While housing is immovable, jobs and people move, and where people live in one house and work in another, they must commute between the two, mustn’t they? 

RDP houses, Soweto … and jobs are ninety minutes away

As reported in The New York Times, this is often more contentious than it should be:

SOWETO, South Africa — Since the days of apartheid, when blacks were required to live in distant townships like this, Susan Hanong, a 67-year-old maid, has commuted to the wealthy northern suburbs of Johannesburg, one of the spectral figures trudging through darkened streets on long trips to wash white people’s clothes and mind their children.

Soweto is an old acronym for South West Township:

Soweto at lower left; Sandton in upper-center

It was deliberately located out of sight, and out of mind, behind an artificial mountain of mine tailings.

A mountain of crushed ore that hid Soweto from downtown

At dawn recently, after walking through Soweto to the sounds of roosters crowing and her sandals slapping against her feet, Mrs. Hanong beheld a vision of urbanity: a stylish, new high-tech bus station.  As the doors of a gaily colored bus closed behind her, she claimed a front-row seat reserved for the elderly and settled in for a smooth, tranquil ride, so different from her usual experience on careering, jam-packed minibus taxis.

We’re visual creatures.  We take our cues from color.

“These people on taxis, they shout at us,” she said. “They say, ‘Granny, just move!’”

Curious response – move where?

“They talk funny to the people. On the bus, no one can shout at you, you see.”

South Africa has erased apartheid from its statute books, but the racist schemes of white minority rule remain engraved on the landscape in an extreme form of residential segregation. Millions of blacks still live in townships far from centers of commerce and employment.  

We’ve seen throughout the world that residential segregation is a preferred tool for keeping ‘those people’ near when we want them, far when we don’t.  We’ve also discovered that housing and transportation are intrinsically linked costs in the family budget, so it is possible to keep ‘those people’ away from us by channeling their affordable transportation alternatives.

Those with jobs, like Mrs. Hanong, must endure commutes that devour their time and meager incomes, while legions of jobless people are isolated from opportunity.

Like the QWERTY keyboard, that was apocryphally designed to slow down typing and hence prevent jamming the keys, a city can survive the deliberate inefficiency of an economically segregated residential pattern for a while … but then, as speeds increase, that inefficiency leads to insupportable traffic jams.

Traffic on the M1; note the walkers

Cities do mean traffic jams, yet traffic too snarled can undermine a city’s efficiency – and therefore its global competitiveness.

The new Bus Rapid Transit systems planned for South Africa’s major cities in recent years have promised to ease those hardships by providing fast, affordable, dignified travel on bus lanes cleared of other vehicles.

The addition of ‘dignity’ is curious.  Are the alternatives, such as combi vans known as taxis, undignified?

Prodded by a national commitment to improve public transportation for soccer’s 2010 World Cup, Johannesburg is carrying out the nation’s most ambitious program.

Need this station open by the time the stadium’s open!

Global events – like the World Cup or the Olympics – are always levers for dramatic and large-scale improvement of the urban infrastructure.  The accelerated political urgency of a hard date and global visibility conjures forth vast financial resources, and also a climate of relaxed regulatory permissiveness.  Things are done swiftly that could never be done slowly.

The city predicted that buses would be rolling from Soweto, where a quarter of the city’s four million residents live, to Sandton, the region’s commercial and financial hub, by June.

But its bus project is falling short of that goal and has also become a reminder of just how challenging it is for South Africa to transcend its scarred history. Beyond the usual logistical delays and a recession-related slowdown in financing, the project has confronted resistance from both suburbanites in what were once exclusively white enclaves and from some in the black-owned minibus taxi industry that sprang up during apartheid.

The taxis are an economically rational pure-market solution. 

The city’s formidable minibus taxi industry moves 14 million people daily in a nation of 49 million, far more than the bus and rail systems combined.

Like slums, they crammed poor people into smaller spaces, so as to raise aggregate spending power to the point of financial viability.

The economic solution: overcrowding

They also drive like madmen, with predictable results.

Fatalities after a Johannesburg taxi collision

“The transport system tells a very big story of the psyche of the nation,” said Rehana Moosajee, the City Council member who leads Johannesburg’s Transportation Department,, explaining that the country still had a long way to go in bridging racial and class divides.

Moosajee knows taxis are a big story

For the taxi operators, the problem is simple – the state-subsidized buses will destroy their business.

“Stop the BRT” = Keep us in business

The city’s first challenge was to win over the formidable minibus taxi industry.  It is perhaps the country’s greatest success story of black entrepreneurship, though with a history of ruthless violence.

Taxi operators demonstrating, March, 2009

Almost certainly it is the province of organized crime, part of the alternative power structures that operate in slums.

Experts estimate that hundreds, if not thousands, of people have died in “taxi wars” to control routes.

To the visible costs of commuting inefficiency, therefore, we must add the invisible costs of crime, violence, and extortion.

