the poorest
still wont afford [that]. I think that was a tough consequence that emerged
out of the mass housing [development] experience, because the ones that
implemented the project said Government [would] subsidise it [up] to a certain
amount. We made the calculations of a process where you bring in different
resources, the people themselves plus their savings and their collective action,
and with N$300,000 you could have supported ten households. If Government
really wants to scale up resources to fight the housing crisis, where will be the
best investment? Where will be the best way to invest their resources? That is
where we think that informal settlement upgrading will scale up land delivery.
Our communities are willing to participate in the process. We can make a
vast difference on land provision at scale. I would still like to know whether
Government can scale up if every plot costs N$80,000. And who are going to
be the lucky beneficiaries in this process?
I believe that there is a way, but you cannot put it on the NHAG and the
Federations shoulders: we are talking about a vast number of people involved.
However, with our learning exchanges, there is potential for people to take
ownership. Local authorities are already buying in on the process, and the
Universities are already showing their willingness. We are talking with
consultants to adopt an informal settlement so that we can take care of the
technical issues. It is a blend of resources it does not only come out of one
pocket.
We avoid the talk about subsidies; we dont fight for subsidies until Government
says, We are going to subsidise each and every person. When we know we
have that type of money, we can say, Lets subsidise at least the peoples process
to build a toilet. Can Government do it? Do they have the resources? Do
they have the income? Until we have the picture of what is a financially viable
option, we try to do things that can evolve, that we can sustain. The Federation
never uses its money to subsidise, members pay back each and every cent and,
in that way, they can help the next one.
Talking about the courts, we had a long debate about [this option]. I dont know
if I can give you a straight answer, but our courts are relatively slow. We could
have tried the courts, but we would rather work together with our stakeholders
to see how we can help the maximum number of people in this country and
I dont know if the courts can help us to do it faster. It is about practically doing
things that might not even cost us so much money, and where people can feel
the difference immediately. For example, with security of tenure, please dont
tell people you should get individual titles if you do not have a budget to back
it up. [We need] some form of development rights, some form of security of
tenure so that people can start developing their own houses. That is what it is
about. Lets see what will happen in Gobabis,7 with giving people in informal
settlements rights to develop their own houses.
Catharina Nord, a Swedish researcher I come from Sweden and Im
here to do a study about old age and housing. If we talk about money, are we
talking only about the money that [it] costs to build the house? I have [been
wondering] if anyone has ever calculated what the Government could get
back if they subsidised [mass housing development], because what they invest
in housing is, for example, also a better environment for a child to study. The
children might come back home with better results because they have will
have a decent environment where they can do their homework. It is also an
investment in [public] health, the Government might save money on health
expenditures because people would be more healthy if they lived in decent
housing. So, there are more gains that come with better housing, [its] not only
the costs. I was wondering whether any one of you ever put a value on what is
gained and not just the cost of a house.
Ms Patel Actually, that is a point that has emerged very strongly in the last few
years. In the worldwide campaign on improved sanitation, there is evidence
that, if everyone has access to improved sanitation, it affects 2% of your gross
domestic product (GDP). These are numbers from the World Bank.8 It is only
when it comes to impacting the GDP and the economy that we get impressed
with these numbers. But the fact that everyone will get a decent place to live, a
nice neighbourhood, a nice place to grow up, is in itself not good enough. We
are so sucked into the economy angle! We were having this conversation in
the morning, that there is no balancing on the peoples quality of life, especially
the poor peoples. It has to have an economic logic to make it legitimate. That
is worrisome.
NUST student My question is more to the SDFN. As it was stated earlier,
some members got plots [of] 126 m2. With the regulation of a minimum erf
size of 300 m2, how did you manage that? And how do you determine who
gets 126 m2 and who gets 120 m2?
6 The Medium-term Expenditure
Framework (MTEF) is a three-year
guideline for national spending to
achieve Government targets aligned
with its regular five-year National
Development Plans.
7 This refers to upgrading efforts
through a partnership between
SDFN/NHAG and the Gobabis
Municipality, with support from the
MURD and the GIZ, among others.
See: SDFN & NHAG/Shack Dwellers
Federation of Namibia & Namibia
Housing Action Group. 2014.
Participatory planning for informal
settlement upgrading in Freedom
Square, Gobabis. SDI-AAPS Planning
Studios. Windhoek: SDFN & NHAG.
Available at http://sdfn.weebly.
com/uploads/2/0/9/0/20903024/
freedom_square_report_clip2.pdf,
last accessed 14 August 2019.
8 A study found that financial
losses resulting from poor sanitation
including overall welfare losses
could average 2% of GDP. The losses
are largely in the health and water
resources, but also labour including
the time spent in accessing poor
sanitation facilities. See: World
Bank. 2008. Economic impacts
of sanitation in Southeast Asia. A
four-country study conducted in
Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines
and Vietnam under the Economics
of Sanitation Initiative (ESI). Jakarta:
Water and Sanitation Programme,
World Bank. Available at http://
www.wsp.org/sites/wsp.org/files/
publications/Sanitation_Impact_
Synthesis_2.pdf, p. 32, last accessed
30 July 2019.
[ 29 ][ 28 ]
Ms Boyes It depends on the flatness of the area where you are. If we have
to design the area, maybe you are in the corner. Sometimes the people who
are at the corner benefit more than the people who are in the middle. I also
happened to be in the middle and I got 150 m2 and the other people that are
on the side got 200 m2. The regulation that [the] City of Windhoek has put in
place stating that everyone should get 300 m2 is a debate on the table that we
are all fighting. We have physical evidence that we can manage with 150 m2. It
is unfortunate for this person to get 126 m2, but it might be because we do not
want to exclude the person but accommodate [them] because they need the
house instead of leaving you out because of the smaller size. We will consult
you and illustrate the house size that might be constructed on the plot. [This
is] not to convince you, but to give the person the option. If the person says,
No, [another] person can come who is on the list. There are so many people
on the list!
Ms Simion I just want to add [to] the 300 m2 [issue]: there is a provision that
states that smaller plots can be acquired, but there is a procedure that needs to
be followed. But it can be done.
Braam Harris, Urban Planning lecturer at NUST I would like to get some
clarity on how the group organises themselves.
Ms Nailulu Before you come to an area where you [will be] located, you are
in a saving[s] group. And when the piece of land is allocated to you, it does
not come to you as a person, it comes to the Federation. They say, The City
of Windhoek has identified this piece of land which can accommodate about
[so] many people. They only bring us the information, then it is us that go
to the piece of land and start mapping it, showing who is staying where. To
be more precise, the mapping does not involve the whole bunch of people:
even though some of the group members are not there due to other reasons,
they will still benefit because they are part of the group. So, we map it out
and then we portion it off and then we allocate the portions. The municipal
professionals tell us, It is ready to go. You can do it. But we draw the map
they only have to approve.
Dr Muller The group that the land belongs to is an association, and they
decide the rules and regulations they will put onto the land. It is usually in
high-density residential areas where these blocks of land are developed. They
[dont subdivide] it into single erven, and we have not found a big need for that.
One of the earliest members of SDFN keeps reminding us: she got her land in
1991 and she still hasnt got her title deed. They managed it as a community.
That is where the Flexible Land Tenure Act9 comes in, where you can register
and transfer your rights on such a property. So, the higher density is a choice:
it came from people because they said, If we take 300 m2, where will we put
the other 30 of my group? Because we are 60 people. That pragmatic decision
has been taken again and again by the groups in Windhoek because the land
demand is totally out[side] of what the city of Windhoek will deliver. They
cant do anything because they have no space to relocate the people that they
want to displace to have 300 m2 plots. They got stuck and the development
stopped because the city fathers decide[d] that, where we cannot properly
subdivide into individual titles, [we] will not allow the community to stay. So,
the community no longer has a say in that. According to the city fathers, there
are people who insist that they want a 4m panhandle plot. But a 4m panhandle
on a plot that is smaller than 300 m2 does not make sense. The house is already
4m wide and now the panhandle is wasting space. It is such standards that are
delaying the process and actually brought us to a standstill. As we sit here
today, the standards have changed four times since we submitted the first plot
for Humble Valley in Otjomuise. We are bogged down: the roads need to be
wide, the subdivision of plots should be big enough, the people need to receive
individual titles. So, we are not moving in this city.
Anthea Houston, CEO of Communicare in Cape Town, South Africa
You said you havent subdivided the group plots, so how are you working with
water and electricity charges after people are settled? What happens when
someone does not want to pay or cant pay?
Ms Nailulu We have separate municipal bills. We only pay [collectively] for
water, because our electricity is prepaid. If we receive our water bill, which
is about N$4,000, we divide it among the households, and every household
brings that money and then we pay. The electricity is prepaid, so if a particular
member does not want to pay for water, we go to the City of Windhoek and
disconnect the electricity for you to pay your water.
Ms Patel This is very interesting: the issue of self-governance, and how the
savings group does not only do this virtuous thing of saving money, it also
produces the capacity to do financial transactions and negotiate collectively.
Wherever community groups are strong, the city is happy to do what they tell
them. For those of you who have worked in municipal administration, you
will know it takes money to send collectors to collect money from debtors. So,
if you have collective mechanisms that just come and dump the money in the
municipal account, it is a godsend. So, the negotiations to make that happen
worked; but the foundation for that is also very good internal governance
because, whenever there is a family in crisis, a temporary crisis say a family
member is ill the group subsidises it once or twice, but the person is also
morally bound. So, when they get the money, they pay it back. And the
difference is, when everyone pays, it is difficult not to pay back; and that is the
power of the collective that Anna was talking about. In modern society we
have individualised everything, so delinquency [in payments] increases. So,
that balance of producing collective supportive behaviour is at the centre of
the SDFN philosophy. When you are well-to-do, you have a formal job, a good
income, you can afford to do things independently; but when you are poor,
you need to do things collectively because your individual identity does not
give you entitlements. So, we dont romanticise collective behaviour: we say
that this is a function of surviving with dignity and with power.
9 Act No. 4 of 2012.
[ 31 ][ 30 ]
Mr Delgado It strikes me every time that we have to mobilise student
input towards the end because we didnt hear much from them throughout
the session. Were at NUST, so there are students and lecturers in the room.
We know that most of what is being taught is formal development and not
much of what weve been discussing here. At the same time, our realities in
the Global South demand different ways of engaging, which we have spoken
about today. Can we have some concluding remarks from Sheela, who was
herself politicised as a young student, directed to the young students and
professionals in the room?
Ms Patel My first experience of evictions was with pavement dwellers. [At]
that time, I supervised health services to the community. In front of our centre
were 46 houses and every two weeks there used to be an eviction. So, one day,
I couldnt stand it and I went down [to intervene] and the policemen told me,
Madam, come and stand here. And he made me stand next to the house
and continued to break it down. I sat on the pavement and I wept; and all of
the women whose houses were broken [down] told me, Dont cry, dont cry.
It made me realise how protected we are as upper-class people living in the
formal world. We take all these things for granted. If you are ever in a place
where theres an eviction, go and stand there; just experience the total and
complete vulnerability that you would feel. You will never again question your
commitment and responsibility as a professional to do something.
So, one of the things we have started in SDI in the last five years is to work
with associations of professionals: planning schools, architects associations,
structural engineers, social sciences, economists anybody who is willing,
as an educational institution, to explore the creation of exposure, ultimately
leading to a stream of educational activities that are incorporated in[to] the
curriculum. The idea is that you learn. So, when I went to a college of civil
engineering, they showed me one of their labs. And in the lab they [were]
being taught how to do a contour. I said, Why dont you come to a slum and
do contours? Why dont you come into an informal settlement and do your
soil testing? The first time the students were doing it, they said, This is so
much more fun than going to the boring lab! So, this is now incorporated
into their studies. We do the same thing with colleges of architecture, colleges
of planning; and our goal is not to have architects, urban planners, [etc.] come
and dedicate their lives to working in slums: we are saying, Develop a practice
in which 20% to 30% of your [work] deals with informal settlements. Use this
as part of your professional development so that the principles you learn from
the one can be used for the other.
Today I spoke to your Dean: we would like to see what we can do. We already
have an MoA.10 The question is, how do you integrate it into your curriculum?
And how do you produce materials that can be used for references for not
only feeling good about working with slum dwellers, but where you can do
theory building? Its like when you were talking about plot size: I mean, all of
us here are living in post-colonial contexts in our countries. We have inherited
these colonial rules; and we legitimate them to an extent [when] we prefer
people having nothing than [have] something that doesnt meet the standards.
People can live in 30 m2 houses, but we will not allow them to subdivide their
land below a certain value. These are all kinds of things that have political
underpinnings. So, whether you are a town planner or a lecturer, we encourage
you to question why that norm or standard exists, and I think young people
are best equipped to do that. As you get older, you get more comfortable with
what you have learned, and you want to stay with it. I keep on telling myself I
want to be a new 25-year-old, continuously questioning and rebelling against
the rules that are there. But I think that is a state of mind and I think it will
be exciting for young people. The other announcement to all of you is that,
if any of you can get some form of scholarship, you can come to any of our
countries to experience local work. We dont have resources to pay you for
your internship, but we will give you an experience that you need.
Ms Molokoane We can give you a house to sleep and food to eat. I think there
are some planning students in the Philippines. They are every day in the office
of the Federation, doing informal work with the Federation and they enjoy
it and they dont get paid.
10 A Memorandum of Agreement
between NUST (then Polytechnic
of Namibia) and SDFN-NHAG was
established in June 2015.
[ 33 ][ 32 ]
SESSION 3
Urban Livelihoods,
the Informal, and
new roles for Professionals
and Local Government
Richard Dobson
Asiye eTafuleni, Durban, South Africa
Richard Dobson, an architect by profession, worked for the eThekwini [formerly
Durban] Municipality as a project leader for over ten years, first leading its
Warwick Junction Urban Renewal Project and later its Inner-city Renewal
Programme. He left eThekwini in 2006 to establish Asiye eTafuleni (AeT) and
focus on offering design and facilitation services to those working in the informal
economy. His technical, design and project work has been recognised through
various local, national and international awards and citations one example
being his receipt of the 2014 Diakonia Human Rights Award for advancing the
rights of informal workers.
Asiye eTafuleni (AeT) believes that urban planning and design are key drivers
of change that can support the livelihoods of informal workers. AeT brings
communities together through inclusive planning and design processes in order
to build a better, more sustainable urban future for everyone. AeT believes that
informal workers and the working poor must have a voice in urban planning and
design processes. AeT works to provide a facilitating role as well as an active role
in promoting informal workers voices in urban design and planning, including
support in spatial planning, infrastructure and urban furniture, and regulations,
laws and policies.1
The session was moderated by Phillip Lühl, Lecturer, Department of
Architecture and Spatial Planning, NUST
Editorial note: All images are sourced from a presentation restricted to the use of the
event, and are copyrighted to Asiye eTafuleni.
1 https://aet.org.za/, last accessed 30
July 2019.
[ 35 ][ 34 ]
2 About 54% of the worlds
population lives in urban areas. See:
UN-Habitat. (2016). World Cities
Report 2016: Urbanization and
Development Emerging Futures.
Retrieved from https://unhabitat.org/
books/world-cities-report/
3 The narrative has been one
promoted by pro-business
institutions internationally; see:
The Economist. (2011, December
3). Africa rising. The Economist.
Retrieved from https://www.
economist.com/node/21541015 .
However, it has been criticised in
respect of whether the development
is actually pro-poor see e.g. Biney, A.
(2013, September 4). Is Africa really
rising? Retrieved September 5, 2013,
from Pambazuka News website:
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/
category/features/88748
4 The condition of an increase
in economic growth without a
concomitant increase in employment.
This has been observed in the case
of sub-Saharan Africa; see: UNECA.
(2015). Economic Report on Africa
2015. Industrializing through
trade. Retrieved from United
Nations Economic Commission
for Africa website: https://www.
uneca.org/publications/economic-
report-africa-2015. It has also
been observed in the Namibian
case, see: World Bank. (2013).
Country Partnership Agreement
for the Republic of Namibia (No.
77748-NA). Retrieved from http://
documents.worldbank.org/curated/
en/247341468323960034/Namibia-
Country-partnership-strategy-for-
the-period-FY2014-FY2017.
Introduction
I am an architect by profession, privileged over the last 20 years or so to be
involved in urban regeneration, particularly in a part of Durban that has
focused on urban informality. I am with an NGO we founded called Asiye
eTafuleni, which in isiZulu means come to the table. That is just the literal
meaning, but figuratively an isiZulu speaker will understand you are saying
Lets negotiate. The NGO is about negotiating the urban future or urban
present for people who use public spaces for their livelihoods. I will talk a
little bit about urbanisation, informality, exclusion, about being alienated
from what I will describe as an urban scene, and the consequence of that: a
reality with parallel worlds where neither learns from the other. The case study
which I will present is the Warwick Junction in Durban, and I will tease out
some observations, but I will not be making conclusions; I am hoping we will
be doing this together. I will not really focus on the labour aspects. First of
all, I am not an academic so I am not even going to try to perform as one.
Often in relation to informality, labour comes up mainly because people are
struggling to define informality, so they start comparing it to the formal, and
formal generally means formal jobs. A lot of definitions of informality start
challenging the trade union movement in terms of how they describe formal
jobs. Based on these definitions, informal jobs are not protected, and then it
becomes problematic. I am not going to go there, other than [make] some
general observations.
Urbanisation and the informal
If we talk about urbanisation, it is really important to talk about some global
realities. We all know that we have reached the mark where, now, the world
is predominantly settled in urban spaces.2 One in eight people live[s] in
megacities, which are cities with over 10 million people; but what I think
is more interesting is that half of the urban population does not live in
megacities. They actually live in cities with about 500,000 habitants. I mention
that because, in my mind, when we start thinking about informality, we start
talking about urban; we sort of start moving towards the catastrophic version.
Your context here is Namibia and, for myself back in Durban, I think our
challenges are those of smaller towns and cities.
Then if we start talking about economics, there is the story about Africa rising.3
The story is that African countries are actually performing better than other
countries in the world. However, that is largely jobless growth.4 While this is
linking us to international markets, the trickle-down to the rest is incredibly
poor. It is postulated that there are two models that we should be pursuing: one
is the Market Model, which is the one I was referring to in which we are trying
to link Africa to global markets which in fact leaves us with jobless growth.
The other one is the Equity Model, where you actually try do both, but you
are very conscious of the trickle-down; [where] in fact all the players have to
win in the equation. I mention this because these do start to bump up against
informality. Because part of what informality is about is peoples reaction to
joblessness: being busy, but not necessarily being productively busy.
We need to look at where we are from an urban point of view, from a global
reality. We are seeing huge displaced populations which are politically
displaced, who now, through survival techniques, try to reconfigure how
they operate in the urban [sphere] from a political point of view, from a
settlement point of view, and of course from the [economic] point of view.
An example of this is mobile money in Somalia,5 which is amazing because it
is really a response to the meltdown of the money system there. In doing so,
people invented another way of doing money, and the reach of that money is
incredible. It may again [be] tainted with the black market and the illicit side of
how that money is being moved and laundered, but the upside of it is a really
functioning circulation of money being able to purchase goods.
If we start looking at the informal economy and start throwing numbers,
the reality is sobering. In Southeast Asia, anything around 80% in terms of
how people earn their livelihood is deemed informal;6 and if you go to India,
the figures are at about 90%. So, what is the reality? Is the reality formal or
informal? Then there is sub-Saharan Africa, where the prevalence of the
informal economy ranges from 82% in Mali down to 33% in South Africa
that is, excluding agricultural employment. There are many figures about
informality today, but at the same time the reality is highly contextual. The big
surprise for me is that, in South Africa, 44% of the wholesale and retail activities
go through the informal economy, and it is estimated that this is worth N$52
billion, or 5.2% of the GDP.7 Therefore, informality is not something which
is marginal: we are actually looking at something which is now starting to be
really mainstream.
Informality is a new entrance into the city, into an urban economy. However,
these new participants are not urban-literate: they do not know about
governance, by-laws, how you access services, planning processes, how
you get in the queue to get a house, how you get a place to sell your goods.
There is a huge deficiency in terms of peoples ability to engage with the new
urban environment that they are in. It is really natural that people come to
the city because the city is the repository of resources. People come to the city
because of the hope of a job, access to resources, and some way in which to
earn a livelihood. However, you are going to explore and deploy the resources
around you, not necessarily in the way they were intended. You will find [an]
electricity supply in all sorts of innovative ways; you will collect your water
from all sorts of interesting places; and so, you hustle. When you do that, you
are causing additional expenses to local authorities, such as extra generation of
waste or maintenance of public conveniences that are used in ways [for which]
they were never designed.
Urban management is a real challenge, and unless municipalities tackle this
reality, you are going to perpetuate prejudicial views about informality: they,
5 Onyulo, Tonny. 2016. More
phones, fewer banks and years of
instability is transforming Somalia
into an almost cashless society.
Quartz Africa, 26 February 2016.
Available at https://qz.com/625258/
more-phones-few-banks-and-years-
of-instability-are-transforming-
somalia-to-a-cashless-society/, last
accessed 14 August 2019.
6 ILO/WIEGO. (2013). Women and
Men in the Informal Economy: A
Statistical Picture (2nd Edition).
Retrieved from International Labour
Organisation website: http://www.
ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/-
--dgreports/---stat/documents/
publication/wcms_234413.pdf
7 Estimates vary greatly depending
on the study, but the available
figures are higher than this; see
Wills, G. (2009). South Africas
Informal Economy: A Statistical
Profile (Working Paper No. 6).
Retrieved from Women in Informal
Employment Globalizing and
Organizing website: http://www.
inclusivecities.org/wp-content/
uploads/2012/07/Wills_WIEGO_
WP6.pdf .
[ 37 ][ 36 ]
the newcomers, are the people who are breaking the public toilets or stealing
the electricity; and all the [other kinds] of judgements that people have towards
informal workers, simply because provision has not been made for them.
Then, there is little participation in the urban economy, partly because this is
predicated on the fact that, generally, economic activities will be operating out
of fixed property. If you are deprived of access to fixed property for whatever
reason, you are already at a disadvantage before you even start the game
Image 3-1
We could probably spend all afternoon speculating why this image represents
alienation from the urban scene. Generally, in Africa, we have inherited an
urban typology from our colonial benefactors. So, most of our cities are not
responsive to our endemic cultures, our cultural preferences. Even before we
start to discuss any issue, we [have] got an urban form which is not responsive
to how we want to live urban. In this backdrop, we see clearly depicted
deficiencies in [the] relationship with public transport: we know that, in Africa,
the minibus taxis are prevalent. They are highly criticised because of their
excessive demand on the road network [and] excessive congestion; but, for
people that need to access urban spaces, [minibuses are] highly efficient. At the
same time, there will be those that will be demanding good road condition[s]
so that they can drive their luxury vehicle[s]. However, the primary figure
in the photograph is really what the challenge is all about (Image 3-1): here
is this individual, a traditional healer, highly respected in his traditional
culture, who now has to assert his presence and his cultural significance in a
foreign environment which is not catering for him. He then starts to acquire
symbols of urban life a briefcase which matches his image as to what a
businessman should look like from the mobile phone adverts. Then he applies
his trade on the sidewalk. For us Westerners, that is equivalent to [going] into
a pharmacy to buy our medicine. However, in his dignity, he maintains his
cultural recognition as traditional healer by the necklace that he is wearing. In
the alienation and the deprivation, the level of dignity is unbelievable and
Image 3-2 Image 3-3
I think that is one of the main things that is being exploited with [regard] to
informality. Here are people that are coming to the city, making a go [of it],
trying [to] find an urban presence, and in the main, doing it with incredible
dignity. That is the message I would like to talk about.
So, what are the consequences? I mentioned earlier the parallel worlds, neither
one learning from the other. In the picture (Image 3-2) there are a lot of guys
cooking corn on the cob mealies. They use timber and wood salvaged
around the city for that activity. They probably know more about how the city
works than the city managers [do]. Theyve got urban intelligence, but no one
is bothering to go to those guys and say, Lets engage you in the system so
we can actually find out whats happening. The other thing is that, through
this facility, they cook 26 tonnes of cobs a day, equivalent to N$1.5 million a
week. Most people do not even know that there are these incredible economic
activities going on which are providing a culturally preferred carbohydrate
meal in the middle of the day. Probably 500m away from the first picture are
people who cook cow heads. A marginal intervention from the City in terms
of health and safety created some infrastructure for them, and suddenly they
are one step up. The margin in terms of recognition is actually very small: it is
not about quantum leaps.
But then we also get the complete opposite end of the spectrum, where
there are the ideologies that many universities drive and that are driven by
international norms of converting cities into devices for branding. South
Africa, as you know, has suffered from that with the World Cup (Image 3-3),
and a whole sub-lecture could be done about that. This drives a completely
foreign focus, which is very seductive, but it leaves the majority behind.
Warwick Junction
Warwick Junction suffered from apartheids spatial regulation, which was
particularly bad in Durban (Image 3-4). The area around it was generally
designated for white use and occupation, but black people could transit freely
as it was the black public transport node of the city. This was the place that you
had to come to if you wanted to access the white city, and it is from here where
the public transport network radiated out into the rest of the city. Today, there
[are] something like 2,000 minibus taxis coming into this area, 460,000 people
[ 39 ][ 38 ]
[traverse] that area a day, coming into the city. Clearly, those are the customers
for those trading in the public space. There are about 6,0008,000 informal
workers who [operate] in this market complex, trading traditional herbs and
medicine, corn on the cob, the cow heads and so on.
Image 3-4. The Warwick Junction, Durban, South Africa.
Image 3-5. The Warwick Junction, Durban, South Africa: Pre-existing conditions
in 1996.
In Durban, back in 1996, there was a honeymoon period after the fall of
apartheid. Local government throughout the country was trying to restructure,
and it embarked on urban regeneration programmes. Durban took its most
blighted area, which is this market area, and tried to restructure it. The first
immediate challenge was the herb market. Even back in the colonial years,
people were trying to establish a traditional medicine market in the city, but
it was totally disregarded. The only land that was immediately available was
an unutilised portion of the citys road network, so it was clear that one could
turn that into a linear market and create the herb trading stalls along the sides.
Image 3-6. Herb market
Since 1996, about R5 million was committed to work in public spaces and
building the market. However, it was only after building the market that
people started to realise what was really there. Turnover in the first year [of
the market] was R170 million; between 800 and 1,000 traders were employed
in the market and benefitting an estimated further 14,000 jobs outside of
the market. In informal economies, there are both the visible and invisible
workers, and the ratio is of about 1 to anything between 3 and 5. Informal
workers have anything from 7 to 12 dependents, so the impact of informality
is huge and disregarding it and disrupting it can have huge and negative
consequences. The message here is with regards to the innovation in terms
of how you can start to get a toehold and start to implement some sort of
response to informality, and that there is a huge amount of assets that are not
being recognised.
[Cooking] corn on the cob is a really aggressive process. One requires a
200-litre drum to cook 13 dozen cobs. The damage to the sidewalk is quite
considerable, so the intervention here was to build a small facility slightly on
the edge of the market where the City would tolerate smoke-generating fire,
as the city is a smokeless zone. This enabled the predominantly women
to cook their mealies and then to hawk them around the city. The interesting
thing of this particular example is the struggle to get the capital from the City
to build that little facility. The facility cost about N$60,000, and at that time we
discovered that the turnover was N$1.5 million a week. So, in essence, they
could have paid for this by coffee break on the first day. Often, the intervention
with infrastructure is virtually disposable architecture, requiring very low
capital but having a huge impact.
[ 41 ][ 40 ]
Image 3-7. Corn-on-the-cob
The next example is a partnership between two communities. The first one
was a religious group of Muslims who venerate a saint who is buried in a shrine
alongside a disused part of the city road network which became inactive when
the freeway network was built. Trade had started to occupy the area with
shack shops, but at the annual veneration ceremony, the communities agreed
to demolish their shops for the [veneration] ceremony to take place. The
ceremony lasts for two weeks. Afterwards, the Muslim community provided
the nails and timber for traders to rebuild their shops, and then it was business
as usual again. This is an annual cycle of activities and, right now, they are on
the 70th year of the veneration ceremony. So, the religious community came
to the City and said that it [was] getting more and more difficult to hold their
ceremonies because the scale of the ceremony was getting bigger and bigger.
So, they came up with a proposal to build an adjacent roof, which the traders
could then use for the rest of the year. The City took on the project and now
that roof is 300 meters long, and it provides almost an urban galleria, which
allows for open space trading (Image 3-8). We would describe it was an urban
umbrella, so it is a typology we think allows for some quite interesting urban
space interventions that one can implement and that can be a wider asset
other than just simply the trading.
For AmaZulu people there is a cultural preference in their rural context in
which women are not allowed to touch the head of the cow. Traditionally,
the head was given to men as a reward for slaughtering the animal, and they
prepared it for a traditional feast. This practice, which was deeply rural, started
to come to the city. I joke with AmaZulu men back at home that whenever the
work starts really getting difficult, the women have to start taking over. So, in
the city, slaughtering is essentially done by women. The interventions in this
case were really very simple, but they had to be incremental. The first step was
observing the situation, then designing an intervention, starting to structure
the activity, providing appropriate training, then slowly starting to dignify the
activities.
Image 3-8. Brook street market
Image 3-9. Bovine head cooks
[ 43 ][ 42 ]
8 Fération Internationale de Football
Association (FIFA) World Cup
[Mens] Soccer tournament.
Observations in lieu of conclusions
We are looking at a sustained presence of this urban activity and a local
government commitment to informality. This stretches now for over 20 years,
and the City has sometimes gone a little bit off course. In 2006, when we had the
World Cup8 [coming in 2010], they wanted to demolish the green roof market
and build a shopping mall; but those are the struggles that you have to engage
in. However, by and large, the City has maintained the market and continued
to respect the activity. Right now, we are almost in the second generation of
street traders who have actually benefited from that. I am starting now to
describe informality in Durban as a career path of being a street trader. It is
not this urban guerrilla [anymore], who has come in and started to hustle and
found space on the street. This is your chosen profession: your children are
taking over your site or aspire to be this sort of urban participant. I think that
is really significant.
