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Sustainable, Inclusive City Systems

THE SOUTHERN AFRICAN HOUSING FOUNDATION

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE, EXHIBITION

& HOUSING AWARDS

10-13 OCTOBER 2010

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA

“GREEN TECHNOLOGY FOR SUSTAINABLE HUMAN

SETTLEMENTS”

“The challenges in developing sustainable and inclusive city systems

in South Africa and the UK”

Anthony Hodson-Curran BA (Hons) PGDH, FCIH

Masters in Public Administration student

Warwick Business School

University of Warwick

Assistant Director of Housing,

Milton Keynes Council, United Kingdom

[email protected]

Keywords: systems; sustainability; development; inclusion; cities; Milton Keynes

1 Anthony Hodson-Curran

mailto:[email protected]


Abstract

From secondary research and direct experience, this paper explores how cities can

function as sustainable, inclusive systems that provide homes. I refer to eThekwini

and its informal settlement of Cato Manor, also referring to the Gauteng Global City

Region in South Africa and in the United Kingdom: Tyneside and Milton Keynes.

The paper has an underlying position that cities should be tricky, messy and wicked as

places of mobilisation and cultural creation as well as economic bases requiring

habitation space. Simultaneously formal and informal, planned and responsive: the

systems that make them work must acknowledge this. Cities are not closed systems:

they work with an immediate hinterland and increasingly as part of global networks.

Their sustainability needs to take account of environmental space considerations,

which means equity issues. The key challenge to inclusion and sustainability in cities,

I contend, is primarily about home, housing, land and space. The key challenge to

creating function systems is in understanding the connectivity between them.

What is a city?

Many people make a city, many dwellings and work places, many resources to enable

connections between them: a place of multiplicity and complexity.

The first cities took root around 6,000 years ago, established because the landscape

offered opportunities for transport, trade or access to a specific resource

(Johannesburg and gold, Newcastle and coal). Martin Murray writing about

Johannesburg suggests that cities are constantly evolving places that resist

objectification, summary and closure. They are “at once delightful sites of splendour,

spectacle and vitality as well as frightful places of utter destitution, degradation and

immiseration.” (2008, 33) Fixed geographically, Johannesburg and Newcastle upon

Tyne have adapted and morphed internally, the centre shifting and land use changing

as their purpose has shifted from raw material extraction and export, to service and

sport. Population changes continuously, permanently and temporarily: Milton Keynes

(MK), like Newcastle, striving to become a world cup host city, attracts new

households from EU accession countries, Ghana, and North West London. Gauteng



has long drawn migrant workers from Mozambique. Each city or region is a place of

mobilisation, of flow as much as fixed structures.

Cities in the UK

Removed from their apartheid context, the underlying residential structures of

eThekwini and Johannesburg are desirable, sharing much with new towns of the UK

in their greenery, spaciousness and functional separation. As the United Nations (UN)

noted “Cities in Southern Africa were conceived as ‘garden cities’ with land uses (and

socio-ethnic groups) separated by open spaces and with the poor located at the

periphery of industrial areas” (2008, 153). MK was planned to similar principles,

existing as a new city plan before anyone laid a foundation, suburbanising existing

small industrial towns and rural villages. Local planning and urban design by

Buckinghamshire County Council was superseded by that of the National Centre for

Environmental Studies. MK in 1967 became a grid for car-based transport between

discreet neighbourhoods within a conceptual framework where electronic

communication over distance would displace face-to-face contact (Clapson 2004, 42-

3).

The new town was developed by a public quango rather than as private or municipal

development. New and pre-existing communities are contained and constrained in

grid squares within the new town area and also within a Greater London Council

overspill estate on its southern periphery, constructed in the early 1970s. MK, like

previous new towns and social housing in existing cities was a site for experiments in

housing layouts and building methods. Barton suggests that Milton Keynes now

“aims for a degree of balance in every grid square, giving affordable housing at least a

share of the prime sites (e.g. lakeside positions). This social mix policy has been an

accepted element in the planning strategy for a conspicuously successful city” (2000,

91). The older grid squares, however, enforce spatial segregation reinforced in

dwelling construction styles, embedding economic and social exclusion. Connecting

roads seal in and isolate neighbourhoods.