Who else lies behind the protests?

The city has sought to get the industry involved by offering taxi proprietors ownership of the bus operating company, but negotiations have dragged on, and some in the industry remain fiercely opposed.

As we saw in slums, the enemy within, inefficient systems nevertheless support free riders, fellow travelers, and fifth columnists, all of whom feed on the inefficiency and use subterfuge and manipulation to preserve it. 

Taxi blockage action, Johannesburg

After the bus line began running five months ago, along a 16-mile route from Soweto to the central business district, a bus was fired on and a passenger and a policewoman on it were hit.

Not by whites, I dare say.  This is black-on-black violence, with economics at its root.

Gunmen shot at the home of Mrs. Moosajee, hitting her security guard in the neck. And Vananda Khumalo, a taxi industry official and advocate for a deal with the city, was killed.

Murder for money, pure and simple.

At the other end of the pipeline, the opposition is more genteel but no less fierce:

The city has also faced steely opposition from suburbanites that some officials describe as a classic case of not-in-my-backyard resistance. At a packed meeting in November 2008, residents from the strand of stately, still mostly white communities along the heavily traveled Oxford Road shouted down city officials who were trying to describe proposed bus routes, including one that would use two of Oxford Road’s four lanes for buses.

Everything in Joburg goes up and down Jan Smuts

I’m very familiar with the Oxford Road area; good friends of mine live and work in its vicinity.

Although NIMBYs never want ‘those people’ to have access, this is a smidgen more rational in Johannesburg, where more affluent households have been subjected to carjackings and home invasions at gunpoint.  And not isolated incidents, either – rampant.  Many South Africans I know fear crime is rising steadily and wish they could emigrate.

Welcome to Saxonwold

“They just stood up and said, ‘No, no, no, no!’ ” recalled Tessa Turvey, a resident married to a mining industry entrepreneur. Mrs. Turvey has since honed a message in defense of her neighborhood, Saxonwold, where jacaranda trees arch over tranquil streets and homes are adorned with rose gardens, swimming pools and lush greenswards.

Plus high cement walls, razor wire, and ADT Armed Response signs …

A fast-growing sector of the economy

Mrs. Turvey, who is white, was dismissive of those who contended that the suburbs were guarding white privilege, noting that much of the black political elite, including Nelson Mandela, now lived in these same neighborhoods.  In a letter to the city, the neighborhood association’s members welcomed a mass transit system but opposed what they considered hastily and ill-conceived routes that they said would pollute the air, cause traffic to spill onto side streets, increase crime and damage property values.

 “This is not a race issue,” she said indignantly.

Regardless, it’s certainly a class issue, and a crime issue.

But Shireen Ally, a sociologist at the University of the Witwatersrand and a resident of Killarney, one of the affected suburbs, said race had everything to do with the suburbs’ reaction.

Anti-black or anti-green?  Often it’s impossible to separate.

At the raucous 2008 meeting, Ms. Ally said she grew angry as resident after resident in the overwhelmingly white audience said the bus project would damage their property values. Ms. Ally, who grew up in Lenasia, a township south of Soweto for Indians, chided residents with cars for not considering the needs of people dependent on public transport.

One in six working women in South Africa is a housekeeper or nanny. Families in the northern suburbs depend on these women, the overwhelming majority of them black, to iron their clothes and clean their toilets. Ms. Ally, who wrote her dissertation on domestic workers –

I’d love to read Ms. Ally’s book, From Servants to Workers: South African Domestic Workers in the Democratic State.  I’ll have to hunt it down.

– said she was disturbed by “the incapacity of these suburbanites to think about it from the perspective of the women they trust their children and home to, the women they call part of the family.”

Obliviousness is not necessarily racism, though.  Just oblivion.

Shortly after 5 a.m., while the suburbs slumbered, Mrs. Hanong stepped out from her small, tidy home in Soweto, a pocketbook dangling from her arm, bound for the housekeeping job she has held for a quarter century.  Just months earlier, Mrs. Hanong, who has never learned to read, was still catching taxis close to home. But her preference for the new buses is so strong that she walks an extra half hour to reach them. They cost about 65 cents each way, a savings of about 50 cents over taxi fare, a considerable sum, given her earnings of $160 a month.

In making that trade, Mrs. Hanong is paying herself about $1.00 per hour, or $25 per month, the equivalent of giving herself a 15% after-tax raise.

The newer buses in Johannesburg offer a smoother ride for workers who commute to wealthy suburbs from distant townships.

Even so, she has to transfer to a taxi to get to Sandton. Transportation still gobbles up a fifth of her salary.

As we saw in driving to the poorhouse, transportation normally takes a fifth of everybody’s salary – it’s just that the poor have less money.

Two hours after she left home, Mrs. Hanong stepped down in Sandton and headed to the townhouse of her employer, who works in a real estate office.

