Real settlement still in doubt

Tin doubt.

HERE is a point on the scale of urban life

where the – always relative – freedom to

choose how and where to live ends, giv-

ing way to policy directives and munici-

pal decision-making.

For the family from Parktown, moving to

Pinelands is a complex, costly affair which - job or

jobs, housing and schooling having been assured –

generally goes ahead unhindered.

Middle-class migration is unexceptional, be-

cause the migrants’ self-sufficiency defines their

freedom of choice. The difficulty for any city is how

to manage those who are not self-sufficient enough

to trek and settle in the certainty that their translo-

cation will mesh invisibly and seamlessly.

City authorities must intervene – and are com-

pelled by law to do so – to manage the twin chal-

lenges of population growth and dependency.

This is the theme of our report on the Wolwerivi-

er relocation camp inhabited by people who, until

five months ago, lived near and lived off the Visser-

shok dump.

If they have been relieved of the environmental

risks of their old life, their new life has all but de-

prived them of food and income. The city argues

that they are now living within a future growth cor-

ridor, but their reality is tramping up to five hours

to the only places that yield work, or food. Strikingly,

residents express uncertainty about their future.

There are contradictions and few easy fixes – but

we are confronted in Wolwerivier, not for the first

time, with a sense that Cape Town is still missing an

overarching plan for settlement, for reshaping and

densifying a fractured city, and giving people the op-

timism of being part of a changing, progressive

metropole.

This is the only basis on which their own sense of

agency, and hope of self-sufficiency, can be built.

Without it, the sustainability of the whole must be