In post-apartheid South Africa, the delivery of low-income housing has been occurring at
unprecedented rates since 1994. This means that more and more poor households are
gaining access to secure tenure on progressive basis. Unfortunately the new low-income
housing townships are often established on cheap peripheral land, adjacent or far
beyond the existing apartheid townships. The widespread growth of informal settlements
in urban areas has also been occurring at higher rates following the repeal of apartheid
laws which restricted rural-urban migration. The growth of informal settlements is nothing
but a precise indication of poverty and the desire of the poor to gain access to
employment opportunities. However, the link between employment opportunities and
home is often provided by transport. Travelling demands money which most of the urban
poor rarely have. For the poor, proximity to areas of employment opportunities is key to
surviving in urban areas. The consequence of this arrangement is the establishment of
informal settlements near places of employment as a way of escaping the cost of
transport.
Yet the upgrading of well-located informal settlements has not been a preferred and
popular strategy for the post-apartheid government as a mechanism for promoting
access to opportunities. Instead the focus has largely been on providing access to
individual tenure through the delivery of the free-standing housing units on the periphery
where land is relatively cheap to accommodate large scale housing delivery. Is this the
only factor which had motivated the rural poor to migrate to urban areas in the first
place? Which matters most for the urban poor? Is it access to subsidised housing in the
urban area only or is the latter. Perhaps it is a combination of both factors.
To provide answers to the foregoing questions, the researcher resolved to pose two
guiding questions to focus the investigation: What are the effects of relocation to the
periphery on household livelihoods and how do relocated households make a living on
the periphery....what sort of coping mechanisms are adopted to survive in remote,
isolated, low density and sprawling low-income Reconstruction and Development
Programme (RDP) townships of the post-apartheid South Africa? The research uses
Diepsloot as a case study area because it presents all the necessary traits of a typical ____4____
post-apartheid South African low-income township which had been used as a northern
Johannesburg relocation site. The findings of the research suggest that the only major
positive impact which result from relocation, is access to secure tenure while the major
negative impact, is the poor location of Diepsloot in relation to major employment
opportunities. This finding correlates with the existing literature and the hypothesis of the
study.