The near-northern business center of Sandton

There she shed her tan dress to reveal a baby blue uniform. She stripped the bedsheets, loaded the washing machine and put the dishes away with a soft clatter. When her boss’s white cat trotted into the kitchen, Mrs. Hanong pleasantly asked him, “Why not have your breakfast?”

From Ian van Coller

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Singing about a better life: the Durban enumeration

“Have you ever been to an enumeration?” asked my hostess at the Gates Foundation convening.  She had brought together all the grantees under the Urban Poverty Limited Learning Initiative, including ourselves, for two days of brain-cudgeling on what we had individually and collectively learned, so far in our respective grants, about the complex challenge of alleviating urban poverty.  On the third day, we had a chance to go as individuals to see an event.  The Durban affiliate of uTshani and FED-UP, South African’s Federation of the Urban Poor, which in turn is a member of AHI’s customer Slum Dwellers International, was holding the first enumeration in Durban.

Durban is South Africa’s third city, after Cape Town and Johannesburg (some might say fourth, after Pretoria).  Long the capital of Natal, now KwaZulu Natal, it is a gritty industrial port with a magnificent seafront and a slowly reviving downtown being given radical ablative surgery in anticipation of the 2010 World Cup.  Radiating from the center in concentric rings like ripples of a stone dropped in a pond are hillside settlements, each outer ring less formal than the one before.

The Durban hillside, carpeted with houses

For that is the nature of tidal wave urbanization in the global South.  People move to the city for a better life for themselves and their children. 

As we arrived, school was letting out

They need to live affordably.  Because the value of urban land is a function of the earning power of those who live or work on it, for the structures close to town, even the smallest inhabitable space they can afford – a single-room building only 100 feet square with an outhouse nearby – is unaffordable.  So they move out until there is a low-value plot of land large enough to accommodate a self-built house, and build one.

Informal house being enumerated, Durban

Multiply that by hundreds of people moving to the city every week, everywhere, and the city grows and grows.  On the periphery, informality rules, outstripping any knowledge that the formal city has.

On the city’s maps, this is green space

So we drove, a dozen of us, out and out from the gleaming downtown, past the soaring white new stadium – it really is beautiful, past the smooth two-lane roadways, past the gradually diminishing shopping centers and grocery stores, off the bitumen, and up into the dirt hills. 

Someone asked, are we still in the city?  Yes, we were.  We came to the big tent, and got out.

A celebration, a fair, or a political event?  A little of each.

Patrick Magabhula of uTshani, whose group had organized and scheduled this enumeration, led us under the big tent to a long dais at its front, with empty chairs.  To my astonishment, we were directed into those chairs, the honored guests at the feast.  We as in Slum Dwellers International – Jockin and Sheela and Somsook, and the rest of us white folk as attendants and courtiers.  Our entry was greeted by singing – chorus after chorus of delighted women ululating in tune and time.

The guests are here!  Let the celebration begin!

Someone told me that their Zulu lyrics said, We are despoiling our beautiful country with our ugly houses, and we want houses as beautiful as our country.

(Aside from its emotive power, I thought that was a brilliant posture: to demand better housing not for oneself but for one’s city and country.  It happens to be true, yet it is simultaneously brilliant messaging.)

Patrick had been passionate about getting us here.  This was Durban’s first venture into citizen-led enumeration, and he importuned us to come.  Sitting there, feeling the energy, I understood: we are your witnesses.

They brought us drinks, nuts, potato chips and pretzels, and they sang until Patrick quieted them.

“Amandla!” he shouted, swinging his arm forward to inspire the crowd.  “Amandla!” the crowd shouted back.

He spoke in passionate and happy Zulu.  We want houses, we want to be part of the city.

Patrick Magabhula in full expository oration

Today, he told them, we will be counted.  Today is the beginning.

“Today is the beginning.”

As always in these urban change-making environments, the leadership is women.

Committee member

The women are in the circle, the men cluster on its edges, watchful.

Women under the tent, men nearby, gradually moving closer

Cautious.

Listening to Patrick orate

An enumeration, as the term implies, is a counting of place, people, and property – done by the people themselves who live there.

Enumeration map of the neighborhood

It’s done with low-tech but reliable materials, using the poor’s own labor as the substitute for technology.

Using a roller to size houses, rooms, streets, plots of land

All at once – one day, one morning – people from the community fan out to every house, and every household, and collect information, in a standardized way.  The people’s census.

Easy to read, easy to compile, and verified on the spot: a household survey

Yet critical to the enumeration is not that it is done by the informal people, but that it is accepted by the formal city.  Months of negotiations had led to these moments, where the city had slowly, even grudgingly, come to accept that there were more people living on this particular hillside than the city had thought.

