Academia: Spatial Dynamics, Contested Development, and Competing Rights in Cape Town, South Africa

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by Duncan Ranslem, June 2011

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts (Geography)

Chapter 1
Introduction

The right to housing needs to be dissociated from the right to property and returned to the right to inhabit.
-Don Mitchell, The Right to the City

Adopted in 1996 after the fall of the apartheid state, the South African constitution enshrines the rights of all people in South Africa. Enumerated among these rights is a right to property and a right to housing.2 The former represents the claims to ownership and private property that are familiar in U.S. law and Western tradition: the rights to possess property, and through this possession, to use it as one sees fit, to accrue any benefits that are derived from it, and to be protected from its undue expropriation. The right to housing, on the other hand, recognizes the fundamental need for access to shelter and basic social connections. Under its provisions, every home is protected from demolition, and its inhabitants protected from eviction, except after a court has considered all the relevant circumstances. Moreover, South Africa’s municipal governments are responsible, within their available resources, to realize the right to adequate housing for all. Juxtaposed against one another, these rights represent claims that are often contradictory. The underlying contradiction, in many cases, is that a person’s home is not necessarily that person’s property. Such homes may exist, either as, or located on, property owned by the state or by a private entity. In such cases, where the lawful property owner is met with the unlawful appropriation of his property as someone else’s home, the right to that property and the right to housing come into conflict.

Media: ‘I don’t believe in voting anymore’

Apr 10, 2011 2:25 AM | By BRENDAN BOYLE
http://www.timeslive.co.za/specialreports/elections2011/article1010864.ece/I-dont-believe-in-voting-any-more

Sarie Booi, better known as Ou Sis, is among many in Cape Town’s informal settlements who don’t intend voting on May 18 because they have given up on local government.

She is one of the original residents of Masincedane, a windswept settlement of some 70 shacks among the dunes of Strandfontein on the False Bay coast. It was started by her late father nearly 20 years ago, when he worked as a janitor in a children’s holiday camp.

There are enough toilets, there are a few taps and the rubbish is collected most weeks from a fly-infested skip, but the high-mast light hasn’t worked for two years, drugs are a problem even among pre-teen children and the promise of new houses has become a standing joke.

Media: This place is a dump – N2 residents

By Clayton Barnes – Cape Argus

Residents of the N2 Gateway housing scheme in Langa say they have been forgotten.

The once-secure government housing complex next to the N2 is now a dump, says Mbuyi Nogahtshi, who moved to the area in 2005, just after it was opened by former housing minister Lindiwe Sisulu.

Press: Kicked Out for the Cup?

Watch Christopher Werth’s multimedia report from South Africa: “Out of Bounds? Cape Town’s Cleanup for the World Cup.”

Kicked Out for the Cup?

South Africa is accused of clearing Cape Town slums to clean up for the big event

Newsweek Magazine, 4 June 2010

by Christhoper Werth

Victor Gumbi sits pensively beside a smoldering fire in a newly cleared lot, literally in the shadow of the recently renovated Ellis Park Stadium, one of the many venues where South Africa will host the World Cup football tournament, which kicks off this week. South Africa billed the world’s most popular sporting event as a boon to development that would help lift millions out of poverty, but Gumbi, a 35-year-old day laborer, says things are only getting worse. Not long after South Africa was awarded the tournament, an entire city block in the neighborhood where he lives was slated for destruction as part of a larger urban-regeneration scheme around the stadium, as Johannesburg began preparing for the throngs of tourists expected to come pouring in over the next few weeks. Late last year, the run-down building where Gumbi was squatting was torn down, leaving him in a small, jerry-built shack in the middle of a block of half-demolished houses that local residents have nicknamed “Baghdad.” Now many residents who’d been living in the area’s abandoned buildings for well more than a decade feel they’re being forced out because of the World Cup. “They want to hide us. They don’t want the Europeans seeing the people living here, so they demolished these dirty houses,” says Gumbi, who’s convinced he’ll be removed once and for all before the games actually begin.

Angry Blikkiesdorp women give Zille a torrid time

November 12, 2009 Edition 2
Aziz Hartley – Cape Times

RESIDENTS of Blikkiesdorp in Delft confronted Premier Helen Zille yesterday and demanded that the DA provincial administration provide them with proper housing.

Angry women told Zille, on a visit to the area, that nothing has come of promises housing MECs made before and after this year’s elections.

Media: City cannot intervene on N2 flats

By Nomava Nobumba – Bush Radio
04 November 2009

N2 gateway residents are seeking for the intervention of the city on crime and fraud they claim is happening in the block of flats.

Residents say the flats are not safe, thought there are security guards.

Meida: Delft squatters shifted to Blikkiesdorp

‘on symphony way we were a strong, respectful community… i’m moving with a heavy heart’

October 27, 2009 Edition 1
Quinton Mtyala – Cape Times

HAVING been defiant for months, 23 of 127 families have relented and yesterday moved from pavement shelters in Symphony Way, Delft, to a notorious temporary resettlement area dubbed Blikkiesdorp.

Most expressed their fear at what awaited them at the row upon row of single-roomed corrugated iron shacks without water or electricity.

Media: Pavement dwellers dig in their heels

Chantall Presence | 20 October 2009 | Eyewitness News

The Anti-eviction Campaign has vowed it would not give up on its fight to prevent pavement dwellers from being relocated to Blikkiesdorp.

‘Dumping ground’ for unwanted people

YAZEED KAMALDIEN | CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA – Oct 09 2009

Mail and Guardian

A man with discoloured skin — dying alone in a shack of Aids — speaks volumes about conditions in Blikkiesdorp, described as a “dumping ground” for unwanted people in Cape Town.

Set up in the Cape Flats settlement of Delft, primarily to stifle illegal invasions of newly constructed houses in the N2 Gateway Project, it has seen the resettlement of other people who have been relocated or evicted, including squatters ousted from Salt River’s derelict Junction Hotel.

Duarte and the housing racket

ADRIAAN BASSON, ILHAM RAWOOT AND GLYNNIS UNDERHIL – Oct 02 2009 07:03 – M&G

It was supposed to be a flagship housing project. Eleven years later, Thubelisha Homes is the albatross around the neck of Human Settlements Minister Tokyo Sexwale, who inherited the flop from his predecessor, Lindiwe Sisulu, now defence minister.

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