JoburgCAN has expressed concern over the more than doubling of informal settlements across Johannesburg in just over a decade, warning that without effective land-use management and planning, the City will continue to experience uncontrolled and unplanned settlement growth.
At its meeting on 30 September, the City Council approved a report recognising an increase in the number of informal settlements from 181 to 379, with the estimated number of households rising from 169,970 in 2012 to approximately 365,000 by the end of the 2025/26 financial year.
JoburgCAN Managing Director Julia Fish said accurate information was essential for effective planning, but the figures also raised serious questions about how the City had allowed informal settlements to expand without adequate intervention.
“Having accurate data is always better than planning in the dark. We welcome the fact that the City now has a clearer picture of the extent of informal settlements, but these figures also tell us that Johannesburg has failed to manage their growth effectively,” said Fish.
She said the increase in informal settlements reflected the City’s wider challenges with land-use management and the enforcement of municipal regulations.
Fish said the City had also approved a new Informal Settlements Policy which, while designed to bring greater order to the management of informal housing, also carried implications for surrounding formal residential communities.
The policy, approved by Council last month, provides for the profiling of settlements and their residents, including identifying and numbering individual households. It also requires the City to record whether households own or rent their dwellings and whether residents have alternative accommodation in other informal settlements.
JoburgCAN believes these measures could help the City identify irregular occupation patterns and prevent abuse, provided the information is properly verified and regularly updated.
However, the policy must be accompanied by a clear, transparent and properly funded implementation plan that balances the needs of vulnerable households with the rights and interests of established communities.
“The City must ensure that recognition does not become an incentive for further unlawful land occupation or a mechanism that can be exploited for political or financial gain,” said Fish.
The policy states that further unlawful land occupations will not be negotiated following the profiling of existing settlements. However, Fish warned that this would require consistent enforcement of the policy and municipal by-laws, an area in which the City’s enforcement units across various departments have repeatedly fallen short.
“Communities living alongside informal settlements must have a meaningful say in decisions that affect their neighbourhoods. Their concerns about infrastructure capacity, safety, land use and municipal services cannot simply be dismissed,” Fish said.
“Good planning must consider everyone affected. We cannot solve one community’s challenges by creating new problems for another.”
JoburgCAN said any upgrading or relocation programme must take into account the capacity of existing water, sanitation, electricity, roads and other municipal infrastructure. Where relocation is necessary, it must be properly planned, lawful and undertaken in consultation with affected communities.
For more information contact Jonathan Erasmus on 073 227 6075