South Africa, you see, takes urban citizenship seriously.  Every adult household is entitled to a one-time capital subsidy, with a face amount of R54,000 (the visible subsidy) and a total value closer to R140,000 (meaning about R85,00 of invisible subsidy), for home purchase, home construction, and ancillary infrastructure (from the invisible subsidy).  Enumerating people and their property enables them to access that capital subsidy, which is what motivates them.  Over-enumerating them compels the municipality to deliver the invisible subsidy, which worries the city. 

Throughout South Africa, I was told on other days by many other people, the single biggest breakdown in delivery is at the municipal level.  From bankers to developers to researchers to consultants, everyone with whom I spoke fingered municipal incapacity as the blockage.

Enumeration by the people themselves represents outsourcing an essential governmental function both to accelerate its delivery and to create political standing for the poor themselves.  If you won’t do it for us, we will do it for ourselves and make you acknowledge us.

That’s why our presence mattered.  Here was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, standing at the dais, telling the assembled gathering, Amandla!  We see what you do today, we recognize your rights as people.  When I come back here next year, she told them, I want to see houses!  They roared with approval.  Of such moments are personal pledges made.

The speeches over, the business of enumeration taking place and winding up, we toured to see the consequences of enumerating.  Start with new houses. 

While the South African capital subsidy was originally intended to stimulate new formal production – and to this day, it principally does – it is a demand-side subsidy, meaning an entitlement of acknowledged citizens.  One can access it to build one’s own house, a house which one has designed.  Like this:

The self-designed house

House maquette, made from a corrugated box

Rooms laid out inside

As I understand it, to access the capital subsidy, one has to show that one lives somewhere.  Of course the people do – they live in houses they have built themselves, like this one:

Showing his house: self-built, of sun-baked adobe and wattle

Again and again I was struck that though people will sleep in the meanest of dwellings, they dress better than they sleep:

Just under 100 square feet total, but note the wall coverings

And they speak better than they dress.

Describing how a new house will change his life.

People will improve their homes when they believe it will be they who benefits from the improvement.  For that, you need security of tenure, and access to capital subsidy.  Enter the map:

Every house, every outhouse, every dirt road, recorded and listed

The map also captures data about the existing structures.

Painted on the house are its dimensions: 4.4 x 9.2 meters (435 square feet)

While the land was being surveyed, and the houses measured and inventoried, the people were interviewed, each a four-page profile of core verifiable information: name with identification number, house with plat number, age, people in household:

A profile of a particular family in a particular place

Together with information regarding the property and its status:

Note question 3.4: “Is the house yours?”  And the follow-up, “Yes, self-built”

Equally important to the compilation is the quality control that went into the information.  The City of Durban had observers, and before the information would be uploaded they would sign off on the documents’ validity. 

What is important is not principally what happened – it totaled a few hours’ work, and resulted in a stack of papers with information.  Papers that had legal validity to the city of Durban, hence economic, judicial, and political consequences. 

I realized with a shiver that I’d seen this dynamic before – at real estate closings.  The same curious convergence: months of work, negotiations, bringing people together, culminating in a gathering where papers are filled out and signed, then taken to government for recordation. 

Information becomes part of the legal reality.  A bargain is struck, a bargain with consequences. 

In a closing, it’s about property and money and future obligations.  So too in an enumeration – property and money and future obligations.

The city has now taken cognizance of this neighborhood, its people, and their property. 

Enumeration is the inauguration of urban citizenship.

A stack of citizenship rights: the enumeration’s output

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By: David A. Smith

It’s taken three days’ worth of posting to describe the three days’ worth of disaster-recovery reblocking that occurred at Joe Slovo township in Cape Town, and like the reblocking, we weren’t quite done in that interval.  Now for the most important part – what we can learn from this?

Joe Slovo, March 2009

(A large set of pictures is here, from which this post’s images are drawn.  My quotes are from a report, written by Tom Herbstein of the University of Cape Town’s African Security and Justice Program (ASJP), and circulated by SDI member affiliate FED-UP, South Africa’s Federation of the Urban Poor led by Rose Molokoane )

What went right

When the palimpsest is suddenly scrubbed clean, action must be swift and coordinated.  As it can take a lifetime to become an overnight success, it takes months and even years of community-building to establish trust. 

[1.  Idea preparation]  iKhayalami invested a great deal of time into building a relationship with the Joe Slovo leadership over the previous year.  Many barriers that would normally be development obstacles were rapidly overcome through a level of trust that, even after a traumatic fire, allowed iKhayalami to move in and start blocking with the community.

The trust can lie dormant until catalyzed by a spark – in this case, a tragic fire.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

In a palimpsest environment, all things are possible; the universe has not formed.  So it’s imperative that everyone be included, because anyone excluded will become the process’s enemy.

