SPATIAL INJUSTICE IN THE WESTERN CAPE: “Many families don’t speak about where they live. They speak about where they come from.”
SPEECH DELIVERED TO THE WESTERN CAPE PROVINCIAL PARLIAMENT BY BRETT HERRON, GOOD MEMBER
21 May 2020
The manner in which societies organise space has a key bearing on social and economic dynamics.
In South Africa, race and space remain indelibly linked.
More than 26 years of democracy have miserably failed to unravel colonial and apartheid town planning.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Cape Town, where conservatives in the DA have found ways and means to block every single affordable housing project proposed for development in areas that their National Party fathers designated for whites only.
The DA’s record mirrors that of the ANC when it held the reins in the city. A big fat zero.
On the Cape Flats to this day, many families don’t speak about where they live. They speak about where they come from.
And where they come from is not Lavender Hill, Grassy Park or Nyanga; it is Constantia, Newlands, Sea Point, District Six and Simonstown.
Spatial injustice is the axel on which the wheels of inequality and the cycle of poverty turn.
Families with the least household income must travel furthest to get to work, to the stadium, shopping mall, hospital, or school.
By the time you’ve paid for transport, what do you have left?
They return to impoverished neighbours and communities where social issues like gangs, drugs and crime take root.
Without jobs, as many are, people are trapped in their immediate environments. There’s no way out.
Between 2016 and 2018, when I was given the responsibility to develop affordable housing in Cape Town, our team doubled the delivery of affordable housing.
Between 2016 and 2018 we also initiated multiple projects to deliver affordable homes in good parts of the city.
Thousands of inner city homes would have been under construction now. But the reality is not a single such home is being built. The DA stopped these projects.
The also stopped people travelling out of apartheid townships.
For 5 years, MyCiTi provided safe, affordable transport to residents of Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain.
8 months after I resigned from the DA they stopped the service. That was almost a year ago.
The province has fared no better.
The Premier shows off Forest Village as his government’s commitment to spatial justice.
Forest Village is at the very outermost edge of the metro. A location for the poor, in a very poor location.
Far from work, far from education and far from whites.
I understand it may be scary for conservative politicians to consider Coloured and Black people living in their neighbourhoods.
Just as it is difficult for them to countenance leaders such as De Lille, Mazibuko, Mashaba or Maimane.
But to continue developing dense settlements for those with few real rights, out of sight and out of mind, is not a viable alternative.
DA leaders must come clean with their constituents and supporters on the Cape Flats, among other areas, and tell them why they don’t want them in their suburbs.
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Closing Remarks:
I started by reminding this house that none of the National Party, ANC or long-serving DA governments in charge of the Western Cape and/or City of Cape Town since democracy have delivered a single affordable housing project in a desirous location previously reserved for whites.
This is not just in Cape Town.
It’s the same in Worcester, Swellendam, Robertson and Montagu. If new homes are built for Coloured or Black residents they are sure to be located even further away than apartheid “locations” were.
We don’t have to stay stuck in the past forever.
There are alternatives to outdated housing models – such as the billions of Rands the DA is planning to spend developing cheap housing on old rubbish dumps in Khayelitsha – that sentence new generations to the cycle of disillusionment and poverty.
Let’s stop sentencing people to the fringes and focus on the middle.
Not matchbox homes on the edges; but affordable homes integrated with expensive ones in new, sustainable communities