12. Post-apartheid Housing Delivery as a (Failed) Project of Remediation

Apartheid was a regime of socio-spatial relegation: racialised populations were banished to South Africa’s urban peripheries and rural hinterlands. In the post-apartheid period, the ruling ANC framed its democratisation project as remedial, a corrective to centuries of dispossession. This entailed government providing the physical infrastructure required for black South Africans to return to cities, not as precarious squatters on the urban fringe, but as residents with an equal right to the city. Yet, more than a quarter century later, little progress has been made in any substantive sense. While South Africa has delivered more free, formal housing units than any other modern democracy, it has consistently failed to coordinate this programme with employment, transportation, and food security initiatives. This has left residents with homes to be sure, but typically delivered to locations where residents already live, rendering the geography of apartheid permanent. This chapter also accounts for the substandard quality of the units delivered; the slow pace of delivery; and the fact that the housing backlog continues to grow despite the ongoing provision of homes. It concludes with an analysis of the exclusionary effects of the government’s equation of housing delivery with democratisation tout court.