As a result, in part of the urban design intended to prevent it, spatial segregation has

emerged in MK. The segregation is also apparent within neighbourhoods related to

property types and tenure. In 2008-9, the borough responded to deep unease about the

growth of the private rented sector in the city and especially: houses in multiple

occupation; dwellings occupied informally by multiple households. African

newcomers often occupied the dwellings and the undertone of race is at odds with a

city which “attempted to encourage the formation of a social mix which

reflected…the growing diversity of ethnic groups” (Clapson 2004, 91).

The 2006 UK State of the Cities report considered Milton Keynes as one of fifty-six

conurbations. The preceding white paper, Our Towns and Cities notes 40% of the UK

populations lives in the major urban areas: 81% live in houses and 61% of those are

over 35 years old (ODPM 2006, 1.10, 1.17). People are moving out of UK cities,

pressuring rural and suburban areas, pushing up housing costs, excluding (local)

poorer households and increasing travel. Cities in the South, like MK tended to

weather economic storms since 1980, having a service rather than manufacturing

base. Most Northern UK cities including Newcastle have experienced major

economic decline, regeneration and perhaps renaissance.

From its birth as the Roman Pons Aelius in 122 AD, Newcastle’s Quayside became a

centre of coal mining, industrial manufacturing and international trade and then

through a combination of adaptation and transformative change has become a cultural

and leisure space. This meant a shift in the riverside residential offer from social

housing for industrial workers to the east and north east of the Quayside (including

Erskine’s Byker Wall) to owner-occupied homes nearer the river. I lived through the

early days of transition as a local resident, participating in the original consultations

with the Tyne Wear Development Corporation. Cameron (1992) reviewing the

housing consequences of this regeneration recognised the counter-suburbanisation

aspects of the project and the way it marked a shift in the demographics and the

production emphasis of the wider city. It also coincided with clearances of social

housing and the abandonment of working class privately owned and rented terraced

Tyneside flats in Benwell and Scotswood upriver, “a deprived and unpopular part of

the city” (Banton et al 2009), reinforcing that the physical form of a city is not fixed.



Cities in South Africa

The State of African Cities (UN 2008, ii), summarises “The challenges clearly put a

premium on vision and leadership for addressing such issues as deep urban poverty,

the need for closing the affordable housing gap, safe drinking water, sanitation,

transportation and livelihoods for swelling urban populations, regardless of whether

they live in Africa’s megacities or smaller settlements.” South Africa has similar

patterns to Africa as a whole; key cities contain close to 30% of the population (UN,

137). The 2006 South African State of the Cities report (SASOTC) found that more

than half of its citizens live in twenty one key urban areas, classified into core urban

regions, major urban areas and significant urban service centres (SASOTC 2006,26).

A 1994 White Paper scoped apartheid’s bequest to South Africa. “Approximately

13.5% of all households (c1,06 million) live in squatter housing nationwide, mostly in

free-standing squatter settlements on the periphery of cities and towns and in the back

yards of formal houses…This form of housing remains the prevalent means through

which urban households are accessing shelter in South Africa at present” (1994

3.1.3.e). According to census data, in 1996 there were just over one million informal

(not in yard) dwellings nationally: by 2001, the figure had increased to 1.36 million.

Informality in African Cities

African cities are characterised by this informality and displacement, including inter-

relationships between a tenuous and sometimes consciously temporary city base and

home in the rural hinterland. Todes (2002, 619) notes that in Cato Manor “households

are surviving through complex urban-rural linkages.” 76% of national rural-urban

migration was cyclical in 2002 (SASOTC, 28). Movement tends to be to areas with a

strong secondary city or metropolitan area, especially Gauteng and the Western Cape

(p30). Seasonal through to daily commuting increases pressure on informal housing.

