Property in a time of transition: An examination of perceptions, navigations and constructions of property relations among unlawful occupiers in Johannesburg’s inner city

Abstract

One of the most enduring legacies of apartheid is the racialised in-access to property for the (black) majority of South Africans. The large unmet demand for accessible and affordable residential property close to work opportunities has resulted in widespread unlawful occupation of inner city buildings, which in the post-apartheid legal order has been shielded by a constitutional prohibition against arbitrary and unjust eviction. Yet, notwithstanding significant protection against eviction, in what remains a largely private property-dominated paradigm, unlawful occupation is an inherently disruptive act that pits ownership against the use/occupation of the same piece of property. Seeking to better understand the under-scrutinised social reality of such unlawful occupation of privately-owned property, we undertook qualitative research to examine how unlawful occupiers view, traverse and (re)define property-related arrangements. Coming from legal and built environment backgrounds respectively, we were particularly interested to understand the extent to which the legal limbo of unlawful occupation has given rise to a rejection of the hegemony of private property ownership and the construction of an alternative urban property rights consciousness among unlawful occupiers. Our research indicates that, although residents in Johannesburg’s inner city have found ways to deal with their state of unlawful occupation, the occupied spaces currently more accurately reflect a survivalist struggle in a mainstream property ownership-dominated reality than the assertion of a new urban property regime, with occupiers yearning for greater, rather than less, formality and legal authority.

The City Otherwise: The Deferred Emergency of Occupation in Inner-City Johannesburg

“…These spaces operate neither through formal property regimes nor through easily legible systems of control, rental, or occupation. In work parallel to my own, Jackie Dugard and Makale Ngwenya (2018) have argued that we cannot grasp these buildings in terms of standard understandings of civic movements or "the right to the city" (Lefebvre 1996;Harvey 2008), and that the occupants in their cases primarily follow survivalist strategies and desire formalization. Most of the residents of unlawful occupations do not participate in the form of political squatting prominent in Berlin, for instance (Vasudevan 2017), nor in the politically motivated occupations extant in places like São Paulo (De Carli and Frediani 2016;Stevens 2017).…”

Retrofitting, repurposing and re-placing

“…Referred to in the literature as hijacked buildings, bad buildings, problem buildings, and the Zulu term 'em'nyamandawo' (place of darkness), these occupations occurred following the capital (white) flight from downtown areas towards the end of apartheid (Bénit-Gbaffou, 2012;Chambers, 2019). In most cases, these informally occupied buildings are privately owned, residential buildings, abandoned by their owners and occupied by those trying to gain a foothold in the city (Dugard & Ngwenya, 2019). While the occupation of existing buildings has also taken place in Cape Town, the city centre did not experience the marked decline, which provided the ground for occupation of high-rise buildings at scale.…”