Urban Housing Policies and Informal Settlements in South Africa

Urban housing policy in South Africa has evolved through major interventions such as Reconstruction and Development Programme housing, the Upgrading of Informal Settlements Programme and targeted social housing initiatives. Despite the delivery of millions of subsidised units, approximately two million households continue to live in informal structures, often on serviced yet unregistered land. These settlements function as dynamic spaces of livelihood strategies, incremental self‐built improvements and informal rental markets, while also reflecting persistent spatial inequalities rooted in apartheid‐era planning. Policy measures have aimed to integrate informal areas via tenure regularisation, basic service provision and relocation into formal housing, but uneven implementation, budgetary constraints and tenure insecurity have limited their reach. Recent scholarship emphasises the interaction between top‐down policy frameworks and bottom‐up community practices, exploring how governance capacity, social dynamics and financial mechanisms shape the lived experiences of settlement residents. Lessons from the South African context contribute to global discussions on sustainable urbanisation, equitable shelter provision and participatory planning in marginalised urban environments.

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Urban Housing Policies and Informal Settlements in South Africa publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in urban housing policies and informal settlements in south africa across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Informal settlement: A residential area lacking formal planning approval, secure land tenure and comprehensive service delivery.

Incremental housing: A phased approach in which residents progressively improve or extend their homes as resources permit.

Disruptive re-placement: A conceptual framework describing the varied and contradictory impacts of state-led relocation on livelihoods, social ties and spatial attachments.

Tenure security: Assurance of legal rights to occupy and use land or housing without the threat of eviction or displacement.

References

1. Strategies for Sustainable Innovative Affordable Housing (SIAH) for low income families in Africa: A rapid review study. Discover Sustainability (2024).
2. Informal rental housing in the South: dynamic but neglected. Environment and Urbanization (2020).
3. ‘Marginalised formalisation’: an analysis of the in/formal binary through shifting policy and everyday experiences of ‘poor’ housing in South Africa. International Development Planning Review (2020).
4. Not entirely displacement: conceptualizing relocation in Ethiopia and South Africa as “disruptive re-placement”. Urban Geography (2022).
5. Renting Shacks: Tenancy in the informal housing sector of the Gauteng Province, South Africa. Bulletin of Geography Socio-economic series (2017).