Image 3-10. Sustained presence, 1996 (left) and 2016 (right)
Interestingly, over this period, [in] just around 1990, we had ten megacities,
and by about 2014 we had 28 megacities. That is to say you can get stability
in one area, but you get a tidal wave coming at you from another side. I think
a lot of people see informality and they do not want to get involved in it. I do
not want to be critical of any government officials that are here, but generally,
a lot of the writing that there is about informality suggests that government
officials are scared of informality in terms of the implications in dealing with
it. What many governments do is that they try to malign it, associate it with
the black market, with tax avoidance, and all those [kinds] of things. However,
interventions can actually be really simple.
I want to discuss three stages here. The first concerns the original conditions
back in 19941996. To get started was incredibly simple: we just had to
make sure that there were solid, drained sidewalks that would allow you to
demarcate spaces, to number those spaces, and have some permit system that
[related] to it. You are not punitive in terms of how you make people move
from one [space] to the other, but you say, Take your pallet tables: we prefer
it to be of [a specific] design because, if not, the streets are not clear and we
have to sweep and wash them. But you can use the same salvaged material
to build a different table. Over time, you start to implement higher-order
infrastructure that starts to bring about some sort of urban aesthetic and,
probably, a greater level of management.
Image 3-11.
This is about the processes of assimilation. If someone has been part of that 20-
year journey, where they met professionals and municipal staff at their pallet
tables who persuaded them to now change the table [and] move into a square,
this person is starting to develop what I earlier referred to as urban literacy.
People start to understand it: You want me to collapse my table because you
want to make the site cleaner for me in the morning. That makes sense. Ill
participate in the programme.
We started an NGO with a three-year funding programme; we are just ending
the first phase of it. We have embarked on participatory action research, and
we like to believe we have taken it one step further, where we have trained the
informal workers to do their own research and determine their own needs
and preferences.
The logo represents the three-step process (Image 3-11). The bottom part
is to engage with the community [and] initiate research. In the middle
[are] the three stages of analysing that information and presenting to local
government and then, ultimately, implementing projects. The training process
in itself is, of course, incredibly enriching in the sense that the questionnaire
is co-designed: Can we put in this question? Will this be helpful? Will this be
offensive? Then afterwards comes role-playing and training of the researchers
so that the traders themselves start becoming acquainted with the intrusion of
someone coming to do the survey. Then the technical team goes in and does
the photographs and the measuring. This was for us to know the footprint
of all the traders and then to take photographic records of that. Community
introductions were also part of the process: you cannot just go around putting
[ 45 ][ 44 ]
numbers on peoples tables without explaining why you are doing it. Finally,
[there is] the process of implementing the questionnaire. About 10% of the
people were surveyed in the three districts. We ranked peoples preferred
needs according to the districts; then we tried to present these with graphics
which the trader leaders are then able to use and interpret. There are also
further graphics through which we now start to prioritise those preferences.
Image 3-12
The results were an amazing surprise, as I would have prioritised shelter,
toilets and storage far above water, but water popped up as being one of the
key things that the people wanted. If you start to allow these systems, you can
start to respond to the real needs that people can relate to. The moment the
leaders saw this, they said, Yes, of course, we told you. This now becomes the
springboard to other projects.
We have now got a project with funding to look at toilets. This is done in
the streets of the core part of the CBD, where trader shelters built nearly 20
years ago have become dysfunctional over time. They have outgrown their
ability to serve the needs of the traders. So, now, we start looking at design
responses that could be implemented to mitigate some of the challenges and
the prejudice that is projected against informal workers, as they are seen to
be an intrusion in the high streets of the city. Part of that process was to train
the leaders to make their presentation to the City. The response from the
City came back and it was surprising: they expressed interest in four of the
proposals. One was about storage; another was looking at a node where there
were old shipping containers used for storage and additional toilet facilities;
another storage facility; and then another traditional market that sells African
incense. The City is now going to commit capital to these interventions. The
traders are already invested in the ideas that were discussed when these visuals
were generated; and so, already, they are part of the process which is going to
be rolled out with their participation.
Image 3-13
Much [more] could be said, [but] I am going to leave it to question time. We
need to remember that South Africa has a particularly exclusionary past,
particularly from an economic and racial point of view, which aimed at
annihilating any cultural preference or cultural expression in the city. Now
you [not only] have people present in the city economy, but you also have
cultural preferences being expressed. The infrastructure I have shown varied
from very small to others that are at large scale, but they are all catalytic. If
you were to see a layout of Warwick, it is almost like a new corridor that
actually traverses and is starting to link the city. We need to start recognising
that there are new entrants into cities and urban economies. We label them
informal workers; but recognising them is a primary requirement in terms
of how we start to become more proactive and be urbanists of the future.
Urbanists start to recognise that we have got this incredible endemic energy
in our cities which we are not realising; and, with that energy, we got a
unique urban aesthetic which is going to set us apart from anywhere else
in the world.
Discussion
Nina Maritz, a Namibian architect, asked how one could get a society to
respect instead of disrespecting informal trade.
Mr Dobson replied that, in the case of Warwick Junction, the local
authority [was owed] a lot of the credit, as they strongly committed to area-
based management and prioritised the area through an interdisciplinary
approach. This wavered somehow with the arrival of the World Cup mega-
event in 2010, but attention on Warwick was regained through challenging
the City in some cases, with litigation. He said there was a need for support
organisations, as the local authority could only do so much. He also gave
credit to other organisations that had kept the City in check.
[ 47 ][ 46 ]
Maria Marealle, a former lecturer at NUST, asked whether AeT had done
work in residential areas or only in Warwick. She also asked what percentage
of informal trade activities happened in public spaces and residential areas.
Mr Dobson replied that the AeT currently only focused on Warwick.
He stated that, through his work and travels, he had seen the relevance of
working with informality. He mentioned that the organisation had started
with recognition, but then it had moved on to claim the right to design the
city for the actual needs of those inhabiting it. For him, sidewalks were a
good example: the usual complaint was that informal traders left no space
for pedestrians. But he then challenged everyone to think about a sidewalk
for various alternative uses. He also prompted the audience to imagine taking
away parking lots, and to activate these for other uses. He warned that it was
important to acknowledge what the reality was on the ground otherwise it
might simply go underground.
A student remarked that she had seen street vendors being chased by the
police in Windhoek. She also noted the stringent informal trade regulations
in Windhoek, which in turn obeyed zoning. Because the city was not geared
for informal trade, she said, in many cases informal traders ended up doing
business in very odd spaces.
Mr Dobson indicated that a City needed a process, a project and a policy. He
said it was important for a City to recognise how much they needed to allocate
from their resources to the informal sector and to reorganise if necessary.
As an example, he suggested closing down a street one day a month for
pedestrian and street trade use, just to send a message that the City recognised
and favoured informal sector activities. He noted that some cities feared that,
by supporting informal trade, they were supporting illegal activities or mafias;
but, as he pointed out, so-called formal trade was not exempt from corruption
or bribery, for example, so it was discriminatory to say that informal trade was
inherently corrupt.
Phillip Lühl of NUST asked how useful it was to demonstrate how much
informal trade was contributing to the economy in order to make others hear
the argument. He also remarked on the danger of addressing the informal as
something that was just happening temporarily until things formalised more.
Mr Dobson said that the economic argument was very powerful, and it was
useful in persuading City officials to publicly commit additional money to
potentiate existing activities. He also said that such figures were currently
even used at ministerial level, and that there was a certain awareness that, by
shutting down businesses due to licences or procedures, would also shut down
a lot of business activity. Nevertheless, as he remarked, while showing statistics
was important, it was as crucial not to leave out the back stories: these helped
to nuance the reality. As an example, he noted how the stories of informal
traders in Warwick had been useful in avoiding the displacement of informal
trade in favour of building a shopping mall: the argument had been that the
mall would only create a few hundred temporary jobs, while the established
informal trade sustained tens of thousands of livelihoods.
An unidentified participant mentioned that Namibia was very town-
planning-oriented and that many were stuck to the drawing board. The
participant proposed having more flexibility in order to see how things could
work on their own.
Ms Marealle remarked that many activities in the formal sector were
supported by those in the informal one. The example she offered was that
some of the meeting participants who were wearing clean and ironed clothes
probably had an informally employed domestic worker performing those
duties for them.
Mr Dobson noted an example from the United States (US) when immigrant
workers had gone on strike for one day:9 it had demonstrated to everyone the
impact that their absence would have on the running of the country.
Ms Maritz recalled that, during a trip to India, in a place where civil servants
and university staff convened, she had seen a man in a small corner with a coal-
heated iron who was ironing peoples shirts. She described his services, which
were very popular, as an example of exchanges between the two economies.
Kristy Asino, an Urban Planning lecturer at NUST, remarked that town
planning schemes, especially the more recent ones, made provision for trading
as long as there had been consultations with neighbours and the business
had been registered. It became an issue, however, when regulations required
structures to have certain special characteristics in order for the business to
take place, such as food preparation areas or bathrooms. She mentioned that
the current rules were largely inherited, but that they continued to be used.
She asked the presenter whether he had achieved any policy reform as a result
of his work.
Mr Dobson responded that in the area-based management example,
most of the City departments had been represented. The official from the
Health Department was in an interesting situation because, in South Africa,
health inspectors themselves could be prosecuted if they did not enforce
municipal regulations. However, the speaker had engaged with the situation
particularly with the cooking of cow heads in a way that would mitigate
some of the challenges while not completely outlawing the practice in an
urban environment. He also organised public talks to the traders in Warwick,
where he explained ways of dealing with the food to comply with regulations.
The traders also became inventive in their compliance with regulations: for
example, the health requirement of having running water, which was thought
to require a water tap, was instead met by having drums of water around for
traders to wash their hands and other items. Seeing how City officials attitudes
9 Lam, B. (2017, February 16). A
Strike to Show What America Is
Like Without Immigrant Workers.
The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://
www.theatlantic.com/business/
archive/2017/02/day-without-
immigrants/516969/
[ 49 ][ 48 ]
had changed in this process, Dobson acknowledged that he had much respect
for them. He said that, today, City officials and even government workers
knew that there were creative ways of complying with regulations.
Mahongora Kavihuha, the Secretary General of the Trade Union
Congress of Namibia, disagreed that domestic workers were part of the
informal sector.
Mr Dobson agreed, but stressed the need to engage with the informal
economy. To illustrate his point, he mentioned how, in Nairobi, Kenya, by
forbidding informal trade, the police could take advantage of the situation;
today, the economy of bribes in that country was considerable. He went on to
say that engagement with the informal sector was not based on a formula: it
often came about through circumstance e.g. where one found a sympathetic
politician or it was a matter of timing. Having worked as a consultant for the
City, he was able to see for himself not only how the issue was regarded from
the Citys perspective, but also from the traders. In illustration, he referred to
a colleague of his that had started as a policeman and now worked as a City
official: experience in both fields had enabled his colleague to gain considerable
urban intelligence. A specific challenge that Dobson highlighted for the AeT
was limited funding. He informed the meeting that all AeT funders except one
were from overseas.
An unidentified female participant stressed the difficulty of complying
with municipal regulations, particularly the need to have a fitness certificate
which in turn required the availability of toilets. She referred to the fact that
there were very few toilets in informal settlements never mind no connection
to the sewerage system and the absence of roads in some cases.
Ms Maritz recognised how the original intent of urban planning legislation
had become lost. She explained that, today, it was not the primary objective
to own the land and have full infrastructure, as long as there are some basic
services that can help those who would like to start trading and make a living.
She also pointed out that regulation could further marginalise people; thus,
the underlying principles of legislation and regulations should be not to close
businesses, but to enable them.
Mr Dobson explained that new technologies had helped to overcome some
pre-Internet limitations. He remarked how, in some places, having a registered
physical address was a requirement for business certification; now, with digital
maps, one could simply submit ones geographic coordinates instead of a street
name and number. He also remembered how registered architects had been
required to have a fixed telephone line before they were permitted to start
practising.
A female employee from the City of Windhoek clarified that, in the
municipal regulations, there were gradients along the axis of formality
informality.10 She illustrated this by way of an area called Onyika, where the
housing structures looked very informal, but each plot was provided with
municipal services.
Ms Asino added that it was indeed possible to have formal aspects in areas
considered to be informal. However, many simply thought of informal as
being a shack.
Martin Mendelsohn, an urban planner, remarked that not only was
regulating the informal sector problematic, but it also had its own rules. In
many cases, it was not about choice between the external or internal systems.
In his view, a sensible approach would be to provide spaces that were conducive
to trade.
Mr Dobson remarked that debating the definition of informal had had a
long history, starting with Keith Harts work in Ghana.11 However, he said that
informal trade could not be seen in isolation because there are many aspects
that impacted the city which could not simply be understood or managed
according to conventional perceptions and regulations.
Mike Iipinge, from Walvis Bay Municipality, remarked that he worked
with informal traders, but sometimes the areas that were slated for informal
trade were not the most conducive to trade. Some traders had moved near
big businesses, and there seemed to be a symbiotic relationship developing
between the two. He referred to a pilot project they were working on in
Swakopmund in this regard, where a plot of land slated for formal businesses
lay next to one for informal traders. The condition for the purchasers of the
formal business plots was that they had to agree to work with the informal
traders.
Mr Lühl noted that informal economies were often in well-connected parts
of the city.
Mr Dobson agreed, adding that a common example was taxi ranks.
Ms Maritz reiterated that informal traders knew the best places in the
city to trade. She encouraged NUST to do further research-oriented work
with students on this matter and requested Mr Dobson to write about their
methodology.
Mr Dobson responded that transport interventions and policy were crucial
for informal trade. He explained, for example, how South Africa was now
shifting to a bus rapid transit system, whose concept originally developed in
Latin America.12 He said that this shift had had a negative impact on informal
trade, many of whom profited from taxi ranks and minibus stations.
10 This refers to the six levels that
the City of Windhoek outlines in
its Development Upgrading Policy
(1999), which was recently updated
in 2019.
11 Hart, K. (1973). Informal
income opportunities and urban
employment in Ghana. The Journal
of Modern African Studies, 11(1),
6189.
12 This was first introduced in
Curitiba, Brazil. The idea was to
create a designated lane for a bus that
would perform a function similar to
that of a subway, but with much less
of an investment. See: Lindau, L. A.,
Hidalgo, D., & Facchini, D. (2010).
Curitiba, the cradle of bus rapid
transit. Built Environment, 36(3),
274282..
[ 51 ][ 50 ]
SESSION 4
Urban design, Public Space
and Local Governance:
Experiences of the Cape
Town Partnership
Bulelwa Makalima-Ngewana
CEO, Cape Town Partnership, Cape Town, South Africa
Bulelwa Makalima-Ngewana is a town planner with extensive experience in
managing and coordinating PPPs. An urban revivalist at heart, she has spent
the last ten years with the Cape Town Partnership managing, developing and
promoting Cape Towns city centre as an economically thriving, creative and
valued public and private space in which to live, work and play. She is a board
member of several national and international bodies, including the Central City
Improvement District, a PPP for Cape Towns CBD; the Investment and Trade
Promotion Agency for the Western Cape, Wesgro; and the Table Mountain Aerial
Cableway Company. She is also on the board of the International Downtown
Association as well as being an ambassador for the Cape Town International
Convention Centre, a member of the World Design Capital 2016 International
Advisory Committee for Taipei, and a World Cities Summit Young Leader.
The work of the Cape Town Partnership, since its beginning as a non-profit
organisation in 1999 (founded, at the time, by the City of Cape Town, the South
African Property Owners Association and the Cape Town Regional Chamber of
Commerce and Industry), has been about helping make the city work. It is an
organisation that brings people together around common goals for Cape Towns
transformation. It defines its staff as connectors, facilitators and translators,
working to help people find a common language and a shared set of priorities
specific to projects that can make a positive impact in peoples lives.1
The session was moderated by Jenny Botha, Lecturer, Department of
Architecture and Spatial Planning, NUST
Editorial note: Shortly after this Forum was held, the CTP came to an end since
funding from the City of Cape Town ceased.
1 https://web.archive.org/
web/20161003181139/http://www.
capetownpartnership.co.za/
[ 53 ][ 52 ]
Introduction
I am going to talk to you about the work of the Cape Town Partnership
(CTP). It is housed in a small space in the CBD of Cape Town. It started in
1999 without the luxury of hindsight of anticipating of what cities were going
to be. Remember that, by 1994, after the first democratic elections [had] just
[taken] place in South Africa, there were many changes in municipalities
and governance. For example, at that time, Cape Town was in the process
of amalgamating into one metropolitan area: a lot of smaller municipalities
were incorporated together to form one single metropolitan area with an
executive mayor. This was happening from 1994 to 1999, which were years
that were marked by a serious decline in the [Cape Town] CBD. In 1994, you
could still have high street shopping in the middle of town. There were major
retailers based there Old Mutual had their headquarters there. By 1999 a lot
of corporate entities left the CBD to relocate to other areas, and the reason
was very simple: the CBD was declining crime and grime had taken over. It
was no longer safe to be in the CBD; you could not conduct business. We were
left with a CBD that was decaying, with empty buildings, and an increasing
ghettoisation of the city.
We, as CTP, emerged out of conflict. That conflict was between the South
African Property Owners Association and the City of Cape Town in terms
of municipal governance. On the one hand, the Municipality was saying they
were in the process of amalgamating. There [were] a lot of municipalities
and that they did not have the time to pay attention to one small space. They
said that they were dealing with a multimodal economy, where there were a
lot of CBDs in Cape Town many in a state of decline. So, they asked why
they should pay attention to a space that, in comparison, was better off than
the centre of Khayelitsha.2 On the other hand, you had property owners
who said they [were] paying rates, but they [couldnt] rent their buildings
because tenants were complaining; therefore, the Municipalitys rates base was
declining. More importantly, the property owners could not do business. And
so, out of this conflict, which happened over a period of time, a compromise
was reached by both parties. Instead of leaving the CBD only to the private
sector or leaving it to the Municipality and abandoning it, the parties needed
to come together to form a PPP with the mandate to rescue the CBD. And that
is how the CTP came about in 1999.
In this presentation I will take you through some of the lessons which we have
learnt, our current challenges, how this relates to housing, and what the future
[looks] like at the moment.
About the CTP
When the CTP was established, there was crime and grime in the CBD. People
were mugged at gunpoint on their way from their offices to get lunch, cars
were broken into, the rubbish piled up in the streets, and there was no parking
system. So, when we came in, we had to convince property owners to pay a
levy on top of the rates for the services that the Municipality provides, because
clearly those services were not sufficient. This top-up levy was for urban
management, including cleaning, security, parking and, most importantly,
dealing with homelessness and street kids. We assisted the Municipality with
developing a bylaw that allowed the establishment of City Improvement
Districts (CIDs). It means that, if you are a property owner within a certain
CID, in addition to your usual rates you pay a top-up levy. This levy is
collected by the Municipality who then passes it on to an agency that provides
the top-up services. For example, if your garbage is collected on Tuesday, and
by Friday there is already a need for another round of garbage collection,
but the Municipality is unable to do it, [then] the CID, through a service
level agreement with the City, would come around and collect the garbage.
The same applies to security. If there is not sufficient security provided by the
City, the CID provides top-up security. There are currently about 80 security
cameras around town which provide visible security in every corner. That
security system works hand-in-hand with the Governments security system,
so that there is a seamless provision without competition.
The relationship sounds easy, but it is quite a complicated [one] to manage. Our
responsibility as the CTP was to create and manage the Central CID, and to
provide a strategic vision of where the City of Cape Town CBD [needed] to be.
We created four CIDs and became the managing agent for all four. [The] CTP
then provided a development strategy that laid out a vision for the CBD for the
following ten years. So, one responsibility is operational and the other is strategic,
but they need to work hand-in-hand in order to provide a seamless experience.
Today, 17 years later, we have an urban management focus. You first need to get
this right, because the urban management focus provides the basics: security,
cleanliness, parking, and attention to homelessness and street kids. Then you
move into urban regeneration: this is where you bring back investment into a
space. Once the basics [were] in place we went out to look for partners in the
private sector who [were] willing to invest in the space. The first real investment
in the CBD was through the Irish, who invested N$1 billion by buying up
buildings in town and renovating them. If you have been to [the] Cape Town
CBD, you will know [the] Mandela Rhodes and TAJ hotels: that was the first
block of buildings that was bought. They initiated a trend where, instead of
only commercial buildings in the CBD, they provided residential space and
suddenly, we had housing in town. Mandela Rhodes is high-income housing,
and at the bottom of the building there was retail, including hotels.
We really celebrated it. At that time, we had the Waterfront development
down the road, Cavendish Square in the Southern Suburbs, and Century City
was developing. So, the CBD was competing with malls or other areas that
were really thriving. Given the context of this conference, I want to note that,
at that time, nobody spoke about affordable housing or accessibility. It was all
about celebrating that there was an investment in town. We then saw a very
2 An informal settlement on the
outskirts of the Cape Town CBD.
[ 55 ][ 54 ]
rapid trend, e.g. Old Mutual abandoned their building to build a new campus
in Pinelands. They boarded up their building in the CBD and literally left it
empty. Later, they came back and reinvested in the building, [renovating] it as
residential units. We suddenly saw an influx of residential owners within the
CBD, which again was something to be celebrated.
Between 2006 and 2007, almost 4,000 residential units were built in the CBD.
However, unfortunately for us at that time, the people who were buying into
these units were people that were not occupying them, but were speculating
for investment. So, what we saw [was] that the lights were on in December, and
after December it was dark. This caused a lot of problems for us, because we
did not have owner-occupiers which meant we did not build communities
within the CBD.
At the same time, in District Six, just outside the CBD, the land restitution
project started. You [will] remember that almost 60,000 people were moved
out from District Six to other parts of Cape Town during apartheid.3 It would
have been ideal to build houses in District Six for the original owners. It was
a process that was incredibly complicated, that involved all three levels of
government, and that was highly politicised. To this day, only about 20 houses
have been built in District Six.
So, here we have this big open space which could be a huge opportunity for
the CBD which, if you remember, is squeezed between the mountain and
the sea, so we do not have a lot of land to begin with. In addition to that, we
have heritage guidelines that regulate that no building should compete with
the view of the mountain. So we do not have a lot of opportunities to go
vertical, leaving a very restricted zone to build. This also means that we have
very expensive land, and very little of that land is owned by the City of Cape
Town. Some of it is owned by Provincial Government, but they have opted for
what was more attractive in economic terms. In other words, there is currently
no social agenda to make the CBD an inclusive residential zone. We would
require different residential zoning and tenure offerings in order to make it a
more inclusive space. That is the current challenge we face.
We also realised that, while we have 4,000 residential units which are empty,
every morning we have 400,000 people driving to the CBD and 400,000
people driving out at the end of the day, leaving the CBD with no life. I had a
lot of people complaining to me, especially [in] hotels that are full, that they
spend a lot of time marketing the city [overseas], but on Sunday, when visitors
open their windows, they are all by themselves. [They] ask where everyone is
because no one actually lives in the CBD which makes it very unsafe. Our
retail strategy of having a 24-hour city is actually affected by the fact that, at
the end of each day, people are rushing to get out of the CBD. However, our
mandate is mainly the management of the spaces in between the buildings.
And although we realised that the CBD really has something to offer for
everyone in the metropolitan area, whether you come from Mitchells Plain,
Khayelitsha, Llandudno or Constantia, you do not feel like the CBD belongs
to you. When we started, there was a fragmented retail pattern within the
CBD. Our first strategy was to integrate the retail offering, and to do this you
need to activate the spaces in between the buildings.
It is similar when you provide a house. If your house is part of the RDP, it is
likely that it is just a house and not a home, because no one is paying attention
to the public spaces. You may end up as a hostage family, where there is
nothing outside the house; therefore, you will spend all your time inside the
house. So, what we are trying to do is to prevent our current workers from
being hostage workers, because they come to work in their cars, which they
park inside their buildings, go to work, and go back to their cars and back
home. We want to get them out of the buildings and into the public spaces.
So, we animate public spaces in various ways: we have a programme called
City Walk on the third day of every month, where we activate public spaces
with music [and] poetry, and we theme it accordingly. We also have the First
Thursdays,4 which happens [on] the first Thursday of every month, [when]
businesses remain open until late so that everyone comes out to the streets
after hours. The transition period is between 16:00 and 20:00, and if you catch
your target during that time, they will linger longer in the CBD, and then you
will be able to turn the tide.
So, to recap: in 1999, the CBD was a space that was abandoned, where nobody
wanted to invest. In 2017, the CBD has become an economic engine for the
GDP of Cape Town. When the city experienced a decline in property values
and sales, the CBD was not affected. If you come to Cape Town, you just
have to look at how many cranes are up: [it] shows that construction is still
happening. We have been having this boom for a very long time now.
Significance to housing
In terms of residential property, you will be very lucky to find something
below N$1.2 million in the CBD, no matter how small the space is. One of the
buildings approved by the City of Cape Town is very controversial because it
casts a major shadow on the Bo-Kaap area. The cheapest apartment in that
building is about N$1.9 million, and the project includes 250 apartments.
What you can see is that our success has become our weakness. With that kind
of investment coming in, we would have liked the Municipality to say that,
If we are going to approve this building, you have to provide different levels
of affordability in order for young professionals who want to work in town to
afford apartments in the building, [or] for students to be able to rent in the
building.
As CTP, we spent a lot of time and energy in providing the City of Cape Town
with guidelines for land use management so that they [would] understand
what type of approval they should give for what types of buildings and in
what part of the city. There are a lot of developers that are willing to provide
3 Today, a dedicated museum holds
the archive of such displacement (see
http://districtsix.co.za/, last accessed
31 July 2019).
4 First Thursdays is a project that
encourages galleries, restaurants and
shops to stay open in the evenings
on the first Thursday of every month
to attract visitors and activate public
spaces (http://first-thursdays.co.za/,
last accessed 31 July 2019).
[ 57 ][ 56 ]
In Cape Town, you will notice that many people are starting to react negatively
to what some call dormitory housing. The cleaner at my office in the CBD
lives in Delft and wakes up at 05:00. [She] takes three modes of transport to
my place: first a taxi to the train, then the train, then she walks. It takes her
two hours and 40% of her salary just to get to work. You can see that this is
unsustainable: we have an unsustainable type of growth. We have a doughnut
situation, where you have centres of prosperity surrounded by a sea of poverty.
What is the solution to something like this?
You cannot have a thriving neighbourhood without paying attention to public
spaces. You need public squares; the streets must serve cyclists, motorists and
pedestrians; and you need to be able to manage parking. We are lucky in the
CBD that we had the 2010 FIFA World Cup which allowed us to invest in
public spaces [and] turn our car-dominated streets into multi-purpose [ones]
for different users. I do not think we will be able to reverse the apartheid city
design without paying particular attention to public spaces, because people
meet each other in public spaces. Once I saw a mother with two children
from Constantia and a mother from Mitchells Plain sitting next to each other,
enjoying the music, and their children playing together. That is how you build
[a] society. In other words, you cannot reverse the apartheid city through
affordable housing on the basis of an incentive strategy, either in terms of land
prices [or] approval systems, etc., but that has not happened yet. I understand
that the housing market in Windhoek is in fact similar in this respect. So, the
question is: whose responsibility is it to make sure that there is a gradation of
different housing options, from the lowest to the highest incomes in society?
There is a gentleman who has taken aerial photographs of neighbourhoods
in South Africa (Image 4-1).In Hout Bay you can see how RDP houses and
shacks are right next to mansions. You would assume that someone in power
would see this as an issue, because if this inequality continues, in a few years
time we will all be at each others throats.
Image 4-1 Hout Bay / Imizamo Yethu, Cape Town, South Africa5.
infrastructure alone: you need to hook [peoples] hearts and minds. Public-
space activation is a science, which requires a methodology and consistency. It
is extremely fragile: it does not happen by mistake. Someone behind the scenes
must make it happen. However, when it happens, you take it for granted; [and]
when you do not have it, you realise how valuable it is.
Lessons learnt
Conflicts of interest carry opportunity within [them]. If we did not have
the conflict of interest at the beginning of our existence, we would not
have embarked on this process. You need to engage with developers: they
want to make money because they want a return on their investment,
but they are willing to help, especially if they understand the context in
which they are investing. It is very rare to get municipalities who have
dealmakers on their staff who are able to entice developers to provide
what the municipality cannot provide. Especially with regards to housing,
there is no single sector that can provide multi-tenure housing: it needs to
be a PPP. Where high land values become problematic, they can only be
mitigated by the municipality to ensure affordability. We have [difficulty]
in convincing our municipality, based on their social mandate, to use their
own land to show leadership of what is possible. There is no one-size-fits-
all strategy for housing.
In the rural areas in the Eastern Cape, people do not have full tenure security;
they do not have a title that allows them to use it as bank [loan] collateral.
In many cases, the land has been passed on from generation to generation,
and there is no fear of displacement. What you see is that people are investing
in their houses; they are building mansions on land that is not secured in
the formal way. We must understand that land is being secured for the next
generation they are not interested in selling. They are building because they
feel that this is their home. This is the same situation in Namibia. Imagine that,
instead of providing houses, one would provide security of tenure. We would
see an amazing and innovative way of housing provision by [the] people
themselves.
Discussion
Jenny Botha asked how the City could encourage affordable housing without
necessarily providing affordable housing.
Ms Makalima-Ngewana mentioned a new programme that the Mayor
of Cape Town had announced to introduce affordable housing in the citys
central areas.6 On the other hand, she noted the difficult situation that the
MyCiTi7 bus system had created in the city, and that its sustainability was still
in question. She also referred to Metrorails8 plans to build housing on top of its
building in the CBD to contribute to the inner-city housing stock.