There were 750,000 people living in 500 informal settlements in eThekwini in 2008

(South African Cities Network 2008, 52).

An informal home means poor access to physical infrastructure (albeit not on the

scale of other cities across Southern Africa) and almost certainly, worse health and



social outcomes. Across all five major conurbations, there are issues with piped water

access: not available to 4.9 % of homes in eThekwini, sewerage absent from 34.2% of

homes in Ekurhuleni and Johannesburg or electricity with no formal supply to 28.2%

of homes in Pretoria (UN 2008, 146). Property rights for the poor, even where

settlement is formalised are not always robust with widows and orphans not always

able to sustain ownership (this is a key issue with high levels of HIV positive tests).

In parallel, domestic space for the affluent became heavily secured in the apartheid

era and remains so. Landemann (2005, 4) considers the systemic issues of such

heavily defended spaces. “The impact of gated communities …particularly regarding

enclosed neighbourhoods, is likely to be far greater due to their extent in the larger

South African cities, their nature (the closing-off of large areas of public space), their

impact on spatial fragmentation and segregation in the context of moving towards

urban integration, and last but by no means least their link to the apartheid city

(symbolic interpretation).” She found there is no national and only one unnamed

provincial policy response despite an evidenced negative impact on inclusion and

environment.

In 2009, I visited eThekwini and two Kwa Zulu Natal rural communities: Madweleni

and Mbelemi. In suburban eThekwini, within a mile of my gated, guarded guesthouse

was the informal settlement, Cato Manor. Massey describes such settlements as

“shanty towns which though locked into networks of connection of their own, are

only peripherally tied into the connectivities where lie the power the money and the

influence” (1999, 166). Cato Manor is home to over 90,000. UN HABITAT describes

it as nationally infamous for a history of forced racial removals (150,000 displaced)

and, more recently, for land and home invasions, internecine political conflict and

violence amongst poor communities, and an absence of urban services (2003, 1).

Hence, in South African cities, apartheid, urbanisation and informal settlement shape

a complex system.



What is a system?

Doppelt (2003 72-3), writing about the need for a whole system perspective in leading

change for sustainability cites five key traits of a system

It has specific purposes

All its parts must be present to achieve their purpose

The way its parts are arranged determines its performance

Its core elements are all inter dependent

It seeks to maintain their equilibrium through feedback

This suggests a set of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a

complex whole in which consideration of human activity and the ecosphere as

systems takes us in a holistic direction.

Gallopin recognises our “only option that makes sense in the long term is to seek the

sustainability of the whole socio-ecological system” (2003, 15) He suggests there are

generic properties needed for such systems to remain sustainable:

available resources,

adaptability and flexibility,

homeostasis

change of response.

He contends that ecosystems are in permanent change as they transform their inputs

into outputs that either have value or are waste: emergence. Clayton and Radcliffe

reinforce that we are dealing with movement and change not stasis, “a stable ecology,

which is at a point of balance between interacting forces, continuously processes and

cycles energy, nutrients and other resources, the point of balance changes over time”

(1996, 7).

Wackernagel and Rees comment that the second law of thermodynamics applies to

open systems (it is hard to conceive of any system that is completely closed): they

need to be replenished with energy and export diminished energy to avoid decaying to

an entropic state. In city terms, it is perhaps our conception that we can function as a

closed system that leads to entropic disintegration.



Clayton and Radcliffe (1996, 3) suggest some “societies have damaged their

environmental support systems to the point at which their demands or their numbers

exceeded the reduced carrying capacity of the area.” Girardet (1999, 17-19) uses

Rome and its inter-relationship with North Africa as a telling case study that enables

us to conclude that a city must be either a highly complex open system or a set of

interconnected systems.

What comprises a city system?

