Housing biggest challenge in SA and needs attention
THERE is the theory that people are essentially comfortable living in womb-like structures. Dotted along the mountain side in Colorado, US, one can still see some architectural examples of such structures nestled comfortably in indigenous foliage.
While some are in tune with our senses, others may actually affect our mental health.
“Buildings create neurotics,” says a voice in my past when I visited the Tavistock Clinic in London as a young student of psychology.
“Look at those grey council buildings,” says Melanie Brown, an associate of psychoanalyst Anna Freud. “They cause social problems to which we have to find psychological solutions”.
We have first-hand experience of this social tragedy in the apartheid era when well settled communities were dislodged and placed in sub-economic housing with no adequate infrastructures.
There were no street names, only numbers, further adding to the alienation.
A once law-abiding cohesive community began to show signs of social degeneration in increased crime, drug addiction and prostitution when they were forced to move into Chatsworth and, later, Phoenix.
As a part of the grand schemes of separate development black, coloured and Indian townships kept people apart resulting in isolated communities threatened by each other.
Little has changed in our democratic South Africa today as the government appears to simply follow the old ways of addressing the housing needs of the poor.
The current RDP houses are small, uniform structures badly constructed with few amenities to bring communities together.
Housing is the most tangible of all conveniences that convey an instant message of inequity and racial and class separation.
Our current landscape depicts racial enclaves of opulent gated communities juxtaposed against a looming sea of dilapidated housing. While this is a common characteristic globally we cannot turn a blind eye to the stark disparities of our current situation.
Does it make sense for a family of four to live in a six-bedroom house while a family of six is squashed in a one-bedroom RDP house with few amenities?
The black agenda of Black First Land First proposes that “townships be eradicated through various interventions including decongestions, demolitions and upgrading”.
A radical proposal is to establish new settlements based on the community centre concept. These centres shall operate as a “onestop-shop” for government services and community needs, including services such as child care, laundry, canteens, libraries, clinics, theatres, computer labs and gyms. In this way, the burden of domestic work and child rearing shall be lifted from the shoulders of women. This is consistent with the African idiom that “it takes a village to raise a child”.
Indeed, architecture and urban planning has its import in addressing the needs of humanity.
Beyond the practicalities of housing the masses, it should enhance, stimulate, beautify and elevate the minds of those who inhabit its spaces creating surroundings of sheer pleasure.
US architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who believed explicitly in this theory, was one such perennially celebrated 20th century artist who still has relevance today as his work is celebrated in leading museums of the world.
His unexecuted designs in his depression-era plans for a self-sufficient agricultural community and his post-war scheme for the world’s tallest skyscrapers tells us that architecture must follow the needs of the people at a given time and not the other way around.
The little farms unit project of 1932-1933 was intended for a back to the land initiative that would have fostered small regional agriculture as a means of making people self-sufficient at a time of widespread economic collapse and unemployment. But urban planners and architects have little say in addressing the housing problems proactively. Instead, they are bound to deal with the problem quantitatively in terms of the number of houses built in a given time.
In the South African context it is perhaps our greatest challenge that appears to be exacerbated by poor political leadership, corrupt practices in the allocation of building tenders, insufficient land in urban areas, ineffective policies and xenophobic competition for scarce resources.
Accordingly, the defining characteristic of our urban areas today is a growing number of large informal settlements and slums, located on the cities’ edges from whence emerges a reservoir of cheap labour.
As urban poverty increases, this underclass grows creating the potential for serious urban conflict.
Housing development is about societal and human development. We can still build strong united communities if we care to look beyond old style dehumanising apartheid townships and seriously addressed the issue of urban slums.
Justice Zak Yacoob, writing the judgment in the Grootboom case, issued an important warning: “The issues here remind us of the intolerable conditions under which many of our people are still living. It is also a reminder that unless the housing crisis in South Africa is alleviated, people may be tempted to take the law into their own hands in order to escape these conditions. People should not be impelled by intolerable living conditions to resort to land invasions.
“Indeed, access to housing is not only about providing shelter; it is also about the provision of services such as education, health, security, and social services.
“If the housing challenge is not solved, South Africa will not be able to achieve the millennium development goals that the state has signed up to, especially the goal of eradicating extreme poverty.”
Rajab is a columnist and the interim chairperson of the Democracy Development Programme