Mark Napier: How to Improve Access to Urban Land for South Africa's Poor
Channel: SACSIS
Date: 2014-05-06

Urban land is of symbolic significance in South Africa because it is land that people of colour were historically denied access to. But the historically privileged still own, occupy and enjoy the best urban land.

The question is, why hasn't our government been able to unlock well-located land in urban areas to provide housing for the people who need it most?

The historically disadvantaged continue to live on marginal land on the peripheries of South Africa's cities and the apartheid city remains untransformed.

Both The South African Civil Society Information Service (SACSIS) and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung South Africa Office (FES) wish to promote discussion about the transformation of the apartheid landscape in an effort to foster social cohesion in South Africa's still largely racially and economically segregated society. The organisations co-hosted a panel discussion to interrogate the issue on 17 April 2014.

The event was opened by Renate Tenbusch, Resident Director of the FES South Africa office and the panellists who spoke at the event included, Mark Napier: Principal Researcher at the Built Environment Unit of the CSIR and co-author of the book, "Trading Places: accessing land in African cities"; Thembani Jerome Ngongoma: Member of Executive Committee of Abahlali baseMjondolo (shack dwellers' movement); Louise Scholtz: Manager at World Wildlife Fund South Africa and leader on joint project with National Association of Social Housing Institutions; and Kate Tissington: Senior Researcher at the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa.

Talking specifically about urban land, Mark Napier argued that the apartheid city is different in different parts of the country. For example, in Cape Town, the middle of town has no poor people. 

Napier said, "I actually heard Helen Zille in a UN event in Cape Town saying that...the poor don't belong in the centre of Cape town. If they can't afford it, they shouldn't be there." If you look at the city of Cape Town, that's dead right. It's not morally correct, it's factually correct."

Trying to create equal access to the cities for the poor will require direct intervention, he argued.

Some of the solutions for land reform that were mentioned by Napier include, land claims. However, there are also other incentives and regulations that can be used, such as, using property taxes to reinvest in the city. He also talked about value capture where you use public investment to claw back the profits that the private sector generates once the investment is made, and putting these resources into a redistribution fund, which allows for the funding of better located housing. Expropriation can also be used. It's an expensive process, but it's totally legal and it's used all over the world, he said.

Napier concluded by pointing out that our housing delivery programme, in the first two decades, has exacerbated inequalities because it has been premised on finding cheap land. But cheap land equals bad location, he argued, so we really need to turn around our housing programme.