Shack Settlements Research Articles

Material flows as Earth politics: Concepts, methods, and approaches for transdisciplinary diagnostics and repair at Muizenberg East, Cape Town

Muizenberg East, in Cape Town, South Africa, is a peri-urban landscape that encompasses sewage works, tourist beaches, a nature reserve, a waste dump, a Ramsar site for the protection of migrating birds, shack settlements, and a corporate office park. The complex and contradictory uses of this land demonstrate the limitations of social-ecological analysis and ecosystem service approaches to environmental governance. Mapping contemporary struggles over food, housing, aquifer contamination, air pollution, conservation space, safety, and farmland, the study proposes that a new materialist approach combining emerging transdisciplinary fields that focus on material flows and metabolism offers a big-picture science for landscape diagnostics and repair. It is argued that the Earth processes such as metabolism, thermodynamics, and flow offer an integrative basis for environmental governance based on partnerships with Earth processes. Such a constitutional shift in approaches to local governance offers the possibility of amplifying habitability without inserting new modes of profit-taking into the web of life.

Google Earth Augments Viewing the Spectacle of Ruin in Selected ‘In-Between Places’ of Old Industrial Johannesburg

South Africa is said to have the worst social inequality in the world, and examples of this inequality can be seen in the shack settlements, backyard shacks and hijacked properties in many parts of the city of Johannesburg. These unsafe and neglected ‘interstitial places’ are where the poor live in inadequate housing, squeezed between factory buildings, railway lines and motorways in the city. One of the challenges of capturing visual information about these settlements in these difficult settings is getting access to the areas where photographs can be taken. In Johannesburg, many areas are no longer safe for outsiders to visit. These unsafe, informal and often well-hidden areas can be considered ‘interstitial’ in relation to other areas where middle-income earners live in decent houses in pleasant suburbs with amenities. It is these ‘unsafe’ areas that the author wished to explore as a source of images and impressions for creative works.
 This study takes an autoethnographic approach to exploring three neglected suburbs of Johannesburg, South Africa (Cleveland, Denver and Jeppestown), which all date from soon after the first discovery of gold in 1886. Through this work, the author hoped to make sense of observed changes within the city and the proliferation of informal, survivalist settlements seemingly arising without town planning interventions. Many open areas and dilapidated buildings are now occupied by low-income earners, perhaps because city governance has been overwhelmed by the thousands of work-seeking migrants arriving in the city on an ongoing basis.
 To explore the many visual indicators of poverty in these selected areas of Johannesburg, the author used Google Earth remote sensing images and Google Earth Street View to augment site visits. Google Earth is a valuable research tool, as one can quickly explore marginal areas that are not safe for outsiders to visit. One can also view activities that are not visible from the street – for example, illegal motor repair operations occurring behind high walls. Ethical issuesabound in these acts of anonymous looking at the poor and destitute and finding the picturesque in neglected buildings, dismal living conditions and slums, as well as the privacy and surveillance issues relating to those being observed. This essay will dwell on some of the benefits of the Google Earth virtual globe software, as well as the ethical discomfort that can result when observing people, poverty and informal living places – whether using remote sensing methods and driving around these areas with a camera, or using the images and perceptions gained for personal use as a source of inspiration for art making and fiction writing.

Hit the Tire

AbstractThe meaning of the strike has evolved across space and time. In contemporary South Africa it has come to include the road blockade, which is now a ubiquitous tool of popular politics in general and forms of politics organized from shack settlements in particular. This essay, drawing on many years of participation in popular politics in the city of Durban, shows that the road blockade is often, although not always, articulated to a politics presented in the language of dignity and marked by defiant humanism.