[2.  Public democratic process]  The public meeting, held on the Monday morning, achieved a buy-in from the community and although cut short – before all voices could be heard – was nonetheless critical for the success of the blocking.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

As we’ve seen with SDI, for an effectiveness process, the slum dwellers themselves have to be in charge:

[3.  Self-managed] An effective decision was to only supply materials, knowledge and advice to Joe Slovo, and leave the process of blocking to the community to manage and negotiate. 

As a consultant, I learned this lesson a long time ago.  Although I know more than my client does about how to solve a particular problem technically, that knowledge should never put me in charge of the client’s goal-setting. 

A good consultant never tells his client what to want, only the consequences of pursuing what the client wants.

What resulted was a community coming together, and helping the process grow.

A good client learns to hear what the consultant is advising about consequences, and to adapt her desires in light of the consultant’s expert advice.

iKhayalami is a non-profit organisation whose primary aim is to upgrade informal settlements. It focuses on designing and manufacturing affordable housing solutions that are easy to transport, quick to erect and offer a range of opportunities for future upgrading.  This is primarily an immediate solution to the national crisis of inadequate shelter, but also provides an effective and rapid response in the event of township hazards such as fire and flooding.  

Joe Slovo, March 2009

Equality of opportunity does not need equality of loss, nor necessarily equality of outcome:

[4.  Fair process and fair outcome]  Deciding what should happen when people’s original shacks were larger than the new iKhayalami shelter. 

While iKhayalami were happy to provide larger shelters in these instances, the leadership was adamant that all new shelters should be of uniform size so as to not create a sense of inequality amongst the community.  This was firmly adhered to.

Men in particular are bonded by uniformity; as every army’s induction and boot camp know, to anneal them into new forms you must hammer out the old ones.  We become brothers when we are all miserable together – and if it is as a community that Joe Slovo’s residents gained the leverage that brought them free homes, then it is up to the community to adjudicate what constitutes equality in that case.  I wouldn’t have expected that.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

Learning by doing is important, as is persuading by showing:

[5.  Piloting] This was further strengthened by the decision to initially block just six shelters, to create a visible an example and help people understand the concept.  It also ensured shelters kept in line, as material was only released once bordering properties had been upgraded.  This maintained active community participation, as people had a vested interest in blocking reaching their area.

Interesting dynamics: the grid exists in everyone’s imagination, but before anyone can build a house into the grid, the buildout has to reach this part of the grid.  Conversely, beneficiaries who wanted free materials were obliged to buy into the community grid vision – freedom came with a price.

This resulted in shelters being constructed quicker and cheaper, due to increased man-power, but also resulted in significantly fewer disputes as the community was now actively involved in their own development and given the opportunity to guide it themselves.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

Not everything worked exactly as the technical advisors would have wished.

What went wrong

[6.  Refusniks]  Some shack dwellers were unwilling to replace their structures with iKhayalami shelters, some even to move theirs back within the demarcated lanes.  While attempts to move shelters were made through negotiation between them and leadership, in cases where resistance continued, the lanes were simply redrawn around the offending shack, and carrying on beyond.

In effect, the non-conforming uses have been grandfathered into the community.  Will the grid be strong enough that over time they will be brought one by one into conformity?  Or will it revert to randomness and inefficiency?

Joe Slovo, March 2009

Back in the present, variation and individuality appeared as they always do.  So did a gradual erosion of unanimity:

[7.  Quality variation]  It proved hard to maintain quality control, as the situation was one that developed organically.  There were instances where building material was released, when neighboring properties were yet to be blocked.  This meant some shelters ended up not lining up with others. 

People become impatient and the inevitability effect takes over.

Control needs to be maintained as it is the promise of materials which turned out to be the most effective tool for negotiation.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

Real estate is also a professional business, and slum dwellers are not real estate professionals.

[8.  Lack of training]  Problems also emerged with people erecting shelters too fast, and without proper supervision, resulting in weaker structures, and in some cases ground that was uneven.

In general, people who own property are entitled to renovate, refurbish, and remodel it – but in the formal city, such alternations are subject to zoning and building codes.  A perfectly informal slum has neither, and when Joe Slovo was reborn after the fire, in accepting the free assistance it accepted the city’s dominion over structure and zoning.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

The better housing is, the more formal it is; and that makes it more structural, more technological, and more complicated.

[9.  Uncoordinated materials]  Khayalami intended to only supply material to construct the walls of the shelter, and then use material supplied by the City for the roof.  However, the City’s material was incompatible with iKhayalami’s design, the wood being to short and stout and the zinc sheets too thin. 

As a result, more haphazard construction of the roofs resulted, making any future installation of ceilings more difficult.  Future coordination between iKhayalami and the City, as to what materials to supply, would result in a far higher quality structure while minimizing costs.

Before the fire, I doubt the City and iKhayalami would have thought it worthwhile to collaborate on rebuilding standards.  The fire forged a linkage between them.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

[10.  Interruption]  The City, suspending the distribution of material and food resulted more time and energy being spent by iKhayalami and the leadership in securing additional resources than in managing the development process, hampering efforts to block adequately.