5 Image courtesy of Johnny Miller,
Unequal Scenes.
6 This may refer to the release of 13
centrally-located sites for affordable
housing projects, also through a
call for proposals; see Yoder, W., &
Hendricks, A. (2017, September 14).
In photos: Cape Towns affordable
housing sites. Retrieved September
24, 2019, from GroundUp News
website: https://www.groundup.
org.za/article/photos-cape-towns-
affordable-housing-sites/
7 Cape Towns integrated rapid
transit system (http://www.prasa.
com/Index.html). It has been
criticised for being costly and serving
only wealthier suburbs, making
it operate way below its capacity;
see Eichhorn, M. (2013, May 29).
MyCiTi: Brilliant service delivery
or irresponsible public planning?
Retrieved September 24, 2019, from
GroundUp News website: https://
www.groundup.org.za/article/
myciti-brilliant-service-delivery-or-
irresponsible-public-planning/
8 Metrorail is a division of the
Passenger Rail Service of South
Africa, a State-owned enterprise and
implementing arm of the national
Governments Department of
Transport (http://www.prasa.com/
Index.html).
[ 59 ][ 58 ]
An unidentified participant remarked that the construction of Maerua
Mall in Windhoek had had an impact on the CBD and lamented that this
caused less diversity in the CBD.
Ms Makalima-Ngewana agreed that malls were a threat to urban life in the
CBD. She stated that malls provided a predictable experience which the city
could not really guarantee. At the same time, she noticed how shopping malls
were in decline in the US.9 She encouraged participants to focus on the CBD
experience that would make inhabitants gravitate towards it.
Nina Maritz, an architect, explained how new apartment buildings were
emerging in Windhoeks CBD, but that they were not offering affordable
housing. She proposed looking at proposals where inner-city developers were
required to ensure a certain percentage of their developments constituted
affordable housing.
Britta Hoffman, an architect, asked about the CTPs sources of funding and
how the City dealt with the issue of the homeless.
Ms Makalima-Ngewana mentioned that the City of Cape Town was giving
additional bulk and tax incentives in order to persuade developers to agree
on certain demands. She cited the case of Singapore, where the model was
that of the vertical village, i.e. a tall building consisting of housing, retail,
schools, public spaces, etc. Regarding the CTPs funding, she explained
that they received public and private money, municipal grants and funds
from other foundations. She added that their relationship with civil society
and the Municipality was based on trust: there was no situation where one
party owned the partnership. Regarding the homeless issue, Ms Makalima-
Ngewana responded that efforts were made to take them back to their familys
homes or to formal childrens homes. However, the issue involved those in
their mid-teens who were more prone to organise into gangs, and in some
cases not even their families were willing to welcome them back into their
houses. She also mentioned that begging had reached a point in the CBD
where some women begged with a baby in their arms or rented out the baby
for a day to increase their earnings.
Ms Botha proposed a situation where urban planning, transportation and
housing issues could be dealt with under one roof .
Ms Maritz remarked that housing was often seen as something apart from
public space. Often, the housing objectives were reduced to a matter of
building as many units as possible instead of thinking that a proportion of
public space should be allocated to each unit at the same time.
Ms Makalima-Ngewana agreed, reiterating the importance of public
space. Referring to Ms Bothas question, Ms Makalima-Ngewana responded
that budgets were often allocated per department, so one was in a situation
where there were multiple teams and multiple budgets. These could be
streamlined to encourage collaboration between departments, she felt. She
also stressed that, to activate the city, one needed innovative ideas. She offered
the example of First Thursdays,10 which was started by a two 20-year-olds
who asked for support but not money, and their project led to 30,000 visitors
attending these events. She termed this organised civil disobedience. Another
example was the social bicycle night-ride in Cape Town at full moon known
as #moonlightmass,11 where cyclists started out at the Green Point Circle at
21:00 and cycled to the CBD. She explained that the events aim was to raise
awareness of cycling as an alternative to the car for transport, and that it had
encouraged the City to provide bicycle lanes.
Pieter Genis, a lecturer at NUST, asked about the relative relevance of the
public and private sectors when it came to public spaces or the space between
the buildings.
Ms Makalima-Ngewana responded that it was important to create
partnerships to transform public spaces. The example she gave was Church
Square offering free WiFi, which succeeded in attracting more visitors to the
space.
An unidentified participant wanted to know how the issue of security had
been addressed.
Ms Makalima-Ngewana replied that the security response in the CBD was
very efficient. She also mentioned a significant presence of security cameras,
but that they also had to address the need for visible security to put peoples
minds at ease. Mounted police had proved not only to be a good way to tackle
visible security, but also provided a higher vantage point for the rider. Another
measure, she added, was to ensure buildings had retail entities at street level
rather than parking garages, and for the retail entities to have glass windows
and to keep their lights on at night for good street illumination.
An unidentified participant asked how the partnership dealt with informal
trade.
Ms Makalima-Ngewana clarified that no African city would be without
some informality, so there was an initiative to get trading zones in the CBD
managed by one entity who would then oversee informal trading activities.
She noted that trading had become more sophisticated, and that some of those
selling local art and crafts were in fact selling items manufactured in China.
An unidentified participant asked what urban design guidelines existed for
Cape Towns CBD.
Ms Makalima-Ngewana responded that there were general guidelines that
needed to be followed.12
12 This may refer to the Draft
Guidelines for the Provision of
Open Space (Isikhungusethu
Environmental Services with Louw
and Dewar 2017) published by South
Africas Ministry of Agriculture,
Rural Development and Land
Reform.
9 Several news sources document
this phenomenon; see e.g. BBC.
(2014, October 21). The death of
the US shopping mall. Retrieved
from http://www.bbc.com/culture/
story/20140411-is-the-shopping-
mall-dead; Thompson, D. (2017,
April 10). What in the World Is
Causing the Retail Meltdown of
2017? The Atlantic. Retrieved
from https://www.theatlantic.com/
business/archive/2017/04/retail-
meltdown-of-2017/522384/.
11 A night bicycle ride in Cape
Town (http://www.moonlightmass.
co.za/moonlightmass/Home.html
and https://www.facebook.com/
moonlightmass, both last accessed 31
July 2019).
10 See footnote 4 of this session.
[ 61 ][ 60 ]
1 https://communicare.co.za/
SESSION 5
Social Housing
and Finance
Anthea Houston
CEO, Communicare, Cape Town, South Africa
Anthea Houston is the CEO of Communicare. She is renowned in the housing
sector as an advocate for housing rights and sustainable urban development.
Between 2000 and 2009 she was CEO for the Development Action Group (DAG),
a leading South African non-profit organisation focusing on low-income housing
and urban development. She developed an understanding of the East and Southern
African regions through undertaking field studies whilst conducting research on
housing and housing microfinance in East and Southern Africa. She currently
serves as a Director of the National Housing Finance Corporation (NHFC), a
development-finance institution of the South African Government. She has also
served on advisory panels and reference groups for three former Ministers of Local
Government and Housing in the Western Cape. She has a Postgraduate Diploma
in Management (Organisation and Management) from the University of Cape
Town and is completing an MBA at its Graduate School of Business. In respect
of her global profile, Ms Houston is a Fellow of the African Leadership Initiative
and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network both Aspen Institute
programmes. She has contributed to the development of various housing policy
documents and has regularly commented on housing issues in the South African
media. She is passionate about social justice, community participation and
the civil society sector, where she has chosen to work to strengthen value-based
leadership in South Africa.
Communicare is the oldest social housing non-profit company in South Africa.
It is based in Cape Town. Its core business is the provision of affordable rental
accommodation in well-located areas. Its stock holding amounts to 3,600 rental
units.1
The session was moderated by Phillip Lühl, Lecturer, Department of
Architecture and Spatial Planning, NUST
Editorial note: All images are sourced from Ms. Houstons presentation and are
property of Communicare.
[ 63 ][ 62 ]
Introduction
Just imagine that you could go into the leafiest, most privileged suburb
in Namibia and you could find people of all income groups living there
harmoniously. On Saturday we visited an area called Wanaheda, where a little
bit of that is sort of happening, but we all know it is not the most privileged
neighbourhood. However, just imagine you could achieve that more and
more. I do not know how you will do it. We are not managing to do it in South
Africa, so I am certainly not here to give you any recipe. I am just here to
share some of our imaginings and how that has played out in the institution
I work with, and the challenges we had doing that. If this is something you
want to imagine in your housing future and something you want to pursue,
then hopefully there are some lessons from our experience that can help you.
Maybe one day you can come and help us reimagine something we thought
wed figured out, but which we know now we are still struggling with. Welcome
to the imaginary session!
5-1. Bothasig Gardens, Cape Town.
The power of change of social housing
This picture (Image 5-1) is an area called Bothasig, an Afrikaans suburb in
the Western Cape [Province, South Africa] of mainly free-standing houses.
It was a tiny complex for whites only that Communicare [has owned] since
pre-1994, the time before change happened in our country. So, post-1994,
we imagined that people of all colours and all income groups could live in
Bothasig. We conceptualised and eventually implemented the Bothasig
Gardens development, after a long, difficult, hard journey. So, the urban
planners and architects amongst you will forgive me as you see we only
managed to do two-storey buildings in the end. A lot of people worry when
you talk about this kind of development. Are you going to build a slum? Is it
going to be an eyesore? Is it going to devalue our surrounding properties? And
are we going to be able to live together?
One of the lessons I am going to share has to do with this set of questions. This
has to do with two things: the built form and the way you engage people. You
can build housing that creates slums. Physically, you can do that for people of
all incomes, it does not matter; you can always make something uninhabitable.
I am not promoting two-storey buildings as the key to not achieving a slum
effect; what I am saying is that, in this development, we had to negotiate and
we ended up with two storeys. This was not because of what was acceptable to
the people who would live there, but what was acceptable to the people in the
surrounding houses, the city council, the politicians, the ward councillor, and
all those interests that needed to be mediated in the process.
The second thing in our engagement was about what you do when you provide
people with social housing: do you put them somewhere and hope that life is
going get better, or do you involve them in a way that enables their lives to get
better for certain? This has been done all over the world: people are engaging
social housing residents with success, and lives are getting better.
Property values are rising in this beautiful area of Bothasig Gardens. Before
we built anything, we spent years talking, negotiating. In the year when the
city council said Yes but nothing had been built yet there was a tiny dip
in property values, about 1%. From the day the construction ended about 18
months later, property values have just been going up at the same rate in this
area as elsewhere. Bothasig is a huge area, and I would dare to say that there
has been no negative effect of having added social housing into the mix. If
you challenge the myth that such projects are going to bring down property
values, it is possible; but it is all about how you plan and how you implement
[such projects].
Communicare and the Cape Town Context
Communicare is a non-profit organisation and a social enterprise. That means
we are involved in both non-profit activities and activities that are profit-
[ 65 ][ 64 ]
making. The surplus generated through commercial residential developments
is reinvested in our social housing so that we are able to build beautiful vibrant
spaces that people can live in, like the development I discussed above. We
focus on the provision of affordable social housing for people with low and
moderate incomes in the Western Cape, and we currently own and manage
3,375 rental units. All units are social housing. Only about ten of those units
are now leased at market rates. The units are spread over 39 complexes.
The organisation was formed in the 1920s. We did a lot of questionable things
pre-1994; but, for our sins, we have set ourselves a goal to develop 2,000 new
social rental opportunities. We are thinking how we can do this at a much
bigger scale. Communicare is one of the largest companies in this sector, with
only two others in South Africa that are larger.
A little about the Cape Town housing context: South Africa has very high
levels of inequality, and more so in Cape Town. You will find a 0.67 Gini
coefficient is amongst the highest in the world at the moment.2 Cape Town
had around 3.7 million inhabitants in 2011,3 so probably there are a few
hundred thousand more by now because we have a growing population,
like yours. Only 14% of our households earn over N$26,000 a month and
live in formal accommodation, either rented or owned. Everybody else is
in some kind of informal housing solution, be it in a backyard structure or
in an informal settlement. They have to find their own way. Nearly half our
citys population is in need of adequate housing as a result of this. Even those
who have shelter, perhaps [even] decent shelter, still do not necessarily have
a secure tenure arrangement, which leaves many people in fragile housing
situations. A N$26,000 monthly income is when banks start talking to you,
but we have around 50,000 households with incomes lower than that. A fair
amount of people have an income of about N$3,200 [a month], including
domestic workers, security guards and other low-level jobs. They are all
stuck in informal living arrangements and they are not living for free. They
are renting from some shacklord, slumlord or landlord all these lords that
own properties. Currently in our country, formal rental accommodation only
accounts for 40,000 households. A lot of those are privileged, middle-class
households. We do not know how many people are renting informally.
The other interesting thing about Cape Town is that our average house price,
based on our Deeds Office data, is N$1.1 million. On the other hand, based on
our census data, the average price that someone can afford for a house based
on their income is N$360,000. This means that there is a huge gap between
what we can afford and what is available in the market. So, even people earning
decent salaries are struggling to find decent housing.
What we are trying to do in our organisation is to explore the parts of our
property market that work well and use what these investments can generate
for us to support the bottom end of the market, that part of our market that is
still very informal. Our business model is like a Robin Hood policy: built into
6 Act No. 16 of 2008 (https://www.
gov.za/sites/default/files/gcis_
document/201409/315771199.pdf,
last accessed 2 August 2019).
4 Rededication of urban land to
another purpose than the one it had.
5 These are among the instruments
pursuing economic, social and racial
integration in South African cities
(http://shra.org.za/resource-centre/
shf-archives/90-urban-development-
zones, last accessed 2 August 2019).
2 For 2017, South Africa topped
the list of most unequal countries in
the world as measured by the Gini
Index, while Namibia ranked second
(http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/
SI.POV.GINI, last accessed 14 August
2019).
3 See http://www.statssa.gov.
za/?page_id=1021, last accessed 14
August 2019.
what we do is a very big economic development programme for people in our
social rental units which I am not going to talk about because it is not the
focus of our session today.
Image 5-2. Drommedaris, Cape Town.
Drommedaris is another development where we did some infill4 in a
previously whites-only development. We were able to add a good number of
units there as well.
The concept of social housing in South Africa
If you look at social housing in the world, everywhere there is a different
take on it. So, we need to be wary of the term as it does not have a universal
meaning. In South Africa, social housing is the following: it is always rental
or co-operative housing, [and] it is always at a scale that requires institutional
management. For instance, we own 380 free-standing houses that we can rent
out but that cannot be termed social housing in our policy context. Social
housing is for a low-income target market, legislated for households with
monthly incomes [of] between N$1,500 and 7,500, with a distinction between
a primary and secondary market. The primary market is for incomes between
N$1,500 [and] N$3,500; and the secondary for incomes between N$3 500 and
N$7 500. I will tell you later about the problem with these definitions, [but] it
was a distinction that our Government felt was important to make at the time
of passing the legislation.
Our [countrys] social housing policy also goes as far as stipulating who must
deliver those services, [i.e.] accredited social housing institutions. So, we and
others who own properties in this market can do so, but if you cannot tick all
these boxes, then it is not social housing in South Africa.
It also has to be located in designated restructuring zones,5 where we start
to transform the spatial patterns of the apartheid city. No other housing
programme in South Africa is doing [this] because it is not a funding
requirement for them. And, finally, social housing is partly funded with public
money.
All of this is regulated by the Social Housing Act,6 which established a
Social Housing Regulatory Authority. For the Government colleagues in the
[ 67 ][ 66 ]
audience, if you decide to establish a regulatory authority, you must look at
ours to see what you must not do. Even Government itself will tell you that
they learned some really hard lessons. However, social housing has two
strategic advantages in the South African context. [Firstly,] land in Bothasig
is very expensive as is land anywhere that is not owned by the City or the
Government anymore. High-density housing is more expensive than low-
density housing in terms of the initial capital investment. But once you factor
in the cost of providing services to locations that are far away and consist of
free-standing houses, medium-density [housing] starts to make more sense.
The second advantage is because it is a rental option, which [focuses] on
the realities of rapid urbanisation where a lot of people are coming into our
cities who do not necessarily want to buy. Some people might be moving
around; for others perhaps, home is somewhere else. So, rental becomes an
option in an urban context where it might not be an option elsewhere. There
is a perception that renting is not acceptable to African people, but many are
renting backyard types of shacks or renting a room somewhere.
Social housing is, thus, a response to the inflationary, exclusionary and
stubborn nature of the housing property market. That is important because our
other housing programmes struggle to counter the system where land values
and building costs are climbing, because all other housing delivery models are
grant-driven. From that point of view, and despite a lot of challenges, social
housing is able to navigate those obstacles and deliver something to the poor.
Our Government puts up about 6070% of the money that it would actually
cost to do a decent housing development. They give us two grants. One is
called an institutional subsidy, which is a once-off capital grant that goes to
the accredited social housing institution not to the beneficiary households.7
Because Government is concerned with who will rent, social housing
companies have to prove that they accommodate the right target market.
This is not a subsidy that is being counted against the individual tenant; so,
tenants can continue to be eligible for other kinds of free housing that our
Government makes available. Government just keeps track that we are
not servicing the wrong market. The institutional grant is usually between
N$125,000 and N$170,000 per unit, depending on its size.
Then there is a restructuring grant,8 which is N$125,000 per unit, once-off, and
which can be higher if you manage to get up to 30% of people from the primary
market in the complex. There is a huge challenge with this stipulation because
our Government passed this legislation in 2008 and we are now in 2017. In
the way the legislation was written, the income brackets were not allowed to
change with inflation and rising incomes. So, in practice, both the value of
the grant and the income brackets of the target group have not moved since
2008. Back then, someone who earned between N$1,500 and N$3,500 might
have been a domestic worker or a security guard. Today, domestic workers
are earning more than that. It is so far below what is regarded as an acceptable
11 https://www.nhfc.co.za/, last
accessed 31 July 2019.
9 No. 34 of 2005 (http://www.justice.
gov.za/mc/vnbp/act2005-034.pdf,
last accessed 2 August 2019).
10 No. 68 of 2008 https://www.
gov.za/sites/default/files/gcis_
document/201409/321864670.pdf,
last accessed 2 August 2019).
7 http://www.shra.org.za/
investment/capital-investment, last
accessed 2 August 2019.
8 (ibid.).
minimum wage that it is hard to find someone in secure employment who is
earning [only] N$1,500 [a month] to sign a lease, and it is irresponsible to sign
a lease with someone who is not in secure employment. In fact, it is illegal to
do that, based on our [National] Credit Act9 and the Consumer Protection
Act.10 Obviously, someone who earned N$1,500 in 2008 is earning way more
in 2017; so, if our regulator were to audit and find that this person is [was] now
outside the target income group, we would be breaking the law.
The other 3040% of funding has to be raised by the institution itself through debt
funding or equity. However, there are very few organisations that are able to do
that because it is quite a cash-demanding activity to be delivering social housing.
The Regulations of the [Social Housing] Act specify how social housing
must perform. They stipulate things such as that the rental amount cannot
exceed 30% of income so [that] landlords do not exploit people. The problem
is that, because income brackets are not allowed to adjust with inflation, the
real market costs of servicing, cleaning, gardening and so on are actually
rising. The [social housing] institutions are responsible [for maintaining] the
housing, and there is a tribunal where people can take you to if maintenance is
not done. At the same time, the [Regulations say] that developments must be
financially viable. So, we are in a Catch-22 situation. All of these are very good
intentions and, for the Government officials present there today, we need to
carefully think through such policies. This exercise does not have to be self-
defeating: there are many places in the world where regulations work well; in
South Africa they are just not working well right now.
If a tenant leaves or dies, you must find another tenant who earns N$1,500 to
N$3,500. While this is good in principle as it is the income group that you
are trying to help, what this does is for your property to go from financially
viable to unviable overnight, while you [still] have to keep it well maintained.
This is why we are active on the other side of the property market: [it] allows
us to cross-subsidise. Other countries have operating grants in addition to
capital grants in order to ensure they can keep servicing the target market at
the bottom.
If it is desirable for you to explore social rental housing in Namibia, you
have to be prepared to invest in it continuously. This is desirable where the
intention is to help a lot of people initially. And regulate this, so that other
people do not displace them all the time. However, you will have to allow
for some inflationary-linked increases if you are not prepared to put a lot of
operating money into the equation. In order to encourage funding affordable
housing, the South African Government established the National Housing
Finance Corporation.11 They provided affordable finance to social housing
institutions in [the] early days, but they made a big mistake: they gave too
many soft loans to the point where they themselves became unsustainable
and could no longer provide loans. Nowadays, social housing is rarely done
with their involvement.
[ 69 ][ 68 ]
Something that is helping us at the moment to continue to deliver social
housing is being able to acquire land below market cost or at no cost at all from
Government. In the beginning, our Government was not prepared to do that;
but now, as social housing development is stagnating, they realise that they
need to get involved a little more. Of course, it would make much more sense
to change the Regulations, but somehow that is not happening. However,
land is availed, which is good because it is very expensive. In South Africa,
we also have so-called development charges:12 if you develop something, you
not only pay for your connection to bulk infrastructure, like here in Namibia,
but you will [also] have to contribute to every infrastructure development the
Government is [implementing] or has [implemented] around your locality.
In our view, these charges are very [low] compared with [charges in] other
parts of the world. This is good, because Government recoups money from
the market. For example, if you are proposing a residential development and
a road needs to be built to support that development, the Government would
split up the cost of that road. They will take their share and developers take the
rest. In some countries, governments charge infrastructure costs even where
the infrastructure was built 50 years ago and then translate the charges in[to]
todays costs. Unfortunately, the South African Government was charging
social housing institutions development charges for the development of social
housing that they themselves were funding through Government grants.
More recently, there is some flexibility on reducing development charges.
What I am suggesting is that giving State money and taking it back at the same
time makes the process unsustainable.
Another aspect that made our social housing possible are guarantees. The
Dutch Association of Social Housing Institutions13 has set up a guarantee
fund to encourage and facilitate social housing development in other parts of
the world, so that social housing developers can borrow at more favourable
rates. If the cost of finance is too high, it kills the whole project before you get
started. Guarantees are powerful because, now, you can promise the bank that,
if you default, the guarantee fund will settle the debt. There are governments
in the world that issue guarantees on behalf of institutions so that they can
borrow from the banks.
I have mentioned that, for social housing to exist, there need to be accredited
institutions. In South Africa, these institutions can be non-profit organisations,
co-operatives, municipalities, government entities, etc. Our [Social Housing]
Act stipulates that social housing is either rental or co-operative housing. Co-
ops are different from rental housing because everyone that lives in a co-op
has an equal stake in the ownership: it is a communal form of ownership. Co-
ops have been a popular way of delivering social housing in many countries
around the world, such as Canada, Kenya, Norway and Holland. However, we
found that, in South Africa, although we use co-ops in agriculture such as the
boere kooperasie,14 and although people know communal land ownership in
a tribal context, the co-operative model has not yet translated into a housing
model. Some of the best NGOs with the best training and capacity-building
12 Graham, N., & Berrisford, S.
(2015). Development charges in
South Africa: Current thinking and
areas of contestation. Presented
at the 79th IMESA Conference.
Changing the face of the municipal
engineer, Cape Town. Retrieved
from https://www.imesa.org.za/
wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Paper-
1-Development-charges-in-South-
Africa-Current-thinking-and-areas-
of-contestation-Nick-Graham.pdf
13 Aedes. (2018). Dutch Social
Housing in a Nutshell. Retrieved
from https://aedescms.getbynder.
com/media/?mediaId=0A645A73-
1A6F-4970-83F2CBF84A1E4136
14 Afrikaans, farmers cooperative.
have tried it, but inhabitants still considered the [NGO] committee as the
landlord. In many cases, when the committee failed to perform some of
the functions, some stopped paying in the same way that they would do to
a landlord. That is why many co-ops in the social housing context in South
Africa were not successful. Although there are those that are really successful,
they are exceptions and we do not know why they work better than the others.
We tried co-ops because there was support from Canada, the Netherlands
and Norway. They sent experts, they did the financial model, but we found
that they were just replicating their models here, which was not the most
appropriate for our context, as I explained before. So, you need to be careful
with this.
Most of the social housing institutions in South Africa are non-profit
organisations, with a few private companies and a small number of
Government entities. We also found that private companies compared to
the non-profits involved in social housing were not really invested in the
tenant engagement aspect [or] social development. Only time will tell us what
the consequences will be, because there is a social price to pay down the line
where people are disengaged. When you put people in an environment that
is alien to them, they may not necessarily feel welcome, and one needs to
provide the tools to help people navigate through that. You need to nurture
the community for it to transform into something stable.
Discussion
Sheela Patel mentioned that the concept of social housing had been
exported aggressively from Europe. It basically preached State provision of
housing; but, in the contexts of South Africa or India, this only worked for a
very small amount of people. She noted that this was in part due to the way
that the economics of it were worked out, which, in European contexts, could
assume a relatively fair wage. In South Africa, however, she explained that
the Europeans would encourage housing activists to start up construction
companies, but this did not work well. She clarified that, ever since she had
been working with social movements in the informal sector, she had refused
to engage in social housing projects because they did not apply to shack
dwellers. She referred to a successful mixed-income development she had
experienced in Surabaya, Indonesia, where traditional villages eventually
became slums (kampongs) where new urban development had begun
catching up with rural areas. The governments intervention was to allow the
houses to remain as they were, but they improved the infrastructure in the
neighbourhood. This enabled the rich and the poor to remain next to each
other and to service each other.
Ms Houston agreed that one should be careful of simply importing models;
it was better to figure out adequate solutions from within. She noted that,
in South Africa, there was a second generation of social housing, where
[ 71 ][ 70 ]
mixed-income developments were becoming more widely accepted. She
favoured these not only for financial cross-subsidisation, but also for what
she termed their social sustainability. She also noted that social housing
had performed well from the rental point of view. Speaking from her own
experience, the success rate in respect of rent collections was above 95%
and vacancies were below 2%. She attributed this to the undersupply of
housing: people made sure they were good tenants and made an extra effort
to pay rent because they knew that finding new accommodation would be
a challenge.
Mahongora Kavihuha, a trade unionist, made clear that they rejected PPPs
as they did not emphasise the communities, but were rather a matter between
Government and the private sector. He rejected the commodification of social
programmes, stating that capitalist propositions were not compatible with the
provision of social programmes. He noted that cooperatives, as a recourse,
were not often employed in Namibia due to the tendency to promote business
issues above social ones. He asked what level of government in South Africa
national, provincial or municipal oversaw social housing. He also asked
which of the two Cape Town or the Western Cape Province was the more
active in terms of social housing.
Ms Houston responded that National Government decided on national
housing programmes such as social housing. Money flowed from there
through Provincial and Municipal Government levels. The Provincial
Government oversaw administration of the housing budget. She reiterated
that Communicare was one of the three largest institutions providing social
housing. Communicare was based in Cape Town, but the other two were in
Johannesburg. She noted that the Government in South Africa supported a
free-market economy, so there was a reluctance of interventionist programmes
that might affect housing markets.
Phillip Lühl noted that Namibia was also reluctant to entertain interventionist
measures. He illustrated this by referring to the common concern that such
measures would affect property prices. He explained that this barrier to
creating mixed-income neighbourhoods arose out of a fear that prices for
higher-income units or for other properties in the surrounding areas would
be affected. However, he cautioned that property prices could not be given top
priority when discussing housing options.
Ms Houston replied that, in South Africa, there had been a conversation about
a living wage of about N$8,000 per month. She noted that various institutions
tracked how income and inflation affected the cost of living. For example,
she explained how an income of N$3,500 in 2008 would need to be almost
N$14,000 in 2017 to be able to have the same value. She also acknowledged
that most people in South Africa did not earn that much, so that was another
conversation, namely what constituted an acceptable amount of rent for this
lower-income sector.
Uazuva Kaumbi from the National Housing Enterprise (NHE) stated
that it was important to note that social housing was mostly of a rental nature.
He asked whether there were examples of rent-to-own in South Africa, and
whether tax incentives existed for social housing developers there.
Ms Houston responded that certain tax benefits existed for social housing
developers. She also said she was aware of rent-to-own options in countries
such as the US, but they were not available in the South African social
housing sector. She noted that the bottom of the middle-income group could
in principle afford the monthly instalments of a mortgage, but the challenge
then became the down payment. To overcome this barrier, the South African
Government had developed a subsidy mechanism. The challenge then
become the supply of housing in that bracket, she said.
Mr Charl-Thom Bayer, Head of the Department of Land and Property
Sciences at NUST, asked where the South African Government got its funds
for housing. He also referred to social housing programmes in Denmark
which were not necessarily focused on the poor but on students, young
professionals, couples with no children, or those who were downsizing. He
also enquired whether the South African property gains tax was useful in
controlling inflation in property prices.
Ms Houston responded that, although South Africa had a property gains
tax, it did not prevent price escalations. However, she explained, it allowed the
Government to capture some of the value and then redistribute that to lower-
income sectors. She also mentioned that the South African Government
did not ringfence portions of fiscal revenue for housing, but that funds were
sourced from the national budget. Just after South Africas democratisation in
1994, there were some international grants via bilateral agreements with other
countries, but those had now ended. She also noted that the Government was
decreasing its funding for housing. She therefore suggested to the Namibian
members of the audience that, if a new housing programme was on the cards,
special attention should be paid to how it could be sustained over the decades
to come. To illustrate, she referred to a discussion in South Africa regarding
the designation of certain areas for value added tax ; however, such additional
taxes had not yet been used to develop housing.
Ms Patel cautioned against a phenomenon that she had witnessed in India
and elsewhere, namely implementing legislation that was very progressive in
principle, but, due to a situation of high inequality, the better-offs instead of
the lowest-income groups benefited from it.