Trevor Ngwane, Amakomiti: Grassroots Democracy in South African Shack Settlements

Trevor Ngwane, Amakomiti: Grassroots Democracy in South African Shack Settlements

Amakomiti: Grassroots Democracy in South African Shack Settlements by Trevor Ngwane

Reviewed by: Amakomiti: Grassroots Democracy in South African Shack Settlements by Trevor Ngwane Mueni wa Muiu Ngwane, Trevor. Amakomiti: Grassroots Democracy in South African Shack Settlements. London: Pluto Press, 2021. Can people who live in shacks teach us about democracy? Trevor Ngwane begins this book with the following question: Ngingalitholaphi ikomiti lalendawo? Where can I find this place's committee? To answer this question, Ngwane sets out to study four informal settlements of South Africa's nine provinces. Organizing among shack communities can be traced back to protests [End Page 222] against forced removals by the apartheid regime. They occupied private land because the state failed to provide adequate housing. Sometimes communities were forced to live in "temporary" housing for forty years. In seeking to answer this question, Ngwane draws back a curtain and reveals a world that few know about. He visited forty-six informal settlements, of which forty-five had committees. He distinguishes between autonomous committees and people's committees. The latter are formed by the state or NGOs. His focus is mainly on the self-organization of the committees, not their physical organizations. These include ten settlements each in Gauteng, North West, and Kwa Zulu Natal, and sixteen in Eastern Cape. The smallest settlement had twenty shacks, and the largest had eight thousand. Most had between one hundred and five hundred shacks, with Alexandria (Johannesburg) having a thousand shacks a month. The number of informal settlements increased between 1990 and 1994 with the elimination of bans on political organizations and apartheid laws. Most of the settlements are named after the pioneers, how the place was occupied, or after major political leaders. Seventy percent of the settlements have electricity, while 65 percent have access to water taps and 39 percent have long-drop toilets. The first committees set up are the people's committees, which are followed by ward committees (state). There were people's committees in thirty-five settlements. Life in shantytowns is difficult. One has to struggle for every single thing that other communities take for granted, from being alive to getting water and toilets. Amakomiti (Zulu for "committee") people learned to depend on themselves from defense and plot allocation to basic services. Most of these committees rely on their experiences in rural areas to govern their communities. Sometimes they work alongside township organizations but on other occasions they don't, depending on the issues at stake. Ngwane calls the discussions and activities of these committees "democracy on the margins." This is the development and practice of local democratic practices and cultures by neglected communities. It gives them agency where they are not victims. This book explores different committees, their history and roles in democracy on the margins. Popular committees in the shacks are an aspect of a democratic practice and ethos that is not fully understood. The ANC had committees in eight of the forty-six settlements. There were community police forums in five settlements. Five settlements had community development forums, which monitor local construction and development. Twenty-five settlements had more than one committee. Whether committees succeeded or failed depended on their accountability and [End Page 223] transparency in meeting expectations. Relationships between committees and the state vary from antagonistic to symbiotic. Most communities are forced to connect their own services, from electricity to water. Most shacks in South Africa are located in close to mines in Rustenburg, where the unemployment rate is 40 percent. It is also the most unequal place in the world. Rustenburg produces 70 percent of the world's platinum. In-migration is 7 percent from neighboring countries. Based on official figures, 17.4 percent of the people live in twenty-four informal settlements, but independent researchers put the number at 40 percent. Fifty percent have no monthly income. There are two views about shack dwellers: shack dwellers as part of workers' movements, and therefore with a lot to gain, and shack dwellers as distinct from workers' movements, with little to gain. Shack dwellers organize settlement, order, and security. Some are better organized than others. For example, the Power Group in Crossroads, an informal settlement near Cape Town, was organized by women who led protests for services for four months...

Brief communication: Radar images for monitoring informal urban settlements in vulnerable zones in Lima, Peru

Abstract. Lima, Peru's capital, has about 9.6 million inhabitants and keeps attracting more residents searching for a better life. Many citizens, without access to housing subsidies, live in informal housing and shack settlements. A typical social phenomenon in Lima is the sudden illegal occupation of areas for urban settlements. When such areas are unsafe against natural hazards, it is important to relocate such a population to avoid significant future losses. In this communication, we present an application of Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images to map the extension of a recent occupation of an area with unfavorable soil conditions against earthquakes.