A sustainable city system comprises a set of inputs resulting in outputs and requires

energy to sustain itself. It would not destroy its resources or produce excessive or

unmanageable wastes within a human settlement that is large and complex. It would

“make a net gain for the ecological health of the Earth” (Register 2006, 1). We are

clearly talking about power lines, about water supply pipes waste removal processes

environmental issues that use hard systems. This doesn’t yet feel like any city I know:

citizens work, travel and use markets: economic processes and also live, study and

take their ease together: social interaction. When we travel by bus to shop for food for

a neighbour who is unwell, these three systems interact.

Cities therefore are not closed systems: we have to understand them through these

internal relationships and also external ones with the nation state, global cities and

hinterlands. “Urban systems with millions of inhabitants are unique to the current

age…they are the most complex products of shared human creativity” (Girardet 1999:

3). If the social, market and political relationships of these citizens also form the

system as much as hardware and structures then people are in the system as well as

observing and trying to act on it.

The systems that make cities work have to accommodate this complexity or else be

inadequate. Such complexity suggests that city systems are likely to be adaptive i.e.

“they in some way interact with their environment and change in response to

environmental change” (Clayton and Radcliffe, 1996, 23). The complexity can be

categorised into physical environment and socio-economic context. Both

demonstrating fluidity within and linkages beyond the city system.



Swilling and Annecke capture this complexity suggesting; “The failure to invest in

urban infrastructures to extend urban services to the sprawling squatter settlements is

basically justified on the grounds that the people living in these informal settlements

should not be there in the first place-they belong in rural areas.” South Africa city

systems are especially open through rural-urban linkages. SASOTC (30-31) identifies

people-flows that constitute an open system of both housing and transport between

Western Cape and Gauteng and their rural hinterlands. Here space-based enterprise

and casual labour is creating new systems that the state can choose to incorporate into

formal processes: eThekwini enabled street trading rather than close it down (Lund

2003). This continuing renegotiation and change of the city system seems to be to be

inclusive. Cato Manor is about such community inclusion (SA Sustainable Cites

2008: 9). It has delivered by inclusive planning at a local level with the Cato Manor

Development Association adopting participatory government together with a focus on

basic services and growing the capacity of the community (UN HABITAT: 2-3).

What is inclusion?

Meg Hulby (1998, 2) confirms the inter-relationships of social policy and

environmental issues noting that “since people’s lives are crucially shaped by the

environments in which they live, environmental issues have a valid place on the social

policy agenda.” While inclusion is about the ability to earn a steady income, have

access to safe and secure housing and being within a reliable physical and social

infrastructure it is also in some way about rootedness and connection in place and

space. Complex interconnected factors, as Nevile (2007) suggests, following Sen, in

South Africa, spaces within and between which to move. Hulby also usefully

recognises the cross fertilisation of spatial and socio-economic issues in mitigating

against inclusion “…rural poverty stemming from resource scarcity can increase rates

of migration to urban areas where the development of impoverished squatter

settlements places massive demands on state provision and aggravates political

grievances” (1998,145).

The South Africa government issued a seven point joint statement with Slum

Dwellers International on working in partnership with people in informal housing in



eThekwini in2008. This followed a period where the relationship of state and informal

settlement was shifting. Murray (102-5) identifies a 1994 deal whereby informal

settlement, ten years previously an effective tool in the liberation struggles, was no

longer acceptable. The occupants of an informal settlement in Kliptown in Soweto

were evicted from a site that is now Walter Sisulu Square. In 2002, two thousand

families were evicted from Mandelaville at Diepkloof to former miners’

accommodation at Durban Deep mine to enable commercial development. In

Alexandra in 2000 and 2001, local people took direct action to occupy several

hundred new homes in Tutsumani and on the Far East Bank to protest against corrupt

allocation and simple failure to begin to use the houses: they were evicted. This isn’t

new nor is specific to South Africa. It is tempting to look back 40 years to the

squatting movement in the UK and 350 years to the events at St George’s Hill in

Surrey, England to see how property rights are a “hot potato” for a new state (Hill

1975: 107-128). Sustainability is less problematic.

What is sustainability and what might be sustainable?

Sustainability became visible as an issue internationally with Limits to Growth (1972).

