State, law and community in the politics of housing in South Africa: 1990-2000

Van Huyssteen, Elsa

State, law and community in the politics of housing in South Africa: 1990-2000

Thesis / Dissertation

2025

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of Historical Studies

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

The housing crisis in South Africa has over time resulted in the experience of waiting for housing on the part of marginalised communities. Housing policy and politics have accordingly historically constituted a site where state power is both imposed and contested. These processes had their roots in apartheid-era urbanisation policy, but took on a different character during the late-apartheid and early post-apartheid period. This dissertation describes and analyses the experience of waiting, first for democracy and then for housing, both as a passive experience of the power of the state, and as a terrain where state power is resisted, contested and negotiated. The focus is mainly on the period 1990-2000 in the Cape Town metropolitan area, but the research relies on reported judgments of South African courts across the country from 1949 to 2000 in order to trace the changing ways in which different aspects of housing policy and its implementation were challenged over time, in court, by marginalised individuals and communities, sometimes assisted by civil society organisations, legal aid organisations and progressive lawyers in private practice. This is supplemented by the use of other legal documents and case studies recorded by civil society organisations and oral histories that describe the experiences of communities and their lawyers. The aim is to understand the interaction between the state, courts, and community and civil society activism and mobilisation in the shaping of housing policy and its implementation, particularly the impact of the political transition and the resultant constitutional right to housing, which allowed the use of various rights-based strategies, on those processes. The analysis shows that waiting communities are able to engage in a number of quiet encroachments as well as the mobilisation of strategic community agency, and while state power remains ever-present, and courts have an uneven record of challenging that power, in this way communities have the capacity to contest the condition of waiting and improve their access to housing.