It’s hard to fault the City on this point; they announced a three-day window and they held to it.  Perhaps more illuminating is the necessity for disaster-relief planners to recognize that it’s not enough to rush replacements to the site – you should take a deep breath and imagine not replicating the old but improving it.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

In the end, it always does come down to money.  Slum upgrading is municipal infrastructure, and that has a large non-recoverable cost.

[11.  Lack of subsidy]  Finance was the single biggest issue facing iKhayalami’s efforts to upgrade Joe Slovo and the biggest single hindrance to the wide spread roll-out of blocking. 

Not finance – subsidy.  These costs are non-recoverable, and the homes will have minimal resale value.  Although they have high occupancy value and that makes them a worthwhile expenditure of public or charitable resources, no one should be deluded that turning on a lending tap will magically transform the slums.

While iKhayalami did admirably in securing private funding to sustain construction, this is a government issue, one which can only succeed with buy-in and support from the City.

Donors are scaffolding; they bridge from vision to pilot, and from pilot to political change.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

The story has a happy ending:

In conclusion

While these shelters are not perfect, and certainly dissimilar to more formal housing projects, iKhayalami was able to re-shelter a significant number of people:

Joe Slovo, March 2009

1. In conditions far above what they had before

2. In situ

3. In a way which prepared the site for future introduction of basic services. 

All these are enduring achievements.   Because slums are places where private investment has outrun public infrastructure, the rationalization of informal private settlements should lead public investment – in fact, it should induce public investment.  The city has granted the Joe Slovo residents tacit citizenship by handing them disaster packages and working with them in their deployment; it will be hard for them to retract it when the infrastructure can now be laid down logically.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

This was all done at a cost of less than 10% of what more formal structures cost and in just a few weeks.

Self-built means self-labored, which means cheap.

Remarkably given the circumstances, it was the community that came to the table in this instance and not government. 

Not remarkable at all: networks and markets always move faster than government.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

In South Africa, decent housing is a fundamental right enshrined in the ANC Charter, but that doesn’t mean everyone is well housed.

Estimates suggest a government house may only be delivered 30 years after being on the waiting list. 

Or until there’s a cleansing fire, which creates the urban palimpsest.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

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By: David A. Smith

Within twenty-four hours of a fire that destroyed more than 5900 homes in the Cape Town informal settlement of Joe Slovo, more progress had been made in community redevelopment than had been accomplished in the previous fifteen years’ of confrontation.  The palimpsests had been scraped, but what would be written on the newly-clean parchment?

 (A large set of pictures is here, from which this post’s images are drawn.  My quotes are from a report, written by Tom Herbstein of the University of Cape Town’s African Security and Justice Program (ASJP), and circulated by SDI member affiliate FED-UP, South Africa’s Federation of the Urban Poor led by Rose Molokoane )

Joe Slovo, March 2009

Would, in fact, the government do what it said?

Tuesday 10th March 2009

On Tuesday, blocking continued throughout the day.  A tense scenario unfolded around 09:00 when Disaster Management informed the community that only fire victims who were resident on the original Government “Thubelishe“ list, compiled many months previously, would receive a starter pack.

When free goodies are being handed out, everybody wants one … but not everybody deserves one.  Residency is used as the proxy for entitlement, which can be a challenge because even if the slum is resilient, individual slum households emigrate and immigrate continuously.  This challenge was solved in the usual way possible only after a disaster:

The Joe Slovo leadership, together with a large crowd of community members, held an informal meeting with members of the Informal Housing Department and after a heated discussion agreed that everyone who had lost a shack in the fire would receive a starter pack.

Incumbency defined as presence at the catastrophe; entitlement lubricated by another dollop of government money.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

Although Ikhayalami’s efforts to reblock were often hampered by these sorts of issues, by the end of Tuesday there were two clear lanes of plots marked out, each 4m x 5m, back-to-back with three lanes each 1.5m wide in between. The leadership, together with the community, then began allocating these plots to the fire victims who had been in that area.

Just as Manhattan was gridded first and then developed, here too it was critical that the grid be laid down before settlement occurs.  As AHI Affiliate Solly Angel observes in his seminal paper, An arterial grid of dirt roads, without the plan there will be no structure and no efficiency.  But if you lay out the plan first, then everyone can build individually and entrepreneurially within the plan. 

Joe Slovo, March 2009

Wednesday 11th March

blocking carried on throughout Wednesday, with iKhayalami continuing to work with the leadership and community to lay out plots and ensure people adhered to the lanes.

Traffic cops are useful if they are transparent and impartial.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

The first batch of iKhayalami material was delivered at noon, just enough for four shelters, but enough to show the community what was involved and what the upgraded areas might look like.  The arrival of this material proved to be a key turning point as people now had a clear understanding of what iKhayalami, and the leadership, were describing.