John Nakuta, a human rights legal expert from the University of
Namibia, mentioned that there were two reasons why the discussion on
social housing in Namibia was not taking place. The first was due to the
pre-Independence legacy of housing migrant labourers in compounds that
were known for their poor living conditions. Having had this temporary
[ 73 ][ 72 ]
accommodation as a backdrop created a particular bias in favour of home
ownership rather than rental. The second reason was the ignorance that
prevailed with regard to social housing. Since South Africa shared a similar
history in both these respects, Mr Nakuta asked how social housing had
become more widely accepted there.
Ms Houston replied that, in her country, the stigma of renting was less
prevalent. Even before South Africa became a democratic state in 1994, there
had been vibrant rental markets. She added that some of the decision-makers,
when they were only young public servants, lived in rentals and knew the
benefits of that model. She agreed that the memory of land dispossession
during the apartheid regime had encouraged a bias for home ownership.
However, she pointed out that shifting away from that mindset might take
generations.
A MURD employee explained that the idea of social housing was not
generally supported by the Namibian Government. Despite the challenge of
land availability and certain shortcomings with respect to PPPs, he encouraged
everyone to see the virtues of Government-supported housing developments.
He suggested considering cross-subsidisation from the wealthier to the lower-
income groups as a possibility. He referred to existing initiatives where the
private sector (banks, construction companies, etc.) had partnered with the
SDFN and local authorities to provide affordable housing. He also mentioned
how some mines had met the challenge of providing housing for their
employees. He asked Ms Houston to expand on the cross-subsidisation that
took place through Communicares schemes.
Ms Houston replied that the organisation cross-subsidised across their
property portfolio. However, she stressed that current legislation restricted
social housing to those earning between N$1,500 and N$7,500 a month.
Nonetheless, she acknowledged that undertaking an entirely new development
focusing on such incomes alone would be unfeasible. She noted how making
provision for some commercial housing units in a social housing development
made such new developments more viable. In South Africa, there was no
formal objective of determining what a high-income earner should be paid,
but she admitted that those who earned incomes at the top of the scale had
several options open to them, making their interest in social housing units
rather unlikely. Her team, however, had identified that their units could also
be attractive to those earning between N$7,000 and N$25,000 a month.
Mr Kaumbi asked how the cross-subsidies were determined.
Ms Houston replied that, for higher incomes, Communicare tried to offer
units for rent that would be comparable to those in the free market. In this way,
instead of the rent being captured by a private landlord, her company employed
the surpluses to cross-subsidise lower-income units. She acknowledged that,
among those who paid the least in rent, people still complained about how
expensive rents were. Nonetheless, for the services and units offered, they
represented the cheapest available in the market, to her knowledge.
An unidentified contributor asked how rent was collected, whether
Communicare developments were mixed-use (e.g. shops, workshops), and
what sort of amenities such as playgrounds their developments offered.
Ms Houston clarified that, when she took over the company, it was not
run in a very efficient way. Accordingly, a lot of effort was made to improve
operations so that the company could recover its good standing with
financial institutions. She explained that Communicare had a team of 28
people in the property management section. This team was responsible for
managing the properties, i.e. signing new leases, collecting rent, resolving
conflict, etc. For example, a team of six undertook development initiatives
with the tenants. Ms Houston stressed the relevance of these social
initiatives to keep togetherness and resolve tensions, which is important
because considerable common space is shared by all tenants. She also
noted that Communicare monitored economic mobility, particularly
if a household improved its economic position. A three-person team
focused solely on rental collection, which showed how important it was
for the company to liaise personally with tenants. She described how some
tenants made deposits and then sent them proof of payment, while others
preferring paying by debit order. However, to her, the method of payment
or the monitoring was not as much of a key to success as person-to-person
engagement was, because of the latter approachs psychological value. She
added that another team focused solely on new developments, whereas
other social housing bodies usually outsourced this function. As a final
point, she noted that Communicare tried to source grants to finance
additional benefits to their developments such as trees or playgrounds.
She acknowledged that, although some of their developments included
small shops, more needed to be done in this respect. She mentioned a new
housing development that would include a market.
Mr Bayer noted that, although watching the property market was important,
housing was also a human right and complete commodification of housing
should not occur at the expense of other aspects. He referred to some
calculations he had made using public sector salaries as a reference to see what
was affordable in the Namibian market. His results showed that, today, only
high-level civil servants such as Directors were able to afford a mortgage for a
home at the median house price. He cautioned that salaries were not keeping
up with inflation and rising house prices, and that, for many in Namibia,
salaries were negligible when it came to owning property. He explained
that, in other countries, private developers were compelled to include social
housing within a new development. Such regulations allowed many who lived
in peripheral areas but worked in centrally located ones to save on transport
costs, for example. He asked Ms Houston whether similar regulations existed
in South Africa.
[ 75 ][ 74 ]
Ms Houston responded that she was aware of this mechanism in other parts
of the world, but that it was only practised at a small scale in South Africa.
She stated that such conditions were negotiated at the municipal level when a
developer requested approval for a new housing scheme. In some cases, they
requested special exemptions or allowances, which offered the municipality
some leverage to press for the inclusion of social housing units. This
mechanism could also be used to compel private developers to include social
services such as public schools or clinics. She mentioned a recent move by the
City of Cape Town to make centrally located plots available for mixed-income
developments with the proviso to accommodate lower-income groups as well;
this corresponded with the approach taken by the social housing sector for
such groups.
A MURD employee asked to what extent the land costs such as rates and
taxes influenced their developments and how social housing companies
received accreditation.
Ms Houston replied that land costs were required for the municipality to
recover their costs of servicing and maintaining the property. However, such
costs could be recouped from other developments such as shopping centres or
office blocks instead. She noted that the accreditation process in South Africa
was quite rigorous. Although accreditation took place on a yearly basis, they
were now in talks to make the accreditation validity period five or eight years.
When applying for accreditation, a company had to have a good governance
structure, had to demonstrate their capacity to deliver social housing, and had
to submit business plans. Accrediting bodies could also inspect an applicants
offices and audit their financial reports.
Mr Kavihuha remarked that what was needed, in his view, was ownership. He
noted that the problem in Namibia was not a lack of land but its inequitable
distribution. He regretted the fact that PPPs did not include partnerships
with workers or social groups. He also affirmed that trade unions were not
considered stakeholders in Government consultations. Noting that land
servicing had been commodified, he referred to the time around independence
when local government still used to undertake some servicing functions,
but that these had since been outsourced on tender to the private sector. He
stressed that union membership was not only composed of working people
but also of the working poor, namely those who were earning a wage that
was nevertheless not sufficient to get by. He also pointed out that the unions
approach to informal workers, which was to formalise the informal.
Hilia Hitula, a town planner at the Walvis Bay Municipality, remarked
that it was not easy to draw much from private developers through PPPs, as
the private sector also sought a profit margin before investing their time in
such ventures. She believed that a cultural change was required in order to
recognise what ownership meant in Namibia. She explained that the idea of
everyone owning a piece of land required property management processes.
She also encouraged the Forum to come up with Namibias own definition
for social housing. She mentioned an example in Walvis Bay where the
Municipality had tried to cross-subsidise the servicing of plots for the SDFN
from the sale of industrial land. However, the challenge then became one of
allocation.
Ms Houston that some institutions in South Africa kept waiting lists, but
that these were generally ineffective because the circumstances of those
registered changed as tiem passed. Her company stopped keeping waiting
lists for this reason, and instead found a way of communicating when units
became available, e.g. through notices at workplaces around the area where
the development was located, via local newspapers or the Internet. When
an applicant came to them, there were forms that needed to be filled out and
supporting documentation that was required. The applicant was then screened
and a credit assessment was made. Ms Houston explained that a poor credit
assessment did not mean that the person would automatically be disqualified,
as there were other factors in place to evaluate the applicant. However, if a
person was already heavily indebted, the social housing monthly payments
would only make their circumstances worse.
Mr Lühl asked how inclusion in social housing takes place.
Ms Houston responded that South Africas legislative process entailed
consultation, although in many instances this was not genuine participation.
She noted how many in South Africa were not organised in terms of a social
group or association, and that it could not be said that all the voices had been
included when policies regarding housing were reviewed.
[ 77 ][ 76 ]
1 http://lrc.org.za/, last accessed 2
August 2019.
SESSION 6
Experiences with the
Right to Adequate Housing
in South Africa:
A Socio-legal Perspective
Cecile van Schalkwyk
Legal Resources Centre, Grahamstown, South Africa
Cecile van Schalkwyk has a BA (Law) and LLB from the University of Stellenbosch,
the latter degree having been awarded in 2014. She commenced her articles in the
Grahamstown office of the Legal Resources Centre in 2016. Her interests include
constitutional law, education law and land reform.
Inspired by South Africas history, its Constitution and international human rights
standards, the Legal Resources Centre (LRC) is committed to a fully democratic
society based on the principle of substantive equality and to ensure that the
principles, rights and responsibilities enshrined in South Africas Constitution
are respected, promoted, protected and fulfilled. The LRC strives to function as
an independent, client-based, non-profit public interest law clinic which uses
law as an instrument of justice and provides legal services for the vulnerable and
marginalised, including the poor, homeless, and landless people and communities
of South Africa who suffer discrimination by reason of race, class, gender or
disability, or by reason of social, economic or historical circumstances. The LRC
seeks creative and effective solutions by using a range of strategies, including impact
litigation; law reform; participation in partnerships and development processes;
education; and networking within South Africa, the African continent and at the
international level. 1
The session was moderated by Guillermo Delgado, Land, Livelihoods and
Housing Programme Coordinator, ILMI, NUST
[ 79 ][ 78 ]
Introduction: Legal background to the Right to Adequate Housing in
South Africa
I am going to start with explaining how the right to adequate housing came to
be in South Africa as well as a bit of the historical background, which Namibia
shares in part. In this way, we can see what we can possibly learn from each
other.
In the multi-party negotiations and CODESA2 leading up to 1994, and the
development of the new Constitution, one of the really prominent issues was
the right of access to adequate housing. A lot of time and energy went into
making sure that South Africa had a proper clause in the Constitution to
ensure that people had at least some form of a right over housing. The result of
that was section 26 of the Constitution:
1. Everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing.
2. The state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its
available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of this right.
3. No one may be evicted from their home, or have their home demolished,
without an order of court made after considering all the relevant
circumstances. No legislation may permit arbitrary evictions.
This is the right of access to adequate housing3 clause that South Africa
employed after 1994. I will speak about all the different factors in terms of
giving content to the right of access to adequate housing.
The Grootboom case: Failure to add content to the right to Adequate
Housing?
The very first South African case in regard to the right to housing was
the Grootboom judgement.4 The case dealt with a community within the
Wallacedene area in Cape Town. This was an informal settlement without
access to water or a sewerage system, patchy access to electricity, and generally
very poor social circumstances. Ms Grootboom, after whom the case is named,
was one of the people living in this community who decided one day that they
could no longer endure their living conditions. They packed their belongings
and moved onto a piece of land that was privately owned and demarcated for
low-profit housing developments. Of course, the private landowner instituted
eviction proceedings, but for some reason, [the community] ended up staying
on the property for another four months or so before they were finally evicted.
They took their belongings and moved onto the Wallacedene sportsgrounds
just outside of Wallacedene, because they could not move back to where they
had previously lived as other people had taken occupation of the homes they
had left behind. So, they erected structures on the Wallacedene sportsgrounds,
after which eviction proceedings were instituted against them. The community
was represented by the Legal Resources Centre and their argument was
primarily based on section 26 of the Constitution. Essentially, they said, We
5 The highest legal body in South
Africa; deals with constitutional
matters.
6 Grootboom case (ibid.); available
at http://www.saflii.org/za/cases/
ZACC/2000/19.html, last accessed 10
August 2019.
2 The Convention for a Democratic
South Africa was a process to oversee
the coalition created by organisations
opposing apartheid (http://www.
sahistory.org.za/article/convention-
democratic-south-africa-codesa).
3 Also referred to herein as right to
adequate housing.
4 Grootboom and Others v
Government of the Republic of South
Africa and Others - Constitutional
Court Order (CCT38/00) [2000]
ZACC 14 (21 September 2000).
have got the right to adequate housing, and the housing policies of the City of
Cape Town does not allow for emergency housing. We currently do not have
any housing. We actually moved from our housing because the circumstances
there were not conducive to normal living. The court, for the first time, looked
at [the meaning of] the right to adequate housing. The Constitutional Court5
said in 2001 that 6
... housing entails more than bricks and mortar. It requires available land,
appropriate services such as the provision of water and the removal of
sewage and the financing of all of these, including the building of the house
itself.
For a person to have access to adequate housing, all of these conditions need to
be met: there must be land, there must be services and there must be a dwelling.
On a close analysis of this passage the court does not actually give a content
to the right of access to adequate housing. Yes, it says that housing must be
more than bricks and mortar, and people must have land, it must be serviced,
and there must be a dwelling. But it does not say what kind of dwelling [and]
it does not speak to what kind of services are to be implemented on that piece
of land. And as my talk continues, I want you to keep in mind that, in South
Africa, we have missed an opportunity in terms of giving content to the right
to adequate housing.
First of all, the court decided to read the right of access to adequate housing
within its textual context. The right cannot be read just on its own: it needs
to be read with the right to dignity, equality, the rights of children, and all of
those related constitutional rights. This is one of the areas where the court
missed an opportunity to flesh out section 26. For example, the judgement
did not say that, if the right of access to housing entails that a person must
have a dignified existence, what that means practically on the ground and
[what] housing [should look like] to ensure that it complies with the standard
of human dignity.
The court also rejected the idea of a minimum core obligation. This is a legal
principle that was developed in foreign jurisdictions, most notably by the
Indian Supreme Court. In the context of socio-economic rights, the minimum
core obligation means that, for each socio-economic right, the State has an
obligation to provide enough resources to at least meet a minimum standard.
The minimum standard is specified and is regarded as the core obligation.
The applicants in the Grootboom case argued that the court should accept a
minimum core obligation for the right of access to housing. For example, every
person in South Africa is entitled to a house of 40 m2; they are entitled at least
to one toilet, a tap that runs, and sewerage infrastructure. The Constitutional
Court rejected this approach for various reasons, one of them being that they
felt they were not in the position to be able to tell the executive or the legislator
what exactly the right of access to housing entails, as they did not have details
about what the government would be able to provide in these circumstances.
[ 81 ][ 80 ]
They also felt that it could have created an inflexible situation where the
right to access to adequate housing could not be differentiated for particular
circumstances or communities. By rejecting the minimum core obligation,
the court failed to set a standard for the right of access to adequate housing
that could be used to hold government to account.
Ironically, in the Grootboom case, they also referred to the ICESCR and the
other rights that the Special Rapporteur was referring to in her message,7
which [make] specific provision for giving content to the right to adequate
housing. It says that the right of access to adequate housing will entail, for
example, legal security of tenure; affordability; availability of services, material,
facilities and infrastructure; habitability; accessibility; location and cultural
adequacy. At that point South Africa had not yet ratified the Covenant, which
only happened in 2015. So, the court referred to that briefly and said, We have
taken notice of this but are not going to accept it, as we are under no obligation
to do so. Given the fact that South Africa has now ratified this Covenant it
would be appropriate for our courts to read section 26 against the backdrop
of international law.
The court did, however, address certain aspects of the States obligation. The
court distinguishes between a positive obligation and a negative obligation
(see below). The positive obligation derives from sections 26(1) and (2) of the
Constitution, which state that the State must act within its available resources
[and] take reasonable and other legislative measures for the progressive
realisation of the right to adequate housing. This means that the State must
prove that it is doing something or starting to do something to realise the right
to housing. It cannot just sit back and do nothing. As the right is progressively
realisable, the State must demonstrate that it is taking some steps and that
there is efficiency in taking these steps. Lastly, whatever steps the State is taking
must be within its available resources.
Section 26(3) of the Constitution addresses the negative obligation on the State
by prohibiting evictions without a court order. The court in Grootboom stated
that government should be reluctant to proceed against unlawful occupiers of
public land in instances where the eviction will lead to homelessness. When
we get to the Eviction section (see below), I will show you other measures that
have been implemented to mitigate the effects of evictions that could cause
homelessness. Essentially, in order to evict someone, there is the need for a
court order. Especially were the State is involved and it is public land, you must
be very mindful that your actions could [not] lead to a person being deprived
of the right of access to adequate housing.
The final measure that the court decided to impose was reasonableness. The
court said that they were not going to establish a minimum core obligation,
and they were not going to give content to the right; rather, what they were
going to do was a reasonableness inquiry. Reasonableness is an administrative
law term that asks whether the measures taken by government are reasonably
possible of facilitating the realisation of section 26 of the Constitution.8 If you
9 See footnote 6 of this session.
10 A branch of law focusing on the
activities of government entities.
7 See Foreword.
8 See 4
consider this carefully, the actions taken do not actually have to facilitate the
realisation. They do not actually have to have any effect, to be quite honest:
they must just be reasonably possible9 of doing so. And the court specifically
said that it was not its role to enquire as to whether or not there were better
means of achieving the right of access to adequate housing. The question then,
rather, is: Is what the government has presented to court reasonably possible
of facilitating the realisation of section 26 of the Constitution? Even in
administrative law,10 reasonableness is a very low standard. It does not require
much of government to jump over that hurdle. Essentially, what they have to
say is, We have embarked on this project. We have decided we will provide,
for example, low-cost rental housing and this is the decision we have taken.
And yes, it is reasonably possible, in the larger scheme of things, that this will
achieve some form of realisation of section 26 of the Constitution. The court
does, however, give a few guidelines in terms of assessing what we deem
reasonable. For example, something will be reasonable if it is comprehensive
and coordinated. It must also be capable of facilitating the realisation of the
right. It must be reasonable in its conception and implementation; it must
be balanced and flexible; and it must have short-, medium- and long-term
goals. This last point was specifically inserted because the Grootboom case
dealt with emergency housing. The measures must address the plight of those
in desperate need. In the Grootboom judgement, the court found that the
housing policy of the City of Cape Town was not reasonable in that it provided
no means to address emergency housing. So, for people who were living in
squalid conditions [and] who needed immediate access to housing, there was
no provision in the policy at all.
The standard of reasonableness, which is essentially the standard we are now
using for adequate housing in South Africa, has positives and negatives. The
first positive is that it is flexible. It is a good standard to have in instances where
you are working with different communities in different contexts because it can
be adjusted to a particular context or a particular group of people, e.g. where
people are more vulnerable than in other cases. So, it is a flexible mechanism
that can take cognisance of peoples lived experiences as opposed to a minimum
core obligation that sets a uniform standard that is applicable to everyone.
However, it does not make provision for people who have very unique particular
circumstances or communities who have very specific challenges.
The problem with this standard as a way of realising the right of access to
adequate housing is that it actually conflates (1) the justification that the
State must provide for the measures they have decided on, and (2) the right
to adequate housing, into one inquiry and the standard is not very high.
What it essentially does is it creates a very normative vacuum within which
the inquiry about the right to adequate housing takes place because we are not
measuring the justification against any benchmark. It also silences the voice of
the people, for whom the right to adequate housing might entail something
more than just bricks and mortar. The standard does not really give proper
content to this particular right.
[ 83 ][ 82 ]
Giving meaning to the Right to Adequate Housing
I will now present some of the South African experiences to give content to the
right of adequate housing since 1994 and even a bit before that; and then speak
to our experiences within our organisation and our other social partners.
If we look at the current social situation in South Africa, we have seen an
enormous increase in public protest surrounding access to adequate housing.
These protests are often very hostile and violent and can take the form of
burning property, including houses. In 2012, the former Public Protector
stated that 10% of all the inquiries or complaints lodged with her office dealt
with access to adequate housing, problems with government provision [of
housing], and problems with mismanagement of the housing system.11 We
have also seen quite an increase in illegal occupations of open areas within
cities recently. We have seen the rise of political parties such as the EFF12 that
have definitely got people thinking about their rights and particularly the right
of access to adequate housing.
In terms of the positive obligation on the State, there are two projects which
I want to discuss. The first one deals with security of tenure. Section 25(6) of
the Constitution, which is the property and land reform clause,13 says that
people whose rights to tenure security were insecure as a result of racially
discriminatory practices or laws or any form of discrimination within the
country, have the right to have their tenure secured. Even before this was
implemented, South Africa had enacted legislation in 1991 to the effect
that, in demarcated township areas and where the municipality had records
of who was living on [a] particular plot, residents were entitled to have
their housing right secured by way of a lease, permit or any other form of
property right that could get them title over that particular piece of land.
After 1994, there was an incredible drive to get titles to get ownership
of property as opposed to any other right. Ownership was the one thing
that people felt could protect them and secure their tenure. So, in many
instances, people were given title deeds to properties in township areas and
their names were registered as the lawful owners of those properties. This
sometimes happened at a minimum fee but varied very much depending on
the particular municipality.
The cost of Titles and Literacy on Ownership
We are now seeing, specifically in the Grahamstown area, the sort of
consequences of that system that seems to, for the most part, have happened
in a haphazard way. We have got a Deeds Registration Office, which I
understand Namibia has as well,14 and ownership only transfers when your
name is registered against a property within the Deeds Office. That is a legal
process and, unfortunately, in South Africa, there are costs associated with it.
That process must happen by way of conveyancers, who are attorneys with
special qualification; and if there is money to be made, the attorneys will make
it. The costs associated with having a house registered are prohibitive. At the
same time, people who have never had access to any housing right often will
not even know that they have to go and register the house. For example, in
16 Inheritance modalities when the
deceased had no will.
15 Proxy Smart Services (Pty) Ltd.
11 Corruption Watch. Presentation
to the Portfolio Committee
on Human Settlements by
the Public Protector Adv TN
Madonsela. Available at https://
www.corruptionwatch.org.za/
wp-content/uploads/migrated/
PublicprotectorDHS.pdf, last
accessed 14 August 2019.
12 The Economic Freedom Fighters
(EFF) are a political party in South
Africa, launched in 2013 on the
platform of radical economic
transformation.
13 Section 25(6) reads as follows: A
person or community whose tenure
of land is legally insecure as a result
of past racially discriminatory laws
or practices is entitled, to the extent
provided by an Act of Parliament,
either to tenure which is legally
secure or to comparable redress.
14 Namibia has a Deeds Office
operating under the Ministry of Land
Reform.
the Grahamstown area, many of the titles that were granted in this way were
never registered. The Act did not provide for the costs around it to be waived,
and the deed registration system does not allow for low-cost registrations.
The costs are very much dependent on the value of your property as well
as certain mandatory registration fees. There is currently an organisation
emerging in South Africa that wants to do low-cost registrations,15 and they
are being stopped by the lawyers and the conveyancers because, obviously,
the conveyancers are anxious [that they will] lose a lot of money. We are in
the process of making representations to the Law Society to ask that this
organisation be allowed to do the job they are doing because the rules of
the Law Society also do not allow NGOs like ours to do conveyancing. The
problem is that there are no other options for people, and there has not been
enough education around what it means to have a title deed in South Africa.
Simply put, people have not gone through the process of attaining home
ownership: the process has not been completed as these deeds have not been
registered.
The Family Home: Beyond Westernised notions of Property
The second point we need to be addressing, also in the Namibian context,
is the Western notion of ownership and property rights: one person, one
house, one title deed. This does not take into account the lived realities of
people living in various family constellations. In the Eastern Cape, people
often talk about family homes. These are homes that have been in families for
generations and have been passed on from one generation to the next, with or
without ownership formally changing in the Deeds Office. The law does not
take cognisance of the concept of a family home. You cannot register a house
as a family home in the Deeds Registry. So, we often get clients that are being
evicted from their homes by relatives, saying, But its a family home! I grew
up there, I was born there, Ive lived there my entire life. This house belongs to
us as a family. And then, when you start going back into the history, you will
see that at the point of registering the title, if the title was registered, often the
uncle or whoever was employed was named on the title deed. In South Africa,
there is a complete misconception that the person who is responsible for the
rates and taxes for a house is also the owner. Families would say, This person
is employed. He is the one who is caring for our family. So lets have him
registered as the owner of the property, because then he will be responsible for
the rates and taxes. Of course, it is not the same thing: you can be registered
as the person who pays the rates and taxes even though you are not the owner.
But 20 years down the line, when this uncle has passed away, the uncles son,
the cousin always that one cousin decides that the house belongs to him
because he got it from his dad because of intestate succession16 and he is
right! In terms of South African law, he is then the owner of that property. He
can have it transferred to his name and he can evict his entire family from that
home. So, it is really important that a mechanism be found to take account of
peoples perceived housing rights which do not always align with Western
interpretations of individual property ownership. One of the ways which we
[ 85 ][ 84 ]
suggested to address this issue was having co-ownership; thus, having more
than one person registered as the owner of the property so that one family
member does not hold all the rights alone. However, this does not actually
address the idea of a family home in perpetuity.
The Gender Dimension
The third point which requires attention is the gender dimension, especially
in the context of customary marriages. In South African law, customary
marriages are recognised, but only once they have been formally registered
similar to civil marriages. However, most people do not register their
customary marriages. Often, the house is registered in the husbands name,
and when they get divorced or when their marriage ends up not working,
the wife does not have any real rights over the property. The default position
in South African law is that the property will be divided equally in cases of
divorce unless there is an antenuptial contract that determines otherwise.
However, when the marriage is not registered, the wife usually does not get
access to her half of the property. The resulting tenure insecurity for women
is really something that needs to be addressed in South African law, and I am
assuming that in the Namibian context you have a similar legal situation.17
Titles may Lead to Insecurity of Tenure
With regard to title deeds, we have also found in the South African context
that, when people have been given title deeds which, of course, provides
opportunities in terms of accessing credit this has often led to more insecurity
of tenure. We have got a big problem with loan sharks specifically targeting
social grant beneficiaries, who are the poorest of the poor. This is because
our credit market is not as regulated as it should be and, unfortunately, grant
beneficiaries inevitably have to access some form of credit. Where people do
have titles, they often end up losing their homes through sales in execution18
because they have taken up mortgage bonds over their houses or they have
incurred debts they cannot repay. Thus, for many people, getting titles has not
actually secured their tenure forever.
The Myth of the Waiting List
Housing waiting lists are also very problematic in South Africa because they go
back to before 1994. Government had already compiled waiting lists and, when
the 1994 democratic transition happened, there were new waiting lists that were
developed at different levels of government. At some point we had a national
waiting list system, but only two of the nine Provinces accepted it. The result
is that, until now, each Province has their own waiting list. It is all very nice to
get onto a waiting list, but nobody knows how the waiting list is managed and
how beneficiaries are allocated. In 2013, the Socio-Economic Rights Institute in
Johannesburg did a study on how housing was allocated through waiting lists,
and they found that nobody knew how it worked.19 There are too many lists, too
many different role players that have a say, and the backlogs are immense.
20 One Rand (R) is equal to one
Namibia Dollar (N$).
21 Gordon, R., Nell, M., & Di
Lollo, A. (2011). Investigation into
the delays in issuing title deeds to
beneficiaries of housing projects
funded by the capital subsidy.
Retrieved from Urban LandMark
website: http://www.urbanlandmark.
org.za/downloads/title_deed_
delays_report_2011.pdf
17 The law is indeed quite similar
to that of South Africa; see: The
Namibian. (2017, September
14). Marital Property. The
Namibian. Retrieved from https://
www.namibian.com.na/index.
php?page=archive-read&id=169266
18 In the South African context,
sales in execution involve a public
auction by a representative of the
court; see e.g. Sale in Execution
Properties Home Loans, available
at https://www.fnb.co.za/home-
loans/sale-in-execution-properties.
html, last accessed 21 February 2018.
19 See: SERI/Socio-economic Rights
Institute of South Africa. 2013.
Jumping the queue, waiting lists
and other myths: Perceptions and
practice around housing demand
and allocation in South Africa.
Johannesburg: SERI. Available at
http://www.seri-sa.org/images/
Jumping_the_Queue_MainReport_
Jul13.pdf, last accessed 14 August
2019.
Corruption and Local Government involvement in Housing Delivery
Another major aspect hampering housing provision which is very well-
documented, especially in the case of the RDP is the issue of corruption
and fraud in tender processes. Before 2001, the RDP was run nationally
and provincially, mainly by way of private tenders. Around 75% of all RDP
houses were built by private developers who had been contracted by the
State. Since 2004, many municipalities have been accredited as developers of
RDP housing projects. So, a lot of these projects are now run by municipal
councils, and often councillors get personally involved. We have a councillor
in Grahamstown who is the owner of six RDP houses, all of them registered
in his name. While he lives in one of the best houses in town, he rents out
his RDP houses. He had another four houses registered in his name, which
he sold for R50,00020 each. Unfortunately, this is not unique. All of the
municipalities in the Eastern Cape as well as our partners in Johannesburg and
Cape Town everybody is complaining about the same thing. The system has
been corrupted by councillors, and it has been corrupted by the way in which
tenders are allocated to specific people. While there is a specific process that
needs to be followed in South Africa for allocation of tenders, very often it is
the tenderpreneurs that are commissioned. This is slowing down the process
of housing delivery. When people are caught, the tender has to be repealed or
set aside by the court and then it has to be reallocated. So, we are talking about
a two- to three-year delay in a particular project because of one tender process
that has not been followed properly.
The Limits of National Capacities to Manage Titles
South Africa has a big problem with the management of title deeds. Very
often, people do not receive their title deeds for RDP houses. Research shows
that 1.5 million RDP houses have not been registered at the Deeds Office.21
So, essentially, they do not have any sort of legal right over the property. Then
there is a clause in the Social Housing Act that states that, when you have
received an RDP house, you are not allowed to resell it within eight years. I can
understand the argumentation behind that: it is supposed to secure the tenure.