The next major step, Our Common Future (1987) defined sustainable development,

establishing common political ground between growth and containment of world

poverty. Post-apartheid South Africa mainstreamed environmental issues through

Article 24 of its constitution. The article, was ground breaking in recognising both

inter and intra generational sustainability within a Bill of Rights. The National

Environmental Management Act of 1998 provides further support. It was an important

step taking the Northern perspectives that dominated before the Rio summit in 1992

and shaping a greater focus on sustainable development for the Johannesburg summit

of 2002.

The sustainability policy response in the UK centres on the Stern Review of 2006,

which considered the costs of climate change across a range of temperatures; between

1997 and 2010, there was a significant acceleration and spread of policy. It covered

sustainability and climate change, energy efficient new house building and the

adaptation of existing dwellings so they consume less carbon. The Sustainable



Development Strategy (2005) focussed on mitigation but including adaptation. The

strategy (16-17) introduces five principles based on an explicit focus on

environmental limits:

1. Living within Environmental Limits

2. Ensuring a Strong Healthy and Just Society

3. Achieving a Sustainable Economy

4. Promoting Good Governance

5. Using Sound Science Responsibly

It is shaped around four priorities; addressing climate change, creating sustainable

communities, moving to sustainable consumption and production and the protection

of natural resources. Reflecting the Melbourne principles, and Swilling’s work for the

South African government (2007), they underpin much that has emerged since.

Environmental sustainability is seen as one of five equal components of a new vision

for urban living rather than an underpinning prerequisite in Our Towns and Cities

(CLG 2006). The State of the Cities Report (ODPM 2006) mentions sustainability in

consumerist terms: cleanliness and the quality of parks, leaving “Sustainable

Communities” to the plan of that name (ODPM 2005): policy and strategy seem

curiously separated from context and operation. The plan defines a sustainable

community as a place where people want to and will continue to want to live,

capturing the idea of inter-generational equity. Housing is seen as “Buildings – both

individually and collectively– that can meet different needs over time, and that

minimise the use of resources;” (2005, 3) There is no significant mention of energy

consumption and carbon emissions in either the occupation or construction of homes.

More usefully, it suggests the need to address suburbanisation and to adapt urban

environments to make them more sustainable for current and future generations.

This was addressed three years later: Transforming Places, Changing Lives (CLG

2008) is a regeneration policy that emphasises citizen/customer involvement and

shifts focus to social and economic issues from the physical environment. It retains,

however, the emphasis on sustainable places from Sustainable Communities, Building

for the Future (ODPM 2005). In attending to outcomes for communities and stressing

customer need and leadership, it suggests a lean approach with a ‘right place, right

infrastructure’ model. It sees a clear holistic role for housing new build (2008, 28):



“New housing supply will be a part of regeneration activities – it is important that our

new homes are provided in the right place and are supported by the right

infrastructure to be economically and environmentally sustainable.”

The rapid recent emergence of this policy framework about sustainability, energy use

and thermal efficiency is recent and the volume suggests an anxiety to play well

internationally as much as addressing the issue. This complex but only partially

integrated set of policies demonstrates a position where the state sees itself as a

market shaper by legislation, regulation and policy but also, although with limited

emphasis as a purchaser of social housing: not so much an element of a system but as

a director of that system…but what is sustainability?

Sustainability is intimately related to the economic, social and environmental aspects

of human populations and how they inter-relate with natural environment systems. At

an international and national policy level, following the Brundtland and Stern reports

it has been seen as relating primarily to the likelihood or otherwise of the (negative)

impact of human activity of the climate and to the consumption of finite resources.