As I’ve said repeatedly, the solution is its salesware.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

Residents began to approach iKhayalami directly with requests to support blocking in their areas.  In many instances people were willing to even dismantle their shacks and relocate in-line, in expectation that they would receive building material at a later stage, which speeded up the process considerably. 

What a turnaround.  In 2½ days, the same people who had spent fifteen years resisting calls for demolition and rebuilding were now eager to demolish their own homes, because they could visualize what they would be getting, they could grasp why it would be better, and they could trust that they would receive what they had been promised.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

People are suspicious, but people are smart.

This process led to greater community participation, and negotiating patiently with the community speeded up the process considerably.  While all decisions as to the relocation of sites, and the allocation of materials, were handled by the Joe Slovo leadership, the Ikhayalami team assisted families in construction the panels. By 20:00 that night, 15 families had shelters in various stages of completion.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

It’s so critical to provide some short-term tangible progress.  Words and personal credibility will take you only so far.

The community, now more mobilised, also organised nightly patrols, aimed both at guarding the building materials from theft and to keep order in Joe Slovo while people slept in tents.  This resulted in almost no material going missing, even when considering the high degree of hands-on involvement by the community

Self-policing, Jane Jacobs’ “eyes on the street,” is a hallmark of a genuine community; it’s an index of formalization and citizenship.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

Thursday 12th March

On Thursday, Disaster Management failed to arrive on site and announced their involvement in Joe Slovo had ended. 

They would no longer be distributing food or government materials, even though 120 families remained without.  This caused a serious problem for the partnership that not only had now to find materials for these remaining families, to supplement what iKhaylami could offer, but also to secure food for those still busy rebuilding and unable to work.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

Here is Stone Soup at work, though.  Everybody wants in on success.  Get a project going, demonstrate that it will be completed and will be something to be proud of, and people come out of the woodwork bringing ingredients and seasoning.

While donations of both were eventually secured, this seriously slowed the process of blocking as the partnership was directed away from the negotiation and planning of the new township, critical in sustaining momentum, to one of logistics and emergency fundraising.

Nonetheless, blocking has continued in Joe Slovo, and by the end of March, 120 new iKhayalami shelters had been constructed, almost all in accordance with blocking.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

The community was transformed – physically in rational grids, socially in the development of leadership, and in network connection to the city and to assistance providers.  All in three days.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

Was this a fluke?  If not, why did it work?

[Concluded tomorrow in Part 4.]

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By: David A. Smith

As we saw yesterday, for fifteen years Joe Slovo had been an informal settlement in the Cape Flats that resisted all attempts at structural improvement.  One night, that all changed:

Joe Slovo, March 2009

(A large set of pictures is here, from which this post’s images are drawn.  My quotes are from a report, written by Tom Herbstein of the University of Cape Town’s African Security and Justice Program (ASJP), and circulated by SDI member affiliate FED-UP, South Africa’s Federation of the Urban Poor led by Rose Molokoane )

Monday 9th March 2009

The fire began in Joe Slovo in the early morning.  Within a few minutes, it had spread widely, fueled by intense winds.  Eyewitnesses described the panic as people sought to save themselves, their families and possession from the flames.

At one point the fire bridged a road separating two sections of the township, as flaming sheets of PVC plastic were blown across.  Streetlights blew, cables melted.  So thick was the smoke it was impossible to breathe, let alone to save possessions. 

Thankfully, no lives were lost, no serious injuries sustained.  But 512 shelters burned to the ground.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

A palimpsest is a previously-written parchment that has been scraped clean.  Parchment was so valuable it had to be reused, so medieval copyists learned how to scrub the delicate surface, removing the former writing so new wisdom could be set down. 

Palimpsest – new writing perpendicular to the old

Like urban land that has to be reblocked before it can be formalized, and formalized before it can be upgraded.

What is blocking?

An informal settlement usually grows haphazardly; shacks are built where free space is available.  Blocking, a fundamental preparatory step for in-situ upgrading, reorganizes the shacks to align in rows, back-to-back, with straight pathways in between. 

I’ve encountered blocking around the world, particularly in East Asia, where CODI and ACHR use community-led reblocking, particularly along waterways and coastlines, to improve sanitation and enhance density.

After blocking, fires are more controllable, the community is safer for residents, and creates space for future upgrade of key municipal services.  The township has the possibility of formalisation as adequate mapping [to establish plots for entitling – Ed.] can take place.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

Blocking is intangible infrastructure – it creates the grid onto which critical utility services like water, sanitation, and electrical power lines can be laid.

The fire created a palimpsest – physically by demolishing the structures, politically by wiping out established notions of security, and economically by triggering large-scale disaster-relief funding.

The fire department was first on the scene, followed shortly by Disaster Management, and attempted to douse the fire, which helped until the pumps ran dry and could not be refilled, presumably due to a lack of hydrants.

