Housing policy in South Africa

This paper traces the development of housing policy in South Africa from its emergence in the 1920s as a response to social and public health problems associated with accelerated urbanisation to its current deployment as a vehicle of ‘reconstruction and development’ in the post-apartheid order. The account focuses on the implication of housing policy in the successive socio-political projects of ‘segregation’ and ‘apartheid’ between the 1930s and the mid-1970s, as well as protracted attempts at policy reform during the late 1970s and 1980s in the aftermath of the ‘township revolt’. It deals primarily with changing responses to what remained, until quite recently, a central concern of housing policy in South Africa — the attempt to ‘contain’ urbanisation within the African population. From this retrospective view, the paper moves to an examination of the key difficulties embedded in current housing policy. These are bound up with efforts to overcome the continuing housing ‘backlog’ in ways which, on the one hand, remain wedded to a simplistic, ‘supply side’ approach and, on the other, fail to address the social and spatial legacy of aprtheid ‘social engineering’ in South African cities. The paper concludes with a brief review of the prospects for developing a more effective policy framework in the future.