Trevor Ngwane, Amakomiti: Grassroots Democracy in South African Shack Settlements

Trevor Ngwane, Amakomiti: Grassroots Democracy in South African Shack Settlements

Living on the Fringe in Post-Apartheid Cape Town

South Africa’s post-apartheid government tried to use urban policy to reverse racial segregation. But as shack settlements proliferated on urban peripheries, squatters came to be viewed as a threat to the state rather than its beneficiaries. In Cape Town, urban policy has entrenched, rather than reversed, racially segregated settlement patterns.

Deriving cues from human cognition for the modelling of shack boundaries in aerial imagery


 
 
 Organic studies inspire cues for modelling logic in image processing and become a basis for the development of novel remote-sensing algorithms. Examples of applications of such paradigms include the growing application of techniques such as object-oriented analysis and neural networks in image analysis for which the logic was drawn from studying various components of organic systems in the human body. Here we document a key investigation based on a set of cognitive tests conducted using aerial imagery captured over Cape Town (South Africa). These tests were conducted to later draw parallels with a feature extraction algorithm for shack settlements. We found that the visual variables of ‘pattern’ and ‘shape’ display the most significant cognitive guide for shack boundary extraction. Although the focus here was on digital imagery, learning points can be selected for application in other scientific fields as well.
 
 
 
 
 Significance: 
 
 
 
 Provides an interest point for several image-processing and computer vision sciences.
 Contributes to geospatial studies and helps improve mapping and imaging initiatives.
 Directed towards solving the challenges that urban governors face in slum management.
 
 
 

The theory and reality of urban slums: Pathways-out-of-poverty or cul-de-sacs?

This article explores two contrasting perspectives on the role of informal settlements in urban labour markets. One proposes that they help to lift households out of rural poverty and onto a path to prosperity through affordable access to urban opportunities. The other suggests that the debilitating conditions confine residents to enduring hardship and insecurity. South Africa is an important test case because of the extent of social and spatial inequalities, and the policy ambivalence towards shack settlements. Preliminary evidence indicates that employment rates are much closer to formal urban areas than to rural areas, but conditions of employment are noticeably worse. Other forms of data are required to assess the magnitude and timescale of economic progression for households.

Worker Struggles as Community Struggles: The Politics of Protest in Nkaneng, Marikana

This article deals with the changing spatial landscape of the mines in the post-apartheid era. It is here that the link between worker and community struggles becomes apparent, given the changing nature of space and community on the mines. It becomes more difficult to deny women’s roles and contributions to political life on the mines in South Africa when we are confronted with the Marikana massacre. For the first time, women on the mines made a public statement about living and working and being on the mines, a realm of experience previously ignored or silenced in most labour historiography. After the 1980s, mine compounds were ethnically desegregated and post-1994, mine companies began to offer a living out allowance (LOA) to mineworkers who preferred not to stay in the hostels. As a result, there was an immediate growth of shack settlements around the platinum belt. With the development of shack settlements has been the introduction of family life on the mines, which has brought with it a new form of community politics that have not been adequately addressed in the public sphere or in new labour literature. This shows how independently organised worker struggles are linked to, and reinforced by, the struggles of women and the community. More specifically the paper presents research undertaken in Marikana in November 2012 and it is an attempt to write a living history of people who currently occupy the shack settlement where most of the mineworkers involved in the 2012 strike live; it is called Nkaneng.