Lack of public infrastructure led to lack of private property.  In Caesar’s Rome, homeowners were required to maintain filled leather water buckets on every floor and every corridor.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

The management of iKhayalami were woken by a call from the Joe Slovo leadership informing them that Joe Slovo was burning and needed their assistance. 

First payoff – there was already a political network of trust built up over several years.  Without that trust, the phone call would not have happened.

Later that morning the leadership began a count of the victims and to draw up a list of those who had lost homes and needed assistance. 

Enumeration is critical. 

That we may wander o’er this bloody field

To book our dead, and then to bury them.

“To book our dead, and then to bury them“

Also critical is community participation and community acceptance of those they now and trust:

A small confrontation developed between the community and the City when officials suggested bringing in bulldozers to level the area, so that the township could be rebuilt on flatter land.  However, the community was highly opposed to the proposal, not because they didn’t want the area flattened, but because distrust was so strong that they feared this may be just a ploy to clear the area and forcibly relocate the residents to Delft, which it wasn’t.

When iKhayalami arrived to assess the damage, it was then that the leadership suggested that however tragic the fire was, it created a blank canvas, in Joe Slovo, where they were able to rebuild in accordance with blocking. 

Ideas germinate and sprout – like the idea of a palimpsest.

It was also requested by the leadership that iKhayalami negotiate with Disaster Management, in regards to the distribution of material, as they were busy compiling the lists.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

I’ve encountered this dynamic in my work with SDI.  If one comes from the formal world, the world of suits and spreadsheets and laptops and vocabulary, one is automatically suspect.  Trust is earned but it is personal trust, not corporate or institutional, which means it must be personally maintained and refreshed. 

Disaster Management’s response was cool as they feared responsibility for any future fires may then be laid upon them. 

Entirely understandable – and intriguing shift of responsibility.  Do informal communities and informal settlers have the same rights to services as other city dwellers?  That depends on which government agency one encounters – and as more agencies treat those they encounter as having individual rights, more settlements gain community rights.  Bit by bit, the community is bootstrapped into the formal city. 

Plots marked with string: Joe Slovo, March 2009

That requires the community, for its part, to live up to its responsibilities of citizenship, one of which is mobilization.

While some officials were personally supportive of the idea, they insisted that previous attempts elsewhere had not succeeded and it was pointless trying to mobilise Joe Slovo, especially in the aftermath of a traumatic fire.

Furthermore, Disaster Management warned they would only be on site for three days, given the high number of emergencies they had to respond to. 

Joe Slovo, March 2009

That challenge threw down the gauntlet: if you cannot agree, and soon, you will all lose.

After that all emergency packs, clothes and food distribution would be suspended regardless of those still in need.

Disaster response requires having a plan all ready to go – and at Joe Slovo, people did not:

It was requested that Disaster Management withhold from delivering their starter packs to site until a clear plan had been agreed as to how to block Joe Slovo.

That required broad stakeholder participation:

Nonetheless, the leadership and iKhayalami decided to proceed and at noon a community meeting was held with the aim of both finalising the list of those who had lost accommodation and also to introduce the concept of blocking.  Five hundred people participated.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

There was an overall interest in blocking, although most residents still had yet to grasp the idea.  However, halfway through the meeting it was interrupted by Disaster Management announcing they were to begin distributing material. 

Although this caused a sudden panic amongst the community, and the meeting quickly dissolved as people rushed off to secure materials, it was felt the critical buy-in towards blocking had been attained.

More likely each householder was so preoccupied with securing his or her own packet of free goods that they did not have time to debate the nuances of blocking.  That created a temporary political vacuum which the technical assistance providers could fill.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

With the help of the leadership, iKhayalami began measuring out plots, using rope and pegs, in one corner of Joe Slovo.  Plots measured were 5m x 4m wide, and back-to-back, with a 1.5m walkway in between, deemed to be the maximum size to achieve both a reasonable degree of space for families, while fitting the original number of residents back in.

These are small houses; even allowing only a minimum of space between buildings, the typical dwelling will be one room, maybe 12m² (130 square feet), with no running water.  People will carry water back in jugs, and will use common toilets. 

Joe Slovo, March 2009

The size was also based on the assumption that material acquired by residents from the City would be used to supplement the iKhayalami shelters.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

Towards the end of the afternoon, iKhayalami started to erect their emergency army tents that allowed the community a safe place to sleep, close to site, so that commuting back and forth could be minimised.  This was a very popular move as people were also reluctant to leave Joe Slovo for fear of being evicted. 

Joe Slovo, March 2009

Large set of pictures here

By the end of the Monday, virtually no construction had begun on site, as people waited to see what would happen.

Joe Slovo, March 2009

Would the promises be kept?

[Continued tomorrow in Part 3.]

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