But what we are seeing is that people are selling the houses anyway. People
move away, peoples circumstances change. Most of us in this room have not
stayed in the same place for the last eight years: our lives have changed, we
have migrated, we have moved. And the same is true for people living in RDP
houses. What we are seeing is that, because people know they are not allowed
to sell the house, they do not go through the formal sales process: they just sell
the house informally. The problem is that, whereas an RDP house is normally
built for about R160,000, people are selling houses for as little as R10,000.
If they had been given the opportunity to sell the house earlier, when they
wanted to sell it, people would be able to resell the house for R150,000 instead
through the formal process and they would know that they could buy another
house with the money received from the RDP housing. That resale clause in
the Social Housing Act, while it was well intended, has created an informal
[ 87 ][ 86 ]
market. About 11% of RDP housing in South Africa has been resold in the
informal market,22 which means title deeds have not been transferred and the
prices have not been at the level they should have been.
Political Profiteering through Public Housing
Housing programmes allow for abuse of political influence. There is a [so-
called] coloured township in East London which has been on the waiting list
for RDP housing for more than 16 years. The development was supposed to
have started [in] 2004. In all the other townships around [there], RDP housing
was constructed, but not within that particular township. When people went
to the municipality to ask why they were not building houses, the municipal
council told them that the area had voted largely for the Democratic Alliance23
and that they should not be surprised that they were not receiving housing.
However, the right to adequate housing is not for a particular group of people
or for a particular political affiliation: it is supposed to be for everyone.
Negative Obligations: Protection against Evictions and the Reality on
the Ground
We will now look at eviction law, which represents governments negative
obligation. Eviction law in South Africa, based on sections 26(1) and (3) of
the Constitution, states that you cannot evict someone without a court order.
The court will not grant an eviction order if they feel that it is not just and
equitable in the circumstances. The circumstances that are usually taken
into account are questions such as: Are there children or elderly living in
the house? Is there alternative accommodation? This sets a benchmark for
protecting peoples right of access to adequate housing if they are already live
in housing. However, in terms of legal evictions in South Africa, we are not
doing particularly well even though the legislation has been established.
The last study that was conducted in 2005 says that only 1% of all evictions in
South Africa went through the legal process.24 That might have increased in
the 12 years since; but, from the number of clients coming into my office on a
daily basis, illegal evictions are still happening at an incredible rate.
Alternative Accommodation
The court will not grant an eviction order if they are not sure that that person
has access to alternative accommodation. The courts also give proper content
to what alternative accommodation means. If a person can go and live with
his or her aunt, the court will see that as alternative accommodation. But
when you are trying to evict larger communities, for example, in township
areas or illegal occupations, it becomes more tricky. The one case that the LRC
has dealt with and I will speak about it in terms of meaningful engagement
as well related to the Joe Slovo informal settlement, situated next to the N2
highway in Cape Town. In 2004, the Breaking New Ground housing policy was
introduced,25 which included the idea [of upgrading] our informal settlements.
26 City of Johannesburg
Metropolitan Municipality v Blue
Moonlight Properties 39 (Pty) Ltd
and Another (CC) [2011] ZACC 33;
2012 (2) BCLR 150 (CC); 2012 (2)
SA 104 (CC) (1 December 2011);
available at http://www.saflii.org/
za/cases/ZACC/2011/33.html, last
accessed 22 February 2018. For
an analysis of the case, see: SERI.
(2016). From Saratoga Avenue to
MBV 2 and Ekuthuleni (Community
Practice Notes No. 3). Retrieved from
Socio-Economic Rights Institute
of South Africa website: http://
www.seri-sa.org/images/Saratoga_
Practice_notes_FOR_WEB.pdf
22 (ibid.)
23 The official opposition party in
South Africa.
24 Social Surveys, & Nkuzi
Development Association. (n.d.).
Summary of Key Findings from the
National Evictions Survey. Retrieved
from Social Surveys Africa & Nkuzi
Development Association website:
https://sarpn.org/documents/
d0001822/Nkuzi_Eviction_
NES_2005.pdf
25 Breaking New Ground is the title
of South Africas 2004 revision of its
housing policy. The revised policy
provides a guide for the development
of human settlements over a five-
year period. See: RSA/Republic of
South Africa. 2004. Breaking New
Ground: A comprehensive plan
for the development of sustainable
human settlements. Department of
Human Settlements. Available at
http://www.dhs.gov.za/sites/default/
files/documents/breaking%20
new%20ground%202004_web.pdf,
last accessed 10 August 2019.
The first project that emerged was Joe Slovo; and [the] settlement was going to
be upgraded with what was called the N2 Gateway Project. The N2 Gateway
Project was meant to provide housing for all Joe Slovo residents, but it needed
to be constructed in the area where people were already living. So, the proposal
was that the residents of Joe Slovo should move to Delft, which is a place nearby,
while Joe Slovo was being upgraded. Some people left; but for those that did
not want to leave, an application for eviction was submitted to the courts. It
was incredibly violent and created a lot of animosity between the State and the
residents of this community. Those who stayed essentially did not want to move
to Delft because they were moving away from their families [and] from their
work, and they did not regard it as proper alternative accommodation. In that
instance, the court gave a structural interdict putting an obligation on the State
to provide alternative accommodation, and also determined what alternative
accommodation must consist of in the circumstances. The court specifically
required that every household must receive a house of 40 m2 with access to
electricity, water and refuse removal, and it must be accessible by roads. This
case has been dragging on for many years and the people eventually did not
move. Now there is an ongoing in-situ upgrading programme in that particular
informal settlement. However, in that [specific] case, the court did give content
to what alternative accommodation meant.
Joinder of Local Authorities
Another way to achieve access to adequate housing is [via] the joinder of local
authorities. In South African law, whether you are evicting someone from private
property or public property, you have to join the local authority and, in some
instances, the Department of Human Settlements if you are dealing with a very
large group of people. You also have to serve notice on the local municipality that
an eviction application has been brought. Then, theoretically, the municipality
is supposed to file a report with the court as to what kind of alternative
accommodation is accessible to the evictees within its particular municipal area.
Getting the municipality to file a report is like trying to pull teeth. This was
the issue at stake in the Blue Moonlight Properties case.26 In Johannesburg,
people were being evicted from a dilapidated apartment complex by the
private landowner. Firstly, the City of Johannesburg rejected the idea that it
had to be given notice and then report on alternative accommodation, because
the case pertained to a private landowner. The court insisted that, even though
it concerned private property, the local authority still [had to] file a report. In
this case, it took three court cases to get the City of Johannesburg to file the
report which was still inadequate because the report did not really address
the issue of those particular people, and required another report.
But, theoretically, if the municipality is doing its duty, the joinder of the local
authority is meant to provide the court with an overview of possibilities for
alternative accommodation for evictees within the same area before it can take
a decision.
[ 89 ][ 88 ]
Meaningful Engagement
Finally, let us turn to the idea of meaningful engagement. Meaningful
engagement is meant to occur before an eviction takes place. This is especially
important when the eviction affects a large group of people. In these
circumstances, there is an obligation on both parties to sit around the table
and to speak about the practical effects of the eviction, instead of coming in
with bulldozers and tearing down the entire place. The idea is that the affected
community must be involved right from the start. The concept was developed
in the Olivia Road case27 in Durban, where people were living in horrible
conditions. The court said that, even before the parties came to court, they
had to have a process of meaningful engagement. There is a need to bring
people on ground level into the conversation about adequate housing instead
of [using] a top-down approach where people are evicted without their voices
having been heard.
Discussion
Guillermo Delgado noted that Rose Molokoane and Sheela Patel had
reminded participants in their session that the legal aspect could be
a very useful instrument, but that access to the law was farfetched for
many. Encouraging a discussion that was varied in approach, he began
by mentioning how the right to adequate housing could be used as an
inspiration that Namibia ought to strive for, rather than only as a legal term.
A participant from the Legal Assistance Centre (LAC) stated that they
received plenty of applicants with eviction problems, where the City Police,28
in particular, were in violation of the law.
Charl-Thom Bayer of NUST mentioned that, in Namibia, illegal
occupations took place mostly on municipal and public land, and that
the State was usually the one that did the evicting. He also explained that
Namibia did not have provisions such as those in South Africa, where
alternative accommodation had to be provided. Nonetheless, he added, the
Namibian Constitution included fundamental freedoms and people had
the right to be treated in a certain way,29 and that ought to guide eviction
processes. He questioned the idea of not employing the right to adequate
housing as a legal avenue.
Mr Delgado explained that a rights-based approach differed in character
from an investment-based approach, for example. While both might be
more or less desirable, depending on the party in question, they could also
be in conflict with each other. He offered as an example the proposal to
reform the legislation on rentals to protect tenants: while many welcomed
this as a positive development, those in the financial sector saw it as a
negative influence on the property markets. He reminded the audience of
31 Gundwana v Steko Development
CC and Others (CCT 44/10) [2011]
ZACC 14; 2011 (3) SA 608 (CC);
2011 (8) BCLR 792 (CC) (11 April
2011); http://www.saflii.org/za/cases/
ZACC/2011/14.html, last accessed 14
August 2019. For an analysis of the
case, see: Tissington, K. (2011). A
Resource Guide to Housing in South
Africa 1994-2010. Legislation, Policy,
Programmes and Practice. Retrieved
from Socio-Economic Rights
Institute of South Africa website:
http://www.seri-sa.org/images/
stories/SERI_Housing_Resource_
Guide_Feb11.pdf
27 Occupiers of 51 Olivia Road,
Berea Township and 197 Main Street
Johannesburg v City of Johannesburg
and Others (24/07) [2008] ZACC
1; 2008 (3) SA 208 (CC) ; 2008
(5) BCLR 475 (CC) (19 February
2008); available at http://www.saflii.
org/za/cases/ZACC/2008/1.html,
last accessed 4 March 2018. For
an analysis of the case, see: SERI.
(2016). From San Jose to MBV 1
(Community Practice Notes No. 1).
Retrieved from Socio-Economic
Rights Institute of South Africa
website: http://www.seri-sa.org/
images/San_Jose_Practice_notes_
FOR_WEB3.pdf.
28 The Windhoek City Police
Service is an organ of the City of
Windhoek, while the Namibian
Police Force (Nampol) is a national
body established in the Namibian
Constitution.
29 This may refer to the case where
the City of Windhoek evicted a
mother of four without a court
order, but with the assistance of
the Affirmative Repositioning
movement, she was able to take
the City to court. While the case
was being reviewed, the family was
accommodated at a bed-and-
breakfast at the Citys cost. See
New Era, 3 April 2017. Court asks
evicted land group to provide proof.
Available at https://www.newera.
com.na/2017/04/03/court-asks-
evicted-land-group-to-provide-
proof/, last accessed 11 August 2019.
the Special Rapporteurs message,30 in which she stressed that housing was
a right, not a commodity.
John Nakuta, law lecturer at the University of Namibia, stressed that
there was a difference between the right to adequate housing, that was
recognised under international law, and the right to property. He explained
that the Namibian Constitution only provided for the right to property, but
that the right to adequate housing was incorporated into this right when
Namibia signed the ICESCR in the early 1990s. He emphasised that adopting
a rights-based approach to fulfil the right to adequate housing was not an
option. In illustration, he referred to the problem of affordability, saying it
was not possible simply to address that issue at the expense of others, such
as security of tenure. He explained that, if one aspect was neglected, then a
person could not be said to enjoy the right to adequate housing. He asked
the presenter to expand on the fair lending legislation in South Africa,
which compelled financial institutions to comply with the right to adequate
housing.
Ms Van Schalkwyk stressed that countries were obliged to take
international law into account. She also emphasised how other rights that
were in the Namibian Constitution could also be used to enforce the right
to adequate housing, even if the right was not included in the Constitution
as such, e.g. the right to dignity, equality and family life.
Regarding fair lending, Ms Van Schalkwyk mentioned there were social
movements trying to get financial institutions to address the plight of the
poor. She explained how stringent the procedures were to get a bond to
buy a house in South Africa, including having a credit record. She stated
that, without these, applicants were regarded as high-risk clients, which
was a proxy for low-income groups. She noted that her organisation
had supported cases protecting peoples rights in execution when their
properties were being sold to cover debt. As an example, she described a
case where a womans house had been placed in execution for a debt of just
a few hundred Rand, and that the court had deemed this a violation of the
debtors right to adequate housing. She also noted how banks were now
aware of the issue and took the option of restructuring the debt. She added
that, previously in South Africa, one could have a house sold in execution
and the execution warrant could be issued by the registrar of the court, i.e.
the evictee was not even seen by a judge. In other words, ones house could
be sold in execution without the debtor being aware of what was going on,
she explained. This ended with a Constitutional Court case, Gundwana vs
Steko Development,31 which established that such decisions had to be taken
by a court of law.
Hilia Hitula of the Walvis Bay Municipality asked whether there was
a specific definition of ownership. She referred to the example of family
homes, where a house was not perceived as being owned by one individual
30 See Foreword.
[ 91 ][ 90 ]
but was the property of a wider family network. She believed that this
notion was probably not limited to Namibia and South Africa but was
arguably applicable to the broader African context. She also questioned
the idea that proof of ownership amounted to a piece of paper and stressed
how much effort went into obtaining such a document, while what was at
stake was a basic human need regardless of proof of tenure or what form
that took.
Ms Van Schalkwyk explained that, in South Africa, particularly under the
presidency of Thabo Mbeki, the focus was on a very neoliberal economic
approach which favoured the idea of individual titles (one person, one
title) because this gave people access to credit. However, she explained that
there was now a shift away from that in South Africa and different forms of
tenure beyond ownership such as long-term leases were being supported.
She nevertheless noted that the support for individual ownership was still
very much alive. She also mentioned the notion of co-ownership, where
one could have more than one persons name on a title deed; all such
named parties remain actively involved when circumstances changed. Ms
Van Schalkwyk also suggested that different tenure possibilities may be
something more related to education and the ability to understand how
public procedures (e.g. land administration) operate than to actual changes
in the way that the Deeds Office operated. At the same time, she stressed
that, in order to actually have ownership, that notion had to be understood
in the same sense that the Deeds Office understood it. While she recognised
that placing property in the name of a trust was a more flexible possibility,
it was a costly and complex endeavour, and certainly not a tool applicable
to the realities of many today. She mentioned that there were also family
property associations but emphasised that such legal options entailed yet
other complexities.
Ms Hitula noted that while shack dweller groups constituted some form of
collective processes, local government authorities were generally reluctant
to engage with them. She asked what practical experience on the ground
could help these organisations.
Ms Van Schalkwyk admitted having no definitive answer to the question,
but she explained how her office had assisted boards of representatives with
constitutions that stated who their beneficiaries were. In such cases, the
board itself was registered as the owner of the property in question, and this
option was acceptable to the Deeds Office.
Mr Bayer noted how these options all came with their own sets of
challenges. He noted that the more sophisticated a collective group was, the
more expensive and complicated its set-up became. He stressed that being
a group automatically implied a greater degree of complexity because of
the multiple opinions that shaped how the group functioned. He used the
Rehoboth area to illustrate this point. Although the Deeds Office allowed
properties in Rehoboth to be registered in the name of all ones dependants,
it created a situation where various individuals had a claim to a property,
32 No. 47 of 1937 (South Africa).
33 The Local Authorities Act,
1992 (No. 23 of 1992) defines the
sense of buildings as including
(a) any structure, whether of a v
or temporary nature, constructed
or used for the housing or
accommodation of human beings
...; (b) a wall of at least 1,2 metres in
height ... [or] (c) any boundary fence
or wall. However, there is no further
specification on the nature of such
building.
34 See footnote 4 of this session.
which made decisions regarding that property a burdensome task. He noted
that a similar case applied in Namibias communal areas.
Ms Van Schalkwyk stressed that the Deeds Registry and the Deeds
Registration Act,32 specifically in South Africa as well, needed to start
becoming aware of the various modes of tenure taking place on the ground.
She mentioned how such Acts stemmed from a very old system and that it
was a mistake to think that system would last forever. She felt that recognising
and supporting different forms of ownership was something that needed to
be addressed in South Africa and perhaps in other parts of the world as well.
Taro Ashipala from the City of Windhoek asked whether the definition
of house was the same in South Africa as it was in Namibias Local Authority
Act.33 He mentioned cases where, if the City Police found a building that,
in their view, did not comply with certain characteristics, then they did not
regard it as a house. He also noted how the discussion had not elaborated on
the time dimension. In this regard, he asked how long a person had to live in
a place to be able to claim the right to adequate housing.
Ms Van Schalkwyk replied that she was not aware of a specific Act in South
Africa that defined the notion of house, but that the challenges regarding
ambiguity in the right to adequate housing could be illustrated in the
Grootboom case.34
Mr Ashipala referred to Namibias Deeds Office not allowing the registration
of properties smaller than 300 m2. He noted how this provision had created
a situation where some people rented for many years. In his view, this was
also unfair fair to those who wanted to leave a patrimony for their children.
He also noted how the lack of ownership, i.e. not being in possession of a
title deed, prevented inhabitants from building a permanent structure on a
plot of land. He added that it was not possible to erect a permanent structure
on a plot of land that was not fully serviced, and that the process of servicing
was left to the local authority to do as and when resources permitted, or they
chose to give it priority. The challenge, he concluded, was that inhabitants
were unable to improve their living conditions because of ownership
limitations.
Mr Nakuta reminded the participants that, when speaking about the right
to adequate housing, this involved not only ownership but rentals as well.
Furthermore, he stressed that inhabitants of informal settlements were
equally entitled to the right to adequate housing and, by extension, security
of tenure.
An unidentified female participant mentioned how monitoring and
evaluation mechanisms were needed to follow up what had already been
tried. She stressed how government projects ended up dying a silent death,
which created the idea that there was no accountability.
[ 93 ][ 92 ]
Ms Van Schalkwyk responded that, in South Africa, it was not so much
a lack of mechanisms to address problems of corruption, but rather that
follow-ups on such cases were scarce. To illustrate, she referred to the
Public Finance Management Act35 and the legislation regulating public
procurement,36 which set out specific mechanisms for how procurements
needed to happen to prevent corruption. These laws prescribed what
tender committees needed to be formed within municipalities and outlined
specific tender processes, but on a day-to-day basis, these procedures were
not always followed. The task was to bring to book or even fire those who
took part in such crimes, but this did not always happen. She concluded that
half of the work was having the mechanisms in place; as important, however,
was following up and holding people accountable.
A participant from the LAC clarified that, under the rules of the Law
Society of Namibia, the LAC could not take a matter to court if they saw
a problem, whereas the LRC in South Africa could do so. Whereas public
interest law in South Africa had the scope to do things on their own, the
LAC needed to have clients walk through the door, screen them, and then
hand over their case to a litigation lawyer, for example. She stated that the
LAC was considering asking the court to expand its standing to allow it to
act on behalf of the public.
Mr Bayer brought up the cases of local authorities not adhering to the law or
misspending their funds. He suggested that, at some point, notwithstanding
the costs, litigation might be the way to go.
Mr Delgado reminded the participants that, in the case of Namibia, local
councillors were appointed, not elected (with the exception of regional
councillors). Therefore, the mechanism for accountability through elections
was not really available. He stated that local governance and accountability
were key areas for further work.
Ms Van Schalkwyk provided an example of a case where a court awarded
a property to a specific person, but the property transfer was not effected
because the beneficiary made a living selling things on the side of the road
and could not scrape the money together for the transfer.
An unidentified participant mentioned that, in Namibia, issues of
affordability were serious: many houses had been built but stood empty
because no one could afford them.37
Ms Van Schalkwyk explained that transfer fees in South Africa depended
on property values. If the house was not expensive, the transfer fees might
be low but many might still find that unaffordable.
Mr Bayer referred to a study in which he had taken part where transfer
costs were established to have been between 7% and 8% of the value of
the property. In his view, these rates were comparatively favourable by
37 This may refer to the houses built
during the first phase of the MHDP
which, at the time of the Forum,
were reportedly still unoccupied;
see: The Namibian. (2017, June
7). 2 000 houses unoccupied. The
Namibian. Retrieved from https://
www.namibian.com.na/index.
php?page=archive-read&id=165448.
international standards; however, such costs sometimes amounted to
almost 100% of a beneficiarys annual income. Even if covering such costs
would take five to ten years, the impact on the beneficiarys livelihood would
be significant. He also mentioned cases where some peoples monthly rental
for a property was higher than what a home loan repayment would be, and
suggested some form of regulation to address this.
35 No. 1 of 1999 (South Africa).
36 Government of the Republic
of South Africa. (n.d.). General
Procurement Guidelines. Retrieved
from http://www.treasury.gov.
za/legislation/pfma/supplychain/
General%20Procurement%20
Guidelines.pdf
[ 95 ][ 94 ]
1 https://www.fig.net/
SESSION 7
Urban Land Reform,
Tenure Options and
Land Administration
Kwame Tenadu
Chairperson, Commission on Spatial Planning and Development,
International Federation of Surveyors
Kwame Tenadu is the Chair of the Commission on Spatial Planning and
Development of the International Federation of Surveyors. He is also President
of the Licensed Surveyors Association of Ghana, Regional Chair of the Ghana
Institution of Surveyors, and a Board Member of the Association for the Protection
of Archaeological and Historical Sites.
The International Federation of Surveyors is an NGO recognised by the UN and
the World Bank. It comprises national member associations that cover the whole
range of professional fields within the global surveying community. The Federation
provides an international forum for discussion and development that aims to
promote professional practice and standards.1
The session was moderated by Charl-Thom Bayer, former Head of the
Department of Land and Property Sciences, NUST
Editorial note: The initial introduction that the speaker gave about the International
Federation of Surveyors was edited, as much of the information was readily available
on the Federations website.
[ 97 ][ 96 ]
Introduction: Urban Land Reform, Land Administration and Tenure
Options
Land administration is the way in which the rules of land tenure are applied
and made operational. Land management is the process of managing the use
and development of land resources in both urban and rural settings.
The processes of land administration include the transfer of rights in land
from one party to another through sale, lease, loan, gift or inheritance; the
regulating of land and property development; the use and conservation of
the land; the gathering of revenues from the land through sales, leasing and
taxation; and the resolving of conflicts concerning the ownership and the use
of land. Land administration functions may be divided into four components:
juridical, regulatory, fiscal and information management. These functions
may be organised in terms of agencies responsible for surveying and mapping,
land registration, and land valuation.
I argue that every tenure option emerges from the land management of any
country, or society or community.
Land reform is a programme which aims to rationalise, with due
process and through equitable means, the existing pattern of land use
and ownership in urban and urbanising areas. As such, it involves the
imposition of certain limitations on the use by the owner of his[/her]
property. I have seen the case of Namibia presented at the [Global Land
Tool Network] platform,2 namely that taking land from commercial
farmers to redistribute it to previously disadvantaged people happens
through due process; but is it equitable? That is why we need to ask these
two questions together. We also need to manage citizens expectations in
a sustainable manner.
I find the following steps useful in engaging with urban land reform:3
Step 1: Know your territory.
Step 2: Develop a city-wide approach to redevelopment.
Step 3: Implement neighbourhood plans with community stakeholders.
Step 4: Make government effective.
Step 5: Create a legal framework for sound redevelopment.
Step 6: Create marketable opportunities.
Step 7: Finance redevelopment.
Step 8: Build on natural and historic assets.
Step 9: Be sensitive to gentrification and relocation issues.
Step 10: Organise for success.
I have selected three case studies from China, Rwanda and my own
country, Ghana, in order to show what drives different tenure options in
these places.
2 The Global Land Tool Network is
an alliance of international partners
contributing to poverty alleviation
through increased access to land and
tenure security (http://www.gltn.net/
index.php/about-us/about-gltn, last
accessed 31 July 2019).
3 See Katz, B. (2003, July 9). Seizing
City Assets: Ten Steps to Urban Land
Reform. Presented at the Vacant
Property Forum. Retrieved from
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2016/06/20030709_
katzvacantland.pdf
Urban Land Reform in China
Modern land reforms began in the mid-1980s following a successful
experiment in Shenzhen with a Special Economic Zone on its border
with Hong Kong. In [the Zone], State-owned land was leased to foreign
corporations. The [Chinese] Constitution was amended in 1988 so that land
use could be transacted according to law. Previously, China did not have this
type of system. In 1990, China officially adopted land leasing as the basis for
assigning land use rights to urban land users.
In the current property rights regime, use rights for specified periods ranging
from 40 to 70 years can be obtained from the State through the up-front
payment of land use fees. This is creating a massive financial asset for them.
The fees are determined by the location, type and density of the proposed
development. This separation of land ownership and use rights allows the
trading of land use rights while maintaining State ownership of land: the State
maintains the ownership and it sells the user right to you. If you have the user
right, you can also sell it to somebody else.
For the Chinese Government, this separation offered three advantages: first,
market mechanisms could help guide the allocation of land resources; second, land
use fees would provide local government with a new source of revenue; and third,
by retaining state ownership, social and political conflict would be minimised.
The pace at which this transformation is taking place offers rare challenges
and opportunities. For land policy researchers, China offers opportunities to
explore questions central to international urban policy debates:
1. How do market forces shape the internal structure of cities?
2. Can markets provide safe and affordable housing for all segments of the
population?
3. Are markets the primary cause of urban sprawl?
For academics and practitioners involved in education and training, China
offers the challenge of sharing the lessons of Western experience without
encouraging the Chinese to make the same mistakes. In the process, both
researchers and trainers can improve the process of development in the
worlds most rapidly urbanising nation.
Urban Land Reform in Rwanda
I present the case of Rwanda because there is hardly a conference on land-
related issues without someone citing the massive progress Rwanda has made.
Rwanda started with a National Land Policy in February 2004 and passed
a Land Law in 2005. The National Land Policy put great importance on
appropriate land administration systems as being key for land tenure security,
providing the possibility of registering and transferring land and, thus, of
[ 99 ][ 98 ]
investment in land. They needed to have a clear distinction between urban
land and rural land, [and] a clear separation of public land and private land.
They needed to decentralise land administration procedures, provide strong
institutional arrangements to coordinate all the systems, and embark on
systematic land registration both in urban and rural areas. To this end, Rwanda
chose appropriate technology to map the rural area, i.e. a global positioning
system (GPS) for tourists, although it is less accurate than a professional GPS.
They needed to know where and how big a property was so that they could
undertake the task in a reasonable time.
Everyone knows that land is a valuable asset; but it is also a very contested one
and a source of various conflicts. [For example,] the Liberian war started as a
political issue, and then it shifted to the issue of land ownership. Getting land
reform right is critical to both poverty reduction and a peaceful and secure
country. Thus, land reform is identified as a priority in the Government of
Rwandas Vision 2020 to improve the security of tenure by clarifying and
registering land rights in order to ensure that all Rwandans, irrespective of
gender, enjoy the same rights to land. The Rwandan Government also aims to
improve land values, promote investment and contribute to sustainable land
use and management.
Urban Land Reform in Ghana
We have two parallel land systems. The first is the statutory tenure and State land
management system, where the government acquires land from communities
through compensation that it deems fit. Government runs this system
through the Lands Commission, the Land Valuation Board, and the Land
Title Registration System. We have a lot of chieftaincies as Ghanaian society is
clan-based; and all these chiefs have land. To administer the revenues flowing
from this resource, there is an Administrator of Stool Lands. We also recognise
the importance of surveying, so we have a Survey and Mapping Department,
and an Environmental Protection Agency. The courts also play a key role in
this: they allow for change in tenure through identification and judgements.
Therefore, the courts are also part of the framing of the land tenure options that
we have in Ghana within the statutory tenure system.
Then we have the customary land tenure and management system, which
deals with what I mentioned earlier regarding the chiefs having land; we call
this the Allodial Title System. Even though the chiefs hold the land in trust,
and it is a fiduciary relationship between them and the subjects of the clan, the
chiefs are always pocketing the money and never account for it. So, this trust
relationship is always a challenge.
At the customary level, there is what we call families. They are not clans, but
they are families. There are families who descend from a long heritage of
owning land, and this is recognised by our Constitution. And then we also
have private interests confronting these.
I did not expand on the benefits of customary land tenure in Ghana because
there is little to say about that, but I will share with you the weaknesses. The
weaknesses emerged from the weakening of the fundamental principles of
customary land law. If customary law were codified and written, then you
could always refer to it. But because it is only documented by word of mouth
and keeps evolving through time, it becomes increasingly problematic as
land started having monetary value. The weakening of the fundamental
principles of customary land law and the breakdown of the trusteeship ethos
have resulted in landlessness (some chiefs can sell all their land to one investor
without the knowledge of their subjects), homelessness, endemic poverty and
general insecurity for women and men alike in peri-urban neighbourhoods.
Land conflicts, protracted litigation and adjudication failures, documentation
bottlenecks and uncertainty are widespread problems with informal land
markets.
What did Ghana do? They decided to balance the two: statutory and
customary land tenure and management. The chiefs own about 80% of all the
land in the country, so they are a big force to reckon with. The State has only
20% of the land, and they cannot get land unless they appropriate it from
the chiefs. This means that you have to do some balancing. This resulted in
what we call vesting orders, in other words, vesting land in the President
of the Republic. In theory, when customary lands are vested, the beneficial
interests rest with the community whilst the legal estate is transferred to the
President. In this case, whatever happens, the stools (communities) benefit
from this operation: any revenue that emerges through this transaction goes
to them. However, for management purposes, the ownership is vested in the
President.
Conclusions: Teach less, Learn more, Do much
China asserted State control over land to accelerate development, which was
the major vision for tenure options. In Rwandas case, they wanted to manage
potential conflicts by enhancing access to land and reducing poverty. With
regard to Ghana, there was the need to balance customary processes with
statutory regulation for inclusiveness.
Now I ask one question: in Namibia, which options will we choose? Which
option are we going to rethink?
