The Value of Secure Tenure: Ethnographic Accounts of How Tenure Security is Understood and Realised by Residents of Low-Income Settlements in Durban, South Africa

Abstract

Studies of tenure security and insecurity tend to focus on the lack of tenure rights for certain groups in society. This discourse of rights is often legalistic and engenders a logical relationship between tenure security and formal tenure rights. The legal guarantee of tenure security through a title deed, for example, is couched in theories of a liberal rights-based discourse where the award of individual rights and access to mechanisms to uphold those rights are regarded as essential for the empowerment and prosperity of the poor. In South Africa, the dominant discourse in urban tenure security for shack dwellers is one of legal rights encapsulated by a freehold title deed that accompanies the award of a housing subsidy in the process to upgrade informal settlements. This approach to formalising tenure assumes tenure insecurity is experienced by shack dwellers as predominantly a fear of eviction emanating from a lack of legal rights to land and property use and/or ownership. The paper contends this top-down conceptualisation of tenure insecurity misrepresents shack dwellers’ own tenure experiences and reflects an incomplete understanding of tenure security. In 2010, I conducted an ethnographic study to ask 24 shack dwellers in Durban their conceptions of tenure security as an ideal, their experiences of tenure insecurity, and the strategies they have adopted to achieve a sufficient degree of security. The study’s emphasis on hermeneutical definitions of tenure offers a detailed perspective that reveals shortcomings in the conceptualisation of tenure security in contemporary housing and urban land policy. The paper offers a re-conceptualisation of the term.