Sacrifice After Mandela: Liberalism and Liberation Among South Africa’s First Post-apartheid Generation

This article examines sacrifice in a post-Mandela South Africa. Twenty years since the fall of apartheid, South Africa remains one of the world’s most unequal societies. From street protests to labor strikes to xenophobic pogroms, dissatisfaction with current socio-economic conditions is being expressed through urban unrest, particularly in townships and shack settlements. This article analyzes an emerging idiom of “sacrifice” among youth activists in response to deaths and injuries sustained during recent street protests. I argue that this idiom draws from understandings of liberation and liberalization , from popular imaginaries of the anti-apartheid struggle, and from processes associated with South Africa’s democratic transition. Broadly, I suggest that sacrifice under liberalism reveals the blurring boundaries between “the gift” and “the market” in political life.

Youth Politics: Waiting and Envy in a South African Informal Settlement

From the mid 2000s, militant local political protests have been widespread in poor townships and shack settlements across South Africa, recalling mobilisations of a previous decade. Youth have been at the forefront of these protests, as the weight of the job and housing crisis has fallen disproportionately on those under 35. Similarly to the 1980s, this has created fears over a youth-led rebellion, with youth portrayed as militant, angry, disillusioned and available for direct action. Significantly, very little research has captured the role of youth in these urban uprisings from the perspective of youth themselves. This paper provides insight into the lives of a number of youth who participated in the 2011 protests in Zandspruit informal settlement, on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Situating the protests within a larger context allows an exploration of the complex web of structural factors which motivate youth involvement, and the ways in which youth actively shape and transform their social reality. This includes an understanding of the nature of youth unemployment, the politicisation of access to resources and services, and the relationship between leaders and youth. Through an analysis of the shared grievances and frustrated aspirations of youth within a context of perverse social inequality and intense competition for power and access to resources, the motivations of youth are analysed through two key concepts: waiting and envy. This paper draws attention to the changing nature of political action among youth and the implications for broader politics and society in South Africa.

Sweet Home: A Preliminary Investigation into the Socio-Political Character of Recent Road Blockades by Protesting Shack Dwellers in South Africa*

For much of the winter of 2012, communities in shack settlements across Cape Town took to the streets in some of the most active civil disobedience protests since 1994. Knowing that the mainstream political terrain often seeks to obfuscate and mislead the public about the true nature of these protests, this paper investigates claims by politicians from the Democratic Alliance (DA) that these protests were being coordinated by the Youth League of the African National Congress (ANCYL). These big political players moralize the debate, shifting the focus from the perfectly legitimate issues of service delivery and demands for meaningful engagement. Speaking directly to community members of Sweet Home Farm, an informal settlement of 15,000 people in the Philippi area, revealed a yawning chasm between what official players are saying about Sweet Home and the actual realities on the ground.

Young women from informal settlements report on their experiences of accessing sexual and reproductive and other health services from clinics

abstract Project Empower is a Durban based non-governmental organisation (NGO) working with young women in a programme aimed at increasing their ability to defend their sexual and reproductive rights as a strategy to support their efforts to avoid primary and secondary HIV infection. Project Empower has worked with up to 80 young women from Durban shack settlements and has become aware of the struggles faced by young women in accessing sexual and reproductive health services. The research reported in the Briefing shows that young women shack-dwellers perceive that they frequently face inadequate and sometimes harmful service provision. Some of these are well known and documented such as long queues, delayed test results and drug stock-outs. Less known is the prejudice and discrimination experienced by young women from health care providers, reported by women in the research to frequently hold anti-poor, sexist and ageist attitudes. The Briefing argues that these experiences discourage young women from returning for follow-up services, often with long-term negative consequences for their health. This Briefing is based on focus group discussions with young women participating in our programme and outlines their experiences of accessing sexual and reproductive health care. It also compares these experiences with the Department of Health's own policy document ‘Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights: Fulfilling our Commitments 2011–2021 and Beyond’ (published in May 2011) and presents the young women's demands for how the services can be transformed.

