Resource information
Land Management embraces systems of land administration, land use management, land information management, and land taxation. Land management is generally understood in South Africa as the manner in which land is controlled, managed, planned for, utilised and transacted. This study saw land management as having a number of dimensions including: the manner in which land is accessed and acquired; the process by which individuals, households and communities continue to have and to hold rights to land; the way in which land use is regulated; the systems by which land is developed; and how land is traded.
This study was born out of deep sense of concern regarding current land management practices, systems and protocols in South Africa. It tried to address the question of ‘what might a land management system look like that takes seriously questions of inclusive citizenship, rights to land, and social vulnerability?’. Five Johannesburg case studies were investigated: Diepkloof, Soweto; Kliptown, Soweto; Diepsloot, northern Johannesburg; Fourways, north-western Johannesburg and Hillbrow/Berea in the City’s centre. The five case study areas were chosen in an attempt to get a sense of the various settlement typologies in Johannesburg, in which different systems – social, cultural, formal and informal – are at work.
In a context such as Johannesburg there are diverse systems of land management ranging from highly formal and legally regulated to entirely informal systems. They also include various hybrids, which bring together the formal, informal, and even within this very urban context, the customary. Land management is also integrally related to broader concerns of participatory and developmental governance. The case studies focused on these dimensions and attempted to draw out the manner in which these formal, informal, and hybridised systems were being utilised by the communities and households in these areas. Many of the researchers emphasised tenure and tenure-related issues, which influence how land and property is held and protected. In part this relates to the interwoven nature of housing and land in South Africa, which are difficult to separate and often conflated. Land is often equated with residential development and ignored for commercial, industrial, ecological, transport and recreational purposes”.
The findings of the study pointed a number of different things; the first is the inappropriateness of the regulations governing the areas in question when contrasted against the people living and operating in these areas. The system attempts to maintain a unified and coherent modernist planning paradigm over areas that do not necessarily benefit from such an approach. There is clearly a severe disjuncture between what the people are doing in these areas out of senses of necessity and the kind of regulation that is in place, which appears at the level of rhetoric to be supportive to the needs of the poor but is in reality at best neutral but in most cases is actively obstructive. The raiding and occasional harassment of hawkers and beggars in Fourways, the lack of acknowledgement of the importance of urban farming are all indicative of a system that is not able to address the competing needs and goals of poor households and the organizing principles of government.