Wackernagel and Rees introducing the idea of the global footprint suggest that too

much waste and too much consumption underlie the human economy. They see

sustainability as “living in material comfort and peacefully with each other within the

means of nature” (1996: 32). McLaren takes us beyond Wackernagel and Rees’

almost too powerful metaphor to the concept of environmental space. This

emphasises equity: a fair share within global limits of the maximum rate of

environmental resource consumption required for a healthy life. McLaren (2003: 26)

clearly points to a need for Northern cities to consume less. “In practice the policies of

Northern countries and Northern dominated global institutions continue to widen

inequalities.” To tackle this we need to decouple growth from resource use,

dematerialisation, but can only do so effectively if we treat the economic social and

environmental spheres as a holistic complex system. Swilling and Annecke make it

clear that the ideas of ecological footprint and environmental space help us draw

sustainability and equity together as a system for inclusion as “only the most

callous still ignore the significance of inequality as a driver of many threats to the



conditions for social cohesion and a decent quality of life for all.” How might this link

to land and special integration?

The Key Challenges

Spatial Integration and Social Inclusion in a Whole System

The South African Medium Term Strategic Framework suggests a relatively clear

challenge. “In line with the concept of human settlements, and proceeding from the

premise that housing provision should promote the building of integrated and

sustainable communities, taking active steps to ensure that human settlement

formation does not perpetuate apartheid spatial planning and the

marginalisation of the poor” (2009, 37.8). Du Plessis and Landemann (2002)

identified a diverse set of urban settlements experiencing a common set of

marginalisation risks around water, crime, AIDS, poverty, institutional complexity

and poor performance. They suggested a choice between weak and strong

sustainability models, between market forces and people centred development. I

suggest that these conclusions focus on a closed system. They look only within the

settlement at the “hardware”, as it were; by not looking at governance and ownership

an approach which is limited to dealing with these deficiencies will always be

insufficient in its response to inclusion.

Human Systems

Banton suggested that to be sustainable, a community needs to take account of the

economic, the social and the environmental, challenging a system of “individual

consumption at the expense of community cooperation, mobility not stability, internet

rather than interplay” (2005, 3). This takes us forward but still feels too static as a

prescription for future urban living despite a utopian offer of convivial close knit

communities as an alternative to urban sprawl that offer local access to the daily needs

of a diverse community.



It seems essential to me that communities have to bridge and bond externally while

developing distinctive identities that enable a sense of change and adventure. Banton

suggested that Milton Keynes pushes in this direction as it “goes a stage further and

aims for a degree of balance in every grid square, giving affordable housing at least a

share of the prime sites (e.g. lakeside positions). This social mix policy has been an

accepted element in the planning strategy for a conspicuously successful city” (2005,

91). Lacking from this planning perspective, however, is same gap in understanding

the power relationships that are critical in drawing the social, economic and

environment spheres together, which Du Plessis and Landemann exhibit.

The response of MK to informal multi-household dwellings is relevant here. These

properties are a key gateway to traditional UK cities. They have emerged in the last

five years in MK as large town houses in central estates are bought, sold on and

converted. A normally uncontentious part of an urban housing market, they have

generated much political and community heat, which seems to me to be about the

emotional and intellectual ownership of the city, stemming directly from the way its

space was proscribed in the original built environment as much as from property

ownership. Ward (1993, 96) noted the way market issues can lead to otherwise useful

city sites remaining undeveloped. It is reasonable to suggest that the “tariff” response

to development in Milton Keynes has recycled capital for the community

development but within neo-liberal partnership terms (Milton Keynes Partnership

2007)

That our physical infrastructure needs to change to be sustainable is a given and the

socio-political issues of tenure / ownership of land and capital required to turn land

into habitation, are prerequisites of sustainable inclusive housing. The Lynedoch

EcoVillage (Swilling and Annecke 2006) is an active experiment in all of these issues.

My experience here in 2009 suggested a real complexity in the socio-political issues

that was much harder to work through than the hard system issues of building:

residents had resisted natural clay construction (www.Youtube.com 2009) because of

cultural connotations not technological suitability.