Upright and free: Fanon in South Africa, from Biko to the shackdwellers’ movement (Abahlali baseMjondolo)

Grounded in the South African experience, in discussions with Blacks about their everyday experiences of oppression and in attitudes formed from that experience and sharpened by an engagement with Africana philosophers like Fanon, Steve Biko recreated the kind of praxis that Fanon suggested in the conclusion of The Wretched of the Earth, namely that the working out of new concepts cannot come from the intellectual's head alone but must come from a dialogue with common people. Today a new shackdweller movement (Abahlali baseMjondolo) has emerged in South Africa, which has put post-apartheid society on trial and has resonated with Fanon and Biko's idea of a decolonized new humanism. At the same time Abahlali's notion of a person and its critique of reification has been challenged by the spontaneous eruption of xenophobic violence indicating that the stark choice between humanism and barbarism is a most concrete question in the shack settlements. Because Biko's development of Black consciousness and his engagement of Fanon's thought remains of historic importance to contemporary South Africa, the paper begins with a focus on the creativity and the contradictory processes by which Fanon's philosophy of liberation is articulated in Steve Biko's conception of Black consciousness. From this starting point the discussion shifts from Biko's critique of white liberalism to the dialectics of contemporary neoliberal ‘postcolonial’ reality. What remains central, however, are the creative and contradictory processes that a reengagement with Fanon will create. In other words, since it is ‘the live subject that unites theory and reality’, the issue becomes how, in a new historic moment, a philosophy born of struggle makes itself heard.

Understanding and managing sanitary risks due to rodent zoonoses in an African city: beyond the Boston Model

The Boston Model describes a successful rodent management plan that succeeded in a first-world city in the USA. In third-world cities, which often contain informal shack settlements, it is debatable whether the Boston Model would apply. In Durban, a major harbor city of three million people on the east coast of South Africa, we investigated the sanitary risks due to rodents in both formal (residential and commercial) and informal (shacks) sectors, and we evaluated the relative merits of different management interventions suggested by the Boston Model. Blood and tissue samples of six species (Rattus norvegicus, R. tanezumi, R. rattus, Mus musculus, Mastomys natalensis, Tatera brantsi) from 262 live-trapped rodents from 54 localities were tested for antibodies or DNA for plague (n= 193: antibody test), leptospirosis (n= 221 for antibody test; n= 69 for polymerase chain reaction test for DNA) and toxoplasmosis (n= 217: antibody test). We conducted a socioeconomic survey of 90 household to determine environmental and socioeconomic disease risk factors in the shack settlement of Cato Crest. No rodents were seropositive for plague, but nine Norway rats, R. norvegicus (4.1% of the sample tested) were seropositive for toxoplasmosis, and 22 R. norvegicus (10.0% of sample tested) were seropositive for leptospirosis. Disease endemic areas were concentrated in Cato Crest and the commercial district of Durban. Serology tests of humans living in Cato Crest (n= 219) showed 0% exposure to plague, 23% to leptospirosis and 35% to toxoplasmosis. Compared with shack-dwellers, the residents of brick houses had slightly lower levels of exposure to leptospirosis and toxoplasmosis. Based on our results, environmental hygiene and rodent-trapping campaigns were launched in Cato Crest. The initiative owes much of its current success to implementation of the principles inherent in the Boston Model, even though certain elements were lacking.

MEASURING QUALITY OF LIFE IN INFORMAL SETTLEMENTS IN SOUTH AFRICA

South African cities attract thousands of new residents every year in search of work and a better life. The housing backlog coupled with a shortage of housing subsidies means that for many South Africans there is no alternative but to live in informal housing and shack settlements. Informal settlements are therefore here to stay for the next decade and beyond. Given the importance of these residential areas, research needs to be undertaken to determine how to improve the lives of people living in shack settlements. This theme has received little dedicated attention by South African quality of life researchers in the past and the paper begins to address this by exploring the quality of life of informal dwellers in three distinct city areas in South Africa: Buffalo City, Durban, and Alexandra, Johannesburg. The paper investigates the factors that are most important in improving the quality of life of residents in informal housing as well as the main obstacles to a better quality of life. It uses regression analysis to obtain an understanding of the kinds of issues which shape quality of life in these areas and concludes by suggesting several research directions which would improve our knowledge of quality of life for informal settlement residents.

