A Sustainability Promise Not Kept: Linking Housing Policy, Urban Poverty and Inclusion in South Africa

Abstract

The multidimensional paradigm of sustainable development encapsulates one of the great changes of the twentieth century. Against its backdrop, apartheid-era South African cities are acknowledged as having been unsustainable due to their unequal and exclusionary character. From the start, post- apartheid housing policy’s sustainable development intent was discernible in its spatial restructuring, poverty alleviation and urban inclusion objectives. Its shifts over the democratic post-apartheid housing programme moreover notably demonstrated South Africa’s alignment with the enduring international focus on sustainable development, reflected, for example in the United Nation’s Millennium Developments Goals (MDGs), the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and, latterly, the New Urban Agenda. Discernible in such shifts was the firm linking of cities, housing and sustainability notions, within which context housing’s potential to improve household income and create wealth was framed as a means to achieve urban inclusion and sustainability of human settlements.

All indications are however that the housing delivered to the poor, predominantly on the margins of the city, has had direct implications for both their spatial and economic inclusion. The chapter considers such outcome, firstly by conceptualising the relationship between sustainability and urban inclusion, and showing how post-apartheid housing policy interprets such relationship as linking home ownership, wealth creation and poverty alleviation to yield urban inclusion. It outlines the limitations that have thwarted the achievement of this objective in practice, and concludes that the failure to meaningfully integrate the poor into the urban spatial and economic systems maintains South African cities’ exclusionary character.