Housing as Home

Returning to the definitions of sustainability offered above, sustainable housing must

include the concept of “home” to address inclusion and exclusion. The World Health

Organisation considers housing as “the conjunction of the home, the dwelling, the

community and the immediate environment.” The idea of housing, just like the

concept of city, is multi-facetted and is open as a system. The WHO could go further

to recognise the cyclical nature of the system but it is limited by its defining sectoral

focus and the neo-liberal emphasis on local community rather than national and

international governance. Indeed, the composition of the family occupying the

dwelling is determined to some extent by the wider society and environment: in South

Africa, apartheid, race, immigration and neo-liberal post-apartheid governance and

the rural to urban flow cycle.

Housing Supply in South Africa

Housing supply, to a visitor seems to be a major challenge for the creation of a

sustainable city system in South Africa, specifically because of the tension between

dense informal occupied or constructed settlements, the townships, fortified suburban

compounds and the movement of people between and within these worlds. A

presentation to the new Human Settlements Portfolio Committee on 9th June 2009

cites showed only the former as being a substantive issue. Managing the “impact of

urbanization, migration & proliferation of informal settlements places pressure on

housing development and management of open space” (2009, slide 18) is a clear

policy prescription. This presentation and a partner, which offers a background on

human settlement, show that South African government sees informality in itself and

not its relation to enclosure, as problematic. The presentations acknowledge explicitly

that current practice is determined by the apartheid era through the 1994 White Paper

and 1996 Housing Act. The second presentation (2009 b slide 41) states “the policy

was shaped by the prevailing context of the housing situation and past housing

practices and settlement laws.”

There is a necessary pragmatic accommodation here but it may militate against a

sustainable system that would enable all people to access sufficient, affordable good



quality housing that meets both their long and shorter term for their continuing

cyclical transfers from rural to metropolitan areas as well as permanent settlement.

Failure to do so, risks developing a security-focussed siege mentality of the affluent

suburbs thereby further pushing housing and linked social, health and crime stresses

into the poorer and by implication informal settlements. A similar pattern is found

throughout the developed and developing world where market forces lead. SASTOTC

(82) suggests a starting point in a shift of focus from needs based allocations of

resources to tackle backlogs to one of municipalities understanding the local market

i.e. the balance of supply and demand and the nature of both.

The supply I saw on the edge of Alexandra as a response to need was initially

worrying. It looked like rows of identikit dwellings with no discernible amenities

immediately nearby. When compared this visual impression with the proposals in

Breaking New Ground, the 2004 National Housing Plan it didn’t make sense. There is

however a range of property types, offering “built in rent out” space and multi tenure

(Alexandra Renewal Project Presentation 2005) as a formal / informal transition

response. In eThekwini, the municipality has developed strategies for liveable

informal settlements exemplified by the Cato Manor Development Project and

Development Association (Odendaal 2007). As a presidential lead project with a

partnership board the project might seem typical of regeneration flagships. Its

importance is also in the recognition of the need to sustain informality with “two large

informal settlements currently being upgraded. The provision of service infrastructure

has been extensive...” (940).

Informal Settlement in the UK

In the UK the concerns are surprisingly similar but with a different historic context.

The commons were enclosed many years ago; the physical legacy of informal

settlement (Ward 2002) is primarily seen in the narrow cottages on the main roads and

greens of rural villages that have become high cost housing for retirees and

commuters. Squatters last occupied vacant premises in central Newcastle in 2000/1.

The CIH trade magazine Inside Housing (30th January 2009) launched a campaign:

Empty Promise, aimed at addressing the high number of private sector homes in the



UK. The campaign website suggested that one million homes remain empty this year

while ironically, repossessed owners are illegally occupying their homes.

Leadership

The complexity of city and ecosphere sustainability presents wicked problems in civil

society and formal political systems. McLennan (2007, 18) sees the need for “ the

centrality of politics in delivery…a focus on the politics and patterns of distribution

and delivery. ” Duppelt (89) suggests causal relationships between leadership

deficiencies and persistent socio-economic and environmental issues. He prescribes

horizontal, engaging and participative forms of governance that see stakeholders as

part of interdependent systems. His emphasis on changing mindsets is valuable but he

does not adequately recognise the neo-liberal mega-system in which change needs to

take place if we are to address the meta-crisis. The scenarios we face are likely to

offer entirely new contexts that will need hitherto unforeseen forms of leadership and

innovation. Odendaal notes, “The example of Cato Manor gives an intriguing view of

the relationship between context and agency in urban development and how

innovation can often be engendered through this relationship. In this case, it was the

socio-political “moment” in the history of transitional South Africa that set the very

special circumstances through which the project evolved.” (943)

Girardet and advocates of deep ecology suggest that rebalancing spiritual and material

foci is necessary in leadership towards sustainability (and sustainable leadership?).