We are fighting the world: a history of the Marashea gangs in South Africa, 1947-1999

This dissertation explores the history of the predominantly Basotho migrant criminal society known as the Marashea or Russians, which has been active in South Africa since the 1940s. The testimony of current and former gang members collected in Lesotho and in South African townships and shack settlements provides the basis for the thesis. The central organising principal of this study is to account for the Marashea's ability to survive, and even flourish, throughout the apartheid era. To accomplish this task, I explore how identity formation, gender relations, economic opportunism, collective violence, and political manoeuvring contributed to the long-term integrity of the different factions of the Marashea. There were three pillars to the Marashea's success: its economic relationship with mineworkers, its control of migrant women, and its non-adversarial stance towards the apartheid state.

Viewpoint: Of universals and specificities: how different are we?

In terms of both normative frameworks and substantive content, planning (as a factor in city building and city management) has long had universalising tendencies. Forces such as colonialism, modernism, and more recently, globalisation, have had the effect of diffusing planning ideas and practices across the world. The vehicles for this diffusion have included consultants, donor and development agencies, and globetrotting academics, but perhaps just as often they have been 'local' agencies seeking a quick solution through a cut-and-paste from a 'best practices' website. A growing volume of literature documents the spread of spatial concepts and urban forms garden cities, green belts, new towns, and more recently waterfronts, mega-malls and new urbanist 'villages' have found their way into almost every city in the world, creating high levels of physical homogeneity. Just as important, but far more subtle, however, are the range of planning assumptions that underpin these physical forms and interventions. These are assumptions about the kinds of planning solutions that 'fit' particular social or economic needs, assumptions about what constitutes just and equitable judgement in situations of conflict, and assumptions about the kinds of processes (consensus seeking or otherwise) through which planning issues can be resolved. It is in these arenas that universalising tendencies have been particularly strong, and have related to the assumed nature of the society with which planners interface. The particular concept of society that, usually implicitly, shapes thinking and action in planning has been strongly influenced by post-Enlightenment and western traditions of thought. These ideas have shaped a dominant rationality which in turn sets standards of 'normality' regarding proper living environments, the proper conduct of citizens, acceptable ways of reaching consensus, notions of the public good, and so on. This is not to suggest that there is one view on these matters, but differences tend to occur within definable parameters. The notion of what is a proper living environment becomes stark in the context of developing countries where so often informal or shack settlements are regarded as unacceptable and in need of replacement by formal housing projects. Extending the grid of formalised and regulated development over what is often termed the 'unruly' (or 'unrule-able') city shapes the planning effort in many cities of the developing world. In the developed world the debate takes on a different nuance, but could be characterised as a tension between the kinds of urban environments promoted by Jane Jacobs' adherents (cities of vitality, diversity and mix) and the ordered, safe and efficient living environments of the planned suburb or downtown redevelopment. Western traditions of liberal democracy, of which there are variations, influence much planning thought about individual rights and liberties, ethical frameworks, and planning processes. Liberalism takes the individual as the basic unit of society, able to be conceptualised and defined independently of society, and in a normative sense holding a distance from society as an autonomous and self-determining being (Parekh, 1993). Morality then, or the notion of the good, is not a socially or collectively imposed construct, but rather an aggregation of individual choices or preferences. Much land use policy, particularly in the USA, has been driven by a utilitarian ethic which holds that the right decision is the one that creates the greatest aggregate level of social benefit, indicated by the price signals of a free market economy in land. This view in turn sees land as an economic commodity, rather than (as in some other parts of the world) a communal resource with perhaps additional mystical or ancestral meanings. The British planning system, by contrast, has been far more accepting of a state interpretation of aggregated individual preferences, which sets the goals of amenity, convenience and efficiency as standards to define the best use of land (Campbell and Marshall, 2002). …