Mixed-Income Housing, Urban Transformation and Social Cohesion in Post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

One of the fundamental challenges facing the post-apartheid South Africa’s urban settlement planning has been the requirement for social cohesion. One of the urban transformation interventions involved the construction of mixed-income housing, wherein social cohesion among low- and middle-income households could be enforced. Far from rhetoric and the drift of middle-income households into cities that were previously the preserves for white people, urban South Africa remains deeply segregated. Negligible progress has been made in transforming the apartheid spatial fragmentation and segregation. Mixed-income housing development is considered to be an innovative approach to housing delivery that could provide a mixture of housing products to suit a range of income groups in the cities. To this extent, this approach is assumed to hold social integrative properties, relevant to post-apartheid urban transformation. The paper maintains that the establishment of the mixed-income housing can lead to social cohesion whilst simultaneously correcting for the perception that the poor cannot cohabit with the middle-income households. There is a realistic potential that new culture, values and norms could manifest to create conditions for coexistence between the different income groups in the urban landscape. The race divide in South Africa appears to create an added complexity to urban social cohesion, though. This paper will use evidence from some cities in South Africa to affirm the argument that mixed-income housing has a potential to redress the socio-spatial divisions in the country. The paper concludes by arguing that mixed-income housing can foster the notion of inclusive compact city and socially integrated community where the low-income and middle-income households can live in harmony and mutually enjoying common sets of facilities and services. However, the race factor could render urban social cohesion in a democratic South Africa an unachievable dream.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n25p36