I have gathered some wisdom through interactions with the survey team from
Cambodia. The discussions were about how they have emerged from a bitter
war to address some of the issues of land tenure. Sar Sovann, a friend of mine
who is retired now, shared with me what the vision of land administration in
Cambodia is: No cry, no laugh, only smile. If you cry, it means land has been
taken away from you unfairly, and this is what they want to avoid. If you laugh,
it means you got it on a silver platter; you have cheated or you have more than
the others. Only smile means that we are in-between and its fair. Therefore,
they bring people along in that corridor with only smiles.
[ 101 ][ 100 ]
I have developed these approaches to reform. I say Teach less. When I talk
about Teach less, I am referring to the principles. In any academic session
we can research so many things, but what should be important to us are the
underlying basic principles which you need to apply. This is what I learned
from Sar Sovann, to teach less. Let them bring you all the loads of data, laws,
assessments, historical evidence, and all that, but take the principles and apply
them.
He also said Learn more. By learning more he meant that you should be
learning facts and that your facts should be based on logic. To have a practical
tenure system that works for all, you must be factual and logical in all your
dealings.
And then he says Do much. By this we mean be flexible and be balanced.
We all know that planning is multifunctional: that it involves various tasks,
roles, and professions. What I would like to highlight is the need to manage
high-level collaboration, consultation and coordination between and amongst
stakeholders from all scales as a policy objective for any country. I hope that
whatever we are going to rethink, we will measure it with the integrity that it
deserves.
Discussion
Charl-Thom Bayer proposed focusing the discussion on the institutional
point of view and how the sustainability of urban development could be seen
from that perspective.
A participant from the LAC raised the issue of 99-year leases, noting that
they were sometimes problematic when being transferred to another lessor.
She asked the speaker if he knew of cases where a 30- or 70-year lease had
expired and what had happened on its expiry.
Mr Tenadu clarified that, in such cases, the only right that the beneficiary had
was the right of use; so, the only thing that the beneficiary could dispose of was
the right of use. A beneficiary could sell that right to an investor.
The same LAC participant asked what would happen in the last year of the
lease.
Mr Tenadu responded that it was a matter of economics. The right of use
over land with only one year left in the lease was worth less than one with
29 years left unless that right of use was renewable. He also mentioned
that the nature of the development associated with the leased land would
add other variables, e.g. developing a factory would differ from building a
housing estate.
4 Werner, W., & Bayer, C.-T. (2016).
Leasehold as a Vehicle for Economic
Development. Retrieved from
Legal Assistance Centre & Namibia
University of Science and Technology
website: http://ir.nust.na:80/xmlui/
handle/10628/587
Mr Bayer stated that, in the case of Namibia, it was not the technical capacity
or skill of the surveyor that was the problem, but the costs associated with
property transfers. He explained that some informal settlements had been
surveyed, but that the costs and procedures from that point on to the transfer
of ownership to the land occupants entailed high costs.
The LAC participant responded that although that might be the problem
in urban areas, in her experience the problem in rural areas was the lack of
surveying professionals.
Mr Bayer referred to a study4 that had looked at communal farms in northern
Namibia. The study had found that, while all of the communal farms had
been surveyed and their diagrams had been registered at the Deeds Office,
no leasehold rights on communal lands had been registered. Furthermore,
while survey costs had been covered by the State, the cost of transferring a land
right seemed to be an obstacle, Mr Bayer stated. In these circumstances, he
felt the issue was more socio-economic in nature than a matter of deficiency
in the land administration system. He also mentioned a certain tendency of
traditional leaders wanting to keep some degree of control over land allocation
in areas under their jurisdiction. This tendency was not, in Mr Bayers view,
one of authoritarianism, but because land transactions were already working
to some extent and the usefulness of formalising land rights was unclear.
Mr Tenadu pointed out that, in Africa, traditional land allocation
mechanisms were something that could not be neglected, and that imposing
land administration systems from Europe could be unproductive.
An unidentified participant asked about cases leasehold rights in urban
areas.
Mr Tenadu explained that urban areas in Ghana still had a dual system of
traditional and statutory land management. However, he emphasised that
it was particularly in rural areas that one needed to recognise and empower
what already worked.
The LAC participant said that traditional land rights could also be
problematic. She illustrated this by describing how land was sometimes
allocated traditionally to a person while the house in fact performed the
function of a family house. This created a situation in which the head of a
household was able to sell or transfer the house, while in practice they were
displacing a larger number that also had a right over such family house. She
stated that the LAC had some cases of families seeking assistance because the
head of their household had sold the land on which they had all depended. She
added that there had been other cases as well, e.g. where some had been tricked
into selling their properties by signing sale agreements without knowing what
the documents entailed. She also noted that original Katutura houses were
subject to 99-year leases, but that their occupants had been able to purchase
[ 103 ][ 102 ]
outright ownership of the land and the dwelling(s) on it for a certain amount
before Independence in 1990.
Mr Tenadu stated that such cases had more to do with poverty and a lack of
education, rather than shortcomings in the system itself.
Mr Bayer cautioned that tenure systems needed to recognise the situation
on the ground. He mentioned how group rights that were supposed to
protect the land rights of a group in fact empowered individuals, creating
uneven land rights within the group. For example, he explained how
programmes like the MHDP could be reviewed not only to entail group
rights, but also sensitivity to the situation on the ground. He asked how
group rights worked in respect of the Flexible Land Tenure5 scheme or
sectional titles. Among the challenges in maintaining group rights, in his
view, was that they required resources and cooperation either in the form
of body corporates or voluntary organisations. He also raised the question
of how group rights beneficiaries could eventually graduate to individual
ownership if the situation required.
An unidentified participant stated that group rights, particularly in urban
areas, depended a lot on affordability and legislation. He explained that
local government in Namibia operated on a cost-recovery basis; however,
the professional costs involved in formalising land tenure, coupled with
legislation setting high standards, created an affordability problem for the
potential owner.
Mr Tenadu referred to work undertaken by the Global Land Tool Network,
where the concept of a continuum of land rights was established.6 He suggested
using this concept to reflect on where Namibia found itself.
An unidentified participant emphasised the need to produce local
definitions for Namibia in terms of what was meant by culturally acceptable,
affordable and social housing.
Mr Bayer encouraged seeing Namibias informal settlements as not
completely unregistered. For example, he noted some informal settlements
had numbered structures and there was some form of registry of plots in the
settled area.
An unidentified participant from the City of Windhoek cautioned that
unlawful land occupations could also become politicised, and that relocation
could become complicated if political support happened for electoral
purposes instead of as a human rights issue.
Mr Bayer pointed out the contradiction between the lack of serviced land
and the simultaneous resistance to densify land uses to make serviced land
more affordable.
5 See Christensen, A. (2017).
The Flexible Land Tenure System
in the context of the Sustainable
Development Goals (ILMI Working
Paper No. 6). Retrieved from
Integrated Land Management
Institute website: http://ilmi.
nust.na/sites/default/files/2017-
CHRISTENSEN-The-flexible-land-
tenure-system-in-the-context-of-
SDGs-WEB.pdf
6 See Barry, M., & Augustinus, C.
(2016). Framework for evaluating
continuum of land rights scenarios
(Report No. 4). Retrieved from UN
Habitat : Global Land Tool Network
website: https://gltn.net/home/
download/framework-for-evaluating-
continuum-of-land-rights-scenarios/
The same unidentified participant from the City of Windhoek
responded that the challenge lay with councillors who sometimes resisted the
notion of densification.
An unidentified participant pointed out that densification required a
revision of urban planning and an increase in public amenities.
Mr Bayer reminded participants that culture changed, illustrating his point
by describing how a young university graduate might not necessarily be
interested in a freestanding house but might prefer a flat in an apartment
building. He suggested that, as an alternative to defining culture and catering
for that, envisioning flexible options in a changing environment would be
more strategic.
[ 105 ][ 104 ]
1 http://ninamaritzarchitects.com.
SESSION 8
Design, Construction
and Sustainable Spatial
Processes
Nina Maritz
Principal, Nina Maritz Architects
Nina Maritz is the principal and founder of Nina Maritz Architects in
Windhoek, Namibia. A graduate of the University of Cape Town School of
Architecture in 1991, she established her firm seven years later with a focus
on environmental sustainability and community projects. A member of the
Namibia Institute of Architects, Ms Maritz has authored numerous papers
on energy efficiency and sustainability within developing countries and
is a frequent lecturer on sustainable architecture. Using an approach that is
deferential to both the setting and its people, Ninas work draws not only from
her familiarity with environmental and social factors, but also from an ability
to delve into the detailed particulars of each place by simultaneously being
both vernacular scholar and environmental designer. Utilising an honest
expression of materials and structure, her firms growing portfolio elicits a
sensitive approach to place and climate, rooted in a deep appreciation of
Namibias unique history, culture and ecology.1
The session was moderated by Phillip Lühl, Lecturer, Department of
Architecture and Spatial Planning, NUST.
Editorial note: The speaker structured her session into several sections and proposed
having a discussion after each section. All images were sourced from the speaker unless
otherwise referenced, and all images were taken by the speaker unless otherwise noted.
[ 107 ][ 106 ]
Introduction
When people hear the word sustainable they immediately think of green
housing, of alternative materials, clay and then recycled materials, but we are
not going to talk only about that today. The topic that we are addressing here
touches on all the other aspects of design, so there might be some repetition of
what has been said before during this Forum. The purpose of this discussion
is to look at creative suggestions. We are not here to judge ideas to be totally
useless; instead, we could assess whether something is less appropriate or
more appropriate.
Under each topic I am going to talk about what prevails in Namibia, what
some of the approaches in other parts of the world are, and then introduce
some ideas to start the conversation. The topics will be Housing typologies,
Construction and delivery, Sustainable housing, and Urban living as housing
is about living in an urban situation.
Let us start with some information: we are experiencing significant growth in
urban areas of Namibia. In terms of housing demand: 52% of the population
have monthly incomes of less than N$1 500 with an estimated backlog of
45 000 housing units; 35% have incomes between N$1 500 and 4 600, with
a backlog of 30,000 units; 7,2% have incomes between N$4 600 and 10 500,
with a backlog of 4 000 units; and 5.7% have incomes of more than N$10 500
per month, with an estimated backlog of 700 units.
The existing housing stock includes: 33% detached housing, 5% semi-detached
housing, 4% apartments, 27% informal housing, and 31% traditional housing,
which gives you an idea of the spread of current typologies.
Image 8-1: Housing typologies in Namibia2
3 See footnote 2
2 Source: Graft. (2016). Architecture
Activism. Birkhauser.
Part 1 Housing Typologies
I want to talk about typologies first, about the form of the housing. This study
shown on the slide was done by Graft Architects for their housing proposal
(see Image 8-1). It compares the building cost and selling price of detached
houses and villas; semi-detached and row houses; small and large apartments;
and mid- and high-rise apartments, with green indicating the unserviced
market (Image 8-2).
In terms of sustainability, the building form and orientation can have a big
impact on the performance of the building in terms of its green ratings,
the height to width ratio, keeping the heat in during winter and out during
summer, the zoning implications, etc. I want to stress that we are talking
about flexibility here: we are not saying one particular typology is the best
performer and therefore we should only go for this one. What we are saying
is that we look at the impact that the typology can have on the green aspects
of a building.
If we look at the aspect of heat loss, the detached house performs much worse
than the apartment building. You might think that heat loss is more relevant
for European conditions, but in Namibia it can have a big impact when people
put their electrical heaters on in winter.
This means that, when we speak about how much money we need to provide
for housing, there is one important factor that does not require that much
money planning and design. It is what you do on paper before you start
construction that is critical in terms of addressing the costs and impact on the
building performance.
Image 8-2: Building cost vs Selling price for various typologies in Namibia3
[ 109 ][ 108 ]
In Namibia, we have our traditional or vernacular houses which provide a lot
of housing and need to be taken into account. We should stop stigmatising
vernacular as bad because, in the rural areas, it can actually be very good to
have a vernacular house.
We also have detached houses or villas. The movie Edward Scissorhands
depicts an ideal, American middle-class suburban house. The husband goes
away in his car in the daytime and comes back in the evening, and the wife
stays at home and curls her hair. That is the kind of dream that we seem to be
pushing in terms of our housing typologies. We must decide if that is the right
thing.
Image 8-3: Traditional house, Bloupoort, north-western Namibia
Image 8-4: Idealised suburban dream living as depicted in Edward Scissorhands4
5 Source: Google Earth.
4 Burton, Tim [Director]; Di Novi,
Denise & Burton, Tim [Producers].
1990. Edward Scissorhands. USA.
105 minutes.
Image 8-5: Upmarket granny flats in larger properties in Windhoek, Namibia 5
Image 8-6. Typical NHE houses.
We have a lot of granny flats in Windhoek, which is a back room with a toilet.
And we charge students a hell of a fortune to live there. If we could double up
on our granny flats, maybe rents could come down and a lot more students
would have a lot more places to stay. But we are restricted by our current
regulations on second dwellings in this city.
Then there is our typical NHE house, which was discussed at length in the
workshop before lunchtime, and our sectional title townhouses in their gated
communities, which we have all over Kleine Kuppe especially.
[ 111 ][ 110 ]
Image 8-7. Kleine Kuppe townhouses, Windhoek, Namibia
Image 8-8. Freedom Plaza
apartment building in
Windhoek, Namibia.6
Image 8-9. An informal structure in
Namibia.
We also have new urban apartments that are going up. I dont know if anybody
has looked at the rental and selling prices, but they seem to be expensive
(Image 8-8).
And then let us not forget shacks! (Image 8-9) We keep on saying we do not
want shacks, that we want to get away from informal settlements. We need
to face it: people are going to live in shacks and informal settlements for
the foreseeable future, so we need to look at what we can do to improve the
conditions of living in informal settlements. We cannot ignore them because
we think they are not good enough.
All of these typologies have one major problem for me, and that is not to do
with the typology itself. The problem is that we cluster them all together with
very few amenities. At most there might be a school, a clinic and/or a corner
shop. In the informal settlements people really know much better because,
there, they open businesses, start their own crèches, you can get your hair cut,
and so on. And why do we have so few options? Seven options might look like
7 See: http://urbanforum.nust.
na/?q=node/46
6 Photograph by the editors.
a lot, but they are not really all options if you are very poor. Number two to six
in Table 1 below are really out of reach for the poor.
Now let me show you some other typologies. Something that is quite old-
fashioned and has come a long way, but it is still used in many countries such
as New Zealand, Australia and India, is the idea of the boarding house. This is
a row of rooms with a shared bathroom and a landlady who runs the kitchen
so that residents eat meals together and go off on their own ways. This is for
single people and students or professionals that are just starting out. It could
be working class, but it could also be any other kind of class.
Then there are many ideas about compact living. Fabio Todeschini,7 at the
Urban Forum 2015 masterclass two years ago, said, We all [would] like to
have a farm. Were all farmers at heart. We also want the inside of our houses to
be as big as farms. But there are all sorts of things that one can do, like putting
your bed on top of your bathroom, which saves a lot of space. Many of the
photographs I show here are very hipster, very high tech, very expensive; but
there are a lot of people in informal settlements that are actually doing this
kind of thing just in a simpler way.
Here is an interesting phenomenon I saw in China. It is called a tulou. It is
an enormous, often circular, rammed earth building with rooms on the
perimeter. Often, one big clan of up to 800 people who built the structure
communally that lives there. Each family has their own vertical unit. You
have your storerooms, your bedrooms, your living room [and] your kitchen
(sometimes combined with your living room). Sometimes they have internal,
private staircases [and] sometimes they have communal staircases. The
buildings in the centre are communal and include the temple.
Image 8-10. Communal housing in traditional rammed earth Tulou, Fujian,
China
[ 113 ][ 112 ]
Image 8-11. Co-housing complex with central communal area between private
dwelling units 8
Image 8-12. LC710 Housing project in Mexico City, by Héctor Barroso. 9
Then there is a thing called co-housing. It started in Scandinavia in the
1960s. People have their own dwelling unit, which has almost everything
that a standard house has. Perhaps their kitchen/dining/living area is
smaller because they also have a communal kitchen and living area.
Residents take turns to do the cooking in teams. They maybe also have
communal vegetable gardens. They coordinate day care. They have old
people and young people mixed with families so that they have old people
available during the day to look after the kids. It is usually quite compact
and very cost-effective.
Co-housing comes in different styles, so it has nothing to do with the
typology or the aesthetic appearance but more with how the complex is
organised.
8 The image belongs to the Livewell
Co-Housing, in Canada. However, the
organisation has now disbanded.
9 Images courtesy of photographer
Rafael Gamo. https://rafaelgamo.
com/
Then there is courtyard housing. This (Image 8-12) is an example from the
Mexico which is interesting, because it is quite narrow. The idea is that the
house is organised around courtyards.
Then there are four-storey walk-ups, [so-called] because you do not need a
lift. This is the kind of low-income housing that was built in the Cape Flats for
a long time. But the example I am showing here is working class housing that
was built in the late 18th Century in Gothenburg, Sweden, and it consisted of a
room and a tiny kitchen per family. The sanitary facilities were in an outhouse
downstairs and there was a school in the complex.
I am not suggesting that this is how we should live now, but it is worthwhile
thinking that this typology is still being used 200 years later. Nowadays,
people are combining two units: buying a second one and then converting
the first one into a bedroom. The other one [turns] into the living area, the
one little kitchenette into a bathroom, and so on. These were originally set to
be demolished in the 1960s in the bright age of modernism, but those which
survived provide a lot of desirable housing today.
Here is another example of narrow row housing, also with a courtyard. Narrow
row housing is something that is quite prevalent in many parts of the world
because you really save on services. Instead of having a property that is 30 m
wide with 30 m of electricity, water [and] sewerage pipes, you have row houses
that are 5 m wide so you can service six erven instead of one (Image 8-14).
Image 8-13. 18th-Century working class housing, now gentrified; Gothenburg,
Sweden.
[ 115 ][ 114 ]
The movement called the Missing Middle Housing aims to bridge the gap
between single detached homes and mid-rise apartments.11 They argue that
people want homes that make them think of a neighbourhood. People do not
[necessarily] want to live in high-rises. The urban apartments work for some,
but others want something else. So, they suggest typologies like the bungalow
court with a number of houses on one property;12 a multiplex with a single
building which houses four to six units; [or] a cottage co-op that is similar to
the bungalow court or maybe a little larger. They suggest a variety of options
the basic idea being that these are smaller typologies that share the land costs,
and they use simple construction technologies that any bakkie-builder13 can
use.
Very importantly, they propose less space for parking. This allows increased
density and, therefore, encourages businesses due to the increased buying
power. Where there is a mix of businesses, people can walk and do not need
that many cars and parking. Their proposed average density is 100 units
per ha. They also talk about live/work units and here is Winfried Holzes
shop-house concept14 as an example [of ] a very viable solution proposed for
Windhoek (Image 8-15).
Image 8-14. Narrow Row House, Observatory, Cape Town, South Africa 10
15 Image courtesy of Winfried
Holze.
16 According to the latest census, the
average household size is composed
of 4.4 members. See: NSA. (2011).
2011 Population and Housing Census
Main Report. Windhoek: Namibian
Statistics Agency, p.63
17 This refers to the Dolam
Childrens Home in Katutura,
Windhoek. See: New Era, 7
February 2008. Old Mutual helps
out orphanage. Available at https://
www.newera.com.na/2008/02/07/
old-mutual-helps-out-orphanage/,
last accessed 13 August 2019.
10 Photograph by the editors.
11 See https://
missingmiddlehousing.com/about,
last accessed 12 August 2019.
12 In the Namibian context this
would be referred to as sectional title
and/or townhouse.
13 Colloquial term denoting small-
scale building contractors, who
usually operate from a light motor
truck referred to locally as a bakkie, a
term borrowed from Afrikaans
14 This project formed part of the
exhibition on experimental housing
projects during the 2017 Urban
Forum.
I want to throw one or two challenges at you: what is a minimum dwelling? In
order to decide what a minimum dwelling is, I suppose we should discuss who
lives in one. We tend to assume that there is a mom and dad [and] two-and-
a-quarter children, according to the statistics.16 But if you are Rosa Namises,17
you have three women and 18 children because she has turned her three-
bedroom house into an orphanage.
Or you might have a co-housing setup where you have people of different
ages. So, when we think of [a] minimum dwelling, I think we must realise that
it has to be flexible: it should not be cast in stone. [But] I am not saying that
you build the minimum dwelling as a core house and then you expand on
that particular minimum dwelling. Maybe you start the way I did: in a little
garden-flat room with a little kitchenette and a bathroom. Then I moved to
another place as I expanded my means.
What does a minimum dwelling need? It needs sleeping space, it needs eating
space, food preparation space, it needs space for washing, and it needs space
for family or socialising. Does it really need a separate living room?
What one has to think about, firstly, is levels of privacy between public and
private which do not have to be static but can be flexible. Secondly, it is about
a spatial separation between activities, meaning you sleep in one room and
you talk in another. Or you can have time separation like the Japanese: they
roll up their beds in the day, put them in a cupboard, and then the sleeping
space becomes a living space. At night they roll out the beds and it becomes a
sleeping space again. These are more multi-functional spaces, where you can
actually have everything in a single space which you use differently, according
to what your needs are at a specific time.
Image 8-15. Model of shop-house proposal for Windhoek, Namibia15
[ 117 ][ 116 ]
Discussion on Part 1 Housing Typologies
Jeremiah Ntinda from the NHE stated that he regarded it as characteristic
of the local context to want to extend ones house.
Ms Maritz agreed, but said that there were different ways to do so, as [a house]
could be extended horizontally but also vertically.
Mr Ntinda related his experience in trying to grow his property upward: it
was not possible in the house he lived in because of the way it had been built.
He moved to a different place with more land. He said he personally preferred
to have a large plot and grow within it, rather than live in a small house and
then move to a larger house.
Ms Maritz questioned this reasoning by asking what would happen if one did
not have the money to buy a large plot in the first place.
Phillip Lühl of NUST agreed that the way that houses were built locally
made expansion difficult.
Winfried Holze, a Namibian urban designer, noted a tendency to place
the house in the middle of a plot of land, making expansion more difficult
than if it were placed towards one side of the land.
Heinrich Schroeder, owner of Kavango Brick Block, opined that, in
urban areas, expansion should go upwards, while in rural areas it should go
sideways.
Gabriel Marín Castro, the Minister of Urban and Rural
Developments Special Advisor on Mass Housing, stated that families
in Namibia were changing as values changed. As an example, he referred
to the first houses he had built for teachers in northern Namibia in 1991.
He had designed the houses with a living room, but people in the end
rather used outside spaces for socialising. However, when television
started to become increasingly widespread, the room was used more and
more. He also noted that, in South America or Asia, a small house of 42 m2
was considered acceptable. Emergency housing for catastrophes such as
earthquakes or hurricanes was 18 m², i.e. two rooms measuring 3 m x 3 m.
He noted a tendency in Namibia to regard the situation of the Namibian
population as special, while with an increasingly globalised world, an
urban mentality and a notion of being a member of the global community
needed to be developed.
Ms Maritz asked how one could develop such an urban mentality.
Mr Castro replied that it could not be achieved simply by talking to people
about it: one needed to experience urbanity in order to understand it.
Ms Maritz also pointed out that the concept of Namibias exceptionality was
often used to reinforce prejudices.
Mr Lühl added that differences among people stemmed from their
demographic group, age group, socio-economic group, etc. He noted that
projecting ones own personal preference or experience onto others might
not resolve their problems. He agreed in broadening the scope of options.
Catharina Nord, a Swedish researcher, related her experience from
working in various contexts. She said she had stopped asking whether
respondents living conditions were good or not as people conformed to their
situations and it became difficult to imagine how things might be different.
Without exposure to other options, people may not have the opportunity to
consider other ways of doing things.
Martin Namupala, an architecture student, felt that research was required
to understand what worked in different contexts, and even in different types of
settlements. He argued that housing should respond to its context.
Uazuva Kaumbi from the NHE stressed that Namibians should start
imagining what they wanted instead of sticking to what was being done
elsewhere. He said there had to come a point where one could agree on a
practical and realistic solution after different options had been tested.
Ms Maritz asked Mr Kaumbi what would happen if the NHE offered more
than one option. She also felt that the conversation was not about designing
houses for individual households, but housing provision for lower-income
groups on a larger scale.
An unidentified participant stated that there were examples of denser
housing typologies in Namibia. For instance, he said he had grown up in a
house with a 5-m front facade, and [Windhoeks] Okuryangava Extension
2 plots measured 10 m x 20 m, i.e. 200 m². He mentioned row houses in
Khomasdal as another example.
Part 2 Construction and Delivery
Construction and delivery is more about how houses are getting built than
actual construction technology. The first delivery method that everyone
thinks about is owner-building. That is the dream: you have a nuclear family,
and you build your urban villa to house it. Then we have private developers
who build multiple units or townhouses and sell them off. That is probably
the most prevalent modality in Namibia. Next we have the MHDP/NHE-type
Government housing interventions, and then the SDFN and Build Together
initiatives.
[ 119 ][ 118 ]
Something which people often leave out of the equation is the amount of
housing Government builds for its staff. We do not really know how many
people are housed in hostels and staff housing for teachers and nurses.
An interesting quote I came across in a UN-Habitat publication18 about
adequate housing says that there is no way that governments can provide houses
for everyone. They argue that public resources are better spent in improving
the existing stock of affordable housing, no matter how substandard. This
means including shacks and implementing a range of innovative and flexible
approaches to creating new stock.19
The first key word is a range of approaches not just one way. They must
be innovative, they must experiment, and they must be flexible. These
are three very important criteria if we think about how we approach the
housing problem. In terms of upgrading, UN-Habitat says you can do on-
site upgrading (taking the existing and improving on that); you can resettle
people on suitable land; you can make government lead a new public housing
programme (which is what we are doing with the MHDP); you can do sites
and services; and you can do incremental land development (which we do not
yet do on a large scale in Namibia).
There are also city-wide housing strategies. These really interest me because,
if you think a little more laterally, you can come up with options that can
actually provide a lot of housing stock not just at the low-income level, but
right throughout the various income groups. We can forget about the wealthy
because they sort themselves out. But if we can provide a lot of housing stock
for the no-income, low-income and lower-middle-income groups, it will
make housing less expensive.
Now the question is this: What other methods to provide housing are there?
Co-ops are ways in which people get together to build something. Another
modality is a non-profit organisation working with the community to provide
housing. An example is the Clay House Project, which has built quite a lot of
houses in Namibia, mainly in Otjiwarongo.
Image 8-16. Aerial image of Windhoek Central 20
21 Image courtesy of Estudio Palma,
Chile. http://estudiopalma.cl/
22 The Proyecto experimental de
Vivienda (Experimental Housing
Project) was launched to challenge
architects to design a strategy for
mass housing as an alternative to the
massive informal settlements that
were dramatically taking place in
Lima during that period; see https://
www.transfer-arch.com/reference/
previ-lima-1969/, last accessed 12
August 2019.
18 OHCHR/Office of the United
Nations High Commissioner for
Human Rights. 2009. The right to
adequate housing. Fact Sheet No.
21. Geneva: OHCHR. Available at
http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/
Publications/FS21_rev_1_Housing_
en.pdf, last accessed 14 August 2019.
19 (ibid.).
20 Source: Google Earth.
Then there is something I want to call infill housing for now. If you look at this
aerial image of Windhoek central (Image 8-16), you can see that there is a lot of
open space, including a huge amount of land that goes into buffer zones (so that
we can drive at 120 km/hour around a curve!). This did not exist in old cities
because the transport was slow and did not require such large safety barriers.
If we start questioning how we plan, we could make a lot more land available.
We can also consider incremental building, like the work of Alejandro
Aravena of Elemental in Chile. He designs half-finished housing units, and
residents fill them in as they get money (Image 8-17).
Incremental architecture is not a new thing. There was a housing competition
in the 1960s called PREVI,22 in Lima, Peru, and they did a lot of housing very
successfully.
I must mention incentives for example, the free residential bulk that you
have in certain areas of Windhoek. If you build an office building, you can
get a certain amount of free bulk as long as it is residential. So, you can put
four apartments on top [of an office building,] as long as you provide enough
parking. This is a good incentive, and you can earn some money from it.
Then there are legislative instruments. For example, in California, it is legislated
that 25% of any new housing stock must be social housing. What we have here
in Windhoek is that you pay a betterment fee for rezoning, which goes to the
municipality. What if, instead of a betterment fee, there was legislation that
you had to provide social housing equivalent to the value of the betterment
fee?
Then we have upgrading, such as this project in Cape Town by an organisation
called Urban ThinkTank. They took this little shack and they improved it.
They built a new frame, covered it with the same kind of sheeting and added
another floor on top.
This other example shows as an interesting project in Mozambique run by a
European university (Image 8-18). Maputo is all single-storey. So they started
with the first little shack, which they insulated; and then the second one, where
they took an existing concrete block house and added another floor; and then
they did the third one, which is three storeys.
Image 8-17. Incremental housing, Chile 21
[ 121 ][ 120 ]
Image 8-18. Casas Melhoradas project in Maputo, Mozambique.23
Again, I ask: why do we have so few typologies in Namibia? Is it, like people
say, that Namibians want this or they want that? Is it market demand and
expectations? Is it that the town planning regulations and the building
regulations do not allow for different typologies? It could also be political
grandstanding where, before elections, announcements are made, like No
more people in shacks! Everybody must have a brick house! Maybe it could
be that our thinking is just not creative enough. Or do you think there are
other reasons?
24 Agrément South Africa is an
independent organisation that
evaluates the fitness for purpose
of non-standardised building and
construction products and systems
by applying performance-based
criteria in its assessment procedure
(http://www.agrement.co.za/).
25 The NHBRC regulates the
home building industry in South
Africa. It was established in 1998 in
accordance with the provisions of
the Housing Consumers Protection
Measures Act, 1998 (No. 95 of
1988), with the mandate to protect
the interests of housing consumers
and to ensure that builders comply
with the prescribed building
industry standards as contained in
the Home Building Manual. See:
NHBRC/National Home Builders
Registration Council. 2014. Home
Building Manual. Available at http://
www.nhbrc.org.za/, last accessed 10
August 2019.
