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Squatting and settlement-making in Mamelodi, South Africa

Gerald Steyn, Dept of Architecture, Tshwane University of Technology
SteynGS@tut.ac.za

The explosive growth of illegal squatter settlements on the peripheries of South African cities seems irreversible. Authorities react to the inevitable socio-economic stress and unhealthy living conditions by building hundreds of thousands of small, identical, freestanding, subsidised houses. This is a questionable policy due to the costs and sheer numbers involved, and because such Western-style suburbanism is generally perpetuating urban sprawl, as well as social and economic fragmentation. Environmentally, economically and socially sustainable strategies must arguably be informed by, and possibly aligned with, data on the dynamics of migration and consequent patterns of shantytowns. The purpose of this paper is to report on a study to investigate the impacts of migration – the fact that all residents are from somewhere else – on the form and function of an informal settlement, using an illegal shantytown in Mamelodi, South Africa, as a case study. It hopes to offer a tentative theory of settlement by exploring the relationships between (1) the demographic profiles of migrant households, including their origins and expectations, (2) the process of creating a squatter settlement and the resulting form, and (3) how it actually functions as a setting for social and economic activities. It is well known that a shantytown, like all built environments, both shapes, and responds to, behavioural patterns, but when the study was initiated it was not clear whether its form and function is the direct and inevitable manifestation of existential realities – a culturally value-free response to poverty, marginalisation and lack of resources – or of an indigenous system of knowledge and consequently the expression of an emerging African urbanism.