This is far from the reality in both the UK and South Africa both of which seems to

view city leadership and governance and through a NPM prism. “State of the Cities”

reports for both nations reflect this, focussing on global connectivity and competition

and national growth. Democratic accountability, provision of services and

infrastructure appear secondary. In South Africa, there has been a rapid formalisation

and possible closing of the political system constraining leadership into management.

Did the initial co-option of civil society struggle leaders into government civil service

create a void that the ANC appears to try to fill through national direction. A loss of

energy is predictable as a closed system becomes entropic.



There is without doubt continued dispersed community-based leadership. Groups “are

engaged in many community-driven initiatives to upgrade slums and squatter

settlements, to develop new housing that low-income households can afford and to

improve provision for infrastructure and services” (International Institute for

Environment and Development 2006, 36). UMfelanda Wonye, the South African

Homeless People’s Federation, made up of largely women-led savings groups had

secured 100,000 development plots by 2006 (36). Female led community leadership is

a common factor internationally. The leaders of the Andover estate in Islington who I

met on a study visit and the Lakes residents in Milton Keynes who I work with

regularly are all women. Beal and Todes, assessing gender and leadership issues at

Cato Manor note, “Women were not passive in the Cato Manor context. A set of

powerful women leaders, linked to political structures, was on the board of the

CMDA and played key roles in the representative community structures that were set

up. They had been central to land invasions and some were involved in informal land

markets. These women did articulate women’s interests, and were not easily

intimidated.” (2004, 9)

In the UK, as an as-yet private review of the third sector in Milton Keynes is

revealing, a co-option of previous activists into service delivers has occurred through

marketisation. It appeared to me at the outset that an NGO that I visited in eThekwini

might suffer the same fate but it is a much more skilful player. In meetings that I

attended, in hotel dining suites and community school meeting rooms and critically in

the spaces outside these rooms, it was clearly adept at negotiating and the spaces and

creating the bridges between national, provincial and municipal governance to lever

international resources and voices into linked AIDS and education delivery systems.

Simone (2009) captures a similar though less positive flavour in a study of the

complexity of visible and invisible political processes in Winterveld near Pretoria.

The co-housing examples of the Lyndoch EcoVillage and the similar Findhorn

community in the UK use a mix of participative and representative democracy within

the community and seek to spread their influence outward into the wider system

through their procurement relationships. (Swilling and Annecke 2006: 325).

Sustainability and inclusion need leadership that springs from, works with and weaves



into the systemic flows of informality. This is how ordinary citizens are working on a

daily basis to keep their lives moving.

Conclusion

I’d like to finish with two thoughts. There is a need for intellectual and social density

to produce urban change, yet I wonder does this also necessitate inequality and

exclusion because city systems around housing seem to be ultimately dependent on

land ownership and value in both the UK and South Africa. The challenge may

simply be one at the heart of the market economy: ownership of the means of

production.

Finally, as politicians and bureaucrats we may have been laggardly in our willingness

to address sustainability in terms beyond Western / Northern anthropocentric

considerations, yet I hope to have demonstrated that whole system approaches to the

ecosphere can resonate with a “what works” incrementalism and dispersed, local and

inclusive approaches to leadership. As the Alexandra and Cato Manor renewal

experiences show, we appear to find better adaptations when we learn to use and learn

from informal spaces. The informal operates at the margins, in the liminal spaces,

which in the natural world so often look barren but are teeming with adapted and

adapting life.



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