23 Photographs courtesy of Johan
Mottelson. http://casasmelhoradas.
com/
Discussion on Part 2 Construction and Delivery
Mr Schroeder stated that every Namibian was entitled to live in a brick house.
Ms Maritz argued that entitlement did not imply affordability.
Rymoth Mbeha, a Planning student, noted that housing prices did not
reflect the various needs, such as that of young graduates.
Mr Ntinda mentioned that the financial sector was also an impediment when
it came to the use of alternative materials.
Phillip Lühl of NUST stated that, since the MHDP Blueprint was being
reviewed, it was the responsibility of all the stakeholders, including financial
institutions, to review their position.
Ms Maritz asked how whether it was better to engage financial institutions
through proposals or by inviting them to the discussion table.
Mr Kaumbi responded that the NHE had tried alternative technologies
before. He explained that they had invited private entrepreneurs using
different technologies to build different housing types. After that, the NHE
had invited financial institutions to see the structures. While the institutions
did not object to any of the structures, they said they needed to see if the
houses remained robust over time because a mortgage might last for 20 years
or more. In their view, if the material deteriorated in five years, then it served
no purpose. Mr Kaumbi mentioned that South Africa had independent
quality assurance providers that tested materials.24 They also had a National
Home Builders Registration Council that did independent quality audits.25
However, in Namibia, there is none of that.
Ms Maritz responded that this was a clear example of something that the
government could do.
An unidentified participant noted that, when there was a big gap between
the haves and the have-nots, it can be expected that the have-nots want what
the haves have. He mentioned that the objective of independence was to have
ownership. The focus of the discussion, therefore, was not on ownership but
on remaining dependent on authorities. He proposed surveying informal
settlements and issuing title deeds for inhabited plots with a clause prohibiting
the sale of such plots for five to ten years. He also criticised that regulations in
Namibia came from South Africa and that, even if one had a large plot of land,
a regulation could prevent one from densifying it.
Mr Lühl agreed that the upgrading of informal settlements was indeed
a necessity and that one of the challenges was the minimum plot size of
300 m².
[ 123 ][ 122 ]
Ms Maritz remarked that, in the context of Namibia, many did not have
exposure to alternatives, so the alternatives needed to be demonstrated locally.
She proposed design competitions to solicit innovative approaches. She stated
that research should not only be on paper, but that pilot projects could be
developed to study how inhabitants responded to them. She also mentioned
having seen a person submitting building alterations to create ten units in a
single-family house simply by making small changes and labelling spaces as
Entertainment area or Workshop. She cautioned that she was recounting
the example not to encourage breaking the law, but to encourage innovation
through a more creative interpretation of current regulations.
Part 3 Sustainable Housing
I want to talk about what sustainable means. To sustain in the dictionary
means to strengthen or to support physically or mentally; sustainable
means to be able to be maintained at a certain rate or level. If you think
about housing, whatever solution we propose is something that must be able
to continue to deliver at a certain rate. It must not be something that you do
once. It is not about the housing: it is about what we are trying to support or
strengthen through the housing our society and our people. So, when we
talk about sustainable housing, we are nurturing society, which is something
that we must not forget.
There are four very important factors. Housing must
" Be feasible: There is no point having fancy dreams about designs if they
cannot be delivered, built and or afforded)
" Provide adequate shelter for a decent standard of living: It does not have
to be a high standard of living, but it must be adequate
" Be durable: A lot of solutions nowadays last five or ten years and then
you have to rebuild, and
" Be environmentally positive.
If you look at the resources that are needed for housing, we need land, roads,
energy, water, materials but we also need labour and finance. Housing also
has to be properly designed: if it is not, no matter what else you throw at it, it is
going to be a failure. The design needs to be based on research.
We must think of all these resources that go into housing. If we reduce these
resources, if we need less energy, fewer materials, less labour, less skilled labour
because skilled labour is expensive and we need less transport, housing
becomes more sustainable.
What we also have to think about is not just what we use to produce the
housing, but what people require to maintain or sustain it. To put it quite
26 Examples of similar terminology
are: alternative, traditional materials;
totally natural, low/zero emissions;
back to nature, with roots in the
green movement; small-scale.
27 Examples of these are: latest
technologies for services, super-
insulation, solar photovoltaics,
waste water recycling, building
automation systems, etc.; energy-
efficient construction, e.g. the Passive
House concept; the Living Building
Challenge for sustainability in the
built environment; large-scale and
expensive.
28 Mixture of low-tech and high-
tech.
simply, it has to be energy-, water- and resource-efficient, and it must address
on-site as well as off-site impacts on the environment. When I talk about the
environment, I mean people as well. So, an impact on the people might be that
they can actually afford that bond or that they can afford the transport from
their house to their place of work.
It is often thought that the technology, the material of the walls, is the solution.
We have conventional materials, found natural materials, recycled materials,
prefabricated materials and hybrids of these. Most housing is a bit of a hybrid.
I once did this analysis of conventional concrete and brick versus low-tech
alternatives versus prefabrication to find out which one was the best, but
there was no such thing as the best: each one worked better under different
circumstances. For some people, a shack might be the best solution because
they are only in the place for six months, or they only have a couple of hundred
bucks to pay for a few corrugated iron sheets, some lumber and a couple of
nails to put it together. As soon as you start getting too narrow-minded about
your construction methods and materials, then you are limiting your options.
You start with low-tech local,26 self-sufficient systems. High-tech autonomous
systems27 are is not necessarily appropriate in Namibia, unless you go for
hybrids28 such as putting solar water heaters on shacks. Offsetting is also
something that has not been done in Namibia, such as when we build a big
housing scheme, we can actually plant a lot of trees to offset the carbon we
released during construction.
It is not only about being ecologically sound but also about identity. Passive
design in other words, the way you design your building to respond to the
climate and to its environment is the first step, because that does not require
money. You first do a good design and then you add technology. The design
must be frugal: you use the minimum means to get the maximum effect. It
must be flexible. Passive design in the Namibian context, I think, must be low-
tech. I know a lot of people do not agree with me: that is something that we can
discuss, and I must accept that we already use a fair number of high-tech items
in our construction. Our door handles, for example, are all made in factories;
they are not low-tech anymore, they are not handmade.
And then we need to look at urban and neighbourhood scale. There is no point
in in designing the perfect house if it is not part of a proper neighbourhood.
How are you using the land? How dense is it? In other words, how efficient is
the way in which we use the land? Is there accessibility and do people have a
choice in transport? If the only land that is provided for affordable housing
is the furthest away from the city, we are actually putting those people into a
transport-cost trap: they will be spending all their money on travelling back
and forth, and not spending money on their house.
Another important aspect is green space. Developers often bulldoze the site
flat, put in the services and then construct the houses. There is not a single
[ 125 ][ 124 ]
tree left. Research in the USA on the psychological impact of greenery on
people has shown that people who live in neighbourhoods with trees have a
much lower crime rate than people who live in treeless neighbourhoods.29 In
Namibia, we usually start with sites that have trees and then we take them
out.
Image 8-19. The relationship between urban density and household
energy needs30 (Note: BTU = British Thermal Units)
According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) energy usage
in the household and the energy used to build the house is not as significant
as the energy used in transport.31 So, if we want to start mitigating the
greenhouse effect, if we want to start reducing global warming, we really need
to reconsider how we get from A to B. That is where urban planning and the
design of housing projects start becoming really important. What they the US
EIA show is that you can save up to 64% by managing your home and your car
more energy-efficiently: up to 30% if it is just the home; up to 50% if the home
is in a transit-friendly location. About 50% of a persons carbon footprint is
energy spent on transport.32
We have to think about the long-term financial impacts I have already spoken
about. People should not get into a debt trap because of bond repayments or
transport costs. We need to consider time. How early do people in Havana
have to get up to get to Klein Windhoek to work? They cannot say, There is
a 07:00 bus, so I will get to work at 08:00, because the 07:00 bus might not
come. They get up at 04:00 or 05:00 and, when they are finished, they get home
at 19:00. That time is not spent with their children, which means that [their
children] can join street gangs or that they dont do their homework. [The time
used for transport] could also be used to earn another income. It is a further
financial burden that you are placing on people by taking their time.
33 Since passed as the Urban and
Regional Planning Act, 2018 (No. 5
of 2018).
29 Jonathan Rose Companies. 2011.
Location efficiency and housing
type: Boiling it down to BTUs. New
York, NY: Jonathan Rose Companies.
Available at https://www.epa.gov/
sites/production/files/2014-03/
documents/location_efficiency_btu.
pdf, last accessed 13 August 2019.
30 See footnote 29
31 According to the US Energy
Information Administration,
domestic residential energy
consumption in the USA amounts
to 20% of the national total, whereas
transport accounts for 29% (https://
www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.
php?page=us_energy_use, last
accessed 13 August 2019).
32 (ibid.)
We need to think about space [as well]: space to do things, space to meet your
friends, space to meet your family. If we only put in little rows of houses and
there are no social or communal amenities, we are actually depriving people:
we are depriving them of community, the ability to form a community around
a certain node.
Nature has certain functions which impact in the long term that people often
overlook. Firstly, it cools us down from the heat. If we destroy the vegetation and we
build a lot of little brick or concrete houses, you create what is called the Urban Heat
Island Effect, which pushes temperatures in the city up by as much as 5% to 6%.
[Secondly,] if we bulldoze everything and do not leave some trees, we get
erosion problems when it rains. The stormwater blocks up all the drainage and
we get major ecological problems. This means we need to incorporate nature
in such a way that it can perform those functions for us efficiently. Trees clean
the air! If we have a lot of greenery it helps to filter the air, reducing the dust so
people have fewer respiratory problems. In Windhoek, the mica in soil is one
of the biggest causes of respiratory problems.
Before we go to urban city life, I would like us to talk about sustainability,
about what people consider sustainable housing to be.
Discussion on Part 3 Sustainable Housing
Mr Ntinda said he agreed in having food or church options near ones house,
but the place of employment should be ones choice.
Ms Maritz agreed, saying her argument was indeed about choice: to be
able to have transport options i.e. not only by car, but also efficient public
transport as well as the choice of being able to work near ones house if that
was desirable. However, due to zoning, it was more often the case that one had
to commute considerable distances to work.
Mr Ntinda replied that housing providers had no control over that.
Tshukoe Garoes, Director of the Habitat Research and Development
Centre, informed the participants that there was a proposal for a quality
assessment certification process with the Government at the moment. They
were also engaging the Namibian Standards Institution to find how they could
work together in this respect. Ms Garoes added that the Urban and Regional
Planning Bill33 was under way as well, which, in principle, should address some
of the outdated planning regulations. She had three questions: (1) whether it
had been proved that conventional methods were not sustainable; (2) whether
there was currently alternative and affordable materials in Namibia; and (3)
whether, to promote these, one needed to relax regulations, or whether it was
possible for such materials to meet current standards.
[ 127 ][ 126 ]
Ms Maritz clarified that conventional materials were not necessarily less
sustainable than their alternatives, but that it depended on what was being
built, who was building it (e.g. the end user, a developer, government), where
it was being built, etc. All these factors impacted on the choice of materials.
The definition of material also mattered, she said. In this regard she mentioned
the Kavango Brick Block, which was considered alternative in Namibia, but
since it employed cement, it could not be considered alternative in the broader
sense. She mentioned sand as a widely available material in Namibia, and how
building with sand bags could be something that could be explored further.
She acknowledged that sand bags could be used structurally or for walls,
but that those two elements were not the only ones making up a house: one
still needed taps, door handles, fittings, etc., so using sand bags was not the
solution to lower costs. She also noted that standards for walls specified they
had to resist at least 7 MPa of pressure, while the actual load of a single-storey
residential buildings foundations in Namibia was no more than 1 MPa. She
gave the Habitat Research and Development Centre as an example, explaining
that they had used Hydraform interlocking bricks that were able to resist 4
MPa, and they were still performing well after almost 15 years. She concluded
that standards ought to be revisited, as they may have not been adequate or
appropriate in the first place.
Mr Schroeder felt that materials should be tested locally, and that South
African standards should not necessarily be welcomed uncritically into
Namibia. He also pointed at the variety of standards that already existed in
Namibia, such as the standards that the banks and the NHE used. He noted
that standards varied even within the same organisation; in this regard he
mentioned the NHE.
An unidentified participant stressed that alternative transport should be
considered. Bicycles, in his view, were the answer. He stated that a N$2,000
bike represented 100 days of paying N$20 for a taxi every day. He also noted
how increasingly bad traffic was in Windhoek and that road safety was a deep
concern.
An employee at Kerry McNamara Architects mentioned that there
could be a regulation compelling developers of industrial areas to place
bulk infrastructure in Greenfields,34 so that the area could subsequently be
developed, and the others could simply tap into it.
Ms Maritz noted that this was already taking place with electricity, as the first
development in a Greenfield site needed to pay for the transformer.
Mr Schroeder suggested the potential of simply redeveloping the central
parts of Katutura instead of looking at expansion.
Ms Maritz agreed that there were ample possibilities within the existing
boundaries.
35 See Session 6 herein.
36 UN-Habitat. 2011. Housing the
poor in African cities. Urban Africa:
Building with untapped potential,
Vol. 1. Nairobi: United Nations
Human Settlements Programme.
37 Kucha and Pukka are the two
types of housing erected in India.34 Greenfields refers to land not
previously built on.
Part 4 Urban Living
In this last section I am going to throw a lot of ideas at you which are not
necessarily sequential.
The UN definition of adequate housing35 includes
" Having security of tenure
" The availability of services, materials, facilities and infrastructure
" Being affordable
" Being habitable
" Being accessible
" Being well-located, and
" Being culturally appropriate.
Notice that they did not say anything about being pretty.
UN-Habitat defines a slum36 as a settlement that
" Lacks certain services
" Is dilapidated and poor-quality buildings that break building bylaws
" Is overcrowded which does not necessarily mean that it is a dense
development, it just means that it cannot handle the population that it
has
" Is unhealthy
" Is often located on hazardous or undevelopable land, which is insecure
and where people might be evicted easily
" Usually has high levels of poverty and social exclusion.
Again, still nothing about being cute or pretty.
We have a bit of an aesthetic prejudice in Namibia that I often see when we talk
about informal settlements, when we talk about incremental development,
and when we talk about settlement upgrading. I would like to discuss a
project from India, where incremental development evolves from Kuccha
(which means temporary, flimsy) to Pukka (which means the right thing,
the solid thing, the permanent thing).37 So, we can see what the different
stages of development look like. I am sure if I showed this slide to most of the
people at the Ministry of Urban and Rural Development and to people at the
municipality they would say, Oh, my God! We dont want that! But that is an
aesthetic prejudice because it does not look neat or pretty. If it does not have
the characteristics of a slum, and it provides those aspects relating to adequate
housing, I think we should be ready to accept it. It is very important that we do
not apply our preconceived ideas of what things look like aesthetically to the
performance of housing and urban settlement.
In Namibia, we have a high housing demand that is not being met by our
current housing models because they are too expensive, they are bad for
[ 129 ][ 128 ]
the environment, they are socially isolated, and we continue to create such
environments. We all know about this, so what is our solution? What should
housing provide? I think it is important that housing should provide at least
those three things: it should be healthy, there must be enough space for what
people want to do, and they have to have access economic opportunities,
environmental benefits and so on. All of these go without saying, but it is
important that we keep having this in the back of our minds.
We must not create the following: financial burdens; soil, air and water
pollution; social problems; urban sprawl; etc. So, what is our definition of a
house? It is a place to do all of those things: it is a place to sleep, eat, clean and
store things and it is a place for family. But it is not just that. It is also a place to
work and earn, a place to study and learn, a place to meet and grow, a place to
rest, a place to play, a place to create, a place to fly.
And this is where I want to ask the questions What is a house? and What is
a city? What do we expect the house to provide and what do we expect the
city to provide? Or are they actually so intertwined that the house and the city
should work together to provide all of those things?
So, when we are talking about having gardens, if people have a village green a
place where there is a garden or park where they can get together does it have
to be that I also have my private garden that I fence?
If people want to have a party with 50 guests, must they be able to fit it into their
living room? Or can they have their 50 guests party in their neighbourhood
square, which is next door?
Do you need a full home kitchen with all the drama? You know, in China, they
have hot water stations within a short walking distance of every little street; so,
you can go there, and you can get boiling water to cook your food. It is a service
that is provided for the community. In many places in Europe, people do not
use their kitchens anymore because they eat out all the time. They go and get
their coffee and their pastry on their way to work, they eat lunch somewhere
near their work and, in the evening, they get a takeaway.
Bathrooms: if people cannot afford to have their own shower, basin and flush
toilets, how about providing them with public bathhouses, so they can have
a proper hot shower in sanitary conditions, they can use a proper toilet, and
they can wash their face and brush their teeth in a proper basin without having
to go and squat behind the bush?
So, again: what is the house and what is the city? We have had a lot of discussion
this morning and yesterday about the informal. There is a lot of prejudice
against the informal in Namibia. This is an informal market in Italy (Image
8-20). They consider this as one on the high points of Italian civilisation to
have their informal vegetable market in the street.
38 See Session 3.
Image 8-20. Market in Italy.
Discussion on Part 4 Urban Living
An unidentified participant pointed out that, in Windhoek, there were not
so many playgrounds, so the options left were malls and Zoo Park.
Ms Maritz replied that, if one had to take a car to get to a playground, it was
not a neighbourhood playground.
The unidentified participant remarked that a community and a nation
were built through the provision of public spaces.
Ms Maritz referred to Richard Dobsons presentation38 on the work of Asiye
eTafuleni in Warwick Junction, noting how an area-based management and a
multidisciplinary team, working with local government, had yielded admirable
results. She favoured this approach instead of simply sending engineers to
service land, place roads, and only leave leftover funds for amenities.
Mr Lühl reminded the audience of the definition of adequate housing,
particularly the notion of progressive rights. He noted that it was not
necessary to check all the boxes on Day 1, but that prioritisation, identifying
immediate intervention needed, and tasking someone to drive it, were
required. He invoked the notion of progressive rights to counter the need to
meet set standards or to move away from the discussion of what was right and
what was wrong.
An unidentified participant asked whether large-scale titling programmes
had been undertaken and what the outcomes were.
Mr Lühl explained that land titling had been debated since the 1980s, but
that it is usually been promoted as a one-size-fits-all solution. However,
in places of high inequality, once titles were issued, those with money were
[ 131 ][ 130 ]
able to purchase the land from those with few means who were more prone
to sell in distress. This led to a new round of displacement and new informal
settlements, so he cautioned against considering titling as a magic wand. He
clarified that the aim should be to protect and enable those who had already
settled somewhere.
Ms Maritz asked what the audience thought was the best way to convince
politicians: field trips to familiarise them with other examples or developing
pilot projects.
Richard Dobson from Asiye eTafuleni noted that what had mainly been
discussed were strategies pre-empting what the end user was going to think.
However, he felt an education programme might be a more effective measure
in some respects. He warned against using examples from places that had been
urban for generations, as many were themselves trying to come to terms with
a variety of challenging transitions currently taking place. He also noted that
many of the contributors were making proposals reflecting their privilege gained
through reading, travelling, etc. However, the challenge was how to engage
meaningfully with the average person that had just moved to the city and was
trying to make sense of what was happening. He also expressed some scepticism
in building pilots: even if one developed only a few units, it would take years for
the space to develop into what was originally intended to demonstrate.
Mr Lühl agreed that an overt focus on the technicalities of housing itself could
make one forget about the social process. He cited as examples the sessions
with Sheela Patel and Rose Molokoane, which stressed the social process.
An unidentified participant mentioned how the River Walk Project39 could
open up possibilities for urban living in centrally located areas with abundant
green space.
Mr Lühl noted that the River Walk Project was an ongoing project with
potential for inner-city densification. However, he said, he had also become
aware of a lack of coordination between the project and other ongoing
initiatives, such as the Windhoek public transport plan.
Mr Ntinda stated that, whatever solution was discussed, it needed to consider
existing informal settlements, as they would still be in existence for the coming
decades, and a solution needed to entail benefits and improvements for them
as well.
Mr Namupala remarked that new interventions were invariably in the
periphery of cities and proposed bringing development to inner-city areas.
Ms Maritz responded that most of the inner-city land was already in private
ownership, but she suggested that an audit could be done to identify underused
space, and that the mechanism of eminent domain40 could be employed to
recover these.
39 The Namibian, 11 May 2018.
Kazapuas dream for Windhoek a
river walk. Available at https://
www.namibian.com.na/index.
php?page=archive-read&id=177270,
last accessed 14 August 2019.
40 A term used to indicate the
supreme power of the state over
all property under its jurisdiction;
including alienating the land from an
owner in instances of public interest.
An unidentified participant noted that, if this (invoking eminent domain
to expropriate land) was done, there should be a mechanism to encourage
owners to develop the land.
Ms Maritz stated that there was already a similar regulation for new land
purchases which compelled the new owners to develop the land in the
immediate years following the purchase to avoid an increased tax burden. She
added that open underdeveloped land owned by government could also be
utilised to develop housing.
[ 133 ][ 132 ]
1 http://www.manchester.ac.uk/
research/Diana.mitlin/ and http://
www.iied.org/users/diana-mitlin
SESSION 9
Housing Strategies
for Namibia
Prof. Diana Mitlin
Director, Global Development Institute, University of Manchester;
and Principal Researcher, Human Settlements, International
Institute for Environment and Development
Diana Mitlin completed her first degree at Manchester University with joint
Honours in Economics and Sociology. After working as a public sector Economist
with the Forestry Commission (19831986) and the Monopolies and Mergers
Commission (19861988), she completed an MSc in Economics at Birkbeck
College, University of London. Prof. Mitlin joined the International Institute for
Environment and Development in London in 1989 as part of a multi-disciplinary
team working within the Human Settlements Programme. Development has
remained the major focus in her work since that date with a particular interest
in issues related to towns and cities in the Global South. In 1996, she worked
part-time for the London School of Economics to set up a Masters programme
in NGO Management. Between 1999 and 2000, she worked with the Peoples
Dialogue on Land and Shelter in South Africa. From 2001, she worked part-
time at the Institute for Development Policy and Management in Manchester,
whilst continuing with a senior research post at the International Institute for
Environment and Development. She has also served as Director and Chair of the
UK charity Homeless International, as a trustee for Practical Action (formerly
the Intermediate Technology Development Group), and as a member of the
Programme and Policy Committee of WaterAid. At present she is a trustee for
the Urban Poor Fund in the Netherlands. Prof. Mitlin continues to work closely
with two networks of southern citizen networks and NGOs, namely Shack/Slum
Dwellers International and the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights. She has
worked on the case of Namibia for more than a decade, in partnership with the
Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia and the Namibia Housing Action Group. 1
The session was moderated by Phillip Lühl, Lecturer, Department of
Architecture and Spatial Planning, NUST
Editorial note: Since the panel discussion contributions entailed further elaboration
by the panellist, the discussion is included in full and not narrated as it was done in
the other sections. Images included in this section are those included in Prof. Mitlins
presentation.
Photograph by Taleni Iiyambo
[ 135 ][ 134 ]
There is an immense housing need in Namibia, and there are immense
opportunities. It is fantastic that this Forum has been convened to allow
for an open discussion about ideas, past experiences, and the directions
they offer for the future. Looking at experiences that I have been exposed
to through my work, particularly across sub-Saharan Africa and Asia,
there are five points that I would like to talk about.
Firstly, getting housing right is immensely beneficial to a country.
Secondly, I will make few comments on land. Thirdly, I will be
commenting on the importance of not relocating people; rather, the
emphasis should be on supporting informal settlement upgrading.
Fourth is the importance of attaining scale not getting caught up
in the perfection of the individual dwelling, and this requires being
comfortable with incrementalism. And finally, learning accessibly and
publicly.
Getting housing right will be immensely beneficial for Namibia
Why does getting housing right matter?
I think I am preaching to the converted, because the fact that you are
here is because you are interested in housing; you are interested in
Namibian towns and cities. But I think I should begin by emphasising
that, time and time again, we see the importance of belonging for both
individual and societal well-being. We have to recognise the importance
of people feeling and acting within the communities that can go beyond
their immediate family. Lots of research papers point out the importance
of community; the importance of strengthening disadvantaged groups
capacity to engage the local governments successfully; [and] the
significance of neighbourhoods which could be any localities from
which very active and engaged community groups can talk to the
government about their needs and about their potential contribution.
This contributes to democracy.
Moreover, housing offers a real basis to accumulate assets to ensure
that peoples livelihoods become established, that their vulnerabilities
become reduced, [and] that they become more able to manage risk
because they have been able to invest in a home. This is both about the
material value of the house and the many ways in which housing can
assist with income: offering the opportunity to rent out rooms, to run
small businesses, and also to create neighbourhood groups that could
begin to think of how to address the needs of others. Neighbourhoods
offer the possibility for people to manage collective assets, such as toilet
blocks [and] community centres. I am sure that you have talked about
the ways in which a strong community and housing consolidation could
strengthen the local economy, providing opportunities for people to buy
and sell within their localities and, in this way, strengthen incomes.
2 UN-Habitat. 2016. World Cities
Report 2016: Urbanization and
development Emerging futures.
Nairobi: United Nations Human
Settlements Programme. Available
at https://unhabitat.org/books/
world-cities-report/, last accessed 14
August 2019.
3 UN/United Nations. 2015. The
Millennium Development Goals
Report. New York: UN. Available
at http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/
mdg/Resources/Static/Products/
Progress2015/English2015.pdf, last
accessed 14 August 2019.
4 This number is the latest
figure gathered through the joint
SDFNNHAG Community Land
Information Programme.
Land is an essential component of addressing housing needs
You do not need to go far to recognise the importance of tenure security
and to recognise that land is an essential component of addressing housing
needs. More or less 900 million people are living in informal settlements,2 in
conditions that threaten their health and well-being. That extraordinary figure
represents a real failure not just of governments, but also of academics and
professional communities that have not been able to engage successfully in
addressing this scale of need.
Of the urban population in sub-Saharan Africa, just under 60% live in
informal settlements.3 Africas urban present is informal. The challenge is, of
course, to think through what that means for a better urban future. Many of
us recognise that this is not necessarily a formalised future. Informalisation
has become a form of discrimination and a reason for exclusion. Hence,
working across the formal and informal spectrum becomes critical in order
to have a progressive route to improve shelter. There are 540,000 people
living informally in Namibian towns and cities4 and they need to both feel
included and be included.
Namibia has an opportunity [to achieve this] with the Flexible Land Tenure
Act [2012, No. 4 of 2012]. This [legislation] offers a positive way forward
and you have real lessons you can contribute. There are many countries in
the world that would welcome that kind of innovation. It would be useful to
talk more about what has come of it, what your experience has been to date,
whether you are realising the potential of that Act, and how you can improve
on what you are doing and share it with others.
This is a picture of an informal settlement in Nairobi (Image 9-1). I am sharing
it because it highlights the importance of densification. And thinking about
such densification for Namibias urban future. These are shacks that have been
consolidated and are continuously being improved. You can see a second
storey being added informally with corrugated iron.
Image 9-1. Informal settlement in Nairobi,
Kenya.
[ 137 ][ 136 ]
There are many advantages in densification: not only does it reduce costs
which makes it easier for low-income earners and vulnerable groups to find
a better dwelling, it also lowers land prices [and] it lowers basic services
costs. So, those living densely have less [fewer] transport expenses as people
travel shorter distances; hence, it has increasingly been recognised to be a
contributor to the environment for lowering carbon emissions. It is now
much more likely for people to talk about compact cities and recognise the
advantages of density.
What I have observed from travelling around the world is that density also
has social benefits. Dense cities bring neighbourhoods together. They
provide opportunities for low-income and high-income citizens to interact,
to understand each other, to talk to each other and have a dialogue. Cities
in which one income group lives a long way from another income group
threaten the understanding of each others realities. Interaction is going to be a
key component of a progressive urban future.
Keep people where they are while improving their living conditions
and housing
A key challenge that low-income groups face in many cities around the world
is the threat of relocation. Some city governments think that they would be
doing good to move low-income groups further into the periphery. There
are loads of research papers that challenge this assumption, [showing] that
households are more likely to do better if they can stay where they are. That is,
firstly, because they can maintain their livelihood strategies. They do not have
to shift jobs [and] they do not have to change the networks that are critical
[not only] for their work but also for other social benefits: proximity to their
families, knowledge of how to move around, how to get advantages, how
to talk to politicians and councillors. If people are maintaining their social
networks, they are maintaining their livelihoods.
There is a case in India where the government offered free housing through a
lottery. It actually offered about 497 free houses. A group of researchers went
to find out what happened 14 years later and found that only 34% of those
households that were given a free house were still in them.5 About a third
had never moved because relocation would have been too costly for them.
Another third tried to move, but they gave up and found a place that was
better located. This is indicative of the problems that come with relocation.
Achieving Scale is Critical
One of the key things is to think big. I see many governments and international
agencies that are not sufficiently ambitious about what they do. One relevant
example is the Millennium Development Goals, introduced 15 years ago. The
MDGs accepted that it was adequate that we only try to address the need of
half of those in need of improved sanitation, for example. I am sure that this
5 Barnhardt, S, Field, E & Pande,
R. 2017. Moving to opportunity
or isolation? Network effects of a
randomized housing lottery in urban
India. American Economic Journal:
Applied Economics, 9(1):132.
sits very uncomfortably with those of you who are conscious about justice and
fairness. How can you say that only half of those who are in need are going to
be helped? For far too long we have thought of housing programmes without
strategies aimed to assist all of those who are in need. We propose solutions
that work for a few and hope that we get lessons out of them that will work for
many. One of the useful things that I have learned through my engagement
with two community networks, the SDI and the Asian Coalition for Housing
Rights, is that, at community level, you do not leave anyone out. Planning
should be inclusive, with improvements for all.
Scale is critical. Because budgets are limited, it is not a question of how many
people one can afford to assist, but how that money can be used to catalyse a
process that works at scale.
You already have interesting experiences here in Namibia. When I started
coming to Namibia in late 1990s, I could observe the ways in which Windhoek
was thinking about progressive development levels. Now it is interesting to
see how other local authorities have started to think in similar ways: the way
in which the Build Together Programme offers low-interest loans; or the
Twahangana Community Fund, which began to think about how people
could contribute and how they could pay back some of the assets they had
been assisted with securing. This means that money could be recycled so that
more people could access the funds they needed to improve their housing.
These are really important things to think about.
As you think about addressing your housing need, you should look closely
at the experiences of your neighbour South Africa. I have been engaged with
South African housing policy over the last 20 years. I first visited South Africa
just before democratisation took place in 1994, the year in which housing
ambitions were being discussed, profiled and imagined. I was really shocked to
learn [later] that the housing backlog around 20102011 in South Africa was
bigger than [it had been] in 1994. And it was not a question of resources, because
the South African Government [had] invested in housing. It had high levels
of housing subsidies, and additional subsidies for bulk infrastructure. But the
government did not reflect on how to use existing resources to meet the needs
of everyone. This has catalysed the realisation of the need to implement a policy
that has actually been in place for some time: upgrading informal settlements,
i.e. working with residents of informal settlements to think about how they
can become active participants in a process that supports their upgrading, that
secures their tenure, that provides basic services, that enhances their dwellings,
and that does so in ways that are more likely to go to scale. Those kinds of lessons
become critical as Namibia thinks of what to do in the next five to ten years.
Learning needs to be Part of the Process
Time and time again we realise that the challenge of housing is immense.
Groups that have been more successful in realising housing are not more
[ 139 ][ 138 ]
successful because they are brilliant. There are no simple solutions to this
problem. What makes the difference is learning from experience, convening
people to understand what is going on [and] what has been tried on the
ground, and looking at the evidence together. What works is consistent
application of the knowledge of what is working, what needs to be changed
[and] tried again, with different participants in that process encouraging each
other when barriers appear insurmountable.
For example, one of the virtues you see when communities get involved is
reducing costs. What was remarkable to me, through some research we did on
sanitation in 2012, was that it was clear that government and professionals like
me were still coming up with sanitation designs that were four times the cost
that the communities could work out themselves.6 Some of these communities
tried one method, then they made some changes here, they reduced costs
there, and working together for many years they cut the costs to a quarter of
what they had started with. This is not a new experience, and you could see it
in another cases, in other sectors in other countries. That kind of application,
that kind of shared learning, becomes key to addressing shelter needs.
Conclusion
One of the critical things is that communities cannot do this alone. Communities
can do a lot, and I am very conscious of the experience of SDFN and the support
NGO, NHAG: I have seen their contribution. However, communities achieve
most when they work with governments and with professional groups that are
involved in finding housing solutions. That kind of co-learning really seems to
be at the heart of successful efforts to address the challenges you face and that
you will be addressing over the next five to ten years.
There is a quote I would like to mention that is from Namibias Fifth National
Development Plan. It is by Joseph Stiglitz,7 and he is reflecting more broadly
than on housing. He says, The only sustainable growth is inclusive growth:
equality and growth are complements.8 I think that is as true in the housing
sector as it is in the economy.
Discussion
[Phillip Lühl] The first challenge that Diana put to us is that there are no
simple solutions to the housing and urbanisation challenge. Perhaps we could
start with imagining the different ways of living in our cities that Nina was
talking about in her session9 this afternoon, to explore different approaches
from those that we already know. Nina, what would you say are the biggest
challenges when imagining different alternatives?
[Nina Maritz] The group [in Session 8] felt that there should be a big variety
and options, rather than that everybody had to have this or that kind of
6 Banana, E, Chikoti, P, Harawa, C,
McGranahan, G, Mitlin, D, Stephen,
S, Schermbrucker, N, Shumba,
F & Walnycki, A. 2015. Sharing
reflections on inclusive sanitation.
Environment and Urbanization,
27(1):1934.
7 Nobel laureate in Economics.
8 See: Republic of Namibia. 2017.
Namibias 5th National Development
Plan (NDP5). Working together
towards prosperity 2017/18
2021/22. Windhoek: National
Planning Commission. Available
at http://www.npc.gov.na/?wpfb_
dl=293, last accessed 13 August
2019. Also see: Stiglitz, J. (2016,
May). Transforming an Economy:
Challenges and Lessons for Namibia.
Presented at the Namibia. Retrieved
from https://www8.gsb.columbia.
edu/faculty/jstiglitz/sites/jstiglitz/
files/May%2011%20Namibia_
Transforming_Economy.pdf.
9 See Session 8 herein.
house or that everybody has to own a house. We saw that there were several
barriers too. One was the lack of exposure, not only in the general public,
but also among decision-makers, banks, and so on, about what kinds of
options are adequate. To address that, we could consider pilot programmes
where we develop alternatives: small developments, in-fill schemes, mixed-
income housing, different kinds of building methods, and different kinds of
delivery. This would make it easier for people to envisage that you do not just
have to go and buy a house from a developer or that you have to be wealthy
enough to employ an architect, but you have a range of options to choose
from. Luckily, we had some participants from the NHE, so the discussion
was that the NHE and the Ministry [of Urban and Rural Development]
should be part of creating such opportunities for experimentation.
[Mr Lühl] Sheela, regarding your intervention: on the one hand we need
to imagine different kinds of models that we are aspiring to, and on the
other hand, we need to imagine different kinds of processes that could
produce these solutions. Perhaps you can share, from your perspective,
how you see processes that actually lead us to more inclusive cities.
[Sheela Patel] Diana said something important: that informality is a very
integral part of Africas future. I am not really sure whether most people
sitting in this audience really understood what that means, and maybe
Richard will talk about the livelihoods part. When you are talking about
informality, if you do not intervene early on with a range of solutions, it
gets harder and more expensive to produce equity. Because when people
are struggling right at the beginning and you support them to improve
their quality of life, to feel integrated in the process, it transforms their
relationships with each other and the city. We know enough of the
disenchantment of the youth that produces so much violence in our cities,
so much insecurity, and there is no other solution other than an integrated
and involved citizenry. We are not weighing that in economic terms. Only
when there is a riot in our neighbourhood do we quickly get economists
to calculate how many millions were lost because of what happened, but
we are not prepared to spend resources to make things work. And that is
very important
As the SDI, we have tried very hard to create [what is now] almost a standard
operating procedure10 on how communities transform themselves from
being consumers and beneficiaries into being serious, important, central
actors in city matters. And that means people locate themselves within
their neighbourhood. They develop documentation about their work,
and they find solutions that work for them. This gradually produces the
different standardised options that we are talking about. The options
that come from the architects or the engineers brain may not work for
everyone; but when the conceptual idea comes from the community, it
gives enormous advantage to the professional to then integrate critical
things like minimum safety standards, minimum structural integrity, etc.
10 Standard operating procedures
are established or prescribed
methods to be followed routinely
for the performance of designated
operations or in designated
situations (https://www.
merriam-webster.com/dictionary/
standard+operating+procedure, last
accessed 31 July 2019).
[ 141 ][ 140 ]
Finally, I want to say [that], if you accept that informality is a very important
reality of Africas future, you all including banks, financial managers, the
private sector, people who build, building material manufacturers should
get used to incremental upgrading, improvements, transformation: it is all
going to happen incrementally. Two thirds of the people in the city do not
have the capital that is needed to produce the kind of beautiful houses that
politicians would want to come and cut ribbons to officially open.
[Mr Lühl] Mr Tenadu, perhaps you could share a little bit from your
discussions around tenure options, tenure security and land administration
in general.
[Kwame Tenadu] Every land management system, whether statutory or
customary, is an incubator for all the tenure options that are required. You will
find in the literature that there exists a continuum of land rights within which
one expects that everyone with an interest in land would find a place. To chart
a stable course of action, where you want to achieve resilience, you need to get
it right. You have to be strategic in your choice of approaches. You have to be
very inclusive, and you need to follow due processes.
We should also be very intergenerational in our thoughts. We are sitting
here, talking about today, but we are imagining for people who are not yet
born. Human lives are dynamic, we keep moving. Land-to-life relationships
always keep changing. Therefore, we cannot be static, which makes planning
more difficult. As we are planning to solve a problem, the people are already
changing their lives. It means that we must not go to sleep when we confront
the issues.
[Mr Lühl] I would like to move on to Cecile. In your session this afternoon11
you talked in more depth [about] the right to adequate housing. This
[manifests] as a set of principles that can be understood superficially, but
it means much more. I am especially interested in the notion that these are
progressive rights, as the Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing explained
in her video message. Could you expand a little bit on that aspect?
[Cecile van Schalkwyk] One of the points from our session was that
adequate housing applies not only to a situation where someone necessarily
has ownership over a particular property: the right [to] adequate housing
applies to all forms of ownership, all forms of tenure security, all forms of
housing irrespective [of] how formal or informal that kind of housing
situation might be.
One of the things that is important in trying to address the right to adequate
housing is the benchmark that the Special Rapporteur has established [with
reference] to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights (ICESCR). This includes different aspects e.g. tenure security,
affordability [and] habitability which should not be seen in isolation. If
12 No. 4 of 2012.
11 See Session 6 herein.
the government is working towards making policies or envisioning housing
programmes, they should give [their] attention to all those factors. Sometimes,
one of the aspects may tend to draw more attention than others, but the focus
should never be on one aspect only. An example would be an overt focus on
tenure security, forgetting other factors such as affordability or habitability.
Another issue is whether the kind of housing that you are envisioning is
appropriate for the cultural context within which that right is envisaged.
What also emerged is the need to address what seems to be the inability of
formal Deed Office registries to accommodate different kinds of ownership
models that might be needed in the future. We spoke about Namibia and
South Africa having limited mechanisms in their Deeds Registry Acts. For
example, you want to ensure tenure security to provide access to adequate
housing, but the regulatory framework only makes provision for single title
housing. Nonetheless, Namibia does have new interesting mechanisms such
as [new legislation on] spatial planning or the Flexible Land Tenure Act.12
Indeed, it is important to understand that the right to adequate housing is
progressively realisable. This means that it is not possible to say that, tomorrow
morning, when I wake up in Namibia or in South Africa, every single person
in [that] country must have a house with sanitation and the other components
of adequate housing. It is a right that will have to develop over a period of time.
That places an obligation on governments to actively work towards achieving
adequate housing, and not use the progressive realisation argument to avoid
taking action. Governments have to show that they are taking steps, that there
is some efficiency in what they are doing, and that what they are doing will in
some way realise the right to adequate housing as opposed to just window-
dressing.
[Mr Lühl] Richard, Diana challenged us to embrace informality; and I think
that this is really what you were bringing into some of the sessions. Perhaps
not so much for the housing perspective, but could you expand a little bit on
why we need to treat informality as a major if not the principal part of our
urban future?
[Richard Dobson] I was asked to talk about urban informality and the
particular case of Warwick Junction, which is a transport node in Durban,
South Africa. It is an interesting example because it exemplifies a lot of what
is already being said about how we need to be foregrounding informality and
how we need to be understanding and appreciating that we are now, as much
as we might not like to think about it, in an informal world that is going to
be thinking and acting informally. What is significant about Warwick is that
it is a project that local government has been undertaking for more than 20
years now. It is a project which has created space for urban informal workers to
work in public spaces for their livelihoods. Typically, they would be described
as street vendors. We are now moving into the second generation of the
beneficiaries of this project where they can almost describe themselves as
[ 143 ][ 142 ]
being able to make a choice to be a career street vendor. This is really significant
because between six and eight thousand people had this stability for 20 years.
The next aspect is about how it was done. Without getting into a lot of detail, it
is about local government involvement, partnerships which are wide-ranging,
from environment professionals to the civil institutions. But most significantly,
it is about the process that engaged the people that were involved. The project
would never have happened if it was not for the act of engagement with the
stakeholders. And that again was through local government innovation,
through an area-based management approach. This means that you are going
to ground yourself in a particular area. You are going to put a local team that
is going to be there for a long time. They are not going to fly in and out, and
they are going to have a long-standing relationship with their community and
build a future for them.
We like to think that mainstreaming informality is not going to happen and
is not achievable. We all probably have heard the expression living on the
growing edge. But it was explained to me that the origin of this was really a
biological analogy. A plants roots grow from the very extreme tips of those
roots. That is why if you cut those tips the tree will be a bonsai tree. This means
that we have to engage at the real tip of the issue and that is the very nature
of informality. Formality is based on stability: that is the cornerstone of why it
works and why people want it to be maintained. Informality is working on the
growing edge. We are not going to solve our urban futures [and] housing crises
[or] actually establish vibrant urban livelihoods unless we are connecting with
these real challenges.
[Mr Lühl] Bulelwa, please share with us from your session and discussions,13
how to actually manage some of those cross-sectoral stakeholder approaches.
We heard that a lot of this requires active management of social processes.
How do you see this being achieved?
[Bulelwa Makalima-Ngewana] One of the many things in Dianas input
that resonated with me is learning from people that have walked this road
before especially looking at South Africa in terms of housing provision. It is
very clear that simply giving someone an asset such as a house especially if
that person is unemployed will not take that person out of poverty. It does
not really help to build a house for instead of building a house with someone.
If we look at what happens in rural areas, in South Africa there is no really
vibrant rural area housing programme. But the sense of security comes
from the tenure of land, even if it is not suitable [as collateral] for financial
institutions. [It] allows people to figure out themselves how to put a house.
A lot of what happens are actually collaborative housing processes, where
somebody that has to have a house built brings the neighbours to help them
build the house and they just have to provide a meal. When I go back to our
rural areas in the Eastern Cape, I am amazed how much growth is happening
14 See Session 4 herein.
13 See Session 4 herein.
in terms of housing which is not provided by government. What is really
necessary is for government to enable people to build houses.
I am also quite apprehensive of the word house. I prefer the word home,
because what we really want is to build sustainable neighbourhoods where
there is a sense of pride. We need to create communities that can be enhanced
by having public spaces which are managed by the community. Again, going
back to South Africa, these dormitories made up of rows and rows of single
units that are provided in desolate edges of the city are not a solution after all
of that investment. If we could go back to 1994 and figure out exactly what is
needed, my input would be to think diversity, mixed use, mixed tenure, mixed
labour efforts, and a sense of pride and understanding of the specific needs of
the people that are going to be occupying these houses. A lot of RDP houses14
are actually passed on to someone else as an asset; the people who originally
got the house seldom live there for long.
So, the question is what the Namibian Government is trying to do. Do you
want to repeat this experience in Windhoek, for example? Is it possible to have
a conversation with the community? We talked about building model villages
so that people can look at different urban structures and can choose what suits
them best. In my view, that will not really help at the end of the day, because
what you have to understand is that the provision of an asset such as a house
requires a huge amount of education of the people that will live there: how to
make it habitable, how to maintain it, how to ensure that the person will have
a livelihood that allows him [or her] to maintain the asset that has been given
to them.
I would propose that you need a people-led, integrated housing programme. A
people-first approach will allow you to mitigate mistakes that could be made
based on assumptions that are not informed by the reality on the ground.
[Mr Lühl] I would now like open the floor to all of you to engage with the
speakers.
[Gabriel Marín Castro, the Minister of Urban and Rural Developments
Special Advisor on Mass Housing] I have been working in some other
countries, and informality has caused local governments to do nothing
in those areas because they are informal. In Zambia, they work only in
formal areas: the municipality does not work in informal areas. To recognise
informality is necessary, but we must be wary that recognising informality
does not lead to accepting poverty.
[Mr Tenadu] I want to talk about the cases of Rwanda and China. Comparing
the population and the available land, it was clear that land ownership would
become a challenge. Therefore, what the government did was to hold the title
to the land but ensure people [had] the use rights to it. When you want land
for any investment, they will give you the land, but you will only have the use
[ 145 ][ 144 ]
right: you will not own it. So, as we are discussing Namibias urban future, we
should be looking at different approaches.
[Mr Dobson] I think there is a lot of writing about local government responses
to informality and it is largely around officials being afraid of informality. I
like to think that the example of Warwick Junction is one which is not a do
nothing scenario; it was one in which they engaged informality where it was
and actually started to work with it. It is about engaging with the thinking of
someone who is operating informally which is completely different from
someone that is schooled in thinking; recognising that those individuals have
particular requirements and that they are responding to them. At the end
of the day, it is actually very much proactivity, about engaging with what is
emerging on the ground. This might not ease our fears, but we have got to start
to learn lessons from informality. We need to stay with it long enough so that
we can actually learn a lesson from it.
[Prof. Mitlin] The land challenge is absolutely huge even in a country like
Namibia where, relatively speaking, you have land available although it might
be peripheral to where you want to be. It is huge in other countries. Sheela
works in Mumbai, where you have crazy cities where densities are very high.
I am not so convinced that China has solved the problem: they have many
low-income people with considerable tenure insecurities and in very poor
living conditions. In fact, if I look across the world, there is no country that has
really solved the land problem. Land is contested. It will always be. And the
lowest income groups, the most disadvantaged people, have got to organise to
advance their interest. And they have to organise creatively to achieve success.
I want to comment on the issue of informality because the trend has changed.
Some local governments are very nervous and are resistant, yet other local
governments have actually come up with a different attitude. Sometimes, they
see informality as a chance to sell basic services to communities that have some
ability to repay. My recent visit to Zambia showed distinct problems: one is
expensive services, which organised communities could lower the cost of, but
they are not given the chance. There is also an optimistic scenario in Lusaka,
where groups have organised to negotiate with service providers to keep the
cost down to about 3% of their salaries for water, which is already expensive
but still affordable. I would argue that local governments are changing their
attitude but they are not always changing it positively. And communities
need to organise if they are to represent their needs and interests and have a
dialogue with local authorities about how basic services can be provided on
scale, but also remain affordable.
In terms of the broader land debate, one of the key lessons has been to,
where possible, encourage people living in informal settlements to remain
there. Often, creating formal titles does not help because it turns land into a
commodity. And when they have a crisis in their lives, they may sell it and
end up as badly as when they started or worse. So, it is important to think
of forms of tenure that do not create vulnerabilities vis-à-vis the market while
also thinking about how basic services can be improved and made affordable.
[Unidentified participant] I have a couple of questions. Number one goes
to Nina: you mention the various options of housing types that we have or that
we can explore, and I think we have been talking about that for some time.
I wonder what is really stopping us from introducing those various types of
housing.
To Diana: you mention the issues of the compact cities and some of the
advantages of that. You mention a couple of things in terms of advantages,
such as lower costs of basic services and so on, but you did not really elaborate
on the disadvantages. For a country like Namibia, do you really think the
compact city model is applicable with all the virgin land that we have?
And the last comment is really a broad comment. We have two towns in close
proximity to Windhoek, [namely] Okahandja and Rehoboth, and a number
of Windhoekers have been buying properties in those towns, primarily
because it is affordable compared to what it costs to live in Windhoek. The
City of Windhoek has been talking about integrated transport for some time
now which should connect the airport, Okahandja and Rehoboth and
introducing a high-speed train, and so on. Can we talk about making sure
that we are not squeezing our people? We should be able to own free-standing
houses and for the kids to be running around in the back yard, playing, instead
of being squeezed into those funny things.
[Unidentified participant] Maybe it will be good if any of the panellists
could share any experience that they might know [of] where a paradigm shift
has taken pace successfully with the concept of integrated development, where
you bring together all the key players in that ecosystem, involving financial
institutions, town councils, city councils, the government, the private sector,
and so on, because everybody has to play their role. Otherwise you will find the
bank saying that we are not going to finance this; the government saying that
this is not the applicable standard in this area, therefore we cannot recognise
this building; and so on. How do you bring all those key players together to
make sure that they actually talk to each other?
[Unidentified participant] I am afraid of the strategy that my sister Bulelwa
was talking about. This thing was designed by the World Bank: I mean the
strategies for the State to withdraw from [the] provision of housing and allow
the private sector to take charge. This was experimented in Latin America,
but the results were disastrous. I know the experience with RDP housing in
South Africa was problematic, but it was a noble idea that was not properly
implemented. I still think there are significant roles for the State to play. After
RDP, they are now trying Breaking New Ground.15 I would encourage them to
keep on improving on past experiences, but please leave the State [the power]
to intervene.
15 See Session 4 herein.
[ 147 ][ 146 ]
[Ms Maritz] I want everybody in this auditorium with children that are
living with you at this moment to raise your hand. [Less than half of the
room raises their hand.] So, it is not even 50%. One of the barriers that we
in Namibia have is the conception that everybody has to have a two- or
three-bedroom family house that sits in the middle of a plot of a minimum
300 m2. We have been battling with that since Independence. But what
we are trying to propose is that there might be people, like the students in
this room, that do not want to build or own something now. They are busy
studying, and when they are finished studying, they might want to go and
work for a while or do a postgraduate degree overseas. There might also
be people who like urban living, that might actually like to live in town, to
be close to their work. In our session today, we concluded that the biggest
barrier is probably a lack of creative thinking; that there are ways in which
one can get beyond the regulations; there are ways in which one can go to
the bank to prove that your alternative building system can fulfil the basic
fitness requirements. But our current preconceived ideas of what a house
should be is probably our biggest barrier. I am going to hand over the issue
about compact cities to someone else, like Diana, but I just want to mention
that if you buy in Okahandja and Rehoboth, and you can afford to commute
to Windhoek, you are not one of those that needs help in terms of housing.
You have [already] managed.
[Ms Makalima-Ngewana] I would like to respond to the question about the
role of the State. Of course, the State has a massive role to play. Wherever there
has been success in the provision of housing, there has been an entity that
was created for the sole provision of housing. The State is needed especially
for those below a certain income bracket. Where it goes wrong is when
governments become construction managers. When governments become
the sole providers of housing, it creates an uncomfortable relation between
housing provision and political aspiration. Another challenge we have is
that we have a housing department sitting over here and the transportation
department sitting over there, and the land management department on the
other side; and all of these departments have different priorities and work
in silos, which creates conflict between departments and delays housing
provision.
[Prof. Mitlin] I want us to talk a little about compact cities, and then I want to
talk a little bit about public dialogue. I think it is clear that small towns inevitably
end up having lower densities. That can be taken for granted. But Windhoek
is not that small a town. Windhoeks population is now about 500,000. So, I
will just make a few points. Firstly, there is a strong anti-poor rhetoric about
the conceptualisation of cities and the way cities are represented. I understand
concerns about crime and violence, but when you look at research on the
relationship between violence and urbanisation, you do not find a link. Where
you do find a link is between violence and inequality. Where cities are very
unequal, you find a link to violence and crime; where they are less unequal,
violence will be lower.
Secondly, regarding benefits of compact cities, I just highlight two in
particular. The one has reduced costs for getting basic services to people,
and [lower] transport costs for residents. The other benefit is regarding
lowering of carbon emissions and global warming. So, I will continue to
argue that, for environmental reasons and to favour low-income groups
that can afford less in terms of public services, densification is something
that we should think about. It does not have to be a low-quality urban
environment.
I think the useful word is enabling. Enabling has two different
conceptualisations: it was indeed the term that was used to legitimate the
rolling back of the State absolutely; but it does not necessarily mean
that to everyone. Enabling might mean that the State does not insist
on you building the structure that you do not want or that you cannot
afford. It might mean that, rather than the State either telling you what
to do or withdrawing, the State engages you to practise co-production of
services. Only when people come and talk to each other can we go beyond
languages issues. So people can say, This works for me, [but] this does not
work for you. Why does it not work for you? And we account for what is
a difference of language and what is a difference of intent.
The final point that I want to make is about the public. Cities are intensely
public. The reason why you can have a compact city [is] because there
is public investment. Working out how that investment gets put down
what the squares are, what the roads are, where the basic services are,
how it may have value to people, and how communities should share the
cost and the benefits is integral. Someone on the panel talked about the
importance of homes and neighbourhoods, and I think it is critical to
think about the quality of urban living. To think about the quality of urban
living also means to think at the city scale, and thinking through plans and
imagining dreams; but it also means thinking about the practicalities of
how we realise these plans. This has to be at the city scale if we are going to
share both the cost and the benefits of urban living.
[NUST student] Firstly, [I would] just [like] to thank [NUST] and all the
stakeholders for coming together to discuss the way forward. I am one of
the students that is subjected to living in the informal settlements. Maybe
after every event, we make sure [we] report on what happened. Maybe
we can come back every year and talk about what has been achieved. I
hope there are representatives from the Ministry of Urban and Rural
Development that would take this into consideration. As a young person,
I am very disappointed that we do not have more young people on the
panel. We as young people are ready to assist in all the structures, but it
is unfortunate that we were not included in the panel. I listen to what
international guests say, but it costs a lot of money to travel to Africa. Let
us look at the expenses to organise this event [as well]. Maybe it would be
enough to build a house or two for someone.
[ 149 ][ 148 ]
[Unidentified participant] I think we need to realise that we, as the people,
are in control of our futures. We need to stand up and realise that, if we want
better housing, we need to come up with the solutions. There are a lot of local
resources in the different Regions that need to be utilised and we must not
just depend on somebody building a brick house for us. Who says that a brick
house is better than a clay house? If I can afford the clay house and it gives me
the same comfort and security as a brick house, why can I not have it?
[Ms Maritz] What I would like to say to the people that are younger is that
nobody is stopping you from getting involved. You can sign up and get involved
this [very] moment maybe not just by taking up the microphone; there are
so many creative ways you can get involved. You can get involved by starting
a student group which is interested in urban design and housing issues. If you
are enthusiastic and you have got the political fervour that the person at the
back showed today, we need you to get involved to educate yourself as to what
is going on, and then to push the right agenda.
[Ms Patel] When someone says that this event would cost the amount of
money needed to build two houses, I want to tell you something that humbled
me. I used to feel like that too. But community leaders that I have worked
with for the last 40 years and some of them were younger than 24 would
basically say,
[b]uilding two houses is Band-Aid. We do not want Band-Aid. We want to
be part of a multi-generational process in which we make sure that we, the
young people, do not make all the mistakes that you have made.
So, I think it is important for all of us to celebrate the fact that we have three
or four generations of people here who are ready to share experiences. And
I would love the fact that you create an organisation and an association that
demands a space at this table. That is the right of the youth, but it has to be
earned. It is important for all of you who are young to get involved in the
creation of history. I have been an activist since I was 20 years old. You have
the right to do the same, but it starts with giving yourself to producing the
equality that you dream about. Do it with the passion that you have brought
here, and we will celebrate that with you. But do not only celebrate your
national identity. You are going to live in a world in which you first have to
be a global citizen because, unless you embrace your global responsibility,
your national and local identity are going to get decimated. Dont be like us!
Dont be parochial! Celebrate the fact that you can sit in this University and
have exposure through the Internet and technology to what is happening all
around the world.
[Mr Lühl] I can just [re]assure those of you who are afraid that we are not
involving the youth. You see a number of our colleagues with white T-shirts.
They are mostly NUST students or alumni. In fact, they are the largest part
of the team that we have put together to review the Governments MHDP
strategy. So, certainly, the youth is involved at that level, [but] perhaps not on
the panel. That is an oversight that can be corrected in future.
[Prof. Mitlin] I am just here to share lessons. I am not here to give you
answers. We have learned so many times that the only person who can identify
answers is you yourself. We can share what we know, we can ask questions, but
you have to own your own answers. You have such an opportunity to address
your needs at scale. I am very conscious that we did not answer your questions
about integrated development; I actually do not know of a case in which all
the stakeholders have come together to learn collectively about how to address
this problem at scale. In Namibia, you have a real possibility to do this. The
audience tonight has exemplified that you have a deep respect for each other,
which seems to me a good starting point for coming together to address these
problems. I would just urge you: do not just wait a year, two years, but come
together: think what you can do together. Provide a platform to share lessons
and commit yourself to really provide leadership around addressing shelter
needs.
[Ms Makalima-Ngewana] It is important to understand that there is no
solution that starts without dialogue. But dialogue is not the only determinant
in terms of a process running smoothly. So, start talking as we have done
now, in this room to help find the solution that will work for you. Every
time I come to Namibia, I actually realise you have not lost hope. I come from
South Africa, where many communities have lost hope. There is a sense of
anger that comes from the fact that the future seems to be getting dimmer and
dimmer. The rainbow nation that we started in 1994 is not coming right and
many are frustrated, afraid, scared of the future, and worried about their own
children. In Namibia, I get a sense of hope and trying to find creative solutions.
[Ms Maritz] I would like to thank NUST and ILMI and everyone else for
hosting and organising this event. It has been an incredibly productive two
days and I dont say this of every conference because quite often they are just
talk shows. But there were a lot of things that came out. Phillip made mention
that there is an ongoing dialogue and a website. They are actually working on
the evaluation of housing issues in the MHDP. So, these dialogues will have
concrete results.
The Public Forum on Housing and Urbanisation took place on
27-28 February 2017 in Windhoek under the title Namibias
Urban Future: Rethinking Housing and Urbanisation. It
gathered about two hundred participants to engage with
eight international speakers and a Namibian counterpart
on the topic. This book documents each of the sessions with
their ensuing discussions, introductory remarks, and an
introduction by the editors.
Sessions cover issues on informal urbanisation and peoples
processes; community-based urban strategies and social
innovation; urban livelihoods, the informal, and new roles
for professionals and local government; urban design, public
space and local governance; social housing and finance;
experiences with the right to adequate housing in South Africa;
urban land reform, tenure options and land administration;
design, construction and sustainable spatial processes; and
housing strategies in Namibia.
urbanforum.nust.na